Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Obsessed with public space, celebrated artist Ellsworth Kelly wrote that he wanted to see all the art he had done “much larger” and that his paintings should “stand up outside as billboards or a kind of modern icon.” Billboards and icons are, of course, at opposite ends of the spectrum: Billboards are gigantic and belong to the order of the spectacular; icons are intimate and meditative. Yet in his art, particularly his totems, Kelly manages to fuse these two antithetical genres. Yve-Alain Bois, professor of art history at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, will demonstrate how Kelly succeeded at that, and that the secret has to do with scale, not size.​