Desirée, 1951, Oil on Academy Board, 24 1/2" x 18 1/2"

This portrait depicts a local teenager who lived in the village of Pett and frequently visited the Rectory Lodge, where Sylvia Sleigh resided for several years. Desirée’s head and neck are solidly rendered, as are the glass beads of her necklace. The sitter’s arms were left unfinished.

Essay provided by Andrew Hottle © 2016-17

Demonstration Nude at the New School, c. 1976 - 1980, Oil on Canvas, 9 7/8" x 20"

While teaching as an adjunct instructor at the New School, Sylvia Sleigh painted alongside her students, which yielded a group of studies from the live model.

Essay provided by Andrew Hottle © 2016-17

Study at the New School: Donna Anderson, 1979, Oil on Canvas, 30" x 24"

While teaching as an adjunct instructor at the New School, Sylvia Sleigh painted alongside her students, which yielded a group of studies from the live model.

Essay provided by Andrew Hottle © 2016-17

The Bridge, 1963, Oil on Canvas, 48 1/4" x 84 1/4"

While many of her early paintings are small, Sylvia Sleigh began to work on a considerably larger scale in 1959. This coincided with her renewed interest in painting the traditional female nude, which she wished to situate in a modern context. When The Bridge was completed in 1963, it was Sleigh’s largest canvas. Her source of inspiration was Giorgione’s slightly smaller Sleeping Venus (c. 1508–10; Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister). In her predecessor’s painting, the idealized female nude reclines in an Italianate landscape with buildings in the middle ground. The Bridge shows a similarly unclothed woman, but she lies instead on the artist’s cream-colored sofa before a window that overlooks the 59th Street Bridge in Manhattan. The young model, Johanna Lawrenson, had appeared in Claes Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Theater, a series of ten Happenings, in 1962. Just over a decade after Sleigh painted her, Lawrenson became the partner of Abbie Hoffman, the influential social activist and co-founder of the Youth International Party (Yippies).

Essay provided by Andrew Hottle © 2016-17

Still Life with Decanter, 1949, Oil on Canvas, 16" x 18"

This small still life painting was exhibited in Sylvia Sleigh’s first solo show, held in 1953 at the Kensington Art Gallery in London. The ribs of the elegant decanter correspond to those of the adjacent white basket; the latter brims with fruit. The containers rest on a reflective ornamental tray, which was placed, for purely compositional reasons, on a divan upholstered in fabric with figural and foliate motifs. Using predominantly warm hues and a variety of embellished objects, Sleigh created a pleasant arrangement of patterns and forms.

Essay provided by Andrew Hottle © 2016-17

Portrait of a Seated Man, Undated, Watercolor on Paper, 12 1/4" x 9 7/8"

Shed and Wall, 1949, Watercolor on Paper, 11 7/16" x 9"

In Shed and Wall, Sylvia Sleigh chose an unusual vantage point for the fragmentary brick wall, which is nearly perpendicular to the picture plane. The shed is visible behind it. Her watercolor of the terrace similarly provides a glimpse of trees and fragments of architecture.

Essay provided by Andrew Hottle © 2016-17

Winchelsea Gate, 1948, Watercolor on Paper, 6 7/8" x 9 7/8"

Winchelsea Gate was completed during Sylvia Sleigh’s outings with her first husband, Michael Greenwood. They first visited the ruin of the fourteenth-century Bodiam Castle, followed by a trip to Winchelsea Gate.

Sylvia Sleigh

Biography

Sylvia Sleigh is an important Feminist realism painter. She was a Welsh-born naturalized American who studied at the Brighton School of Art and had her first solo exhibition in 1953 at the Kensington Art Gallery. She married Lawrence Alloway, art critic and future Guggenheim curator, before moving to the United States in 1961.

In 1970, from feminist principles, she painted a series of works reversing stereotypical artistic themes by featuring men in poses that were traditionally associated with women, like the reclining Venus or odalisque. Some directly allude to existing works, such as her gender-reversed version of Ingres's Turkish Bath, which depicts a group of nude male art critics, (Smart Museum of Art). This and other works also present a reversal of the male-artist/female-muse pattern typical of the Western canon. As Sleigh explained, "I feel that my paintings stress the equality of men and women. I liked to portray both man and woman as intelligent and thoughtful people with dignity and humanism that emphasizes love and joy." For her sensitivity to the humanity of her figures, her paintings have been compared to those of Alice Neel in the New York Times.

Sleigh was a founding member of the all-women SOHO 20 Gallery (est. 1973) and later joined A.I.R. Gallery (est. 1972). In 1978 she contributed to the Sister Chapel, a collaborative installation, wherein she depicted Lilith with the superimposed bodies of a man and a woman to emphasize the fundamental similarities between the genders. Manipulating existing art historical models for group portraits, Sleigh painted the now famous portraits of the women artists of SOHO20 and A.I.R. Gallery. In addition to figurative work, Sleigh is much know for the botanical themes, in the form of still lives, landscapes and garden scenes, some which also incorporate figures.

Sleigh’s work is held in many important collections including the National Portrait Gallery, London; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; Mills College, Oakland, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Rowan University Art Gallery, Glassboro, NJ; The Smart Museum, Chicago, IL; University of Missouri-St. Louis, MO; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC. During her lifetime she received the College Art Association Lifetime Achievement Award, a Pollock-Krasner Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artists Fellowship. The Women's Caucus for Art posthumously honored Sleigh in 2011 as a recipient of the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award.