1954 Drawings on a Bus, Sketchbook 23
A facsimile of Sketchbook 23 by the American painter Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015), reproducing the ink drawings of shifting shadow patterns he made riding New York City buses in the fall of 1954, weeks after returning from six years in Paris.
In Paris, Kelly had built paintings from window patterns and the shadows cast by Seine bridges back in New York he sketched the sunlight moving across bus seat backs and overhead bars, then reworked the sketches in the studio into abstractions stripped of their physical source. These drawings fed directly into his earliest American paintings, among them Atlantic (1956), the first of his works to enter a museum collection when the Whitney purchased it in 1957. The sketchbook itself has an unusual origin: a friend gave Kelly a blank publisher's dummy of Sigfried Giedion's 1928 Bauen in Frankreich, its cover designed by Moholy-Nagy, and the facsimile reproduces that cover. Co-published by Matthew Marks Gallery and Steidl in 2007 as a slipcased hardcover with a 2006 text by the artist, accompanying the gallery's exhibition of twenty drawings from the sketchbook.
Kelly stands among the defining figures of postwar American abstraction, his hard-edge shape and color paintings drawn from observed fragments of the world. His work is held by MoMA, the Whitney, and Tate, among others, and his estate is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery.
