The effect is intensely tactile the painted nudes not only captivate the eye but invite the fingertips. Leiter was known to add to his work continually, sometimes over the course of decades, accruing new layers and scratching at old ones. Flat or furrowed, smooth or coarse, the photographs’ surfaces are further enlivened by the rich, earthy quality of many layers of paint.

Indeed, the painted photographs are guided by an affinity for texture. Unlike a stretched canvas, a printed photograph will easily crease or tear-accidents Leiter embraced, permitting these wrinkles and folds to become organic constituents of the image. Its surface alters the paint’s behavior a matte ground will hungrily absorb layers of paint, while a glossy finish touched with a water-heavy brush forms erratic rivulets. Much like a sketch, it provides an underlying geometry-a landscape of shapes-that guides the strokes of his brush. Leiter recognized that a photograph could supply him with qualities that would excite any painter. Like the work of Egon Schiele, Leiter’s painted nudes reveal a fascination with surfaces-layers that can be peeled away to release an intense vitality. Here, his devotion to color and form took on a baroque sensuousness that has something in common with the erotic energy of turn-of-the-century Vienna. He created hundreds of these works, combining two media that were traditionally kept scrupulously apart. His heroes were the Impressionists-devotees of color and light.įrom the late sixties through the early nineties, Leiter adopted the practice of painting over his own photographs of nude figures. He declined to work on the giant canvases of his contemporaries, much preferring the pages of notebooks and the covers of old books.

Leiter also painted-abstract planes of color kissing at unruly horizons. Like other New York School photographers of the fifties and early sixties, Leiter was captivated by what the curator Jane Livingston called “the fleeting and the candid,” but he infused those qualities with a lyricism and a delicacy that were quite his own. Saul Leiter, an unassuming but ferociously single-minded artist, delighted in photographing the streets of New York, focussing above all on the rounded, the sensuous, and the colorful.

The following text is adapted from the author's book “ Painted Nudes,” a collection of Saul Leiter’s work which_ is out this month from Sylph Editions._ Photograph by Saul Leiter / Courtesy the Saul Leiter Foundation and Sylph Editions

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