Death of Ellsworth Kelly: the reaction Fabrice Hergott – Le Figaro

The director of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris tells the Le Figaro how the great American artist found his inspiration in the City of Light.

The announcement of the death of the giant American art, Ellsworth Kelly, if linked to the Paris, created a great wave of emotion in the world art and cultural institutions. Thus, Fabrice Hergott, director of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, which reacts to Le Figaro .

“With the death of the last Ellsworth Kelly disappears great American painter of the postwar period. The more European if not the most Parisian. Whoever had found his way by visiting the halls of the Museum of Modern Art to draw windows. It was, I think, those of the national museum of modern art at the time, now the Palais de Tokyo, which are therefore the same as that of the modern art museum of the city of Paris who is the for architectural. These windows have made him the first great minimalist artist, a painter of the full and radiant color, and amending taking the space where its tables whose simple shapes are of course never as simple as it seems ” , says the historian of art deeply rooted in painting, as evidenced by his numerous exhibitions, de Chirico to Keith Haring, Warhol Markus Lüpertz.

“I had the chance to see one of its large install works for the exhibition” Polyptychs “which inaugurated the Grand Louvre in 1990. Michel Laclotte, friend of the artist, President of Louvre and curator of the exhibition, gave him a huge wall to set up his table in several parts. Kelly took care and infinite time, measured to the millimeter height and spacing while we were certainly not ahead in preparation for hanging. Any exposure, covering several centuries of painting, it was the work which put the most time to install. But also one which, when hung, which allowed the rest works to easily find their place, as if the top of his extreme attention to detail, and a meticulousness that seemed then almost oriental, it was his work that gave the measure and perhaps even tone, full, accurate and generous throughout the show. “