Alfred Leslie

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 when Tony Smith at the New York University.

He had his first exhibitions in 1947 with pictures that are still heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism. End of the year 1950, he, he painted in the style of short-term geometric abstraction.

From 1961 he turned definitively to be figurative. Alfred Leslie used in his paintings often bright incident light, large formats and biblical allegories. He thus builds on the classic painting by artists such as Caravaggio, to ironically this time. In his paintings, he omits any background that does not directly belong to the theme and thus forces the viewer to focus on the centrally placed figure - focus - usually larger than life portraits with emphasis on the individual characteristics of each person.

The late 1950s and early 1960s, he began seriously to make films. By Robert Frank of the Beat Generation cult film Pull My Daisy (1959 ) was based on the third act of Jack Kerouac's play Beat Generation and Kerouac told. With The Last Clean Shirt ( 1964), a collaboration with Frank O'Hara, Leslie participated in the Documenta 5 (1972 ) in Kassel, in the Department of Individual Mythologies: Film, part. 1965/66 was Birth of a Nation. The Cedar Bar (2002 ) is set in August 1956, after Pollock's death, in the well-known meeting place for the New York Abstract Expressionists. Published in 1999 an expanded edition of The Hasty Papers, a small magazine in which Leslie had published poems in 1960 his New York School poets and friends.

Literature and sources

• Exhibition catalog: documentation fifth survey of reality - imagery today; Catalog (as folders ) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: ( list of exhibits ); Kassel in 1972
• Documenta Archive (ed. ); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive to the documenta, 1972; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121- X