The insightful, gorgeously illustrated first volume of the most important publication to date on Ellsworth Kelly’s work Written by Ellsworth Kelly scholar Yve-Alain Bois in direct collaboration with the artist, this comprehensive multivolume publication contains exhaustive documentation of each of Kelly's paintings, sculptures, and reliefs. The catalogue includes insightful texts and high-quality images of individual works and preparatory drawings, along with provenance information, exhibition history, and bibliographic information. Encompassing Kelly's work up to his return to the United States from France in 1954, the present volume covers the artist's formative years as a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and as a young artist living in Paris, where he began painting the abstract forms which would later define his career. Kelly’s remarkable pace of production during this early period resulted in an especially diverse oeuvre, which is discussed in depth throughout this publication. In Bois’s words, “This diversity is the main reason many of the works examined in this volume are discussed at such length and in such detail: In almost every case, the particular question the artist was addressing, and the formal solution he devised for it, was entirely novel to him.”

The National Gallery of Art houses the single most important collection of portrait medals in the United States. This two-volume catalogue examines in depth these holdings, comprising more than nine hundred medals. Providing detailed technical information--including the alloy composition of each medal--drawn from careful research, observation, and analysis, Renaissance Medals breaks new ground in the scholarly literature. Volume 2 documents the Gallery's collection of German medals of the sixteenth century, French baroque medals, and smaller, though no less significant, groups of Netherlandish and English medals.