Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Green of 1970 belongs to the artist’s Series of Ten Lithographs, his first group of prints published by Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. Created at a decisive moment in Kelly’s practice, the series reflects his shift from the curvilinear forms and figure-ground relationships of the 1950s and early 1960s toward a stricter language of geometric structure, joined color fields, and shaped pictorial architecture. In Blue Green, two saturated planes, one blue and one green, meet along a sharp diagonal seam, forming a tilted polygonal composition that appears at once stable and dynamically compressed.

The power of the work lies in the precision with which Kelly makes color behave as structure. The blue field occupies the upper and right portions of the image, while the green wedge rises from the lower left, producing a diagonal force that cuts across the sheet with architectural clarity. There is no descriptive subject, no illusionistic space, and no expressive mark in the conventional sense. Instead, Kelly builds the entire experience from proportion, edge, chromatic weight, and interval. The surrounding white paper is essential to this effect, allowing the joined forms to read not as a flat design but as a constructed visual event suspended within the sheet.

As a lithograph, Blue Green demonstrates Kelly’s early mastery of Gemini’s technical possibilities. The print’s surface is exacting but not inert; its two-color structure carries the same disciplined intelligence found in the artist’s paintings and shaped canvases of the period. Kelly understood printmaking not as reproduction, but as a primary arena in which to test the behavior of form and color under conditions of precision. Here, the diagonal division between blue and green becomes a site of tension, transforming the sheet into a compressed field of balance, pressure, and visual economy.

Within Kelly’s graphic oeuvre, Blue Green occupies an important position as part of the artist’s first major Gemini project and as a key example of his 1970 turn toward polygonal abstraction. The work is represented in major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Brooklyn Museum. Elegant, rigorous, and visually immediate, Blue Green exemplifies Kelly’s ability to make color and edge into a complete perceptual experience.

NOTES

This artwork is signed and numbered in pencil, from the edition of 75 plus 9 AP.

Published by Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, with their blindstamps and ink stamp on the verso.