The right moves: Alfred Leslie in the fifties: although best known these days for his heroically scaled figurative paintings, Alfred Leslie spent the 1950s working in an intentionally raw Abstract-Expressionist vein. A recent show of these early works captured the brash, unfettered spirit of the era
Art in America, April, 2005 by Richard Kalina
Continued from page 1.
In addition to his painting career, Leslie made a name for himself as an underground filmmaker, although his momentum was slowed significantly by a disastrous fire in 1966 that destroyed the masters of his films, along with all the paintings in his studio. A program of those films was shown at Allan Stone. I found Pull My Daisy to be particularly engaging. Narrated by Jack Kerouac (who sounds, I guess not unexpectedly, like the archetypal New York hipster), the dialogueless film shows a bunch of Beat characters-Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram and Larry Rivers--hanging around a loft, drinking, smoking pot, horsing around and generally trying the patience of the woman of the house, played by the ethereally beautiful French actress Delphine Seyrig (the star of Last Year at Marienbad and at the time the wife of the painter Jack Youngerman). Other art-world figures show up, including legendary dealer Dick Bellamy, playing, of all things, Larry and Delphine's straight-laced bishop, and the painter Mice Neel, looking sweet and grandmotherly, in the role of the bishop's mother. It's all frenetic and rather silly, but fun, and with the great photographer Robert Frank co-directing, the film displays a lot more visual cohesiveness than is immediately apparent.
The show at Stone, covering the years 1951-62, was subtitled "Expressing the Zeitgeist," and it certainly brought back a sense of that time. In a way, Alfred Leslie, young, energetic and brash, truly exemplified the hopeful bohemian ethos that animated downtown life. The older artists like de Kooning and Kline were already well settled into their art, and while they evolved, the possibility of radical change was diminished. For Leslie and others of his generation, though, things remained wide open. That the work in this show represents an approach that Leslie would soon abandon is, perhaps paradoxically, proof of its freshness and vitality.
"Alfred Leslie, 1951-1962: Expressing the Zeitgeist" appeared at the Allan Stone Gallery, New York [Oct. 16-Dec. 22, 2004].
Author: Richard Kalina is a painter who also writes about art.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
Top of Page