“Whether it is a large oil on canvas or a miniature collage, his work is immediately identifiable. Leslie has the ability to impart scale much like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. His small works have great scale and his large works project an even grander sense of scale. This combined with Leslie’s color sense creates a body of work that epitomizes the power and dynamic of postwar American abstract painting”
Structured yet spontaneous, energetic yet controlled, Alfred Leslie’s #25 from 1959 offers a rare glimpse into one of the most defining and acclaimed periods in the artist’s oeuvre, capturing a pivotal moment in his career as an Abstract Expressionist before his subsequent departure towards Realist portraiture. While Leslie’s artistic evolution from the raw dynamism of abstraction to the considered and meticulous precision of realism is symbolic of the larger shifting currents of the mid-20th-century American art scene, it is his Abstract Expressionist works which continue to resonate with scholars and collectors alike. Testament to the present work’s singular importance within the artist's oeuvre, #25 was included in the Annual Exhibition of American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1959, the year of its execution, and the same year which saw Leslie’s inclusion in the groundbreaking exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, alongside titans of twentieth century art such as Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. A remarkable icon of American abstract art, #25 has been cherished in the collection of Tom and Whitney Armstrong for nearly two decades.

With #25, Leslie delivers a masterful synthesis of compositional structure and painterly spontaneity, presenting a masterpiece that aligns closely with his other works of the period. The arrangement of divided planes and distinctive shapes, such as the two commanding dark shafts running along the right-hand side of the composition, demonstrate Leslie’s relentless pursuit of capturing the dynamic interplay between spontaneous gesture, spatial relationships, and the tactile qualities of the painted surface. The work’s nuanced contrasts are particularly evident in the juxtaposition between areas of thinly painted areas and passages of impasto, where thick, assertive brushstrokes form dense, opaque textured surfaces. This dialogue between transparency and density is further enriched by the subtle emergence of soft yellow underpaint through these thinner, more delicate layers, lending the canvas a dreamlike, ethereal glow that contradicts the vigor of some of its bolder strokes. This nuanced treatment to the surface employs a similar vocabulary to other Abstract Expressionist masters such as Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, yet remains distinctly his own language.
A native New Yorker, Alfred Leslie’s formative years were shaped by both artistic mentorship and diverse life experience. Leslie served in the United States Coast Guard before studying under notable art luminaries Tony Smith and William Baziotes at New York University. His studies were soon complemented by a foray into experimental filmmaking, with his works gaining a place at the Museum of Modern Art in the late 1940s and early 1950s, paralleling his Abstract Expressionist works being presented in seminal museum exhibitions. Despite his success, Leslie’s artistic journey was not without hardship. A devastating fire destroyed his studio in 1966, claiming not only a substantial portion of his Abstract Expressionist paintings, but also the masters of his early films- further rarifying the subject 1959 work. Despite the loss from the fire, Leslie’s resilience and enduring contributions to American art were recognized decades later when, in 1994, he received the Award of Merit Medal for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters - a fitting tribute for a man with a lifetime of artistic achievement.