In 1985 I journeyed to upstate New York to meet with Ellsworth Kelly and art historian Diane Upright to select works for her 1987 landmark exhibition "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper." A condition for visiting—guests had to be driven to and from the studio—struck me initially as odd, but after our meeting, I realized the reason was valid. It seems that studio visitors (indeed, often the artist himself) have experienced a sort of temporary "reality blindness" after a day spent looking at a range of Kelly’s work. (This would prove to include me.) One is unable to see shapes within their settings: The flat side of a dark-blue truck driving down the street becomes a navy-hued rectangle, for example, or a stop sign "reads" as a red octagon.

Understanding this aspect of seeing Kelly’s art is important to appreciating his exceptional achievements. Indeed, Kelly has long been recognized as a master of modern art, and in a truly wide range of different media: paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints and photography. Seeking insight into his work, some writers have pointed to Kelly’s experience with camouflage when he served in the Army in World War II.

Interestingly, this association—about "seeing"—enjoys a historical connection. According to legend, one day on the eve of World War I, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque saw camouflaged tanks and trucks rolling down Paris streets. "We invented that!" said one to the other (I’ve heard both versions as to who the speaker was), in reference to the Cubist fracturing of forms. However, we might argue that Kelly’s art works opposite to how camouflage functions. Rather than merging a form into a setting, or into other forms, as camouflage does, Kelly’s perception instead pulls the form out. Shapes are isolated or abstracted from their context, thus the "unread" stop signs.

This distinctive way of seeing emerged early in Kelly’s career, beginning with his years living in France, from 1948 to 1954. One stunning composition from this period, "White Plaque: Bridge Arch and Reflection" (1953), both a large, painted-wood construction and a paper collage, is based on Kelly’s seeing an arched bridge over water. But here, in these joined elements, the artist gives us only the shadowed opening of the arch and its reflections on the surface of the water. The bridge itself and the other portions of the water’s surface have been excluded to underscore his focused vision of the scene.

Kelly returned to New York in 1954 and soon garnered important attention. Alexander Calder, whom Kelly had known in Paris, introduced the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney to his work. And more importantly, the still-unrecognized modernist David Herbert (then at the Sidney Janis Gallery) brought Kelly to Betty Parsons, which led to Kelly’s first one-man exhibition in New York in 1956. And now, some five decades later, Kelly’s art was recently celebrated and highlighted in New York—of note, with a record-setting sale and two public exhibitions, all featuring Kelly’s multi-paneled compositions. Interestingly, his multi-element pictures belong with a broader usage of many panel compositions found in post-1950 art, ranging from Mark Rothko’s trio of chapel triptychs and Willem de Kooning’s pair of altarpiece triptychs to Andy Warhol’s "Silver Double Elvis" diptychs and Jim Dine’s multi-panel "Tool Series" works.

Among Kelly’s most distinctive presentations are his panel works known as "Spectrums," including "Spectrum VI (in 13 parts)" (1969), which sold at Sotheby’s New York in November for $5,193,000, a record auction price for the artist. With colors ranging from yellow through the entire spectrum of hues to an enclosing, repeating color, again yellow, the "Spectrums" may vary quite widely among themselves, with regard to the proportions of the individual panels and on the spacings between the panels.

Some of Kelly’s panel compositions are among the artist’s most abstract, but at the same time they are based on things seen, through Kelly’s vision, in the everyday world. His great "Chatham" paintings of joined rectangular canvases of different dimensions and colors are derived from the sides and facades of barns that he saw in upstate New York and on Long Island—images he also photographed. So too, related compositions, including the angled rectangles of the commanding "White Black" (1988), were shown this winter at L&M Arts in New York. This dynamic union of shapes finds corresponding compositions in other Kelly photographs, especially his "Opening to a Cellar, Hudson, New York" (1977), an image I first saw on that 1985 studio visit.