Abstract Painting - Leon Kelly (1901 - 1982)

Leon Kelly (1901 - 1982) France. Mixed Media. Measure 22"in H x 16"in W and 23 1/2"in H x 17 1/2"in W with frame. Leon Kelly was born in Perpignan in the French Pyrenees and brought to Philadelphia as an infant. He entered the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) in 1924. Afterwards he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where his most influential instructors were Earl Horter (1881-1940) and Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952). Their familiarity with French Fauvism and Cubism, as well as Horter's own collection of avant-garde European art, exerted a considerable impact on Kelly. One art historian has opined that his paintings of the early 1920s "were among the most sophisticated versions of analytical Cubism to be produced in Philadelphia."