Sylvia Sleigh
(Llandudno, Conwy County Borough, 1916 - 2010)
North America, American
Sylvia Sleigh studied at the Brighton School of Art in Sussex, England from 1934 to 1937. She later recalled being outraged by the double standard that allowed female models but not male ones in life drawing classes—this foreshadowed her later artistic interest in gender. In 1941 she married Michael Greenwood, a painter and art history lecturer. They moved to London and remained together for thirteen years, but they spent much of their time apart. Greenwood discouraged Sleigh’s painting and undermined her confidence as an artist, and so she ceased painting and instead worked as a dresser at a women’s clothing store on Bond Street. Eventually she opened her own dressmaking shop in Brighton, and her appreciation of fashion, textiles, and patterning often guided her later work.[1]
When her relationship with Greenwood became estranged, Sleigh renewed her interest in artmaking. Her first solo exhibition was in 1953, at the Kensington Art Gallery in London, featuring still-lifes, landscapes, and portraits. She also began taking art history night-classes at the University of London, and there she met Lawrence Alloway, whom she married after obtaining a divorce from Greenwood in 1954. Alloway, an art critic who later worked as a curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, became a partner and muse for Sleigh. When the couple moved to New York in the 1961, they welcomed artists, writers, musicians and performers into their home, and Sleigh painted many of them.[2]
Often overlooked in contemporary art, Sleigh was an important figure on the feminist art scene in New York in the 1960s and ‘70s. She is most known for her paintings of male nudes that challenge the tradition of male artists depicting female subjects as objects of desire. By reversing these gender roles, Sleigh questioned the values attached to traditional representations of women and men, as well as the absence in Western art of erotic portraits of men. Her portraits included great attention to detail, including body hair elaborated in all its various peculiarities. In The Turkish Bath (1973), which is among her best-known paintings, Sleigh borrowed from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1852–1859 composition of the same title, but instead of a harem of voluptuous nude women she depicted a group of nude men, matching Ingres’s inclusion of a figure seated with their back to the viewer and strumming a guitar for their companions.[3] The nude figures include Alloway alongside fellow art critics Carter Ratcliff, Scott Burton, and John Perreault, as well as Sleigh’s frequent model Paul Rosano.[4]
“I wanted to give my perspective, portraying both sexes with dignity and humanism,” Sleigh once said. “It was very necessary to do this because women had often been painted as objects of desire in humiliating poses. I don’t mind the ‘desire’ part, it’s the ‘object’ that’s not very nice.”
Sleigh helped found the SoHo 20 Gallery in 1973 and became a member of the Artists in Residence Gallery in 1974. In two large-scale paintings titled SoHo 20 Gallery (1974) and A.I.R. Group Portrait (1978), which showed the members of the two all-women cooperative galleries, she documented the rise of the feminist art movement.[5]
Sleigh was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship in 1982, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1985, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art in 2011, and the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association in 2008. Her work is included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery (London), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.), the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Weatherspoon Art Museum (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), among many others.[6]
--Jeff Katzin, Assistant Curator, AAM
[1] Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, “Sylvia Sleigh Biography,” http://www.caac.es/descargas/bio_sleigh13B.pdf.
[2] Ibid.
[3] William Grimes, “Sylvia Sleigh, Provocative Portraitist and Feminist Artist, Dies at 94,” New York Times, 25 October 2010: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/arts/design/26sleigh.html.
[4] Smart Museum of Art (University of Chicago), “Sylvia Sleigh, The Turkish Bath,” https://smartcollection.uchicago.edu/objects/9221/the-turkish-bath?ctx=2f2c410d-535e-4ef0-a195-b5ae65909097&idx=7.
[5] Grimes, “Sylvia Sleigh.”
[6] Sylvia Sleigh artist’s website, “History,” http://www.sylviasleigh.com/sylviasleigh/History.html.
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