The right moves: Alfred Leslie in the fifties: although best known these days for his heroically scaled figurative paintings, Alfred Leslie spent the 1950s working in an intentionally raw Abstract-Expressionist vein. A recent show of these early works captured the brash, unfettered spirit of the era

It seems hardly credible today--the supposed rawness, the inherent aggression, the deliberate unpalatability of Abstract-Expressionist painting, according to the rhetoric of the time. Maybe back in the 1950s such claims staked out a satisfyingly extreme position, even if it was more of a conceit than an esthetic. But Rothko and Still harsh? De Kooning gauche? Kline and Pollock barbarians? Mitchell crude? Time (and not much of it) put an end to such talk, and the masters of Abstract Expressionism are now seen as consummately skilled painters, whose works radiate beauty and elegance--attributes they would have deemed insultingly European.

Still, visiting the Allan Stone Gallery's show of Alfred Leslie's abstract paintings, collages and prints from the 1950s and the first years of the '60s, I was taken aback. Leslie is best known as a realist painter, and he has worked in that style since 1962. His heroically scaled portraits and narrative tableaux (particularly the series "The Killing Cycle," which depicted the death of his good friend Frank O'Hara in 1966) have positioned him, along with his contemporaries Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and, of course, Philip Guston, as a key player in the revival of American figurative painting. I knew that Leslie had a prior painting life. He was considered an important younger member of the New York School, a painter of muscular gestural abstractions and the maker, in collaboration with the photographer Robert Frank, of the classic beatnik film Pull My Daisy (1959). I'd seen reproductions of Leslie's abstractions--they are in major museum collections--but I'd never encountered one in real life.

Photographs of works of art always lie, but they don't automatically detract. For example, Andy Warhol's work often looks better in reproduction than in real life. The surfaces of his paintings can be dull, with the grayish-white primer exerting an unpleasant flattening effect. Photography, acting like that old-fashioned artist's tool, the reducing glass, concentrates and crisps up Warhol's paintings, and when reproduced on glossy paper stock, the works take on a nice uniform shine. They look, in essence, more Pop. Photos of Leslie's abstract paintings accomplish something not dissimilar. The effect, though, is to diminish the work.

In reproduction a typical Leslie looks, well, pleasant--properly composed, well behaved (although a tad gruff) and almost invariably atmospheric. When seen firsthand though, the paintings have an altogether different impact. They do not sit prettily. The surface is lumpy, dry and excessively overpainted, the color harsh, the space planar and flat. The drippy gesture--the element that seems, in reproduction, so calculated and mannered--feels violent and visceral. The paintings are, in fact, almost ugly. I was brought up short by this discover. So this was what they were talking about!

I am not implying naivete on Leslie's part. As a technically accomplished painter and an active participant in the seemingly ceaseless talk about art in that era, he knew what he wanted to do and how to go about doing it. Structure and composition assume quiet but key roles in his work. The emotional and esthetic roughness of those paintings is made all the more pointed by their careful, although not necessarily immediately evident, geometric underpinnings. Take Texas Baby (1959). A 5-by-6-foot painting, it is divided into quadrants. Leslie often employed this formal strategy, although in this case, as with the larger Quartet #1 (1958), the division is literal--separate equal-sized canvases are butted up against each other, and the painting operates across the seams, with only the barest acknowledgement of internal edges. A canted horizontal band of dark brown, lightened on the bottom with a smear of tan, covers the top quarter of the painting. In the area below it, the larger right-hand section consists of brown rectangular forms obscured by an energetically brushed overlay of murky kelly green. To the left of the green area, and extending to the left edge of the canvas, is a smaller vertical space, the lightest section of the painting. Here Leslie's signature device appears--two clearly defined parallel vertical strokes. Every work in the show had them; sometimes the strokes appear as a single pair, sometimes as two pairs. Occasionally he will work with three parallel lines instead of two. In Texas Baby, the strokes are the same dark brown as the topmost section and are set off against a light tan background. They come to rest on a pinky beige rectangle. It all looks perfectly intuitive, but the two canvases on the left are each clearly divided into four sections, while the right-hand two panels have horizontal and vertical divisions, although they are more subtly delineated.

Leslie's geometry forces you to give the paintings a straightforward compositional read. You must stick with a part-to-part, part-to-whole examination, rather than having the painting swirl away into an easily scanned allover field. The more you are compelled to look, the more intense and insistent these works become. Considering their geometric structure, it's surprising that you don't get much sense of Hans Hofmann's vaunted push-pull. With Leslie it's push-push. The different elements of each painting seem to squeeze up against each other, and the drips feel as if they are wrung out from the forms.