Sylvia Sleigh

Sylvia Sleigh (8 May 1916 – 24 October 2010) was a Welsh-born naturalised American realist painter who lived and worked in New York City.

She is known for her role in the feminist art movement and especially for reversing traditional gender roles in her paintings of nude men, often using conventional female poses from historical paintings by male artists like Diego Vélazquez, Titian, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Her most well-known subjects were art critics, feminist artists, and her husband, Lawrence Alloway.

Sleigh was born in Llandudno, and raised in England.

She studied at the Brighton School of Art.

For a time, she worked at a clothing shop in Bond Street, where she recalled "undressing Vivien Leigh".

Sleigh later opened her own business in Brighton, England, where she made hats, coats, and dresses until she closed her shop at the start of World War II.

She returned to painting and moved to London in 1941 after marrying her first husband, an English painter named Michael Greenwood.

Her first solo exhibition was in 1953 at the Kensington Art Gallery in London.

Sleigh met her second husband, Lawrence Alloway, an English curator and art critic, while taking evening classes to study art history at the University of London; they married in 1954 and moved to the United States in 1961.

The following year, Alloway became a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Around 1970, from feminist principles, she painted a number of works reversing stereotypical artistic themes by featuring nude men in poses that were traditionally associated with women, like the reclining Venus or odalisque.

Some directly alluded to existing works, such as Philip Golub Reclining (1971), which appropriates the pose of the Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez.

The model was the son of the artists Nancy Spero and Leon Golub.

This work also presents a reversal of the male-artist/female-muse pattern typical of the Western canon and is reflective of research into the position of women throughout the history of art as model, mistress, and muse, but rarely as artist−genius.

Unlike earlier male artists, Sleigh individualized her nude subjects instead of representing them as generalized types.

In 1972, Sylvia Sleigh played a significant role in securing a venue and serving as a juror for Women Choose Women, a major exhibition of more than 100 works by female artists at the New York Cultural Center in January and February 1973.

The Turkish Bath (1973), a similarly gender-reversed version of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting of the same name, depicts a group of artists and art critics, including her husband, Lawrence Alloway (reclining at the lower right), Carter Ratcliff, John Perreault, and Scott Burton.

Also shown are two views of Sleigh's frequent model, Paul Rosano.

One pose borrowed directly from Ingres's painting is found in the figure of Rosano, seated on the left and playing a guitar with his back turned to the viewer.

Alloway reclines in the conventional pose of an odalisque.

Ingres's painting has many nude women but Sleigh minimized the number and painted only six men.

She carefully painted individual body hairs.

Over the course of her career, Sleigh painted more than thirty works that feature her husband as a subject.

While somewhat idealized, Sleigh's figures remain highly individualized.

She often used her husband and friends as models because they were important to her.

In her male nudes, the subject "is used as a vehicle to express erotic feelings, just as male artists have always used the female nude".

Sleigh was a founding member of the all-women, artist-run SOHO 20 Gallery (est. 1973) and later joined the all-women cooperative A.I.R. Gallery (est. 1972), which opened a year before SOHO 20 and inspired its organizational structure.

Sleigh painted group portraits of the artists in both organizations.

In works such as Paul Rosano Reclining (1974) and Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano (1975), Sleigh portrayed her male subjects in stereotypical female poses in order to comment on past biases in which male artists have depicted sexualized female nudes.

The SoHo 20 Gallery Group Portrait was painted in 1974.

Other works equalize the roles of men and women, such as Concert Champêtre (1976), in which all of the figures are nude, unlike its similarly composed namesake by Titian (earlier credited to Giorgione), in which only the women are unclothed.

As Sleigh explained, "I feel that my paintings stress the equality of men and women (women and men). To me, women were often portrayed as sex objects in humiliating poses. I wanted to give my perspective. I liked to portray both man and woman as intelligent and thoughtful people with dignity and humanism that emphasized love and joy."

Likewise, her painting of Lilith (1976), created as a component of The Sister Chapel, a collaborative installation that premiered in 1978, depicts the superimposed bodies of a man and woman to emphasize the fundamental similarities between the two genders.

Between 1976 and 2007, Sleigh painted a series of 36-inch portraits which feature women artists and writers, including Helène Aylon, Catharine R. Stimpson, Howardena Pindell, Selina Trieff, and Vernita Nemec.

Her A.I.R. Group Portrait (1977–78) is considered to be a document of the feminist movement, especially the centering of women in cooperative galleries.

Among the feminist artists in A.I.R. Group Portrait are Nancy Spero, Howardena Pindell, Agnes Denes, Sari Dienes, Blythe Bohnen, Dotty Attie, and Mary Beth Edelson.

Sleigh painted herself standing next to Howardena Pindell.

In a 2007 interview with Brian Sherwin, Sleigh was asked if gender equality issues in the mainstream art world, and the world in general, had changed for the better.

She answered, "I do think things have improved for women in general there are many more women in government, in law and corporate jobs, but it's very difficult in the art world for women to find a gallery."