The artist Alfred Leslie is 90, but he acts decades younger. A recent conversation in his East Village studio had to wait while he finished fiddling with an image on his computer for a new project.
Mr. Leslie is an unusually generation-spanning figure. He can reminisce about the New York City art scene of the late 1940s, when Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were hanging out at the Cedar Bar, yet his latest series is made with Photoshop.
Some of his work — black-and-white watercolors from the 1980s series “100 Views Along the Road” — is being shown at the London Frieze Masters this week by Bruce Silverstein Gallery. But although he is certainly a “master,” Mr. Leslie is a workaholic who could also be shown at the contemporary-focused sibling fair, Frieze London.
Mr. Leslie may be most famous for his experimental films like “Pull My Daisy” (1959), which he directed with the photographer Robert Frank, or maybe it’s his later, monumental “Grisaille” painting series. He’s been as promiscuous and catholic with media as it is possible to be, and he’s secured a place in the history of all of them, as evidenced by his presence in the collections of numerous museums.
