Saul Leiter’s Painted Nudes

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._

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. 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. Leiter also painted—abstract planes of color kissing at unruly horizons. He declined to work on the giant canvases of his contemporaries, much preferring the pages of notebooks and the covers of old books. His heroes were the Impressionists—devotees of color and light.

From the late sixties through the early nineties, Leiter adopted the practice of painting over his own photographs of nude figures. He created hundreds of these works, combining two media that were traditionally kept scrupulously apart. 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. 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.

Leiter recognized that a photograph could supply him with qualities that would excite any painter. Much like a sketch, it provides an underlying geometry—a landscape of shapes—that guides the strokes of his brush. 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. 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.

Indeed, the painted photographs are guided by an affinity for texture. Flat or furrowed, smooth or coarse, the photographs’ surfaces are further enlivened by the rich, earthy quality of many layers of paint. Leiter was known to add to his work continually, sometimes over the course of decades, accruing new layers and scratching at old ones. The effect is intensely tactile; the painted nudes not only captivate the eye but invite the fingertips. Further, as many artists have remarked, paint has a singular penchant for mimicking flesh. (Lucian Freud said, “I want paint to work as flesh. I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them.”)

Ductile and sensuous, paint hugs the flat photographic forms of Leiter’s nudes in a tailor-made mantle. Gentle sea-blue washes are punctuated by bold, assertive strokes in bright pink and yellow. Strands of the women’s hair, formerly grey, become vivid red tendrils, while their bodies are made radiant by streaks and patches of color, variously soft and diaphanous, deep and opaque. The effect is of a turbulent maelstrom of color, created with impulsive, almost dancing brushstrokes. In these painted nudes, color seems to have been unleashed; it is a carnival, a riot, an irresistible force.