To commemorate the 100th anniversary of photographer Saul Leiter's birth, the Howard Greenberg Gallery is presenting a comprehensive exhibition showcasing the remarkable diversity of his artistic career. "Saul Leiter: Centennial" will run from December 2, 2023, through February 10, 2024, featuring more than 40 photographs and paintings, including painted photographs, many of which have never been exhibited to the American public before.
The exhibition, created in collaboration with the Saul Leiter Foundation, coincides with the release of a new book titled "Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective," published by Thames & Hudson in November. An opening reception is scheduled for Saturday, December 2, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM, marking what would have been Leiter's 100th birthday on December 3.
Born on December 3, 1923, Saul Leiter dedicated himself to photography and painting almost daily for more than 60 years. He made an enormous and unique contribution to photography during a highly prolific period in 1950s New York as a pioneer of color photography. His abstract forms and radically innovative compositions possessed a pictorial quality that distinguished his work from that of his New York School contemporaries. Often finding inspiration just blocks away from his Lower Manhattan apartment, Leiter sought beauty in the ordinary and captured intimate moments both indoors and on the street.
The Howard Greenberg Gallery exhibition will examine his black and white photographs as well as his color work, including portraits and urban landscapes from the 1940s through 1960s. The show will also feature his paintings, which he continued working on until the end of his life, including abstract watercolors and painted photographs, as well as his fashion photography for Harper's Bazaar around 1960.
Anne Morin, curator of the recent Saul Leiter exhibition at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, and director of diChroma Photography in Madrid, noted: "Paintings, photographs, color, black and white, street photography, fashion photography. Approaching Saul Leiter's work is complex. Due to the transdisciplinary dimension of his work, the artist/photographer occupies a very special place in the history of photography. As a collector of tiny fragments of the world around him, Leiter wove a work of extraordinary density. Known as one of the great masters of mid-century color photography, his work extends far beyond that territory."
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923, the son of a rabbi who was a prominent Talmudic scholar. In 1946, he moved to New York to pursue painting. Shortly after arriving in New York, he met abstract expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting with photography. Leiter's friendship with Pousette-Dart, and later with W. Eugene Smith, along with photography exhibitions he saw in New York, including Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, inspired his growing interest in photography.
Edward Steichen included Leiter's black and white photographs in the exhibition "Always the Young Strangers" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. In the late 1950s, art director Henry Wolf published Leiter's color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper's Bazaar. Leiter continued working as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova.
In the early 1980s, Leiter faced financial difficulties that forced him to close his commercial studio on Fifth Avenue. For the following two decades, he lived and worked almost in obscurity. In 2006, with the help of writer/curator Martin Harrison and the Howard Greenberg Gallery, the groundbreaking monograph "Saul Leiter: Early Color" was published by Steidl in Germany. The "small" book became an overnight sensation with worldwide distribution and firmly established Leiter as one of the early pioneers in the history of color photography.
In 2006, the Milwaukee Museum of Art organized the first American museum exhibition of Leiter's photographs. His work has been widely featured in solo museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. His work is part of the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the National Gallery of Australia; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.
The Saul Leiter Foundation, established in 2014, is dedicated to preserving Leiter's art and legacy. Led by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo, the foundation maintains Leiter's extensive archives and organizes educational programs, exhibitions, and books. "Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective" presents Leiter's iconic works as well as discoveries made during the 10 years since the artist's death in 2013. The foundation is working toward completing a catalogue raisonné that will be made available to students, curators, writers, and art professionals. The exhibition runs through February 10, 2024, at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, located at 41 East 57th Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10022.
