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Sylvia Sleigh They wouldn’t photograph people if they didn’t find them interesting – and by interesting, I mean interesting. He did not idealize the naked body like the old masters. In fact, the naked bodies they were showing were really beautiful. Many were friends, among them artists and critics. Some were paid models. Looking at pictures of his beautiful paintings on the Internet, I find myself singing the REM song: “Happy people…”
It was certainly part of the appeal of Johanna Lawrenson, a beautiful brunette with long legs who created the 1963 film The Bridge. Few exhibitions are worth visiting for just one painting, but this large canvas is unique. Sleigh kept it until his death in 2010, when it was donated to a New York nonprofit. It is now on sale, and before its release there is a rare opportunity to see it on display at Malarkey, a small venue opposite Russell Square in London.
The Sleigh Bridge is displayed along with seven other Sleigh drawings, accompanied by a curator and an instructor Daniel Malarkey. There is his first work, the dirty landscape of Hampstead Heath painted in 1946, and his first famous portrait, curious in a green turban, from 1941. It is the homecoming of the artist, who was born in Wales in 1916 and studied at the Brighton School of the London Art with her first husband a photographer in London. There she attended evening history classes and met her second husband, art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway, with whom she moved to the US in 1961, settling in New York.
The bridge shows Lawrenson reclining on a cream-colored sofa, his upper half resting on one of two green cushions, in front of a window overlooking the 59th Street Bridge. It was painted in the house that Sleigh and Alloway shared on the Upper East Side, overlooking the East River. Lawrenson’s left arm is bent at the elbow, his rosy cheek is raised. His right hand stretches across his body, palm to thigh. His legs are placed together, and gently crossing each other. Eyes are closed.
Sleigh took the subject from Giorgione, who painted it in 1510 Sleep of Venus encouraged the most batsmen from Titian’s Venus of Urbino to Manet’s Olympia. Here, the genitals were changed, and the woman was brought into a modern place (and she gave a flash of pubic hair – unusual for viewers even in the 1960s). Just as the peaks and valleys of Giorgione’s Italy match the curves of his pale-skinned goddess, so the bridge matches Lawrenson’s thin form, the steel frame rising and falling along her neck, her shoulder, her hips.
There’s no doubt that Sleigh, whose interest in art history began when her mother showed her books as a child, was well aware of what mothers see on museum walls. He once said that the reason he painted naked men and naked women was because he wanted to show how he saw things, “showing both men and women with mutual respect and compassion.” It was important to do so because women were often portrayed as objects of desire by engaging in shameful acts. I like to picture him with a brush in hand, his body lined up with a bridge and a smile on his face.
According to Andrew Hottle, who is writing a monograph on Sleigh and preparing a catalog raisonné of his paintings, he was not so much a feminist as an artist who experimented with the naked. Even later, when he helped to find all-women Pictures of SoHo20they were not walking in the street, marching with banners. Her brand of feminism was brilliant, she says. He was 47 years old when he took this photo, and has been researching genitalia for years.
Lawrenson, who later became a friend of the famous critic Abbie Hoffmanhe was working at the time as a photographer. He took some great photos and took part in one of the filming sessions Claes Oldenburg. This was the only time Sleigh photographed him, and since Lawrenson was not a friend, he was probably paid. Whether he was photographing a friend or a professional photographer, Sleigh liked to talk while he worked. He was a people person, and he loved to socialize.
He painted slowly and methodically, with thin oil papers. It seems that he built seven bodies of different body parts in a clever way because there are seven layers of skin. That is why Lawrenson’s face is dewy, his legs bright; against the cushions, which approach the surface, his body protrudes. Often, Sleigh would work on two or three paintings at once, moving between them as the pieces dried, turning on his back when the sitter was away. For The Bridge, he recorded eight episodes with Lawrenson, totaling about 30 hours.
When I think of Sleigh, I think mainly of his male genitalia: The Turkish Bath, a wonderfully modern interpretation of the 1973 Ingres painting of the same name using male bathers; many nude pictures of Paul Rosanosinger and photographer with soft, curly hair; Let it be like a loving bride. Hanging opposite The Bridge in Malarkey is a small portrait of a topless boy named Robert, with peach lips and gray eyes.
I asked Hottle how the female genitalia stacks up against their male counterparts. “To him, naked, clothed, everything was just human.” In Sleigh’s mind, it was not unusual to see a naked or naked man, any more than it was to see a clothed man or woman.
Above all, he saw himself as a photographer, who portrayed people very well. The result, and The Bridge, is a film that attracts attention but is not sexual, which is really appropriate. A real woman who is really beautiful.
