Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010)
Oil on canvas, 1973
The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago; Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions Photograph © 2012 Courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
Feminist Sylvia Sleigh was one of the breakthrough women artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Under the influence of Andy Warhol and other postmodernist artists, Sleigh practiced a particularly sly form of artistic legerdemain as she overturned the privilege of the male gaze by reversing gender roles in paintings inspired by earlier masterpieces. The Turkish Bath is a remaking of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1862 painting of the same name (Louvre Museum). Art history aside, Sleigh’s painting is also a document of the trippy world of the 1960s and 1970s, the pleasures of the countercultural lifestyle, including sex, drugs, and rock and roll. In its homoeroticism it also acknowledges the world of gay liberation in the post-Stonewall Riots era.