I had noted from my childhood,’ said feminist artist Sylvia Sleigh, ‘that there were always pictures of beautiful women but very few pictures of handsome men so I thought that it would be truly fair to paint handsome men for women.’
During the 1960s, Sleigh shocked the art world with her hyper-realist portraits of naked male bodies. Turning the tables on art history, she substituted nude men for the reclining, undressed women traditionally seen in masterpieces, painted by the likes of Peter Paul Rubens or Gustave Courbet. Today, she is celebrated for challenging such gendered stereotypes with her subversive images. But who were these male muses? Were they complicit in her feminist intervention? What did they think of these provocative paintings?
Between 1934 and 1937, Sleigh studied at Brighton Art School in Sussex, where she specialised in painting. Early on, she was outraged to discover that the art education system was steeped in sexism; distinct double standards meant that only female nudes, not male ones, were allowed to pose as life models, and she later recalled how female art students were ‘treated in a second-rate fashion’.
In 1941, Sleigh married a local painter and art history lecturer, Michael Greenwood. Suffering a crisis in confidence as an artist – there are rumours that Greenwood undermined her practice – she stopped painting. Moving to London, she worked instead in a women’s clothing store on Bond Street, dressing prestigious and celebrity clients, including Hollywood icon Vivien Leigh. Back in Brighton, Sleigh opened her own shop, and enjoyed some success until it was forced to close at the outbreak of the Second World War.
Although the married couple remained together for thirteen years, they often lived apart. Leaving Greenwood behind in London, Sleigh spent much of her time in the small village of Pett in Sussex. Here, she began to start painting again, and attended life-drawing sessions. In 1943, she also decided to attend an evening art history class, at the University of London, which changed the course of her life for ever.
It was at this art history class that Sleigh first met Lawrence Alloway. Aged twenty-seven, she was ten years older than the seventeen-year-old who was just beginning to make a name for himself, as a critic and curator of contemporary art. From the very start, the pair were emotionally and intellectually drawn to one another, and, as her marriage deteriorated over time, Sleigh’s connection with Alloway developed from close friendship to romantic relationship.
Following her eventual divorce from Greenwood in 1954, she married Alloway, within just months. In 1961, the couple emigrated to New York, where Alloway took up the role of senior curator at the very recently built Guggenheim Museum, looking after its great collection of modern art by Marc Chagall, Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian, amongst others.
Relocating to America was also the best thing that Sleigh could have done for her artistic career. Arriving in New York, she encountered second-wave feminism, which was surging across the city. In 1963, Betty Friedan’s bestseller The Feminine Mystique appeared on bookshelves. Friedan had interviewed fellow college classmates, now stay-at-home mothers, and discovered how unhappy many of them were: ‘Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – “Is this all?”.’
The problem, Friedan argued, was the notion of ‘the feminine mystique’. Women were expected to dream of becoming mothers and wives, but what if they wanted a professional career? The writer set out her manifesto: ‘The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.’
Writers, including freelance journalist Gloria Steinem, took up the fight against sexism. Steinem famously went undercover as a Playboy Bunny, spending eleven days in Hugh Hefner’s New York Playboy Club. Her article, ‘A Bunny’s Tale’, published in Show magazine, exposed the rampant sexism and dehumanising objectification that Bunnies suffered.
In the visual arts, Faith Ringgold led a group called the ‘Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee’ who, in 1970, left hens’ eggs and sanitary products in the Whitney Museum, with the words ‘50 per-cent’ written on them, demanding that 50 per cent of artists in the upcoming biennial that year be women. Painting her eggs black, Ringgold also drew attention to her identity as a Black female artist, creating a much-needed dialogue, and asking for intersection, between feminism and the civil rights movement.
Having long felt the injustices of a patriarchal art world back home in Britain, Sleigh assumed a leading role in New York’s growing and active feminist art scene, where she found acceptance and purpose: ‘Feminism gave us this intense freedom of expression thus allowing a change. Anything that helps to express the artist’s ideas, whether it is to surprise, glorify, shock or simply express a philosophy will lead to a change or will simply allow an opportunity for change.’ Sleigh was a founding member of the all-women artist’s cooperative SOHO20 Gallery. She also co-founded A.I.R. Gallery, America’s first gallery run by women for women, providing an exhibition space for professional female artists: ‘At a certain point I realised what my mission was. And that was to help women, to stress the importance of equality.’
