Minimalist painter and sculptor, Ellsworth Kelly explains, "By removing the content from my work I shifted the visual reality of painting to include the space around it." Kelly was born May 31, 1923 in Newburgh, New York. He studied at Pratt Institute* Brooklyn, from 1941 to 1943. After military service from 1943 to 1945, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1946 to 1947.

Kelly studied art in Paris from 1948 to 1954, when post-war Paris was the home of European Abstraction and the avant-garde*. He enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts* in Paris under the G.I. Bill, although he attended classes infrequently. In France, he discovered Romanesque* art and architecture and Byzan...