Preview of an exhibition at Hackelbury Fine Art  June 2013. Follow this link for examples of Saul Leiter's painting and photography.  Also of interest: information about and a trailer for a recent documentary film about Saul Leiter  'In No Great Hurry' )

Saul Leiter: A Life in Colour

 text by Nigel Warburton

‘Everything is what it is and not another thing’
Gottfried Leibniz

Sometimes words screen us from what is in front of us. In the face of abstraction it is easier to fall back on biographical references, on artists’ statements, on art historical contextualization: these can be alternatives to engagement, ways of avoiding what is in front of you. There is, of course, no innocent eye, no pure retinal experience of painting, but focusing on fact, meaning, and source can undermine rather than enhance the joys of looking.

"I have personally not cared about the emphasis on the personal because I think that what matters is the work you do. When an artist talks about his own work he’s not very often discussing the work, he’s discussing quite possibly what he’d like it to be, or what he thinks it is. What can you do? The work itself outlives what people say about it"

Saul Leiter’s paintings have an unmistakable beauty. They burst with colour – yellows, turquoises, violets, reds. If you give them a few moments they will draw you in. Saul will tell you how much he enjoys the act of painting, how unlike some artists he doesn’t suffer when he paints - far from it. He is openly seeking a particular kind of beauty, and the enjoyment in the process is as obvious as it is in his photography. But you should be able to see this. No one should have to tell you. It is in his use of colour, the variety of marks, and in his sheer exuberance in painting that this emerges. The temptation is to try and explain it all in terms of something else that it isn’t, something more complicated or more personal. There may seem to be a horizon, and a sense of landscape or cityscape in many of these – though perhaps not. Everything in his painting is what it is.

"I have a great weakness that I’m ashamed to talk about. I have a great secret. I love painting! When I wake up in the morning and I’m depressed I got into the front room and pick up a brush and I feel much better"

This delight in colour and in brushstrokes is visible and contagious. It is there in the exuberant choice of hue, in the free marks, in the asymmetrical compositions – a wonderful expression of Leiter’s personality, his intelligence, wit, and pleasure in life.

There are echoes of his photography in his painting - and of his painting in his photography. The ochres and reds of a passing taxi, the patterns of out of focus lights in Times Square, such details often find their equivalents in both the colour and form of particular paintings. Equally the delight in multiple layers of paint and texture can be seen in many of his exquisite street shots, which frequently use windows and mirrors to frame, veil, and abstract. In both media his sensibility has been shaped by his first loves: the paintings of Renoir, of Matisse, and above all, of Bonnard. He began as a painter, and it is painting that still inspires him.

"Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I reach over to one of my 30 books on Bonnard…if I can’t find the one I want, I go out and buy another copy"

Leiter works on an intimate scale, often on scraps of cardboard and paper, sometimes almost translucent paper. An old returned envelope or a photographic print provides a surface for painting as readily as does a notebook of watercolour paper. For one series he used discarded book covers from his father’s library; for a more recent one he has been collecting the slivers of cardboard that wine stores place between bottles to stop them breaking. Many of the marks he makes are self-consciously calligraphic. They are both delicate and direct. One of his favorite books is of Zen brushwork, that tradition of immediacy flowing from a clear mind.

"The brush is one of the greatest inventions of mankind. Even if I don’t always use it correctly, I aspire to a kind of quality in the marks I make"

Built up from layers of gouache and watercolour, his paintings are palimpsests. He returns to earlier work that he finds in the stacks of sketches that fill his apartment, adding a light stroke here, improving, reworking, layering. This is a highly personal way of working, but it has no secret private meaning. It is not a diary, not a confession. If it brings joy to those who look at it, that is more than enough.

"In a very imperfect world it is good that something you’ve done gives pleasure to people"

There is a story, of course, of how he came to be as he is. Leiter’s father, a distinguished, scholar and rabbi, cried when Saul had his first exhibition, literally cried: ‘Now everyone will know’ he lamented. Saul’s artistic career, he jokes, began in adversity. Some seventy years on, this is still poignant. That’s where it all comes from. He wasn’t meant to be an artist, but, as he puts it, with a shrug in his voice, ‘What can you do? I preferred looking at paintings to sitting in a synagogue praying to a god I wasn’t sure was listening to me.’

Leaving Pittsburgh for New York, in part to get away from a life that others were planning for him, he took a different path. There he fell in with painters and photographers, worked as a fashion photographer, read, looked at paintings, enjoyed friendships, built up a personal portfolio of colour street photography that has only recently been fully appreciated and collected. But always he kept painting. Not every day, but most days, finding beauty and joy in brushstrokes when he wasn’t finding it in the street through his photography. Painting is at the core of his being. Despite the pressures to earn a living, he sidestepped attempts to show his work until he was ready. He quietly got on with what he wanted to get on with, living his own life, resisting the Siren calls of the art world. The resulting paintings, in portfolios and boxes, surround him in his New York home, like Saul himself, not seeking attention, but amply rewarding the interested observer who takes a step closer and stops awhile. 

Today, his work is in major collections, is the subject of retrospectives and a recent television documentary, but that sort of attention and fame was never what drove him – his independence allowed him to do what he has done in his quiet and focused way. While his contemporaries were painting large-scale canvases for museum spaces, he carried on creating intimate abstractions on torn cardboard. Franz Kline once said to him ‘If you worked big, you could be one of the boys’. That wasn’t a choice he wanted to make, and he doesn’t regret it. Working small has brought different, purer rewards.

But don’t take all this as an explanation. The point is not to interpret, but to enjoy, to look at what is there. As he told me when I said I wanted to write about his art: 

‘You’re going to write about my work? Really, and I mean this, the less said the better.’

