Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MA

College

College of Creative Arts

Department

Art History

Committee Chair

Kristina Olson

Committee Member

Rhonda Reymond

Committee Member

Kasi Jackson

Abstract

Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) was a prolific artist whose career spanned six decades. During that time, Kelly forged new ground stylistically through his unwavering devotion to formalism. Derived from his keen eye for observing his quotidian surroundings, the masking of readymade sources via abstraction has become the understanding central to scholarship on the artist. Kelly’s practice of veiling the subject also reveals a vast, complex matrix of sociohistorical forces related to and stemming from his positionality as a gay man—the significance of which has been generally discounted or omitted from understandings of Kelly within the art historical canon.

This thesis probes the artist’s oeuvre, seeking new interpretative ground by interrogating the artist’s canonized positionality via close looking at three distinct bodies of work through lenses of critical feminist theories—most notably the idea of queer formalism. In tracing the origins of formalism and its use throughout modernism as a means for reinforcing heteronormative universalities, this thesis will argue that Kelly used his distinctive brand of formalist abstraction as a means of navigating tides of sociopolitical persecution during his time away from the United States on the G.I. Bill in Paris during the Second World War—veiling the subject as a means of veiling the self.

Ultimately, the goal of this research is to examine and interrogate Kelly’s output and canonized understanding by making space for queer visualities and futurity. Seeing Kelly as more than just “another” minimalist or abstractionist, this thesis argues that the artist’s commitment to forms owes its lineage to a queer way of seeing and a queer way of depicting.

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