This monograph was copublished by Cahiers d’Art and Centre Pompidou on the occasion of the 2019 exhibition Ellsworth Kelly: Windows, which brought together, for the first time, the six Windows made by Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) in France between 1949 and 1950. Kelly’s years in France were a period of perpetual invention and are fundamental to an understanding of his work. As he wrote in 1969, “After constructing Window with two canvases and a wood frame, I realized that ... painting as I had known it was finished for me.” This signal moment is evoked through more than 80 works, paintings, drawings, sketches and photographs, along with two beautiful essays by Yve-Alain Bois and Jean-Pierre Criqui.

Ellsworth Kelly is one of the most important abstract artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as a key figure in the rebirth of Cahiers d’Art: the publishing house was reopened in 2012 with an exhibition of Kelly’s work in its legendary gallery, and, in collaboration with Yve-Alain Bois and the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, it published the first volume of Kelly’s Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Reliefs, and Sculpture, 1940–1953.