Requiescat in Peace

British-born painter Sylvia Sleigh – who donated one of her most ambitious works to the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers – died at her home in Manhattan on Oct. 24 at age 94. The cause was complications from a stroke.

Sylvia Sleigh at a presentation of her
“Invitation to a Voyage” at the Hudson River Museum.

In July 2006, Sleigh gave the panoramic “Invitation to a Voyage: the Hudson River at Fishkill, 1979-1999” to the museum. The 70-foot work, made up of 14 panels, depicts the artist, her husband, the influential critic Lawrence Alloway, and several friends on a jaunt near Bannerman’s Castle on Pollepel Island. (It was on a train trip to Albany that Sleigh first saw Bannerman’s Castle, whose ruined beauty inspired the work.)

But the site wasn’t Sleigh’s only muse. The placement of the figures along the river’s banks – that’s Alloway helping Sleigh to her feet in one panel, just as he helped her in her career – suggests Watteau’s fête galante painting “L’embarkment pour Cythère,” in which a group of revelers sets sail for the birthplace of Venus. With its Arcadian lushness and fluidity, “The Embarkation for Cythera” is an allegory on the brevity of romantic love.

Three panels of Sleigh’s evocation of Watteau are now on view at the Hudson River Museum.

Despite the significance of “Invitation to a Voyage,” Sleigh was not known primarily as a landscape painter. Rather she was most famous for her male nudes, which cast her subjects as the male equivalents of Venuses and odalisques. These works, painted during the feminist movement of the 1970s, were seen as a controversial, delightfully cheeky response to men viewing women as objects of desire. The New York Times’ obituary quotes her as saying: “I don’t mind the ‘desire’ part, it’s the ‘object’ that’s not very nice.”

Indeed, so thoroughly is the female entrenched as the primary sex object in our culture that it always comes as a bit of a shock when people learn that for most of art history – up till about the middle of the 19^th century – men were the primary sex symbols as the heroes of the genre known as history painting, which included religious and allegorical works. It wasn’t until the rise of the bourgeoisie and the shift in painting to interior scenes of everyday life that women came to the fore as culture’s primary sex symbol – a role that for good or for ill they still own today.

Nonetheless, Sleigh has her heiresses. Look at Sam Taylor-Wood’s 2001 photograph of Robert Downey Jr. – the only nude in her haunting “Crying Men” series – in which she casts the actor as a modern-day Endymion and her camera as the caressing moon.

Viewing Taylor-Wood’s and Sleigh’s work brings you back to a question that will always tantalize: Do women look at men the way men look at women?

Perhaps not. Most female nudes are first and foremost about the body.

Whereas women can’t seem to help themselves. They cannot separate the body from the soul.

Hudson River Museum hours are noon-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun. Admission is $5; $3 for senior citizens age 62 and up and children ages 5-16. The museum is at 511 Warburton Ave. 914-963-4550, hrm.org

Read Georgette Gouveia’s cultural musings at the artsmuse.blogspot.com, a collaboration with artswestchester.org.