From left to right, Harry Cooper, associate curator of modern art; artist Ellsworth Kelly; and Yve-Alain Bois, the Joseph Pulitzer Jr. Professor of Modern Art; view the Ellsworth Kelly exhibition at the Sackler, which opened March 6.

Ellsworth Kelly was at Harvard last Thursday, March 4, to meet students, scholars, and artists, and to speak to the press about his work.

A trim, white-haired man of 75, casually dressed in a black sweater and brown corduroy slacks, he seemed perfectly at ease as he faced a throng of journalists with pens poised. It wasn't always that way.

"I was kind of feisty and impatient in my early years," Kelly said. He told of meeting a man in an elevator who asked him about one of his paintings. Kelly's reply: "If you don't understand it, I can't explain it to you." The man turned out to be the influential critic, Clement Greenberg.

He also spoke about Picasso. "Picasso was one person you had to get out of your blood." After painting in the manner of the older artist, Kelly suddenly stopped. "I said to myself, 'I can't go on this way. I'm not Parisian. I'm American. . . . To me, content was not that interesting. I wanted color, line, form. I loved expressionism, but I'm not an expressionist. I wanted to take the 'I' out of painting.' "

On learning to appreciate his style of painting: "You have to live with it a while, and you have to think differently about it. People who live with my paintings eventually get to see whatever it is that's in them."