Alfred Leslie

The Green Gallery, New York
B.C. Holland Gallery, Chicago 
Acquired by the present owner from the above

The work is in very good condition overall. The canvas is not lined. There are scattered areas of faint craquelure in the upper left canvas. There are minor areas of craquelure of the lower right canvas, primarily in the white of the composition. There is some surface soiling throughout. There is some buckling to the upper and lower right canvases. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Alfred Leslie was at the forefront of the New York School’s second generation of Abstract Expressionists. Leslie and his contemporaries, Michael Goldberg, Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan were profoundly interested in “action painting” forged through the gesture and heavily worked surfaces. Beginning in 1951, Leslie participated in the artist-organized Ninth Street Show. By 1952 he had his first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the gallery that would foster and exhibit Leslie throughout the subsequent decade. In 1959, the same year that Leslie painted Minnie’s Cookie Jar, the artist was included in the ground-breaking 16 Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art which included and launched the careers of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg and Louise Nevelson.

Leslie’s Minnie's Cookie Jar  has a rich, intense and dynamic surface. The artist’s process was to paint directly on canvas without the use of preparatory studies or sketches. He layered pigment using thick brushstrokes and overlapped squared-off areas of color. His audacious and virile palette utilized verdant greens, flanked by intense yellows and punctuated by passages of red that balanced the layer of splattered pigment. Leslie's earlier collages and the stacking of individual panels has a similar flexibility and variation as the parts coalesce into a unified whole. In Minnie's Cookie Jar, each panel was audaciously assembled to forge a complex yet unified composition.

In 2004, Allan Stone celebrated Leslie’s contributions to American Abstract Expressionism in the show titled Alfred Leslie 1951-1962 Expressing the Zeitgeist.  Stone postulated, “Alfred Leslie’s work has an indisputable signature: the architecture, the wielding of the loaded brush, and the consistently present double vertical bands. Whether it is a large oil on canvas or a miniature collage, Leslie’s work is immediately identifiable. Leslie has the ability to impact scale much like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline…This combined with Leslie’s color sense creates a body of work that epitomizes the power and dynamic of postwar American abstract painting". (Allan Stone, Alfred Leslie 1951-1962 Expressing the Zeitgeist, New York, p. 4)