In the show's catalog, Kelly's drawings are described as "a series of windows opened onto the private sphere of the studio. And what is perhaps unique about this artist's studio is that the grail he sought was his own effacement. Automatic Drawing, 1950 Automatic Drawing, Coat Hangers VI, 1950 Original sketch for Cité, 1951

In some ways, the Ellsworth Kelly show at the Sackler Museum looks like something one might find across the street in Gund Hall.

There, in the Design School's main exhibition space, one is accustomed to seeing architectural projects presented in every stage of completion from rough sketches through detailed plans and models to mural-sized Cibachromes of the finished structure.

Architects like to show people how their ideas evolved, how they overcame problems, how they went from nothing to something. That isn't usually the case with painters. But Kelly, one of the most important abstractionists of the post-World War II era, is clearly an exception.

The exhibition, "Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948- 1955," comprises 185 works from the artist's early years in Paris, most of them from his own collection. The show does not include any of the finished paintings he did during these years, but rather the experiments and preparations that led up to them.

The show is curated by Yve-Alain Bois, the Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art. (Those who are curious about the paintings that emerged from Kelly's exploratory work may want to look at a book that Bois co-wrote several years ago with Jack Cowart and Alfred Pacquement, Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948- 1954 [National Gallery of Art, 1992].)

"This show isn't about beautiful drawings," Bois said. "It's about how Kelly developed a set of strategies, a vocabulary, that he was to use for the next 40 years."

Kelly's strategies are unique as much for what they avoid as for what they embrace.

"One of his obsessions was to try to avoid composition, to try to avoid subjectivity. He was suspicious of the grandstanding type of expressionism," Bois said.

In the show's catalog, Bois describes the drawings as "a series of windows opened onto the private sphere of the studio. And what is perhaps unique about this artist's studio is that the grail he sought was his own effacement."

According to Bois, Kelly was reacting against the notion of the artist as a high priest, exemplified most powerfully by Picasso, who exerted a kind of suffocating influence over younger artists at the time.

Kelly's breakthrough came when he realized that there were designs and compositions in the world around him waiting to be discovered and used. He later wrote about this discovery:

"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. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map . . . , paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes."

Many of the sketches reflect Kelly's early efforts to appropriate designs from the everyday world. Some, like his painstakingly exact drawings of a striped beach cabana, remained mere notations, while others -- the layout of a tennis court or the pattern of shadows on a wall -- were developed into large, abstract oil paintings.

Kelly developed other techniques for creating artworks in which the hand and mind of the artist were, if not wholly effaced, at least minimized. He experimented with automatic drawing (inscribing lines without conscious control), drawing with his eyes closed, and cutting up existing drawings and recombining the pieces into collages. This last technique led to one of his best-known early paintings, Cité.

Kelly's experimentation took another turn when he discovered a large stock of colored, gummed paper in a Parisian stationary store. The paper (papier gommette) is commonly used by French kindergarten students. "It would be highly recognizable to a French eye," said Bois.

In one exercise, Kelly cut the paper into one-inch squares --1,600 of them -- and pasted them onto large sheets, determining the placement and color combinations entirely by chance. He also cut the paper into larger panels and stripes and tried various ways of combining them.

Many of these experiments of the 1940s and '50s emerged in much later works. Kelly's recently completed installation in the rotunda of the U.S. Courthouse on Boston's Fan Pier, consisting of nine huge, brightly colored panels, is essentially an extension of his early experiments with papier gommette.

One of the most remarkable things about Kelly's pioneering work in Paris is that he was carrying it out almost entirely alone. The composer John Cage and the artist Jean Arp, both of whom used chance in their work, gave him encouragement, and a few friends cheered him on, but by and large he was working out his ideas in isolation.

When he returned to the States in 1954, he began to be recognized as a creator of large abstract paintings and sculptures incorporating subtle, hard-edged curves and often brilliant color. But during the Paris years, that recognition was in the future.

"He was a kind of loner," said Bois. "He had virtually no support system. He didn't sell anything."

Kelly's ability to persevere along paths where there was almost no one to provide direction or support "really showed an incredible strength," Bois said.

"Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955" opened March 6 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Installed at the Fogg Art Museum is a related show, "Line Form Color," a series of drawings and collages Kelly created in 1951 while living in Paris. Kelly intended the images to be the basis for a book, but the project was never realized. As part of this exhibition, Harvard will publish "Line Form Color" for the first time as a single volume. Both exhibitions will be on view through May 16.

See the related item about Ellsworth Kelley, "Messages from the Master."