Made of paper and ink. Hardcover.

Sourced from W. W. Norton & Company, known to be the oldest and largest book publishing house owned by its employees.

An eye-opening presentation of largely unknown figurative drawings by a renowned pioneer of abstraction Featuring one hundred figurative works on paper by Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015), this volume shows a new side of an artist best known for abstraction. These informal depictions of friends and expressive self-portraits—all rarely or never previously displayed or published—span the entirety of Kelly’s career, from the mid-1940s to the early 2000s. Throughout his life, Kelly made portraits as a means of keeping his hand adept at drawing, which provided a place to test his ideas, refine his bold use of lines, and interrogate the space between naturalism and abstraction. These works also capture his social milieu, which intersected with other creative circles and the queer community. He painstakingly recorded how his own appearance changed over time, and once described some of these sketches by saying, “I use myself in order to draw.”

Size: 8.29 W x 10.24 L in. |   190 pages.

Care: Use at your leisure.