Alfred Leslie

Alfred Leslie (October 29, 1927 – January 27, 2023) was an American painter and filmmaker. He first achieved success as an Abstract Expressionist painter, but changed course in the early 1960s and became a painter of realistic figurative paintings.

Biography Alfred Leslie was born in New York City. After service in the U.S. Coast Guard at the end of World War II, Leslie studied art at New York University, the Art Students League, and Pratt Institute. A bodybuilder and hand-balancer, Leslie posed for artist Reginald Marsh and others and modeled for classes at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute. Anticipating the Situationist International's detournement, his 1949 film Magic Thinking combined black-and-white cartoons, home movies, GI training films, industrial commercials, strip footage, and old feature films. Even though figuration and narration became contentious issues for painters in the 1980s, "these concerns didn't exist per se in film, theater, literary or still photography world, all of which I was part of."