SELECTED CHRONOLOGY: ALFRED LESLIE
October 29, 1927
Alfred Leslie born in New York City.
1945 - 49
After serving in the United States Coast Guard from 1945-46, Leslie studies at the Art
Students League in 1947, and from 1947-49 with Tony Smith and William Baziotes at
New York University.
In 1949, the critic Clement Greenberg chooses Leslie’s work for the New Talent
exhibition at the Kootz Gallery in New York City. Concurrent with the exhibition, Leslie
releases his third film: Directions: A Walk after the War Games (he started directing in
1945). It is shown at a special screening at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1951 - 59
In 1951 Leslie is part of the legendary Ninth Street Show at the 9th Street Gallery in New
York.
Leslie has his first solo show in 1952 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City.
Other solo shows at de Nagy follow in 1953, 1954 and 1957. The Robert Keene Gallery
in Southampton, New York, shows Leslie’s work in one-man exhibitions in 1957 and
1958.
Leslie’s work is also included in various American museum exhibitions: Recent Work by
Young Americans, organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 1954, Artists of the New
York School: Second Generation at The Jewish Museum in New York in 1957, the
Annual Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1957, the
Pittsburgh International at the Museum of Art at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania in 1958 and again at both The Jewish Museum in 1958 and the Whitney
Museum Annual Exhibition in 1959.
In 1957, Leslie’s work is part of a traveling exhibition organized by The Museum of
Modern Art, for the Metropolitan Art Museum in Tokyo, called Fourth International Art
Exhibition: Japan. In 1958, Leslie is part of another exhibition in Japan, The International
Art of a New Era, U.S.A., Japan, Europe, which opens at the Takashimaya department
store in Osaka. The same year two other international group exhibitions feature Leslie’s
work: Young Americans at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in France, and
Fifteen American Artists in Spoleto, Italy.
In 1959, while working on his literary magazine, The Hasty Papers, Leslie shows new
work in The Museum of Modern Art exhibition 16 Americans, and the Whitney Museum
of American Art exhibition Project I: Longview Foundation Purchases in Modern
American Painting and Sculpture and completes his movie Pull My Daisy.
1 Pull My Daisy, co-directed with Robert Frank, recited by Jack Kerouac from his play The
Beat Generation and featuring Allen Ginsberg, becomes a landmark in what is then the
incipient American underground film movement. The film will later be selected for
preservation in the National Film Registry and inducted in 1996.
Leslie also works with writing, music and set design. Towards the end of the 1950s,
Leslie writes The Chekhov Cha-Cha, a literary work that Leslie states “can be seen as a
poem, a novel, or a play, a multi-purpose work.”
1960 – 65
In 1960, Leslie exhibits his work alongside John Chamberlain at the Martha Jackson
Gallery; and participates in Sixty American Painters, 1960: Abstract Expressionist
Painting of the 50s at the Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; V Bienal in São Paulo,
Brazil; and a group exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The same year, Leslie also publishes The Hasty Papers, an edgy, anarchic commentary.
Received with enthusiasm by the artistic and literary communities, The Hasty Papers
features works by artists, poets, critics and politicians. Although the Establishment at the
time dismisses the review, many of the contributors - among them, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac - will come to be considered
twentieth-century masters.
In 1961, his work is included in the exhibition American Abstract Expressionists and
Imagists at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and he has solo shows
at the Martha Jackson Gallery and at the David Anderson Gallery in New York.
In 1962, Leslie is featured in the exhibition 4 Amerikanare: Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie,
Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm,
Sweden. He has a solo exhibition at Holland Goldowsky Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.
After working more than fifteen years as an abstract painter, in 1962 Leslie begins to
change toward realism, resulting in his multi-horizoned, large Grisaille portraits. Leslie
becomes known as an artist who does not follow trends, but rather as somebody who
sets them. His move to figurative painting is greeted with everything from excitement to
resentment.
Leslie releases the movie The Last Clean Shirt, a collaboration with Frank O’Hara, in
1964. The movie is screened at the Lincoln Center Film Festival in New York, and it wins
an award for Best Experimental Film the same year at the Film Festival in Bergamo,
Italy.
