?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
ELLSWORTH KELLY Cat Study.
Pen and ink on cream wove paper, 1957. 230x303 mm; 9¼x12 inches. Initialed and dated in pencil, lower right recto.
Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by Robert Indiana, New York; gifted by Indiana, Vinalhaven, Maine, to current owner, private collection, Maine.
Indiana (1928-2018) was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (1949–1953) and, after a brief stint at the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland, settled in New York in 1954. Once in New York, he changed his name in order to avoid confusion with two other artists called Robert Clark, and met and fell in love with the painter Ellsworth Kelly. In 1956, Kelly helped Indiana move from his loft on Fourth Avenue (from where he could see into Willem de Kooning's studio) into a ships' chandlery next to Kelly's studio on Coenties Slip. Among his neighbor artists in lower New York (Coenties Slip is near the southern tip of Manhattan) were Agnes Martin, Jack Youngerman and Cy Twombly, with whom Indiana shared a studio for a while. Kelly influenced Indiana to shift from the figurative, realistic work he been pursuing up to this point, and to explore a more abstract, geometric style. Indiana recounted, "This was my first head-on contact with painting of any geometric, or clean hard-edge style, I never knew a painter who worked in this manner." He also said, "Painting life began with Ellsworth . . . before [him] I was aesthetically at sea. With Ellsworth, my whole life perspective changed. All of a sudden, I was in the twentieth century." Though their love was short-lived, Kelly's impact on Indiana was significant; soon after their relationship, Indiana began experimenting with his iconic LOVE theme, initially conceived as a Christmas card design for The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1965), which would catapult him to worldwide prominence.
