A new show of this Welsh-born artist’s mesmerising portraits is worth visiting for one nude alone: a painting of an eyes-closed, long-legged, elegant brunette, inspired by Sleeping Venus
S
ylvia Sleigh wouldn’t paint people if she didn’t find them interesting – and by interesting, I mean attractive. She didn’t idealise nudes like the old masters. Instead, the naked bodies she depicted were really, truly beautiful. Many were friends, among them artists and critics. Others were paid models. Scrolling through images of her radical, realist artworks online, I find myself humming along to the REM song: “Shiny happy people …”
It was surely part of the appeal of Johanna Lawrenson, the elegant brunette with enviably long legs who posed for the 1963 painting The Bridge. Few exhibitions are worth visiting for a single artwork alone, but this monumental canvas is special. Sleigh kept it until her death in 2010, at which point it was donated to a not-for-profit theatre company in New York. Now it’s for sale, and before it’s snapped up there’s a rare chance to see it on show at Malarkey, a small space overlooking Russell Square in London.
The Bridge is on display alongside seven other paintings by Sleigh, brought together by curator and adviser Daniel Malarkey. There’s her first ever commission, a dappled view of Hampstead Heath painted in 1946, and her earliest-known self-portrait, inquisitive in a green net turban, from 1941. It’s a homecoming of sorts for the artist, who was born in Wales in 1916 and studied at Brighton School of Art before moving to London with her first husband, the painter and gallerist Michael Greenwood. There she attended evening art history classes and met her second husband, the art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway, with whom she moved to the US in 1961, settling in New York.
