Red Yellow Blue 赤・黄・青

Kelly spent roughly six years from the late 1940s to the early 1950s in France when Abstract Expressionism was going on strong in the U.S., and this makes the artist a unique figure in the history of postwar American art. In France, he studied Dadaism and Surrealism, and experienced in automatism and collage. The most notable works of his stay there is the series of traced pictures in which window frames and shadows are captured exactly upon the canvas. In making pictures of already existing things, instead of creating them from scratch, he was already showing an avant-garde attitude toward painting. After his return to the U.S., Kelly was surprised to find that Frank Stella and Jasper Johns have arrived at the same kind of art through a completely different approach. His subsequent works became completely devoid of representational elements, culminating in the series of color panel paintings. In these paintings, he attempted to set down colors as a tangible reality by using random combinations of colors and making the surface perfectly uniform to allow no fluctuation in tone. This work is one of them, and here too the three primary colors balanced at a tone slightly brighter that the norm keep up their respective areas with a tension that seems to push and widen our field of vision.