LEON KELLY | THE MESSENGER (MAN WITH KITES)

The artist

Estate of the above

Acquired by the present owner from the above

(possibly) Emily Genauer, “Julien Levy Gallery,” New York Telegram, February 1944, (as Man with Kite)

By the 1940s, Leon Kelly had progressed from his early experimentation with analytic Cubism towards an interest in Surrealism. Kelly initially studied at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania before training with Arthur B. Carles and the Cubist Earle Horter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Following his schooling, he spent six year in Paris where he eschewed the city's avant-garde art community in favor of extended trips to the Louvre to copy the works of the Old Masters. By 1943, Kelly had returned to the United States and was at work on a series of macabre Surrealist canvases, such as The Messenger (Man with Kites), that focused on depictions of human musculature surrounded by abstracted forms.