Ampersand is pleased to present Painted Nudes by Saul Leiter, one of the first solo exhibitions dedicated to this mostly unknown body of work. “Saul Leiter’s painted nudes are intensely intimate,” writes Margit Erb, director of the Saul Leiter Archive and assistant, collaborator and close friend to Leiter in the last years of his life. “They come from private interior spaces, and they represent some of the most quiet moment’s in Saul’s life and also some of his most creative. They were a true obsession, and he produced hundreds of the painted nudes from the 1970s until about 1990. Their existence in such great numbers is bewildering. They are another of Saul’s great mysteries left for me and the world to ponder as his archive takes new shape in his home in New York’s East Village.”

Having long admired Leiter’s photographs, last summer we had the good fortune of visiting Leiter’s old apartment where Erb and others are in the process of organizing his vast output of photographic transparencies, paintings, watercolors, painted silver prints and hundreds of little painted notebooks that he made over the years. The archive is indeed bewildering because it serves as evidence that the diversity of Saul’s creative work is far greater than anyone not close to him could have imagined. Walking through the rooms, with birdsong and a faint September breeze coming through open windows, it was easy to imagine any number of possible exhibitions. The objects on his walls, his notebooks, all his little drawings—each are equally amazing. The ephemeral traces of Leiter’s life evident throughout the apartment somehow have the look of an outsider, even though Leiter is widely known for iconic color photographs that he made in the 1950s and 60s. Erb writes that in the first year after Saul’s passing she found his painted nudes under tables, buried in boxes, between shelves and on top of cabinets. “Some had been gathered carefully in binders, while others were found between the pages of books encased deep within Saul’s vast library.” Which is not to say that they were neglected, but rather that they had been integrated into the nuances of Saul’s daily life. It is this evidence of intimacy, in addition to his singular use of color and eye for abstraction, that compelled us to show these works. Leiter’s street photographs present an outside world seen unmistakably through his eyes. The painted nudes, on the other hand, give us access to a private world, not just the relationships he had with these women, but also the solitary and mostly private encounters Saul had with his paint, brushes and silver prints.

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923. In the mid-1940s he moved to New York's East Village, where he would remain for the rest of his life. During the 1950s and 60s Leiter participated in various exhibitions of black-and-white photography, becoming associated with what later ame to be known as the New York School of photography. His skill as a fashion photographer led to commissions for Harper's Bazaar and Esquire. Leiter's landmark monograph Early Color was published in 2006 and was followed by a series of exhibitions throughout the US and Europe. In 2012, the Deichtorhallen Museum in Hamburg hosted a major retrospective of Leiter's work. He died in New York in 2013.

The biographical details above and quotations from Margit Erb are found in Painted Nudes, the first ever publication dedicated to Leiter's painted photographs.

Published by Sylph Editions, copies of Painted Nudes
are available through the gallery. Here >

All works courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery.

Untitled, 1980-1990
Gouche and watercolor on gelatin silver print photograph
10 x 8 in.
Signed in ink on verso