Sep 19, 2024 - Sale 2678

Sale 2678 - Lot 99

Price Realized: $ 1,430
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
LEON KELLY (1901-1982)
The Fantasy of Raphael's Model.

Pencil on cream wove paper, 1945. 355x252 mm; 14x10 inches. Signed lower right, and signed, titled and dated in ink, verso.

Provenance:
Private collection, Pennsylvania.
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Additional Details

Leon Kelly was born in Philadelphia and studied at the School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts), Philadelphia, and with Arthur Beecher Carles at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 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 the Philadelphia printmaker Earl Horter. During the mid 1920's Kelly traveled to Paris and became acquaintances with Henry Miller, James Joyce and the critic Félix Fénéon as well as copying frequently at the Louvre. He is most well-known for his contributions to American Surrealism, but his work also encompassed styles such as Cubism, Social Realism and Abstraction. 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.

Kelly married Helen Horter, the ex-wife of his mentor Earl Horter, in 1941, his second marriage after a brief marriage with a French woman, Henriette D'Erfurth, during the 1930s had dissolved. In 1940, Helen Horter had contacted Julien Levy, a Harvard classmate of her brother-in-law Paul Vanderbilt, to propose an exhibition of drawings by Kelly. Levy's gallery, The Julien Levy Gallery on 57th Street in New York was at the forefront of innovation and Surrealism. Levy represented artists such as Salvador Dalí, Arshile Gorky, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp. Levy was impressed by Kelly's work and began representing him. His first show was an exhibition that traveled to the Art Alliance in Philadelphia in 1941. A solo exhibition followed in March 1942 in New York. In 1943, the magazine View printed nudes by Kelly and Pablo Picasso that resulted in the banning the issue in the United States. In 1944, Kelly had a second solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery.