Study for Three Color Panels

This collage dates from the crucial year of 1953 when Kelly was honing his distinctive approach to the interaction of solid blocks of color arranged either with precise relationship to his observation of the world or alternately by chance. Some two years earlier Kelly had joyfully discovered papier gommette, the brightly hued and coated papers (industrially produced in twenty bold shades and with a semi-gloss sheen) used by French schoolchildren for arts and crafts. At the time, he had been planning a painting called Train Landscape composed of three horizontal bands of color and based on a memory of French farm crops blurred through the square window of his highspeed train between Paris and Zurich; the crops—lettuce, spinach, and mustard—would be rendered in yellow green, green, and bright yellow, respectively. Using papier gommette to make a preparatory collage, Kelly created four additional examples in different hues, all in matching tripartite horizontal formats, of which this is one. This landmark example of the artist’s early work presages a substantial career based on such juxtapositions of bold colors and helps to elicit a deeper understanding of the elegant simplicity and sheer ingenuity of his formidable body of work.