The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly: A Catalogue Raisonné

For more than sixty years, Ellsworth Kelly has been making prints, prints that are integral to his art as a whole. The abstract lithographs, screenprints, and etchings celebrate, as do Kelly’s paintings and sculptures, the sensuous primacy of vibrant color merged with emphatic shape. The plant lithographs rephrase in lithographic crayon the spontaneity of his plant drawings in ink and pencil. Together, their contemplative lyricism places them among the most beautiful prints ever made. Now Kelly’s complete oeuvre in prints is gathered into a two-volume catalogue raisonné, each of the more than three hundred works reproduced in color with full documentation. In addition, two essays—one on the work before 1987 and one on the work since then—elucidate the artist’s sources, working methods, stylistic evolution, and all-important collaborations with printers and printmaking workshops. A chronology further places the prints in context.