Train Landscape

Ellsworth Kelly explored the fundamentals of color, line, and form, yet the basis of his abstraction always lay in his observations of natural and built environments. Train Landscape, which Kelly made during his formative years in Paris (from 1948 to 1954), draws its vivid colors from nature. The title refers to fields of lettuce, spinach, and mustard that the young artist viewed from a train while speeding through the French countryside—this perceptual blur here pushed to the extreme of a flat, pristine monochrome. The multipanel composition emphasizes the status of the painting as an object on the wall, with a shape, density, and heft of its own.