Sylvia Sleigh

The late Sylvia Sleigh painted her subjects clear-eyed and composed as she positioned their bodies in unusually harmonistic relationships to their environments. Sleigh’s scenography is made up of these comfortably domestic backdrops that have the ring of bohemian privilege to them with their heavily patterned fabrics, soft plush pillows, and delicate flower gardens. In a joint production between CAPC and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Tate Liverpool, and the Centro Andaluz de arte Contemporáneo in Seville, this excellent retrospective of Sleigh’s oeuvre is a colossal and thorough effort to lift the painter’s work out of 1970s rose-tinted nostalgia characteristic of the fashions and figures with which this feminist artist surrounded herself.

In Felicity Rainnie Reclining, 1972, a pattern of cornflowers and green tendrils over wallpaper and furnishings serves to create a polite yet luscious backdrop for a naked, blond female subject with hazel eyes. Though one might recognize echoes of Manet’s Olympia or the unashamedly decorative botanical environments beloved by Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Albert Moore, Sleigh’s depiction of her subject’s fit, sun-marked body treats the image with an everyday realism, whilst continuing to unreservedly aim at beauty. It’s Sleigh’s male nudes, however, that are perhaps the most enjoyable in this exhibition, particularly those of her favorite model, the lushly Afroed musician Paul Rosano, who is pictured either stretched out on a cushion or standing in the garden dressed in denim cutoffs, the sun lighting his halo of curls—a hairy chested angel of the flowerbed.

Sleigh’s partner was famously the writer and curator Lawrence Alloway; the British couple settled together in New York, where Sleigh painted their shared artistic and intellectual milieu. Alloway appears in every room of their home (a “leitmotif” as CAPC puts it) either red-faced, naked, or working, and yet always at ease. His various portraits are accompanied by letters and intimate notes sent between the pair, making their mutual adoration appear even more palpable, almost dauntingly so, in breadth and in depth.