Alfred Leslie “Hoboken Stripes”

Janet Borden

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Janet Borden, Inc. presents ALFRED LESLIE: HOBOKEN STRIPES, by acclaimed painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie.

Although these striped paintings adhere to a geometric format, they display the virtuosity of paint handling and touch that have been hallmarks of Leslie’s abstract and figurative works for a half century. Controlled but impassioned, the stripes are indeed hand-made, rather than taped or the machine-made marks that predominate now.
The original Hoboken Oval was an oil painting on masonite panels, made between 1952 and 1953, then later destroyed by an irate boyfriend of Grace Hartigan, while moving between galleries. A six-panel version was created in 1984 to replace the original. In 2010 Alfred Leslie revisited his Stripes piece and attempted to recreate it into an entirely new 8-panel striped work. He then reworked the individual panels into separate works and created what we see today. These marks capture the lucidity of stripes, but still manage to remain within the field of Abstract Expressionism. He uses multiple planes, newspaper, and ground to create masterly images that are both abstract and specific.

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 a filmmaker and an 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, Jack Kerouac, and Frank O’Hara with whom he often collaborated.