Alfred Leslie Art

Alfred Leslie was among the most interesting counterculture figures of the second half of the 20th century. He was perhaps most famous for Pull My Daisy, the 1959 film he made with Robert Frank that today stands as the quintessential Beat Generation movie, but Leslie was an active painter, printmaker, collagist and sculptor as well as a filmmaker throughout his entire career. 

Leslie’s many projects and activities saw him work alongside and collaborate with such luminaries as Frank O’Hara, Robert Frank, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet. Born in the Bronx, New York, Leslie began making paintings, prints, sculptures, photographs and films as a teenager. After two years in the Coast Guard, Leslie studied with William Baziotes and Tony Smith at New York University under the GI Bill. While working in Studio 35, an influential work and lecture space, Leslie forged ties in the avant-garde community of artists known as the New York School.

Leslie was quickly recognized for his talents as an abstract painter and collagist. In 1951, his work was included in the Ninth Street Show, the landmark exhibition cum coming-out party for the New York School, and he subsequently was represented by the highly prestigious Tibor de Nagy gallery. He was represented in a number of important exhibitions in the 1950s, including “Recent Work by Young Americans” (1955, Museum of Modern Art, New York), “Artists of the New York School” (1957, Jewish Museum, New York) and the 1958 Pittsburgh International at the Carnegie Institute.

With his star rising, Leslie began to branch out and follow his multidisciplinary instincts, working with other artists, photographers, writers and filmmakers on a huge number of projects. In addition to Pull My Daisy, Leslie produced several other films in the early 1960s. He also worked extensively in photography and edited a radical literary journal. All the while he continued painting and making prints in an abstract mode. Leslie’s studio was destroyed by fire in 1966, along with nearly all of his film masters and equipment, a huge number of paintings, and all of his documentation. Indefatigable, Leslie spent the next 15 years recreating his lost oeuvre while at the same time producing new work.

The Tiber Press was founded in 1953 by Floriano Vecchi and Richard Miller. The press produced intensely colorful, high-quality screenprints by Abstract Expressionist artists, including Leslie, Michael Goldberg, Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell. The press’s most significant project was a group of four volumes published between 1957 and 1960, each pairing one of the above artists with the work of contemporary poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler. In this scheme, Koch was paired with Leslie, Ashbery with Mitchell, O’Hara with Goldberg and Schuyler with Hartigan. The intention was not for the artwork to be illustrative, but to mirror the imagistic properties of the poems and therefore to be just as important as the text. The resulting volumes are masterworks of postwar fine art publishing.

Leslie’s collaboration with poet Kenneth Koch on Permanently was published by the Tiber Press in 1957. The volume of Koch’s poetry included 15 of Leslie’s screenprints. A special set of these prints was made again in 1961.

Find authentic Alfred Leslie art on 1stDibs. 

(Biography provided by Hirschl & Adler)