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.

Cahiers d Art refers at once to a publishing house, a gallery, and to a revue founded in 1926 by Christian Zervos at 14 rue du Dragon in the heart of Saint-Germain des-Pres. Cahiers d Art was entirely unique: a journal of contemporary art defined by its combination of striking typography and layout, abundant photography, and juxtaposition of ancient and modern art, including original works by Picasso, Miro, Giacometti, Duchamp, and Man Ray, where writers like Paul Eluard, Ernest Hemingway, and Samuel Beckett often replaced the usual art critics.

This is the first issue of the Cahiers d art revue to be published since 1960. The first issue contains an extensive article of 70 pages dedicated to a defining artist of our time, Ellsworth Kelly; texts from renowned architects, art historians, and critics; as well as portfolios of previously unpublished material by Cyprien Gaillard, Sarah Morris, and Adrian Villar Rojas.

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