Kelly's painting and sculpture rest on a single sustained idea: that color and shape can stand entirely on their own — without reference, without gesture, without psychological narrative — and that the work of an abstract artist is to bring them as fully into the room as architecture brings a wall or a window.
Kelly's path into abstraction was conditioned by an unusual wartime apprenticeship. The 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, organized to deceive German military intelligence about the position and strength of Allied forces, drew heavily from American art and design schools and produced one of the most curious assemblages of working artists in twentieth-century U.S. military history. Kelly designed both camouflage patterns and propaganda posters during his service, and the experience of watching painted forms function as visual fact — convincing illusions of mass, shadow, and edge — became, by his own account, the basis of his subsequent thinking about color, shape, and the wall.
His postwar studies in Boston gave him a renewed grounding in academic painting, but the decisive period of his formation was the years he spent in Paris that followed. There he encountered the work of every major figure of European modernism then still living and working and absorbed two influences not usually paired: the radical reduction of the European geometric abstract tradition, and the silent, light-organized interiors of Romanesque churches and Byzantine architecture. Together they prompted his break with the gestural Abstract Expressionism that dominated American painting at the same moment.
The body of work he produced in Paris — including the multi-panel paintings, monochromes, and shaped canvases that would become his signatures — was unlike anything else then being made by an American artist, and his first one-man exhibition there in 1951 announced an artist who had effectively bypassed the New York School to arrive at his own form of abstraction. He returned to New York and over the following decades extended the work into sculpture, large-scale public commissions, and a sustained engagement with the architectural setting of painting.
His mature paintings are characterized by adjacent panels of smooth, uninflected color, often in shaped or curved formats that act as much as objects in space as as pictures on a wall. His sculptures — totem-like forms in painted aluminum, weathering steel, and bronze — extend the same vocabulary into three dimensions. The work has often been grouped with Minimalism, but his concerns are finally less reductive than those of the Minimalists: his shapes are derived from the seen world (a leaf, an arch, a window, a shadow) and carry a residue of figurative observation that distinguishes them from the more programmatic geometries of his younger contemporaries.
His final project was Austin, conceived in the 1980s and posthumously completed as a freestanding stone structure with stained-glass windows, a totem, and marble panels that translate a lifetime of pictorial concerns into permanent architectural form. Envisioned by Kelly as "a place of calm and light," it stands as the fullest answer to the wall ambition expressed in the line above — and as the closing statement of one of the most influential careers in postwar American abstraction.