In 1965, his abstract and his realist works are featured in different museum exhibitions.
His abstract work is featured in the exhibition American Collages at The Museum of
Modern Art in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual Exhibition
includes his Grisaille paintings in 1965 and 1967.
2 1966 - 69
In 1966, Leslie’s studio burns down (address), destroying all his paintings as well as his
film masters, just as the Whitney Museum is about to give him a one-man show
featuring the Grisaille paintings and just as one of his films is being considered for the
New York Film Festival. A few months earlier, Frank O’Hara, one of Leslie’s good
friends, is killed in an accident.
In 1967, Leslie starts work on what he later titles The Killing Cycle, a collection of five
major canvases and nearly a hundred studies depicting the death of Frank O’Hara. (He
will complete The Killing Cycle in 1981; and in 1991 the works will be featured in the
exhibition Alfred Leslie: The Killing Cycle at the Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri.)
In 1968, Leslie receives a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He
participates in In Memory of my Feelings: Frank O’Hara at The Museum of Modern Art in
New York.
In 1969, he receives the Guggenheim Fellowship, and has a solo exhibition at the
Goldowsky Gallery in New York.
1970s
In 1970, Leslie’s work is included in 22 Realists at the Whitney Museum of American Art
in New York.
In 1971, Leslie’s work is featured in Younger Abstract Expressionists of the 50’s at The
Museum of Modern Art in New York and in Leslie, Thiebaud, Pearlstein at the Hayden
Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
also has a solo exhibition at the Goldowsky Gallery in New York. The same year, Leslie
receives the Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1973, his work is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial
Exhibition.
In 1976, a solo traveling exhibition that originates at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,
Massachusetts, is included in the XXXVII Biennale di Venezia in Italy. Leslie’s work is
exhibited in 30 Years of American Printmaking at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in
Brooklyn, New York. In 1976 and 1977, he has a solo exhibition at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois (catalogue essay by Robert Rosenblum).
In 1977, Leslie’s work is included in Nothing But Nudes at the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York, in Drawings of the 70’s at The Museum of Modern Art in New
York and in A View of the Decade at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago,
Illinois.
1980s
Leslie’s work is included in the 1980 exhibitions The Fifties: Aspects of Painting in New
3 York at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., American
Portrait Drawings at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and in American
Drawings in Black and White at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York features his paintings in the 1981
exhibition An American Choice: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection. Two
traveling exhibitions in 1983 and 1985 follow: 100 Views Along the Road: The
Watercolors of Alfred Leslie, originating at the Oil and Steel Gallery in New York, and
American Realism: The Precise Image, originating at the Isetan Museum of Art in Tokyo,
Japan.
1990s
His work is featured in the 1991 retrospective exhibition, The Power of Form: Alfred
Leslie’s Art, 1951-1991 at the Joseloff Gallery at the University of Hartford, Connecticut.
In 1994, Leslie receives the Award of Merit Medal for Painting for lifetime achievement
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
2000s
In 2000, Leslie’s painting is exhibited in Picturing the Modern Amazon at the New
Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. His feature-length movie The Cedar Bar
is released in 2002.
In 2004, Leslie’s early work is exhibited at the Allan Stone Gallery in Alfred Leslie 195162 Expressing the Zeitgeist, and again in 2010 in the exhibition Alfred Leslie, John
Chamberlain: Collage.
In 2006, Leslie becomes a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 2007, Ameringer Yohe in NYC exhibits Leslie’s work in The Radical Theatre of Alfred
Leslie.
2010s
The Museum of Modern Art in New York includes Leslie’s work in the 2010-2011
exhibition Abstract Expressionist New York.
In June 2012, Leslie exhibits his new photographic work The Lives of Some Women at
Janet Borden, Inc.
Alfred Leslie currently lives in New York City.
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia
Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Indiana
4 Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Neue Gallerie der Stadt Aachen, Aachen, Germany
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri
Museum de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Washington Art Consortium, Seattle, Washington
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
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