Ghosts of chance.

In book 35 of his Natural History, Pliny the Elder tells how the Greek painter Protogenes, frustrated by his inability to finish one of his paintings to his satisfaction, ended up throwing a sponge he was using against the artwork. A small miracle resulted: the hurled sponge did what the painter was unable to do, and "chance placed nature into the painting." This painterly dilemma - How does one finish? When does one stop? - seems never to have concerned Ellsworth Kelly, whose work, though extremely attentive to the operations of chance, has developed instead through a meditation on beginnings. This meditation, which takes the form of a sidestepping aimed at finding ways for the painting to have always already begun, puts the artist in a secondary position and removes him from the demiurgic responsibility he renounces. Kelly has recounted many times how, starting with Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949, the beginning stemmed from a sort of personal epiphany, a "flash," to use his term, that made him "recognize" his painting amid the interplay of the world's forms, in the mode of a proposal to which he had only to acquiesce: "Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything" (Notes from 1969). And already in 1963, he had told Henry Geldzahler: "The things I'm interested in have always been there" (one might compare Kelly's comment to Jasper Johns' "things the mind already knows," his statement regarding the use of target and flag motifs).

But things are not, of course, remade identically, and it is in the gap between the visual pinpointing and the realized object that Kelly manages to exercise his power to transform - without particular concern, it must be stressed, for the nature of the referents: one of the works in the series of paintings entitled Brooklyn Bridge, around 1960, for example, would be born of the observation of the outline of a tennis shoe seen from above, and not that of a suspension bridge. Four Sketches, 1960, allows one to grasp both the processes of optical selection and formal reorganization in which the artist engages. In the black and white photograph of two men passing each other in the street (in India, perhaps), one seen from the front in a black shirt and a sort of white loincloth, the other dressed in a gray shirt and black loincloth and observed from behind, Kelly has used a pencil to "geometrize" the bodies of the two passersby (shirts and loincloths), thus sketching out a diptych composed of two bicolored panels. In the same piece, a press clipping shows a group of young girls seen from behind. Their long braids of hair are outlined against the lighter ground of their clothes, but it is not these "zips" Kelly has taken advantage of. Instead, he has focused on the young girl on the left - white sweater, dark skirt, rounded shoulders - and turned her into another diptych, vertical and curved at the top. One thinks of Poussin, who wrote to his supporter Paul Freart de Chantelou: "The beautiful girls you will have seen in Nimes will not, I am sure, have delighted your mind by their sight any less than the beautiful columns of the Maison Carree, since these are only old copies of those."

This poetics of the chance encounter, this serendipity that is Kelly's own, has its counterpoint in the aleatoric procedures he would elaborate, notably in the early '50s, during his time in Paris. One finds in this central role left to chance a sort of amplified echo of Protogenes and his sponge. In the works from this period, the artist reuses his own productions or those of children he has taught, as in the wonderfully titled Children's Leftovers Arranged by Chance, 1950. Kelly's use of chance would abate in the '60s, but the artist would turn to other forms of the "already there," allowing him to twist around the original aporia and to have, in a way, always already begun: the spectrum of colors and its conventional organization (the "Spectrum" series), for example, or the permutation and the ordered transformation of various basic geometric figures. Today, it is no less remarkable that this work, whose disengagement from the self and aspiration to impersonality form one of its founding principles, can reemerge like a phantom, rising above and haunting other equally important work that followed it. Who could fail to see, for example, in Warhol's Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963, traces of the multiple panels of Colors for a Large Wall (done in France in 1951 and shown at Kelly's first New York exhibition at Betty Parsons in 1956)? In a classic (in every sense of the word) shift, Kelly's work, founded on the memory of things, henceforth belongs just as fully to the memory of art.

Jean-Pierre Criqui is editor of Les Cahiers du Musee national d'art moderne. He lives in Paris and contributes regularly to Artforum.

Translated from the French by Jeanine Herman.