"It was a cold, gray Parisian winter,” says the painter, seated in his studio in Spencertown, New York, almost two hours north along the Hudson from where he was born and raised, in Newburgh. “I was always really broke in Paris—I’d gone over on the GI Bill, but that ended after several months. Finally I sold some textile designs to the Swiss silk manufacturer Gustav Zumsteg, who had seen my paintings at Galerie Maeght: ten drawings for $100 each. I felt so rich that I went to the South of France with friends."
In 1952 Ellsworth Kelly wanted to try something. According to his thoughts, he produced "Red Yellow Blue White". The work can be described as an early Hard-edge painting. It consists of five vertical panels separated on the wall and four occurring intervals of the wall surface between them. Each of the five panels is made up by a grouping of respectively five square-cut canvases; he had purchased red, yellow, dark blue and white cotton fabrics in the marketplace of a small fishing village in South of France, and had stretched directly onto their supports. Following the strategy that he had explored in Paris with collages made from various found coated and uncoated colored papers, it is the only painting the artist ever did using actual industrially dyed fabrics of ready-made colors.
In Random Order (October Books, 2003, p. 99) the art historian Branden Wayne Joseph takes up on Kelly's try and expects that he used the left over cloth from "Red Yellow Blue White" to make a dress for the artist Anne Weber. "Kelly's use of the same fabric for the dress of his friend Anne Weber only makes the equation between color and commodity in this particular work clear."
All that remain of that dress are a collage by Ellsworth Kelly and a photograph of Anne Weber wearing the dress. In 2013 art adviser Sharon Coplan Hurowitz and Francisco Costa, women's creative director of Calvin Klein, worked with Kelly to recreate the dress for Anne Weber as he had actually wanted it to be. It is composed of equally wide horizontal bands, made of modern fabrics in the fibers cotton, silk, nylon and elastane, rendered in a very limited-edition. As mentioned in Leslie Camhi's article "In the Abstract: Ellsworth Kelly Creates a Limited-Edition Collection with Francisco Costa" for Vogue, May 31, 2013, Kelly had anticipated within his work a way of “getting color off the wall and having it walk around the room.” The original intention remains present in the ten reinterpretations of the dress for Calvin Klein. One copy was donated to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and one to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose permanent collection includes the work "Red Yellow Blue White", the try that inspired the design of the dress at first.
Red Yellow Blue White, 1952, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Calvin Klein x Ellsworth Kelly, Dress, 2013, Metropolitan, New York
Leslie Camhi: "In the Abstract: Ellsworth Kelly Creates a Limited-Edition Collection with Francisco Costa", Vogue online, May 31, 2013
Interview with Christoph Grunenberg, Tate Modern, 2009
