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October 4, 2002
Award-Winning
Artist Alfred Leslie to Speak October 10
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Alfred
Leslie's Holyoke Range, near Oxbow, Easthampton, Massachusetts
(1983)
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Should
you happen to visit Vienna's Museum Moderner Kunst, be prepared
for a strangely familiar sight. The museum is home to the monumental
canvas View of the Connecticut River as Seen from Mount Holyoke
by Alfred Leslie, one of the world's foremost contemporary realists.
But don't call your travel agent just yet. Leslie's fascinating
large-format study for the canvas, along with his luminous black-
and-white watercolor of the site, are featured in Changing
Prospects: The View from Mount Holyoke at the Mount Holyoke
College Art Museum through December 8. On Thursday, October 10,
at 7 pm in Gamble Auditorium, Leslie will speak about his view
of the mountain that has inspired scores of artists and writers
over the course of two hundred years. The program is sponsored
by the
art museum and is part of the Weissman Center's fall series, Destinations:
New Meanings of Travel.
It was Leslie who
initiated the resurgence of interest in Thomas Cole's 1836 painting
known as The Oxbow. "Leslie was the first major contemporary
painter to return to the site depicted in Cole's nineteenth-century
painting," says art museum director Marianne Doezema. Now
considered one of the most important American landscapes, Cole's
Oxbow is the centerpiece of the Changing Prospects exhibition,
which features one hundred art objects and memorabilia related
to the mountain after which the College is named.
In his View of
the Connecticut River, painted in 1972, Leslie set out deliberately
to respond to Cole's idealized vision of the Connecticut River
Valley. Leslie's study and canvas show a landscape that has been
unmistakably altered by the twentieth century: Interstate 91 cuts
a horizontal line across the Oxbow, and, in the painting, atmospheric
haze partially obscures the view. "In Leslie's revisionist
interpretation," writes Martha Hoppin in the exhibition catalogue,
"the balance of man and nature has shifted. Where nature
had the upper hand in Cole's painting, man has aggressively intruded
in Leslie's view . . . . " Doezema notes the "conversation"
between Leslie's and Cole's landscapes. "Cole's painting
has a blasted tree in the foreground, and Leslie has a dead tree
trunk with a vine around it, which at first looks almost like
barbed wire. So, there are many references to Cole, but at the
same time, it was very much Leslie's own statement."
The large-format drawing
for Leslie's View, featured in the Changing Prospects exhibition,
was the artist's first on-site study for the canvas. Trying to
replicate Cole's point of view, Leslie climbed out along the ledge
below the Summit House and drew on sketchbook pages that he later
stitched together. The drawing is dated October 17, 1971, soon
after Leslie came to the region to teach at Amherst College.
How Leslie came to
teach at Amherst is the subject of an anecdote related by Stephen
Petegorsky, whose photographic view of Mount Holyoke also appears
in the Changing Prospects exhibition. "Frank Trapp, who used
to be the director of the Mead [Art Museum], apparently contacted
Alfred about the possibility of teaching at Amherst," says
Petegorsky. "Against his better judgment, Alfred, who had
not especially thought of himself as a teacher, agreed to check
it out. On the ride up, perhaps from New York or the airport,
they passed the Holyoke Range, and Alfred either asked if it was
the mountain from which Cole painted or was told that, and apparently
this fact (more than anything else) convinced him to give [Amherst]
a try."
Leslie's ongoing interest
in the site of Cole's nineteenth-century painting is reflected
in another of his works, also part of the exhibition. A monochromatic
watercolor of the Holyoke Range as seen from Interstate 91, Holyoke
Range, near Oxbow, Easthampton, Massachusetts was painted
in 1983. It is one in a series of views that the artist created
during a road trip across the United States when he hit on the
idea of drawing the highway landscape from his "speeding
van" by clamping his knees on the steering wheel. Leslie
called the series his "driving drawings." The paintings
that resulted from these drawings were exhibited and published
together in 1988 as 100 Views along the Road.
A pioneer among the
abstract painters of the 1950s, Leslie evolved a personal form
of realism during the 1960s. Today, his work is represented in
collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; the
Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm,
Sweden. In 1994 Leslie received a merit award in painting from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the founding editor
of The Hasty Papers, an art and literature magazine, and
is also a noted filmmaker. Leslie was recently given a lifetime
achievement award in film by the Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Leslie has been a visiting professor of painting at Boston University
since 1993.
The
counter is
2,692
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