During the mid-1960s, Sleigh’s feminist convictions began to infiltrate her paintings – of nude male figures. She depicted her models in domestic interiors, reclining on beautifully patterned sofas and chairs, or looking at themselves in the mirror. Sleigh was deliberately, and defiantly, taking on centuries of art history, in which women had been painted naked for men to gaze upon.
In museums around the world, you will find celebrated masterpieces in which men are clothed but women’s bodies are exposed. Black and Indigenous women are often objectified, fetishised as an exotic ‘other’ to fulfil unspoken fantasies of the male viewer; on the other hand, white women are frequently depicted as sexualised and desired; their pale skin instead depicted as inviting the touch of an artist.
Hanging in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, for example, is Édouard Manet’s impressionist painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63). Set within idyllic woodland, a group gather around a picnic; both of the male guests are smartly dressed, in jackets and ties, whilst their white female companion is completely naked. In the background, a second pale-skinned woman bathes in a stream, her sheer white dress leaving very little to the imagination.
Another famous painting from art history featuring the white female nude is Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–51). Venus, the Roman goddess of love, is reclining, nude, on a bed. Her son Cupid holds up a mirror in which she admires her sensual reflection. Across the frame of this mirror are draped pink ribbons, alluding to the fetters which Cupid would use to bind lovers together, and serving to enhance the erotic atmosphere of the painting.
Many art historians have now critiqued the ways in which male artists painted women to be looked upon as objects of desire. As the art critic John Berger wrote in his seminal book Ways of Seeing in 1972, ‘You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.’
Then in 1975 Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist, coined the term ‘the male gaze’. In a groundbreaking essay titled ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ she argued that traditional Hollywood films represent women as sexual objects, positioned for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. As Mulvey wrote, women are characterised by their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ and ‘spectacle’, while man is ‘the bearer of the look’.
Even before the arrival of these theories and texts, however, Sleigh made a significant first step in calling out the sexist objectification of women in art. Turning her female gaze on the male nude, she confronted portraiture’s gender imbalance. She deliberately reworked recognisable, famous paintings by replacing naked women with male models: ‘It was very necessary to do this because women had often been painted as objects of desire in humiliating poses. I don’t mind the “desire” part, it’s the “object” that’s not very nice.’
In 1971 Sleigh painted her own provocative version of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. In Philip Golub Reclining, the graceful, twenty-something son of artists Nancy Spero and Leon Golub is seen sprawled naked on a sofa. He gazes upon his beautiful body in a large wall mirror. In its reflection, Sleigh has also included herself, seated at an easel, scrutinising her subject in a clever and overt reversal of the traditional male–female roles associated with art history.
However, Sleigh was adamant that she had no intention of humiliating or objectifying men: ‘In the ’60s I made a point of finding male models and I painted them as portraits, not as sex objects, but sympathetically as intelligent and admired people, not as women had so often been depicted as unindividuated houris.’
Many of Sleigh’s models were close friends – artists, writers and musicians – who both she and her husband welcomed into their bohemian New York home. Rather than idealising them, Sleigh captured the beauty of these men by including distinguishing features, from body hair to birth marks; at other times, she incorporated still-life objects, such as books or musical instruments, that pointed to her sitters’ unique personalities and talents. ‘I paint people whom I like or love… The human situation adds a certain poignancy to portraits.’
One of Sleigh’s most frequently painted and clearly recognisable muses during the 1970s was Paul Rosano, whom she had first met while he was working as a life model at the School of Visual Arts. He’s immediately identifiable for his tall, slim build, his casual style – he often wore cut-off denim shorts and flip-flops – and his full Afro hairstyle. The Black disco scene had popularised the Afro, particularly among musicians like Rosana, who Sleigh frequently pictured with his guitar.
In 1974, she painted Paul Rosano: Double Portrait in which her model surveys himself in the mirror, and can be seen, by the viewer, from several angles. Sleigh painted this three-quarter-length portrait in exquisite and explicit detail, including the shadows of Rosano’s ribcage, marked tan lines, and the trailing patterns of his dark pubic hair.
