Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Curve distills his lifelong project, turning the act of seeing into pure form, into an object of handheld clarity. A single, saturated sweep of ultramarine floats against the untouched field of Rives BFK, its edge describing a precise, asymmetrical arc. Nothing here is descriptive and yet everything is specific: the work stages a meeting between color and paper in which the curve becomes an event. Kelly understood that perception is sparked at boundaries, and Blue Curve is all boundary, an exacting frontier where blue presses into white and the eye completes what the image withholds.

The lithograph belongs to Kelly’s late-century refinements of the curve motif that had occupied him since the 1960s—shaped panels, austere canvases, and, crucially, prints that allowed him to test the behavior of color and contour with surgical control. Unlike his monumental wall works, Blue Curve is intimate in scale (8 × 6 in.), inviting close viewing; the curve’s sweep reads almost as a wrist motion, a bodily trace transposed into geometry. Yet the sensation it releases is expansive: a rising hull, a turning leaf, a shadow sliding along architecture. As in his plant drawings and his early Paris cut-forms, Kelly’s abstraction originates in observation, then sheds resemblance to produce an image that feels both inevitable and freshly discovered.

Technically, the choice of a one-color lithograph is telling. Kelly favored processes that could deliver unmodulated planes and immaculate edges; lithography, with its capacity for velvety, matte density and knife-sharp contours, meets that demand. On Rives BFK, the blue reads as a presence rather than a coating, bonded to the paper’s fibers so that surface and color are indivisible. The work is a tutorial in restraint: no line, no texture, no modeling—only a calibrated arc whose exactness lets the paper’s whiteness act as active space. Figure and ground switch roles as the eye tracks the arc, and the print seems to breathe.

Color, for Kelly, was never merely hue but temperature, distance, and pressure. The blue here is cool and lucid, recalling the Mediterranean registers that haunted his palette since the 1950s, but its effect is muscular. Because the print sets a single chromatic field against untouched paper, every microscopic shift at the edge registers as rhythm. Viewers do not “read” the image; they pace it, feeling how the curve accelerates and relaxes. In that sense, Blue Curve is a time-based work collapsed into a still plane.

Printmaking mattered to Kelly not as reproduction but as a laboratory for essentials. An edition asserts the democratic, distributable life he imagined for such images: rigorous enough for connoisseurs, immediate enough for a wider public. By reducing means and multiplying reach, Blue Curve models how late-modern printmaking could be both exacting and generous. It is a quiet manifesto: that a single, perfectly judged curve in a single, perfectly judged blue can carry the weight of looking, memory, and place, and that nothing more is needed.

NOTES

Signed and numbered in pencil, from the edition of 220, plus 38 artist’s proofs.