For Press information regarding Saul Leiter: A life in colour please contact Amy Barder at Four Colman Getty amy.barder@fourcolmangetty.com or 2030239025.

A version of this review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, March 15th 2013.

Man Ray Portraits 

review by Nigel Warburton

(NPG until 27th May 2013)

Although he thought of himself as a painter, posterity celebrates Man Ray (1890-1976) as a creator of Dadaist objects and as an experimental photographer. Yet for much of his early life he worked more prosaically as a studio portraitist, photographing his contemporaries on commission. His interest in photography ebbed and flowed over a career that lasted five decades and as he moved back and forth across the Atlantic, but he nevertheless bequeathed an impressive portfolio of portraits of the artistic, musical, and literary avant garde, many of which are included in this National Portrait Gallery exhibition, the first to show the full range of his portraiture. In this chronologically arranged parade of stars Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Braques, Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemmingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Eric Satie, Stravinsky, Bernice Abbott, Lee Miller, and even Catherine Deneuve all feature. Portraits of the famous are interspersed with those of more obscure contemporaries and friends, together with nudes, fashion photography, and self-portraits. The 150 or so prints, mostly vintage, are simply framed, minimally captioned, and presented in 5 rooms that tell the story of Man Ray’s periginations: ‘New York 1916-20’, ‘Paris 1921-8’, ‘Paris 1929-1937’, ‘Hollywood 1940-50’, and ‘Paris 1951 – Later Years’.

Man Ray loved women. No one visiting this exhibition could fail to realize that. In his experimental, affectionate and erotically-charged portraits of lovers, his artistry and originality are unmistakable. His portraits of men, in contrast, are more formal, less inspired, frequently cold, and occasionally stiff: their main interest lies in their sitters’ subsequent fame. Few fulfill the photographic promise of his early portrait of his friend Marcel Duchamp in a wicker chair (1916) – a remarkable image by any standards that would still hold our interest had Duchamp remained an unknown.

There are previously unseen portraits on display here, and visual discoveries to be made by those prepared to jostle and move in close enough to appreciate the smaller prints, but it is the familiar and iconic images that stand out, enhanced by juxtaposition with other photographs of the same sitters. Although the ‘Violon d’Ingres’ (1924), that picture of Kiki de Montparnasse’s naked back with the ‘f’ holes of a violin superimposed, is now a cliché (and scarcely a portrait), its presentation here alongside others of Kiki allows us to see it as of a specific spirited individual rather than of ‘a woman’s back’.  The title doesn’t simply allude to the woman-into-violin Surrealist joke, or to the pose and patterned turban reminiscent of an Ingres nude, but also to Ingres’s habit of playing the violin to visitors to his studio: from this ‘violon d’Ingres’ came to mean any favourite pastime for which the person in question was less known, a second string to one’s bow, as it were. Man Ray’s ‘Violon d’Ingres’ combines a visual, an art historical, and a linguistic pun, and, perhaps, too, a more private message about his relationship with Kiki, and with women in general – a literal objectification, woman as instrument. As Marina Warner points out in the exhibition catalogue, the 1920s were unenlightened times, and the notion that women might become playthings for men a given. Yet Man Ray’s attitude to representing women was more complex than many, driven as it was by Surrealist notions of Eros and a willingness to explore the near dream imagery of desire and fantasy.

 In another familiar photograph, ‘Noire et Blanche’,  which is of Kiki with her head resting on a table next to the African mask which she props up with her hand, her pose as if asleep, is reminiscent of, and possibly inspired by, Brancusi’s sculpture ‘Sleeping Muse’.  Originally captioned ‘Visage de nacre et masque d’ébène’ (mother of pearl face and ebony mask), it first appeared in Vogue in May 1926. In the exhibition it is displayed near a less familiar variant from the series in which Kiki stands cradling the mask against her cheek. Also in the exhibition – and easily missed -  is a small and intimate portrait of Adrienne Fedelin (‘Ady’), Man Ray’s later companion. Ady was a dancer from Guadelope, and hers is one of the few non-white faces included. In this snapshot-like photograph from 1937 she is standing in a dressing gown, smiling, facing the camera, her hand resting on a white bust of Man Ray’s head echoing Kiki’s in ‘Noire et Blanche’. The naturalness of Ady’s smile contrasts with the controlled closed-lipped pose of almost every other woman depicted, reminding us of the degree to which Man Ray directed his sitters and controlled their poses.

The highlight of the exhibition is a remarkable solarized portrait of Lee Miller in profile from 1929 which has the calm beauty of a Renaissance painting by Baldovinetti that hangs a few hundred yards away in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. Miller was Man Ray’s assistant, lover and model, before leaving him to become a photographer and journalist, subsequently working on the frontline in the Second World War, and documenting the liberation of Dachau. The serenity of the Miller portrait belies their tempestuous three-year relationship that, when it ended, left Man Ray with a suicidal energy that he eventually re-chanelled into his art: Lee Miller was the inspiration for ‘Indestructible Object’, the famous metronome with a photograph of an eye attached to its arm, that the viewer was encouraged to attempt to destroy.

Man Ray left Paris for the States in 1940, settling in Hollywood with his new partner Juliet.  There he made portraits of film stars, including Ava Gardner,, before returning to Paris in 1951 where he continued to photograph until the late 1960s.  But as this rich and varied exhibition reveals, it was in the artistic crucible of Paris in the 1920s and 30s in the Golden Age of Surrealism, living among the artists, writers and composers who were to become the founders of modernism, that he reached his apogee as a portraitist. [ends]

[Read some other reviews of the exhibition here]