Art
Brideshead revisited
by Jill Trevelyan
New Zealander Felix Kelly was a Charles Ryder-like figure.
The Felix Kelly story reads like a fairy tale. In 1935, the young New Zealand artist arrived in London and found work with an advertising firm. At his first exhibition in 1943, his paintings attracted the attention of Herbert Read, one of the most influential art critics of the day. Not only did Read buy a picture, he commissioned Kelly to illustrate his novel, The Green Child, and wrote a glowing introduction to a book of his art.
Good-looking, charming and stylish, Kelly went on to become a minor celebrity in Britain, mixing with aristocrats, designing stage sets for John Gielgud, painting pictures of country homes for the well-to-do, and eventually revamping Highgrove for the Prince of Wales. He was evidently a master of self-invention.
In 2007, Donald Bassett published a fascinating biography of the multi-talented Kelly, and now he has curated an exhibition for Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery. Designed with sensitivity and flair, Felix Kelly: A Kiwi at Brideshead covers the range of the artist’s output, from paintings and drawings to stage design, illustration, interior design, commercial art and cartoons. The exhibition title identifies Kelly as a Charles Ryder-like figure, the middle-class hero of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, who befriends aristocrats and paints murals at their country homes, just as Kelly painted a set of murals at Castle Howard, which stood in for Brideshead in both the 1981 TV adaptation and last year’s movie version.
Kelly was an inspired illustrator, and the exhibition contains a generous selection of his work. Whether he was designing perfume packaging or giving hints on interior decorating – “Five improving ideas from Felix Kelly” – his style is lively, whimsical and assured. His sense of the dramatic was well suited to books such as Joseph Braddock’s The Haunted House, but he was also capable of subtlety. The delicate patterning in a drawing of wine glasses infuses them with a rare sense of personality.
Although he never returned home, Kelly continued to paint New Zealand subjects all his life, and his whimsical, romantic pictures are a far cry from the austere landscapes that dominated exhibitions in this country. A New Zealand Childhood Remembered celebrates a lost Edwardian past, a time of bonnets and paddle steamers- and colonial turreted mansions. This is the landscape tradition of the idyll: a tranquil, perfect world where the sun is always shining and nothing ever really happens.
Kelly is not always so upbeat. His early work, influenced by surrealism, has an eerie sense of disquiet that recalls the paintings of British contemporaries such as Paul Nash. Early Lineswoman is a typically enigmatic scene, in which a woman, clad in a ball gown,
balances precariously on a roof as she grapples with a set of telegraph wires. A -fragmentary cross dangles in the
air; two phallic chimneys loom beyond the rooftop. It is one of the strangest and most compelling works in the show.
During the 1940s, Kelly’s surrealism gave way to neo-romanticism and his painting took on the imagery of that style: broken branches, crumbled walls and dilapidated buildings. Reviewers began to note the “charm” of his work – always a loaded term in art criticism. In later years, he specialised in painting commissioned “portraits” of country houses, and his work became formulaic. At his posthumous show in 1995, a critic was dismissive: “Felix Kelly at his best is still a mite too close to the chocolate box.”
Kelly’s career makes an interesting parallel to New Zealand’s best-known expatriate artist, Frances Hodgkins. Though Kelly was 45 years younger than Hodgkins, both were associated with the neo-romantic movement of the 1940s and they exhibited together on one occasion. From that point, however, their careers diverged. Hodgkins earned a place in the modern movement, while Kelly found his niche as a society painter, part of a fashionable world of country houses, theatre and fast cars.
It is Hodgkins whose reputation has lasted: until recently, Kelly was practically unknown in New Zealand. Now, thanks to Bassett and Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery – which sets such a high standard with its exhibitions – we are able to appreciate the quirky and engaging artist whom -Herbert Read once described as “a poet of the inner court”.
