“Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments,” produced by Edgar B. Howard and Jo Carole Lauder, directed by Edgar B. Howard and Tom Piper. Distributed by Checkerboard Film Foundation. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Showing Dec. 13, 16, 19, 22, 29.
Since the beginning of his career, Kelly’s emphasis on pure form and color, and his impulse to suppress gesture in favor of overall spatial unity have played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art in America. This hour-long documentary elucidates the complexity of Kelly’s work. In following Kelly as he revisits the Paris of his early twenties, the film uncovers early influences that became leitmotifs he would return to, reiterate, refine, and re-work for decades to come. Insightful commentary is provided by scholars and critics including Robert Storr , Anne d’Harnoncourt , Alfred Pacquement , Ann Temkin and Roberta Bernstein. In the Boston Globe, Cate McQuaid reports that it’s not the usual biopic, but rather focuses on Kelly’s art.”Howard lets the building blocks of Kelly’s aesthetic tumble through the film with a kind of brio and seeming randomness that match the artist’s working style. It’s only toward the end, when Kelly takes us to Chartres and points out the rotating orientation of the square panels in the cathedral’s north rose window, that we see a line tying so many of Kelly’s own slightly spinning, squarish paintings together across the decades.” Read more.
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“Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments” at FilmColumbia Festival