One year later, Rosano’s provocative portrait was included in a Bronx Museum exhibition hung in the Bronx County Courthouse, ‘The Year of the Woman’, where it created significant controversy. One of the county’s leading judges, Owen McGivern, took great offence at the image, and demanded that the entire exhibition be cancelled because of the ‘explicit Male nudity’.
Sleigh responded to this attempt at censorship with a frank and pointed public statement: ‘I wonder if the judge would object to a female nude (hung in the show)… I don’t see why male genitals are more sacred than female.’ Judge McGivern’s complaint was dismissed, and Sleigh’s painting remained on show. The incident only served to further illuminate the sexism and double standards of art history, drawing attention to, and confirming the need for, Sleigh’s feminist cause.
Another of her most notable paintings, in which Rosano also appears, is The Turkish Bath (1973). With this artwork, she reworked the erotic, nineteenth-century painting of the same title by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, in which he depicted a room filled with dozens of nude women who recline around a pool, their tangled limbs offering up an erotic fantasy for the male viewer.
Sleigh replaced Ingres’s anonymous crowd of female bathers with her more personal take on the subject. She pictured five of her close male friends: Rosano, seen playing the guitar, the artist Scott Burton, and art critics John Perreault and Carter Ratcliff. This painting also includes Sleigh’s most important model and muse: reclining in the foreground, and looking directly at the viewer, is her husband, Lawrence Alloway.
It was not long after Sleigh first met Alloway, at the art history class back in England, that she started to use him as a model for her paintings. An early work, At the Café (1950), shows the couple seated together at a train station café. There is a formality to the scene, in which Alloway wears a jacket and bow tie, and Sleigh a black dress, with white pearls and a hat. However, there is a knowing intimacy between them: their arms, leaning across the tabletop, touch and, as their hands disappear from view, it seems likely that they are secretly linked.
Sleigh painted this picture while she was still living in Sussex, and married but estranged from her first husband, Michael Greenwood. She later explained that the double portrait ‘commemorates the many times that I had to leave Lawrence and return to Pett… Many times when he took me to the station we went to a café while waiting for my train.’
During this time, Sleigh and Alloway began to write tender, heartfelt letters to one another. Some are typed, in neat lines of formal font, with news clippings attached. Others are handwritten, filled with poems, pen-ink drawings and pencil sketches. The couple continued to correspond in this manner throughout their marriage, particularly while travelling independently of one another. These letters reveal the couple’s connection as romantic, emotional and intellectual partners: ‘I love you, madly, intellectually, impulsively, constantly,’ wrote Alloway to Sleigh in 1949. They also highlight his role in Sleigh’s creative life; among the repeated terms of endearment, she constantly addresses him as her muse: ‘Dearest Lawrence, thank you for your love, it is so important to me, you are my muse indeed; and I love you so well, dear love, adored poet. A golden vision of you always accompanies me; my Apollo. I love you, Sylvia.’
Given Sleigh’s gender-swapped paintings of the nude, it makes sense that she perceived of, and directly referred to, Alloway as her muse, reversing the stereotype of the female muse and male artist. Apollo was the Greek god of music and arts, and became a common term of endearment she continually used to reference the inspiration he provided for her.
Sleigh painted over fifty portraits of Alloway, who is characterised by his blonde hair, bright blue eyes and contemplative expression. In the painting Portrait of Lawrence Alloway (1965) Sleigh has caught her husband deep in thought, staring into the distance, while sitting on an iconic red Arne Jacobsen Egg chair. His grey shirt is casually unbuttoned to reveal his chest and a book lies beside him on the floor.
Sleigh also painted him naked on many occasions, lying in bed, or reclining on the sofa. However, far from reducing him to an object of desire, she was capturing intimate moments, in which he appears relaxed in their home. She frequently framed him with the background of their Chelsea town house, including modernist furniture and floral William Morris wallpaper, exhibiting the couple’s mutual interest in modern art and design.
Many of Alloway’s letters to Sleigh demonstrate their shared love of art. Alloway would send Sleigh postcards of celebrated paintings from museums he visited, such as the Louvre in Paris, or post invitation cards for gallery shows. In lengthier correspondence, he would include detailed discussions on art history, drawing parallels to, and praising, his wife’s paintings: ‘I adore your painting. The synthesis of the different rhythms of growth is wonderful. The summer-snow of the blossom, the exquisite tone of the upper trunks on the blue sky, is so delicate and yet impetuous too,’ he wrote in a letter dated 22 December 1948.
