Alfred Leslie

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Alfred Leslie (born October 29, 1927 in the Bronx , New York City , USA ; lives in New York City) is a contemporary American painter , graphic artist and avant-garde film director . He is an important representative of the new figurative painting.

life and work

Alfred Leslie studied in 1946 at the Art Students League of New York and from 1946 to 1948 with Tony Smith at New York University .

He had his first exhibitions from 1947 with pictures that are still strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism . At the end of the 1950s he painted briefly in the style of geometric abstraction .

From 1961 he finally turned to figurative painting. Alfred Leslie often uses brightly incident light, large formats and biblical allegories in his pictures . He thus ties in with the classic art of painting by artists such as Caravaggio in order to ironize them at the same time. In his pictures he leaves out any background that does not belong directly to the topic and thus forces the viewer to concentrate on the centrally placed figure - mostly larger-than-life portraits with emphasis on the individual characteristics of the respective person.

He began making films in earnest in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Beat Generation cult film Pull My Daisy (1959) was created with Robert Frank , based on the third act of Jack Kerouac's play Beat Generation and also told by Kerouac. With The Last Clean Shirt (1964), a collaboration with Frank O'Hara , Leslie took part in Documenta 5 (1972) in Kassel , in the Individual Mythologies : Film department . Birth of a Nation was created in 1965/66 . The Cedar Bar (2002) takes place in August 1956, after Pollock's death, in the famous meeting place of the New York Abstract Expressionists. In 1999 there was an expanded edition of The Hasty Papers , a small magazine in which Leslie had published poems by his New York School poet friends in 1960.

Alfred Leslie was elected a member ( NA ) of the National Academy of Design in 1994. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2006 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nationalacademy.org: Artists & Architects "L" / Alfred Leslie b. 1927 ( Memento from December 29, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 17, 2019 .

Literature and Sources

  • Exhibition catalog: documenta 5. Survey of Reality - Imagery Today ; Catalog (as a file folder) Volume 1: (Material); Volume 2: (list of exhibits); Kassel 1972
  • documenta archive (ed.); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive on documenta 1972 ; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121-X

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Leslie, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter and filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Bronx , New York City , USA