Alfred Leslie American , 1927-2023

Alfred Leslie (1927–2023) was among the most inventive American artists of the postwar era, a painter, filmmaker, printmaker, and editor whose career moved from Abstract Expressionism to a defiant revival of figurative painting, and onward through narrative pictures, watercolor, film, and digitally composed portraiture. He worked alongside Frank O’Hara, Robert Frank, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Mitchell, Larry Rivers, Sartre, and Genet, collaborating with many of them. Across every change of style, his work remained committed to narrative, artifice, and the human figure, while his refusal to remain within a single discipline has resisted the categories preferred by art historians.

Born in the Bronx in 1927, Leslie was making paintings, prints, sculpture, and films as a teenager. After two years in the Coast Guard, he studied with Tony Smith and William Baziotes at New York University on the G.I. Bill, while also taking classes at the Art Students League. He rose quickly through the postwar New York art world: New Talent in 1950, the Ninth Street Show in 1951, a first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy in 1952, and Sixteen Americans at The Museum of Modern Art in 1959.

Photography ran beneath all of it. Leslie had been making photographs as a teenager, and around 1955 a collector who had made his money in Polaroid stock gave him a small bellows Polaroid camera with a good lens. Leslie began taking police-style mug shots of everyone who came into the studio, arranging them in a grid on the wall. After twenty or thirty, he realized he had begun a body of work and went on to make hundreds. The mug shots pushed the abstract possibilities of the most representational of media and became a bridge from his abstract paintings to his films and, later, to his confrontational portraits. In 1959, he directed Pull My Daisy with Robert Frank, narrated by Kerouac, and in 1964 The Last Clean Shirt, with subtitles by O’Hara. He also edited The Hasty Papers, a one-issue review that brought together Sartre, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ashbery, Genet, and Alice Neel.

At the end of 1962, Leslie abandoned abstraction for monumental grisaille portraits: frontal, evenly lit, and larger than life. He called the approach “confrontational art.” He emphasized scale, frontality, and accuracy while eliminating color, space, light, and conventional composition, painting each figure from separate eye-level views so that every part carried equal weight. A studio fire in 1966 destroyed nearly all of the paintings and brought a planned exhibition at the Whitney Museum to an end.

Leslie’s self-portrait of 1966–67, one of only four grisailles he completed afterwards, entered the Whitney’s collection and became an icon of the new realism. The shift helped open the way for artists including Philip Pearlstein, Chuck Close, and Alex Katz. The Killing Cycle, a group of theatrically lit narrative canvases in the tradition of history painting, occupied him from 1967 to 1981. “It is not primarily about any one thing,” he wrote—not only about death or the loss of American innocence. The five paintings were shown together at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1991 and at the Haggerty Museum of Art in 2014.

The same years produced Americans, Youngstown, Ohio, a triptych of life-sized figures made in 1977 and 1978 from the workers and residents of the city. Commissioned for the Butler Institute of American Art, the first museum in the country devoted exclusively to American art, it remains in the museum’s collection.

Leslie began the Pixel Scores at the age of seventy-eight and worked on them for the rest of his life. These hand-drawn portraits, composed on the computer, depict protagonists from a century of fiction, with a particular emphasis on outlaws and outsiders, from Conrad’s Marlow and Hammett’s Miss Wonderly to the soldier of All Quiet on the Western Front and the killer of No Country for Old Men. He called the series his final magnum opus.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery presented The Toast is Burning in 2016.