Viewing Room Main Site
Skip to content

Biography Intro

Alfred Leslie - Artists - Bruce Silverstein

Image: Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

Painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie was born in the Bronx, New York in 1927 and currently lives and works in Manhattan. In the late 1940s he emerged as an experimental filmmaker and a second generation Abstract Expressionist painter. In the 1950s and ’60s, he was associated with a community of avant-garde artists and writers, including Joan Mitchell, Larry Rivers, Robert Frank, Frank O’Hara, and Jack Kerouac, with whom he often collaborated. The quintessential Beat Generation film Pull My Daisy (1959) was codirected by Leslie and photographer Robert Frank, with subtitles and narration by Jack Kerouac. In the early 1960s, Leslie's style evolved from pure abstraction to figurative realism, distilling his background in film to be fully realized through painting. Over the last 15 years, he has taken these interests one step further, incorporating them with new digital technology to create paintings on the computer, which he has named Pixel Scores.

In 2018, Leslie was given the Lee Krasner Award in recognition of a lifetime of artist achievement, granted by The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His most recent body of work, the Pixel Scores were the subject of a major solo exhibition, Alfred Leslie: One Hundred Characters in Search of a Reader, at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Texas, from September 2018 through January 2019.

His work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., The Saint Louis Art Museum, The Walker Art Center, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Lives of Some Women

Back to Other Works
Alfred Leslie -  Brenna Gordon, 1989  | Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Alfred Leslie

Brenna Gordon, 1989

Oil on canvas

77 x 84 in.

Alfred Leslie -  Casey Key, 1983  | Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Alfred Leslie

Casey Key, 1983

Oil on canvas

72 x 108 in.

Alfred Leslie -  Cindy Cresswell, 1977  | Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Alfred Leslie

Cindy Cresswell, 1977

Oil on canvas

108 x 72 in.

Alfred Leslie -  Brenna Gordon, 1989  | Bruce Silverstein GalleryAlfred Leslie -  Casey Key, 1983  | Bruce Silverstein GalleryAlfred Leslie -  Cindy Cresswell, 1977  | Bruce Silverstein Gallery
Back To Top