Keene enjoyed a long career and he began studying art as a schoolboy at Philadelphia’s Graphic Sketch Club, now known as the Fleisher Art Memorial. His first immersion in Modern art came while he worked in the late 1940s in Paris after serving as a Tuskegee Airman in WWII. A John Hays Whitney Opportunity Fellowship took Keene and his family to Haiti in 1951-53 where Paul discovered new ways of expression in his work. Fiesta, Abstraction, and Saeto show Keene very nearly letting go of the figuration, resorting to gesture and color in these masterful works.

Other works by Paul Keene