The Seated Nude

Leon Kelly is better known for his surrealist paintings and drawings of the 1940s. Earlier in his career, however, he was one of a few artists--Stuart Davis and Max Weber among them--who embraced a form of cubism in the United States. Kelly's drawings of 1920-25 demonstrate his sophisticated assimilation of analytical cubism, pioneered a decade earlier in Europe by Picasso and Braque. The nude figure in the present drawing emerges from a prismatic web of straight lines, arcs, and shading. Kelly's use of gray wash adds to the sense that the figure, whose torsion complements the dynamic composition, is illuminated.