Alfred Leslie 1951-1965: Expressing the Zeitgeist    Oct 16 - Dec 22, 2004

Emotional, dynamic and unrehearsed, Leslie’s work depends heavily on a loaded brush and energetic execution. The geometric division of the canvas into quadrants restrains his exuberant brush strokes and splattering, creating a classical dialog. This, combined with his unexpected use of color and the consistently present, double vertical bands gives Leslie’s work an instantly recognizable signature. Much like de Kooning and Kline before him, Leslie conjures great scale. His miniature collages convey power usually seen in large-scale paintings. Leslie’s abstractions from 1951-65 are a powerful body of work representative of the best of postwar American abstract painting.

Alfred Leslie was at the epicenter of the social, political and cultural changes of the time, as a painter, a writer and a filmmaker. Painting titles like Guevara and Nix on Nixon suggest a political awareness not evident in the work of most of his peers. The works of today’s literary giants – then relatively unknown – Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others were featured in Leslie’s 1960 single-issue review The Hasty Papers, an edgy, anarchic commentary. Leslie’s studio was the arena for a nearly continuous series of art happenings, performances, musical improvisations and parties. His movie Pull My Daisy, co-directed with Robert Frank in 1959, is a landmark of the American underground film movement and it was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1996.

Born in New York City in 1927, Leslie emerged in the late 1940s as one of the core-group Second Generation New York School of Abstract Expressionism painters, alongside Joan Mitchell and Michael Goldberg. Leslie studied in 1947 at the Art Students League and from 1947-49 with Tony Smith and William Baziotes at New York University. Throughout his career Leslie was involved in music, set design, film and literature. His early exhibitions include the 1949 New Talent group show at the Kootz Gallery and a first solo show at Tibor de Nagy in 1952. Other exhibitions followed at de Nagy and Martha Jackson, and numerous museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Alfred Leslie’s work is in the collections of major museums throughout the world including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Kunsthalle, Basel, Switzerland; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York among many others. In 1994, Leslie received the Award of Merit Medal for painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives in New York City.

In 1960 Tiber Press published a set of four volumes of poetry by Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler illustrated with original silkscreen prints by Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell, Michael Goldberg and Grace Hartigan. Each volume consists of forty pages, jacketed in molded acetate, and all four volumes are boxed together. The edition is limited to two hundred numbered copies, signed by the poets and painters. A limited number will be for sale at the gallery. The Allan Stone Gallery opened in 1960 showing works by Willem de Kooning, Cesar, Joseph Cornell, Barnett Newman, and a host of then-emerging artists such as Andy Warhol, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Estes, Robert Ryman, Eva Hesse, and John Chamberlain. The gallery continues to show contemporary, mid-career, and emerging artists while maintaining a tradition of expertise in the New York School of Abstract Expressionism (Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, John Graham).

GALLERY SUMMER HOURS: Monday – Thursday 10 – 6, Friday 10 – 4 GALLERY REGULAR HOURS: Tuesday – Friday 10 – 6, Saturday 10 – 5 AUGUST: Closed

For further information or photographic material, please contact Claudia Stone or Georgia Jaksic, tel. 212.987.4997, e-mail: gjaksic@allanstonegallery.com.