Hommage à Kelly by Irma Boom

Hommage à Kelly was the first book in which Irma Boom used IBO paper—the paper she developed in collaboration with a German paper company—and the first self-initiated artist's book that she planned, edited and designed entirely on her own. The publication marks a remarkable series of firsts in Boom's career. This is hardly surprising, given that Ellsworth Kelly's abstract works had long been among Boom's greatest sources of inspiration.

It is titled Hommage because Kelly passed away before the project was completed. She had been developing the concept long before his death and wrote him letters explaining the project and asking for his permission to publish it. Yet she never mailed them. Before she finally found the courage to send them, news arrived that Kelly had passed away.

While she was grieving his death, she received an unexpected invitation from Slewe Gallery in Amsterdam to present an exhibition devoted to her work. Seizing the opportunity, she decided to contact the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and propose producing a special edition limited to just ninety-nine copies. It brought together several impulses at once: a tribute to Kelly, a desire to give lasting form to an idea she had carried for years, and a wish to create an artist's book independent of commissioned design work.

The book is based on only a handful of Kelly lithographs that she had collected. Each print is relatively small—roughly the same size as the finished book. By devising an innovative folding structure, she transformed just a few printed forms into a volume of 1200 pages in which no two openings are ever the same.

Her editorial method here also differs radically from the approach for which she is best known. Rather than orchestrating an abundance of diverse materials through bold editing, she works with the smallest possible visual vocabulary, leaving the original images entirely untouched. The result is an extraordinarily compelling book that invites the reader to turn its pages again and again. The shifting bands of color revealed through the act of turning pages evoke the tangible forms that may once have appeared before Kelly's own eyes.

Kelly often said that he wanted viewers to look only at the work itself, without thinking about its maker. It is a sentiment that seems entirely characteristic of someone who, as a frail child, spent countless hours birdwatching with his mother. After all, when we hear the beautiful song of a bird, who pauses to think about its creator? Is not the beauty before us enough?

Another of Kelly's aphorisms is equally revealing: Close the mind's eye and look only with your eyes; in the end, everything becomes abstract. Not the other way around—not closing your eyes to see. Kelly argues against perceiving the world through emotion or sentiment. This insight also captures Hommage à Kelly perfectly.

The book contains no foreword dedicated to Kelly, no afterword, and no commentary. There is no body text, no table of contents, no page numbers, no captions, and no explanatory notes. It does not even have what we would ordinarily call a title page. Irma considers the black box to fulfill that role, yet even a dust jacket is absent. Everything that might distract from the experience has been stripped away, leaving the reader with nothing but pure form and color, to be perceived as they appear.

For this reason, Hommage à Kelly remains one of the most original—and consequently one of the most celebrated—books among the more than five hundred books designed by Irma Boom. One cannot help wondering how beautiful the world might appear if we could, like Kelly, simply learn to "look only with our eyes."

In her recent publication Book Activist, she reflects on both Hommage à Kelly and the 1971 monograph Ellsworth Kelly from her own collection.