Ellsworth Kelly's Chance Collages: Spectrum Colors, 1951

Ellsworth Kelly’s chance collages are among the clearest examples of an artist handing decisions over to luck. In 1951, in Paris, Kelly cut squares of coloured paper, numbered them, and drew slips to decide where each colour would go on a grid. The result looks bright, cheerful and carefully designed, but no one chose the arrangement. This page explains where the idea came from, how the method worked, and how you can use it alongside froissage and other chance techniques.

Kelly in Paris

Ellsworth Kelly was born on 31 May 1923 in the United States and died on 27 December 2015. After serving in the Second World War in a camouflage unit, the so-called Ghost Army, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and then, from 1948, lived in France on the G.I. Bill. Wikipedia describes these Paris years as the time when he established his aesthetic. A 1993 exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, Ellsworth Kelly: The French Years, 1948-54, gave the period its own show.

In Paris he met Jean Arp and the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, and encountered John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who were themselves exploring chance in music and dance. Wikipedia also records that a friend from Boston, Ralph Coburn, introduced him to automatic drawing: making an image without looking at the sheet. Kelly found that it loosened his drawing and widened his idea of what could count as art.

Arp and the laws of chance

Arp had made collages decades earlier by letting torn paper fall onto a sheet and fixing it more or less where it landed; the works are often titled as arranged “according to the laws of chance”. Our page on chance in art tells that story. For the young Kelly, meeting Arp showed that chance could be a working method, not just a lucky accident. Tate’s glossary entry on automatism explains the wider Surrealist background.

Seine, 1950

Kelly’s first abstract paintings date from 1949. In 1950 he made Seine, a panel of small black and white rectangles. Wikipedia describes how it grew from watching light scatter on the surface of the river, and how the rectangles were arranged by chance. The painting does not picture the river; it works like the river, with an even, flickering pattern that no single decision controls.

Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance

In 1951 Kelly started a series of eight collages, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I to VIII. According to Wikipedia, he used numbered slips of paper, each referring to one of eighteen hues, to decide which colour would be placed in each square of a grid measuring 40 by 40 inches. Each of the eight collages used a different process, so some have broad bands of related colour while others scatter the hues evenly.

The method is simple, but its effect is subtle. Because the colours come from one spectrum, any arrangement looks harmonious. Because the order comes from a draw, the eye keeps searching for a pattern that is not there. Kelly later made painted versions; Wikipedia lists Spectrum of Colors Arranged by Chance (1951-53, oil on wood) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Kelly’s works are still in copyright, so look them up in museum collections rather than on image sites.

How Kelly’s chance differs from froissage

Froissage also starts with chance, but the chance is physical: the creases of a crumpled sheet fall where they fall, and the artist then reads figures into them (see what is froissage). Kelly’s chance is procedural: a rule (draw a slip, place a colour) produces the order, and the artist adds nothing afterwards. Both remove the artist’s habits from part of the process. One leads to dreamlike images, the other to clear abstraction.

	Froissage	Kelly’s chance collage
Source of chance	Crumpled paper	A draw of numbered slips
Artist’s role afterwards	Find and develop figures	Accept the result
Typical result	Landscapes, faces, creatures	Even colour grids

Classroom version: a chance colour grid

This works with any age from about seven.

1. Draw a grid of 8 by 8 squares on a sheet of A3 paper.
2. Cut 2 cm squares from 8 to 12 colours of paper; tissue, sugar paper or old magazines all work.
3. Number each colour, then write the numbers on slips and put them in a bag or box.
4. Fill the grid square by square: draw a slip, glue that colour, put the slip back.
5. Make a second grid with a different rule, for example only drawing for every other square and leaving the rest white.

Then talk about the results. Which grid feels calm, which busy? Did anyone want to cheat and move a square? That urge is exactly what chance methods are designed to resist.

Combine it with crumpled paper

For a mixed-technique piece, crumple and ink a sheet as in how to do froissage, flatten it, and cut it into squares. Use the squares as one “colour” in the chance grid. The crease patterns add texture, and the grid adds order. For more cut-and-paste ideas, see froissage collage, and for an artist who pushed paper collage in a very different direction, see Kurt Schwitters and Merz collage.

Kelly’s chance among other chance methods

Artists have invented many ways to let chance into a picture, and comparing them helps students see what is special about Kelly’s. Some methods use physical accident: crumpled paper in froissage, ink pressed between sheets in decalcomania, or the spattered and scratched paint of Jean Dubuffet’s Texturologies. Some use the body: the free-moving hand of Surrealist automatic drawing. Others use light, as in the cameraless prints of Christian Schad and Man Ray described in how to make a photogram.

Kelly’s method is different from all of these. Nothing is physically accidental in Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance: each square is cut and placed carefully. The chance lies only in the order, decided by a draw. That makes his collages cool and even, without the gestures, stains and textures that other chance techniques leave behind, and it links him to later artists who used rules and systems rather than accidents.

A useful classroom question follows from this: if the artist does not choose the arrangement, what does the artist still choose? With Kelly the answer is the colours, the grid, the size and the rule itself, which is exactly the balance between accident and decision discussed in chance in art.

Learning more

Wikipedia’s article is the most detailed free source on the Paris years and the chance works. Museum collection pages give dates, materials and sizes, and Tate’s glossary entries on collage and automatism place Kelly in the longer history of chance in modern art.