Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco

The catalog for Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco, SFMOMA's 2002–03 exhibition uniting the twenty-two works the museum acquired from the artist's personal collection in 1999 with its earlier holdings, together the most important grouping of Ellsworth Kelly's work in any museum. The 1999 acquisition included Cité (1951), Red Blue (1966), and Curve XXI (1978–80).

Spanning fifty years of paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings, and reliefs drawn from the museum and Bay Area private collections, the exhibition (July 13, 2002 – January 5, 2003) presented 58 works in all. The primary essay by Madeleine Grynsztejn, SFMOMA's Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture and the show's organizer, follows the evolution of Kelly's art, his interest in the phenomenology of vision, and his chance-generated compositions Julian Myers contributes analyses of key works and groupings, from the early figural paintings to the shaped panels and reliefs, with a foreword by Neal Benezra. Co-published with University of California Press.

Kelly (1923–2015) was a defining figure of postwar American abstraction, his hard-edge shape and color paintings drawn from observed fragments of the world. The library also holds 1954 Drawings on a Bus, Sketchbook 23, the facsimile of the sketchbook behind his earliest American paintings.