Alfred Leslie

His work as a filmmaker followed the same line of development as his paintings. And they too (Pull My Daisy, The Last Clean Shirt, Birth of a Nation 1965) have been acknowledged as seminal works: Pull My Daisy entered the National Film Archive, and both it and The Last Clean Shirt (founding work of Structuralist film) were commended as such in the Whitney Museum millennium exhibition.

ENID ABRAHAMI
Oil on Canvas
7 feet X 5 feet
© Alfred Leslie.
Courtesy of The Boil and Squeal Gallery, New York.

Alex Katz, in a 1967 interview, referred to Leslie as the only figurative artist he related to. And Chuck Close in 1996 called Leslie a hero for his figural groundbreaking; later both Close and Philip Pearlstein were instrumental in Leslie's receiving the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Painting, an award given for lifetime achievement. Pearlstein was the award presenter.

PERICLES PAPAYIANNIS
Oil on Canvas
7 feet X 5 feet
© Alfred Leslie.
Courtesy of The Boil and Squeal Gallery, New York.