While living and working in Paris, from 1948 to 1954, Kelly developed an abstract vocabulary of line, form, and color and began his career-long investigation into how figure and ground are perceived in nonrepresentational painting. He became interested in the way that painting engages with the architectural space it inhabits; rather than attempting to simulate three-dimensional perspective in a composition, he instead considered the wall a kind of “ground,” the painting itself a “figure” on it. In Orange Green, made the following decade, when he was back in New York, he established the figure-ground relationship on the canvas itself through the careful balance of two areas of color: the truncated orange egg-shape is the figure and the bright green color that surrounds it functions as its background.

Gallery label from

Studio Visit: Selected Gifts from Agnes Gund, 2018

Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 67 x 50" (170.2 x 127 cm)
Credit Promised gift of Agnes Gund in honor of Jack Shear
Object number PG543.2013
Department Painting & Sculpture

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Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly

American, 1923–2015 338 works online

In 1951, the 28-year-old artist Ellsworth Kelly submitted a grant to the Guggenheim Foundation, proposing “an alphabet of plastic pictorial elements, aiming to establish a new scale of painting, a closer contact between the artist and the wall, providing a way for painting to accompany modern architecture.

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