PAUL F. KEENE, JR. (1920 - 2009)
Untitled (Carousel).

Oil on linen canvas mounted on masonite board, 1953. 794x1156 mm; 31¼x45½ inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.

Provenance: private collection, Philadelphia, PA.

This extraordinary painting is an important artwork by Paul Keene. It is one of his finest 1950s paintings we have seen - a wonderfully vibrant synthesis of modernism and the Afro-Caribbean imagery Keene encountered in Haiti.

After his studies at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (now University of the Arts) from 1939 to 1941, Paul Keene was enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1949 to 1951. Keene absorbed the lessons of European modernism and enrolled at the Académie Julian. While in Paris, he founded the cooperative Galerie Huit with Raymond Hendler, shared an apartment with Sanford Greenberg, and studied with French modernist painter Fernand Léger. Keene exhibited with Picasso and Léger at the Salon de Mai.

After return from Paris, in August of 1952, Keene received an Opportunity Fellowship from the John Hay Whitney Foundation to travel to Haiti. Keene had proposed a study of Haitian art and culture through his painting, with a particular interest in Voodoo and its African roots. With his fellowship, Keene had a studio and taught art courses at the Centre D'Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti between 1952 and 1954. His time in Haiti had a tremendous impact on his painting - visually and spiritually. There Keene developed close ties to the Haitian artist community, including the artist Antonio Joseph, with whom he exhibited with twice in 1953.

This tumultous, densely painted scene rhythmically alternates between figure and abstraction, pattern and form, ground and space. It reflects not only Keene's modernist approach to painting, but his visual expression of the real and the supernatural in Haitian culture. In his 1954 essay, Haitian Painters, Keene wrote that the "Haitian is able to identify and align himself intimately with either the unseen world or the one in which he actively lives." Here, Keene paints with a kinetic energy that beautifully fills the space between what is seen and unseen.

Keene's Haitian art was collected at the time by Joseph H. Hirshorn and is found today in many institutional collections including those of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the La Salle University Art Museum, the Woodmere Art Museum and Villanova University.