This early work of Alfred Leslie’s was shown at MoMA as part of “American Collages” in 1965, where the curator Kynaston McShine noted that collage “has been a means of creative liberation, leading us to recognize not only the beauty of ephemera but also that of texture and spatial effects different from those of painting and sculpture. It has added much to what we accept as art – severe and formal juxtapositions of everyday scraps of paper as well as arrangements of pristine materials seemingly arrived at by accident of chance,” pointing out also that the “freedom of their own painting styles is found in the collages of Robert Motherwell and Alfred Lesle.” The artist considered it one of his favorite works and kept it hanging on the wall of his bedroom at his apartment on East 6th Street, which is where Aardt’s founder first saw it on a visit. Leslie later gifted it to his long-time companion Nancy De Antonio and when she decided to sell it, she and Leslie said they wanted him to have it but out of loyalty to Leslie’s friend and dealer Manny Silverman sold it through him, even though that netted her less money. Take that as a page from a vanished age?
