Leon Kelly

Leon Kelly (October 21, 1901 – June 28, 1982) was an American artist born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He is most well known for his contributions to American Surrealism, but his work also encompassed styles such as Cubism, Social Realism, and Abstraction.

Kelly was born in 1901 at home at 1533 Newkirk Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He was the only child of Elizabeth (née Stevenson) and Pantaleon L. Kelly.

The family resided in Philadelphia where Pantaleon and two of his cousins owned Kelly Brothers, a successful tailoring business.

The prosperity of the firm enabled his father to purchase a 144-acre farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1902, which he named "Rural Retreat" It was here that Pantaleon took Leon to spend every weekend away from the pressures of business and from the disappointments in his failing marriage.

Idyllic and peaceful memories of the farm stayed with Leon and embued his work with a love of nature that emerged later in the Lunar Series, in Return and Departure, and in the insect imagery of his Surrealist work.

"If anything," he once said,"I am a Pantheist and see a spirit in everything, the grass, the rocks, everything."

At thirteen, Kelly left school and began private painting lessons with Albert Jean Adolphe, a teacher at the School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) in Philadelphia.

He learned technique by copying the works of the old masters and visiting the Philadelphia Zoo, where he would draw animals.

Drawings done in 1916 and 1917 of elephants, snakes and antelope, as well as copies of old master paintings by Holbein and Michelangelo, heralded an impressive emerging talent.

In 1917, he studied sculpture with Alexander Portnoff but his studies came to an abrupt halt with the start of World War I. Being too young to enlist, he joined the Quartermaster Corp at the Army Depot in Philadelphia, where he served for more than a year loading ships with supplies and, along with other artists, working on drawings for camouflage.

By 1920, the family's fortunes drastically changed.

His father's business had failed due to the introduction of ready made clothing and his marriage, unhappy from the beginning, dissolved.

Broken by circumstance, Pantaleon left Philadelphia to begin a wandering existence looking for work leaving Kelly to support his mother and grandmother.

He found a job in 1920 at the Freihofer Baking Company where he worked nights for the next four years.

Under these circumstances Kelly continued to develop his skills in drawing and painting and learned of the revolutionary developments in art that were taking place in Paris.

During the day he was granted permission to study anatomy at the Philadelphia School of Osteopathy where he dissected a cadaver and perfected his knowledge of the human figure.

He also met and studied etching with Earl Horter, a well-known illustrator, who had amassed a significant collection of modern art which included work by Brancusi, Matisse, and Cubist works by Picasso and Braque.

Among the artists around Horter was Arthur Carles, a charismatic and controversial painter who taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Kelly enrolled in the Academy in 1922, becoming what Carles described as "his best student".

In the next three years Kelly's work ranged from academic studies of plaster casts, to pointillism, to landscapes of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, as well as a series of pastels showing influences from Matisse to Picasso.

Influenced by Earl Horter's collection and Arthur Carles, he mastered analytical cubism in works such as The Three Pears (1923) and in 1925 experimented with Purism in Moon Behind the Italian House.

In 1925 Kelly was awarded a Cresson Scholarship and on June 14 he left for Europe.

The first trip to Europe lasted for approximately three and a half months and introduced Kelly to a culture and place where he felt he belonged.

Though he returned to the Academy in the autumn, he left for Europe again a few months later to begin a four-year stay in Paris.

He moved into an apartment at 19 rue Daguerre in Paris and began an existence intellectually rich but in creature comforts, very poor.

"I kept a cinderblock over the drain in the kitchen sink to keep the rats out of the apartment" he once explained.

He frequented the cafes making acquaintances with Henry Miller, James Joyce and the critic Félix Fénéon as well as others.

His days were split between copying old master paintings in the Louvre and pursuing modernist ideas that were swirling through the work of all the artists around him.

Patrons during this time were the police official Leon Zamaran, a collector of Courbets, Lautrecs and others, who began collecting Kelly's work.

Another was Albert C. Barnes of the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.

She appears frequently in paintings and drawings done between 1928 and the early 1930s.

In 1929 Kelly married a young French woman, Henriette D'Erfurth.

The stock market crash of 1929 made it impossible to continue living in Paris and Kelly and Henriette returned to Philadelphia in 1930.

He rented a studio on Thompson Street and began working and participating in shows in the city's galleries.

Work from 1930 to 1940 showed continuing influences and experimentation with the themes and techniques acquired in Paris as well as a brief foray into Social Realism.

Reclusive by nature, a character trait that became more exaggerated in the 1940s and later, Kelly's work reflects his determination not to be limited by the trends of his time.

His large output of paintings is complemented by a prolific number of drawings that span his career of 50 years.

Some of the collections where his work is represented are the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Boston Public Library.