TitleHurly-Burly
Artist
James Kelly
(American, 1913 - 2003)
Date1991
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 40 × 30 in.
Framed: 41 3/8 × 31 3/8 × 1 1/2 in.
SignedSigned at bottom right: "JK 91".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, May 22, 1996
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1996.5
Label TextDespite the recent departure of Clyfford Still from the Bay Area in 1950, the year James Kelly arrived, Abstract Expressionism was still in full bloom and a pervasive force. Kelly was born in Philadelphia and attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Arts there in 1937 followed by classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His first exposure to European modernism was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in 1941 he won a scholarship to study at the Barnes Foundation, which brought him into close contact with artists such as Matisse, Miró, Picasso, and van Gogh, whose work would come to have a great impact on Kelly. Enlisting in the air force shortly after Pearl Harbor, Kelly spent four years serving as a technical sergeant, returning to Philadelphia after being discharged in 1945. In 1950, feeling the East Coast insular, Kelly traveled to California with his friend, painter John Lynch. Kelly arrived in San Francisco at the height of West Coast Abstract Expressionism. As a GI Bill student Kelly enrolled in the progressive California School of Fine Arts. In 1953 Kelly met and soon married painter Sonia Gechtoff, NA, who had arrived in San Francisco in 1951, and together they became an integral part of the Bay Area avant-garde. The couple participated in the earliest artist-and-poet-run cooperative galleries such as King Ubu and the Six Gallery. These served as venues for exchange between painters and poets such as Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsburg, and Jack Spicer, and would be visited by writers such as Jack Kerouac during trips to San Francisco. By the mid-1950s Kelly was receiving some critical attention and he was developing more of an interest in the physical qualities of the materials. In 1957 he taught drawing and painting at the University of California, Berkeley and won first prize for painting at the San Francisco Museum of Art's Annual exhibition the following year.
In 1958 Gechtoff and Kelly moved from San Francisco to New York and five years later each artist was awarded fellowships to attend the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. Kelly's work has been described as "volcanic gesturalism in which boundless energy was suggested through the accumulation of dense swatches and slabs of color that drove in surging, rhythmic trajectories across his canvases." Indeed, "Hurly Burly" exhibits the artist's interest in tactility of materials through the combination of small animated areas of rapidly applied paint with broad sweeps of various colors using the palette knife. Like many of Kelly's best works, the painting hovers precipitously in the obscure threshold between abstraction and representation and can be understood within the context of the artist's lifelong intention of mediating between these two modes.
MNP
