Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

The Seated Nude

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Leon Kelly
1901-1982

The Seated Nude

1921
11 1/4 x 8 inches (28.58 x 20.32 cm)
Black conté crayon and gray wash on ochre paper.
2017.356

Gift of Whitney B. Armstrong.

Notes
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.
Artist
Classification
Century Drawings