Stella shared Kelly's commitment to hard edge abstraction and shaped canvases where the form of the support itself became integral to the composition. Both artists pursued a rigorous reduction of painting to pure color and geometry.

Noland worked in the Color Field tradition with bold unmodulated areas of flat color arranged in simple geometric configurations such as targets and chevrons. His work shares Kelly's emphasis on color relationships and clean formal clarity.

Albers explored the optical and perceptual effects of flat pure color through precisely bounded geometric forms, closely paralleling Kelly's sustained investigation of how colors interact and assert themselves against one another.