Review: Ellsworth Kelly's 'Austin' at the Blanton

Ellsworth Kelly was one of the most important American abstract artists of the 20th century. Born in 1923, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and spent six formative years in Paris absorbing the lessons of Matisse, Arp, and the European avant-garde. When he returned to New York in 1954, he brought with him a visual language that would define his career: hard-edged abstraction, monochrome panels, shaped canvases, and a relentless attention to the relationship between color, form, and architectural space.

He made paintings that looked like buildings and buildings that looked like paintings. And at the end of his life, he made one that was both.

## The Commission

The building that became "Austin" was originally conceived for collector Douglas Cramer, who wanted Kelly to design a chapel for his California vineyard. The project fell through. Kelly kept the design.

In January 2015, at the age of 91, Kelly gave the design to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. It was a gift — his final major work, and his first and only building. He had been planning versions of it for decades. The Blanton, led at the time by director Simone Wicha, accepted the commission and began fundraising and construction planning immediately.

Ellsworth Kelly died on December 27, 2015 — less than a year after making the gift. He never saw the building completed.

## The Building

"Austin" opened to the public on February 18, 2018, after five years of design development and construction. It is a freestanding stone structure of 2,715 square feet, positioned on the Blanton grounds at the southeast corner of the UT campus.

The exterior is composed of 1,569 limestone panels quarried in Alicante, Spain. The interior flooring is Georgia granite — cool, gray, and grounding. The building has no applied decoration, no signage, no branding. From the outside, it reads as a simple geometric form: a cross-shaped plan with a single entrance.

Inside, 33 mouth-blown glass windows — fabricated by Franz Mayer & Co in Munich, the same studio that has produced stained glass for European cathedrals for over a century — fill the space with colored light. The windows use three motifs: a color grid (squares of saturated primaries and secondaries), a starburst (radiating bands of color), and tumbling squares (rotated geometric forms cascading across the glass). The light changes throughout the day. In the morning, the east windows project warm color across the granite floor. By afternoon, the west-facing glass transforms the interior into something cooler, more meditative. At midday, the space is flooded.

There is no religious imagery. Kelly was a lifelong atheist. There are no pews, no altar, no cross, no scripture. The building achieves transcendence without religion — through geometry, color, light, and the quality of silence that 1,569 limestone panels and a vaulted ceiling can produce.

## The Tradition

Kelly's "Austin" belongs to a lineage of artist-designed sacred spaces that includes the Rothko Chapel in Houston (1971), the Thanks-Giving Square chapel by Philip Johnson in Dallas (1976), and the Matisse Chapel in Vence, France (1951). Each represents an artist's attempt to create a space of contemplation using the vocabulary of modern art rather than traditional religious architecture.

But "Austin" is different from all of them in one crucial respect: the building IS the artwork. The Rothko Chapel contains paintings. The Matisse Chapel contains windows and murals. Johnson's chapel contains a spiral ceiling. In Kelly's building, there is nothing inside it but light and stone. The architecture, the color, the geometry, and the space are the work. You don't look at something hanging on the wall. You stand inside the art.

## Visiting

"Austin" is located on the Blanton Museum grounds at 200 E Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Austin, TX 78712. It is free. Always. No tickets are required. No reservations. You walk across the lawn and through the door. It is open daily during Blanton hours.

The best time to visit is mid-morning or late afternoon, when the angle of the sun activates the colored windows most dramatically. Go alone if you can. The space seats perhaps 20 people on the built-in stone benches, but it is best experienced with as few other visitors as possible. Sit for at least 15 minutes. The building reveals itself slowly — the colors shift, the light moves, and the silence deepens.

In a state that contains the Menil Collection, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Ruby City, and the Chinati Foundation, calling any single work the best free art experience in Texas is a serious claim. But Kelly's "Austin" earns it. It is the kind of work that makes you rethink what a building can be, what art can do, and what it means to stand inside something beautiful that was made by a man who knew he would never see it finished.

He gave it away. He died. It opened. It is free. That sequence tells you everything you need to know about what Ellsworth Kelly valued.

For the full picture of Austin's art scene — the Blanton's current exhibitions, the Contemporary Austin, East Austin's galleries, and the studio tour — our complete city guide connects all the pieces.