Totems of tempered grandeur

ART REVIEW

Kelly conjures abstractions from the natural world

September 25, 2011|By Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

In Curve XXI, Ellsworth Kelly makes full use of the knots and growth rings… (MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS )

ELLSWORTH KELLY: Wood Sculpture

At: Museum of Fine Arts, through March 4. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org

Ellsworth Kelly, whose wood sculptures are on show in a series of sprucy, palate-cleansing galleries in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, is an artist of refined sensuality. Just how sensual, and how refined, are impossible to put into words, since both qualities are locked in a supple embrace, one forever tempering the other. All you can say for sure is that, looking at his work, you feel yourself dealing with the visual equivalent of perfect pitch.

At 88, Kelly is one of the world’s two or three most acclaimed living abstract artists (only Frank Stella and Richard Serra have reputations to match), and my personal favorite. Most people associate his mature work with flat, carefully shaped planes of rich, unmodulated color, each plane placed subtly in relation to another. His “Blue Green Orange Yellow Red’’ was recently acquired by the MFA and now graces a handsome gallery in the Linde Family Wing. Another superb work -a series of 21 flat, square panels in bright, saturated colors - is permanently installed against the curving atrium of Boston’s Moakley Federal Courthouse.

Color - in these, as in so many other Kelly works - is key. The artist early on grasped Matisse’s insight about the relationship between (shaped) quantity and intensity of color (“one square centimeter of blue is not as blue as a square meter of the same blue’’). He ran with it.

But the wood sculptures are something else. They are brown, for starters - not a color Kelly tends to use elsewhere. And they occupy space differently. They are more frankly sculptures. They have none of color’s tendency to swell and transmute, turning material form into immaterial, emotionally charged space.

And yet they are, for sculpture, exceptionally linear. They don’t gain much from being seen in the round, simply because, though they are certainly three-dimensional, they are not in the least bit round. They are lean, both physically and spiritually. All the fat has burned off.

You “get’’ them just by looking at them straight on, registering their outlines (which curve tautly as they ascend or else fan out luxuriantly) against the wall behind, appreciating the perfection of the joins, and relishing, up close, the grain, color, and warmth of the wood.

These sculptures were made at intervals over the course of 38 years. They are really about Kelly’s intermittent love affair with wood. Each piece is made from a different variety. Just to recite the types is to approach a kind of music - a music to which Kelly himself is by no means deaf: elm, oak, walnut, teak, mahogany, zebrawood, sapele, maple, sycamore, wenge, redwood, birch, and padouk.