Felix Kelly

Felix Kelly:

"Felix Kelly was born in Auckland, New Zealand on February 3, 1914, though

   in later years, he claimed a birth year of 1916. The second son of Felix

   Vincent Kelly, originally from south Australia and of either Scottish or

   Irish heritage, and Hortense Agnes Kelly, who was twenty years younger

   than her husband, he was born into a household already unsettled. Both

   parents were artistic - the elder Felix did pen-and-ink drawings and

   Hortense later pursued a career as a painter - but while his mother

   encouraged her younger son's artistic leanings, his engineer father

   preferred that he train as an architect. Delicate as a child, Kelly

   briefly attended the elite King's College, but was mostly home-schooled in

   his younger years and apprenticed as a teenager to a civil engineering and

   survey firm. However, he hated math and soon moved on to minor jobs at an

   advertising agency and teaching in the art school where he had once taken

   Sunday lessons before training as a graphic artist and designer. By age

   17, he'd succeeded in publishing two cartoons in the New Zealand Artists'

   Annual, signing them with his nickname "Fix", which later became his

   professional name as a cartoonist.

   The upper middle-class comfort he had been born into disappeared in 1933

   when his father went bankrupt as a result of the global effect of the

   Great Depression. Hortense Kelly left him, moving to England, where the

   21-year-old Felix joined her in 1935, quickly lining up a job doing

   lay-out for an advertising firm and drawing cartoons on the side for

   several British publications. Though he shared rented rooms with his

   mother, because he was handsome (with black hair and "startling blue

   eyes") and charming, Kelly quickly made aristocratic friends who invited

   him for weekends at the country houses. The architectural interests of his

   early life spurred him to begin painting them and he began to gain a

   reputation as a house "portraitist", accumulating important commissions.

   On May 1, 1940, he enlisted in the RAF where he worked as a radar man

   while continuing to create cartoons and illustrations for British

   magazines and books. In 1943, he suffered a severe illness (perhaps a

   nervous breakdown) and had to be hospitalized, effectively ending his

   active service. He spent more time painting, and his first one-man show at

   the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, launched his career and enabled him to quit

   his old job in advertising. In the same year, his mother launched her own

   career as a sort of magic realist painter at the age of 60 and did fairly

   well.

   Though architecture always featured in his paintings, his early works

   contained more figures, but even then had a haunting and somewhat

   surrealistic quality. One critic of his first show purported to see "the

   spirit of something sinister and ghostlike" present in each painting.

   Though surrealism was quite influential on his work, it more properly fit

   into the genre of neo-romanticism, which was very popular during the late

   1940s and `50s, particularly among the ex-pat painters, many of them also

   from New Zealand. While post-modernist painters moved increasingly toward

   abstraction, Kelly focused on craft, prepping the surface of his canvas or

   board for an exceptionally smooth surface in a process that took almost as

   long as the actual painting. His works were so carefully drafted that they

   were almost drawing with paint - in fact, in some of his works, the bricks

   of the houses are scratched into the oil paint rather than painted on. In

   1946, critic Herbert Read declared:

   Felix Kelly works on a scale, and with a technique, appropriate to his

   vision. There is nothing grandiose or pretentious about his art - he

   paints for the "cabinet", for the intimate world of people who surround

   themselves with private possessions rather than certificates of culture .

   . .

   His success in England led to his first trip to America in 1947 when the

   New York gallery Portraits, Inc. and Conde Nast publications commissioned

   him to paint important American houses, a turning point in his career. His

   painting of the White House appeared in one of that year's issues of

   House and Garden magazine, promoting his work to estate owners

   throughout the country. With his new income, Kelly visited Spain and Italy

   before returning to England, where he began yet another career as a set

   designer for West End plays. He was also becoming known as a decorator;

   his own apartment was featured in several magazines, displaying his taste

   for the neo-classical and Regency styles that often featured in his

   paintings as well.

   Kelly had a series of one-man shows throughout the 1950s and by the 1960s,

   he was a minor celebrity in England. Critics were comparing him to

   Canaletto and Piranesi, but art scholar John Haldane probably described

   what was most attractive to his patrons:

   Kelly painted what Edmund Burke articulated in prose: the virtues of

   traditional conservatism. In part philosophy, in part sensibility, this

   celebrates the ownership and cultivation of the land and the maintenance

   of good order, not so much through the imposition of rules, as through the

   development of personal habits of care and respect.  

   In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kelly discovered the beauties of the

   Deep South, particularly its Steamboat Gothic architecture with which he

   quickly fell in love. Louisiana, particularly the area around New Orleans,

   gave him a whole new range of subjects. By then, he had developed a series

   of recurring motifs throughout his painting, including outmoded mechanical

   contraptions, candy stripes (pink and white), miniature railways, hot air

   balloons, paddle steamers, and, of course, great houses down on their

   luck. He developed a friendship with the Norton family of Shreveport,

   Louisiana, which led to his first one-man show in Louisiana at the R.W.

   Norton Art Gallery. The Norton still contains the largest public display

   of Kelly's works.

   In the last two decades of his life, Kelly continued to paint, producing

   murals for Castle Howard to be featured in the tv miniseries Brideshead

   Revisited, but also branching out into architecture, designing

   small-scale garden pavilions for friends as well as new facades for larger

   dwellings. As part of his architectural interests, he became a friend and

   associate of the Prince of Wales when Prince Charles began his campaign

   for the preservation of heritage buildings. Though he had spent 50 years

   of his adult life in England, which he loved, he didn't apply for British

   citizenship until 1987. A few short years after that, he began to show the

   effects of Alzheimer's Disease from which he passed away in 1994.

   A last one-man exhibition was held for him in 1995 and, while modernist

   critics always had mixed reactions to his work, even they had to admit his

   talent; in his final review, one explained:

   Felix Kelly at his best is still a mite too close to chocolate box.

   However Partridge's memorial show to Kelly who died last year . . . does

   remind us that there are good chocolate boxes and bad. Kelly's are

   definitely superior.  

   Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections"

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