The Red Side

The Red Side was selected by curator and art historian H. H. Arnason for inclusion in the important Guggenheim Museum show American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists in 1961. The Guggenheim exhibition acknowledged Leslie as an important inheritor of the abstract expressionist aesthetic, which can be seen directly in this work. The Red Side demonstrates Leslie’s interest in both the gestural style of Willem de Kooning, seen on the right side of the work in his loose brushwork, and Barnett Newman’s artistic vocabulary of planes of color separated by vertical lines, as seen on the left. Leslie juxtaposes diverse fragments of other painters’ artistic characteristics like a huge collage.