Sylvia Sleigh, October: Paul Rosano, 1974. Pinterest.
Sylvia Sleigh was beautiful inside out—brave and independent, she pursued her figurative style which was regarded as outmoded in the years of Pop Art dominance. She was a woman artist who slayed male nudes. She painted brilliant naked male portraits in the United States, a country that in the 1970s had a lot of prudishness hanging about. Then, she was also an active feminist who in 1972 cofounded A.I.R. Gallery, which was run by women for women, where they were given space and attention to present their work professionally.
Although she was born in Wales in 1916, she spent most of her life in the US where she moved with her second husband, Lawrence Alloway, a curator and art critic who is known to have coined the term “Pop Art.” They met at the University of London where Sleigh was taking evening classes. First, she studied painting at Brighton School of Art and then nursing, before turning to a full-time painting in the late 1940s. After her transfer to the US in 1961, she quickly became entrenched in New York’s bohemian intelligentsia since Alloway started work at the Guggenheim as a senior curator the same year.
One can say more about the chair, which appears in a large number of her portraits and self-portraits, than about this lean curly-haired man who seems to be her favorite model and about whom we know basically nothing.
The red “egg chairs” were designed by Danish designer Arne Jacobsen in 1958, especially for the Radisson SAS hotel in Copenhagen, and were manufactured by Republic of Fritz Hansen. Jacobsen had been given an opportunity to design every single element of the hotel and the chairs intended for the lobby and reception areas complimented the interior with a perfect juxtaposition making with their ovoid shapes a sculptural contrast to the hotel’s almost exclusively vertical and horizontal surfaces.
In 1974 Sleigh painted a series of male and female nudes citing from the past masters (who all happened to be male) such as Titian, Giorgione, Ingres, and Manet. Thus she created gender-reversed versions of classic works from art history because not only it was men who were the models, but this time it was a woman who did the painting.
Moreover, as she explained, she did not intend to reduce her sitters, whether male or female, to a role of a sexualized muse subjected to the voyeuristic gaze of the artist and subsequently of the viewer. Sleigh said:
To me, women were often portrayed as sex objects in humiliating poses. I wanted to give my perspective. I liked to portray both man and woman as intelligent and thoughtful people with dignity and humanism that emphasized love and joy.
Sylvia Sleigh. Murray Edward’s College.
And we can feel this egalitarian treatment in her portraits, her models seem comfortable and relaxed, and the paintings are not charged with traditional stereotypes in which the naked person is presented as sexually available. She found this inversion of roles necessary because, as she explained:
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.
Sylvia Sleigh. ArtForum.
Cornelia “Connie” Butler, an American curator described Sleigh’s style as realist but not a typical one. “I think her painting style is where the work is quite radical. It’s a very raw realism that she was using, and there is something quite rough at how those bodies are painted that tries to get at something a bit more essential about sexuality and nakedness.” Indeed, her approach to her portraits is extremely personal, infused with her own life philosophy and emotional bonds that she had with her sitters.
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Magda, art historian and Italianist, she writes about art because she cannot make it herself. She loves committed and political artists like Ai Weiwei or the Futurists; like Joseph Beuys she believes that art can change us and we can change the world.
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