Seaweed Ellsworth Kelly Saw

Ellsworth Kelly, Seaweed, 1949, oil on canvas, 72.4 x 99.7 cm, : @albemuth at the Phila. Museum I forget what a delight it is to read Ellsworth Kelly’s catalogue raisonné, especially the first volume, which covers Kelly’s years in Paris. As Yve-Alain Bois, who’s writing the CR, has noted frequently, Kelly was exploring and discovering and inventing so many things that would become the focus of his decades-long career. Between this generative importance and Kelly’s own exhaustive archiving, Bois wrote an essay filled with new insights and historical detail for basically every painting. I’d forgotten all this when I saw @albemuth post his photo of Seaweed, the largest painting Kelly made during his 1949 stay on Belle-Île, off the Atlantic coast near Nantes. It’s one of several fascinating, mostly white paintings from the moment, that toggle between the seemingly abstract and the diagrammatic, including two favorites, Toilette and Kilometer Marker, which were both in the EK100 show at…