Barnegat Bay, Fishery

Watercolor on paper 18 1/4 x 24 1/4 inches
Signed at lower right: “Leon Kelly”
Inscribed at lower left: “Barnegat Bay.Fishery.”

One art historian has opined that Kelly’s paintings of the early 1920s “were among the most sophisticated versions of analytical Cubism to be produced in Philadelphia.”¹

Kelly won the Pennsylvania Academy’s Cresson Traveling Fellowship in 1924 and went to Europe for six years, living in Paris and traveling throughout the continent and North Africa. Kelly’s interest in Cubism gradually subsided after he saw the Louvre’s collection of old master paintings. His first solo show was held at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 1925, followed by an exhibition at the Galerie du Printemps in Paris in 1926. Kelly was included at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Century of Progress exhibition in 1933, as well as in the annuals of the Whitney Museum in New York, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and at the Pennsylvania Academy during the 1930s and ’40s. Kelly began to experiment with Surrealism around 1940. In 1965, his work was included in both a large survey of Surrealism at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a retrospective at the International Gallery in Baltimore. Kelly taught at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1966 to 1969, and died in 1982.

This painting dates from the 1950s, when Kelly lived in Philadelphia and owned a summer house on Long Beach Island.

Notes

1. Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art [exh. cat.] (Philadelphia, Pa.: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1976), p. 572. See also Leon Kelly, American Surrealist [exh. cat.] (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1999).

About the Artist

Leon Kelly

(American born France, 1901 - 1982)

Leon Kelly was born in Perpignan in the French Pyrenees. He studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where his most influential instructors were Earl Horter (1881-1940) and Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952). Their familiarity with the French Fauve and Cubist painters as well as Horter’s own collection of avant garde European art had considerable impact on Kelly’s work. By 1926, when Yellow Flowers was painted, Kelly’s early interest in Cubism had subsided. In 1925 his first solo exhibition was held at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, followed by an exhibition at the Galerie du Printemps in Paris in 1926. Kelly was included in the Century of Progress exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1933 as well as in the annuals of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and the Pennsylvania Academy during the 1930s and 1940s.