By 1966, Leslie’d lost three friends to car crashes: Jackson Pollock in 1956, sculptor David Smith in 1965, and O’Hara. The seventh of October of that year: Leslie’s studio destroy’d by fire. Twelve firefighters kill’d. All Leslie’s art work, films, and personal possessions lost. “When my studio burned, I gave up filmmaking altogether and merged all my ideas into . . . painted stories. This metastasis of ideas was not unusual for me except for its suddenness. It was not possible to reconstruct all of my working situations after the disaster.” The Killing Cycle: “The Narrator” (1973), “The Cocktail Party” (1967-1978), “The Accident” (1969-1970), “The Telephone Call” (1971-1972), “The Loading Pier” (1975). Leslie: The Killing Cycle is not primarily about any one thing. Not only about death or Frank O’Hara or about the loss of American innocence or about the defiling of the seashore or about the brutality of the automobile or a lecture to the avant garde or the demise of a hero or the depiction of a single instant in time or multiple figure painting or the loss of my work by fire . . . or . . . or . . . What this work is really about I can’t say, except that formally it is meant to be multi-leveled with its implied meanings focused enough that they are all fighting for ascendancy. And that these jostling meanings seek out the viewers perceptions to combine and recombine with each person so that no one interpretation succeeds. (http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.nl/2010/08/alfred-leslies-killing-cycle.html) The year 1966 was a turning point for painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie. That fall, a devastating fire destroyed Leslie’s studio-home and all of its contents. This personal loss, as well as the death only a few months earlier of his close friend and collaborator, poet Frank O’Hara, provided fertile ground for artistic inspiration. The Killing Cycle is a series of constructed narratives that synthesize fact and fiction to describe the beach scene car crash that ended O’Hara’s life. Part personal testimony and part metaphor for loss, these “painted stories” will be exhibited together for the first time in over 20 years. (http://www.marquette.edu/haggerty/killing-cycle.php) Around 1964, during Leslie's filmmaking days as an artist, he collaborated with one of the kingpins of the Abstract Expressionist movement, the writer and poet, Frank O'Hara, who also happened to be a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The film was titled The Last Clean Shirt. O'Hara wrote the narration. Just two years later, in the early morning hours of July 24, 1966, while walking with friends on Fire Island, O'Hara was hit by a Jeep. He died the next day of a ruptured liver. The tragic episode became the subject for Leslie's most important figural works, "The Killing Cycle." A few years later (1969-70), in a series of nine paintings, Leslie harnessed all his talents and instincts for an in-depth look at not just the Killing of Frank O'Hara, but the meaning of the man's life and death. Although some of the works have a narrative element, some even featuring a written narration at the bottom, the series does not lend itself to a simple interpretive reading. In some respects, the series is as abstract, in its reasoning if not its images, as anything Alfred Leslie splashed together during his years striving to be more extreme than his extreme New York School colleagues working in the lofts next door. (http://art-now-and-then.blogspot.nl/2014/12/alfred-leslie.html)