Alfred Leslie
Alfred Leslie has been at the center of America's most edgy art for over fifty years. Born in 1927, Leslie won the title Mr. Bronx at the age of eighteen for his body building. After serving in the Coast Guard, Leslie studied at New York University on the GI Bill and at the Art Students League, where he was also a model. In the fifties, Leslie was one of the abstract expressionists who were taking American painting in new directions, congregating in New York's Greenwich Village as the new home of the American avant-garde. In addition to his painting, Leslie also became a filmmaking visionary. In 1959, with Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, he directed Pull My Daisy. In 1963, he collaborated with Frank O'Hara to make The Last Clean Shirt. Leslie's other films include: The Eagle and the Foetus, and Directions: A Walk after the War Games (1946-1949). In the sixties, Leslie moved away from abstract paintings to create a series of full body portraits on a large scale. Much of his work was destroyed in a 1966 fire. The fire inspired his self-portrait, which is now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. Exhibitions of his work have been shown by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Kilcawley Center Art Gallery, Youngstown State University, Worchester Museum of Fine Art, Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, California, Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, College of Saint Rose, Albany, Boca Raton Museum of Art, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. His film Cedar Bar is a perfect summary of his artistic themes and his relationship to art, asking the most fundamental questions: what is art and who determines its meaning?