In another letter, he tells Sleigh: ‘I have been looking at your paintings again – with what pleasure I need not tell you. I was passing your Venus when I simply had to stop and examine the delicious, sensuous, felicitous brush-work.’
Alloway’s admiration for Sleigh as a painter is also apparent in the love poems he wrote, and included in letters, to her:
Today when the clouds are exact
Like Rene Magritte weather
I think of you my loving
Double and double-dealer
At the game of likeness
On the shore where formerly
I was your foreground figure
The cliffs and complicated greyness
The slanted shore, the shells
(I have their doubles here)
Are doppelgangers on
The canvas where your brush
Records its double function
To please and possess.
Poems like this also demonstrate how Alloway revelled in his role as muse, as the ‘foreground figure’, for his wife’s paintings.
In more playful letters, Alloway included sketches of an alter ego, Dandylion, which he’d created. The half-human, half-lion cartoon is seen engaged in everyday tasks, from reading and writing to sleeping and sunbathing. In a letter from 1950, Alloway notes how Dandylion’s ‘tail curled up with pleasure’ while reading a note from Sleigh. In another, dated 6 October 1948, he shows him working at a typewriter: ‘Dandylion wants you to see him at work.’
Behind the comic cartoons, Alloway was a deeply intelligent man. As a curator and critic, he favoured contemporary art that pushed boundaries. Back in London, he had started his career at the forward-looking Institute of Contemporary Arts, serving as assistant director from 1955 to 1960. In New York, he became an advocate for abstract art and ‘pop art’, a famous term which he coined.
Sleigh’s feminist activism also positively influenced Alloway, who became an ally to the feminist art movement and promoted women’s art across America. In 1977, he called out the ‘3-to-1 advantage’ of men over women in the Whitney Annual, becoming the first male critic to publicly endorse the claims made by female artists; then, in 1979, he wrote the notable article ‘Women’s Art and the Failure of Art Criticism’ in 1979.
Although Alloway supported female artists, he never wrote publicly about, or directly promoted, his wife’s work. One reason for this, certainly, is that he would have been considered biased – we only have to look at his letters to see his overwhelming praise of Sleigh’s painting style. However, perhaps Alloway also recognised the importance of staying silent. A highly intelligent man, steeped in a knowledge of art history, Alloway understood the significance of Sleigh’s gender-swapped paintings.
Surely, then, Alloway realised that he could allow her the most power by posing, compliantly, as her naked male subject. By taking on the role of muse, not critic, he was actively supporting her subversive paintings and feminist statement. His silence also ensured that Sleigh, not he, was given the spotlight. It was not his place to say what she had so eloquently stated in her paintings.
If we return to Alloway’s inclusion in the Turkish bath, we can see him posed prominently in the foreground. He looks outwards, seemingly at us the viewer. But, if you think about it, he would actually have been looking at his wife. As an art historian and critic, Alloway fully understood the importance of these paintings; held within this glance is his support, endorsement and validation for what she was doing – taking on centuries of sexist paintings.
After Alloway died in 1990, Sleigh continued to paint for a further two decades. In 1999 she finished a gargantuan, mural-size painting, which took her twenty years to complete: Invitation to a Voyage: The Hudson River at Fishkill (Riverside) (1979–99). The celebratory work consists of fourteen panels, each eight feet tall by five feet wide, in which she portrayed herself and Alloway spending time with their friends – artists and critics – painting, talking and picnicking in woodland, by the banks of the Hudson River.
This painting is Sleigh’s feminist spin on Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. She exchanged Manet’s nude women for clothed female friends who are engaged in conversation with their male counterparts. Sleigh always maintained that her utmost goal was to create equality in her paintings, and the art world: ‘I wanted, above all, to express the equality of men and women.’
With Invitation to a Voyage: The Hudson River at Fishkill (Riverside), Sleigh undoubtedly achieves her aim, while also paying enormous tribute to her husband, Lawrence Alloway, who was a loyal ally to her cause. Fully committing to the role of muse, Alloway used it to reimagine gender stereotypes – particularly within the outdated structures of the art world – legitimise his wife’s work, and transfer all power to her in a true act of love.