| Born in 1916 in Llandudno, Wales, and still an active artist, Sylvia Sleigh’s life and work deserve far more credit than what is usually afforded her: wife to critic Lawrence Alloway. Sleigh’s career reached its climax in the 70s when she decided to turn the male gaze in upon itself with some anti-traditional male odalisques. |
|
Whitney May on Sylvia Sleigh
Born in 1916 in Llandudno, Wales, and still an active artist, Sylvia Sleigh’s life and work deserve far more credit than what is usually afforded her: wife to critic Lawrence Alloway. Sleigh’s career reached its climax in the 70s when she decided to turn the male gaze in upon itself with some anti-traditional male odalisques. The contemporary climate of burgeoning feminist ideologies may not exactly have quaked under the pressure of works like Sleigh’s Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano, but Sleigh was satisfied with the figurative realism she had so steadfastly employed during the heyday of the New York Modernism, and she planned to hold there.
A.I.R. Group Portrait, strict documentation within this era of polyester, hand-knit sweaters, and high-waisted jeans, appears almost comical in its un-posed group awkwardness, but functions as a significant snapshot of a moment in feminist history not to be overlooked. The women here may not be the most glamorous icons of the 60s and 70s, but it was their efforts that propelled generations of female artists to follow them out of obscurity and into the limelight.
In one of her most successful works, Annunciation, the artist does away with such strict documentation and realism by infusing her subject with darkness, mystery, and a confidence absent from the rest of her oeuvre. Here, Paul Rosano possesses none of the awkwardness apparent in Imperial Nude, instead he stands upright, strong, with hands on hips. The male subject is still the sexual object of the viewer’s gaze—chest exposed and cut-off jeans barely concealing—but he is hardly the passive, docile odalisque freely consumed.
Comparable to Manet’s breakthrough for female sexuality in his Olympia over a century before, Sleigh’s greatest accomplishment is her objectification of the reclining male, but only when paired with her honest reinstatement of his carnality, desire, and active sexuality.
