Between 1946 and 1948 Kelly studied at the Boston Museum School, his tuition paid by the GI Bill. He made Reclining Nude, a spare yet naturalistic drawing of a model in repose, the same year the artist Max Beckmann visited the school and delivered a memorable lecture on the importance of observing nature.

Upon graduating, Kelly moved to Paris, a city he had visited two years earlier while serving in the US Army. He would remain there for six years. His initial steps toward abstraction can be seen in the pared-down drawings made from his observations of nature and the city during his first years in Paris, like the two rows of café tables placed atop one another, their curved legs in the air, in Stacked Tables (1949).

Kelly depicted his own likeness with a similar economy of line in Self-Portrait (1949). The drawing, with the artist’s face composed of a series of curves, was probably made in a mirror in his room at the Hôtel de Bourgogne on the Île Saint-Louis, where he lived for three years.