The Right Moves: Alfred Leslie in the Fifties.

The article focuses on the Allan Stone Gallery's show of artist Alfred Leslie's abstract paintings, collages and prints from the 1950s and the first years of the 1960s. Leslie is best known as a realist painter, and he has worked in that style since 1962. His heroically scaled portraits and narrative tableaux have positioned him, along with his contemporaries Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and Philip Guston, as a key player in the revival of American figurative painting. Leslie's geometry forces you to give the paintings a straightforward compositional read. You must stick with a part-to-part, part-to-whole examination, rather than having the painting swirl away into an easily scanned allover field.