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Leiter, Saul
(American, b. 1923)
Canopy
1958
Silver dye bleach print, printed later

Purchase, Richard and Ethel Herzfeld Foundation Acquisition Fund
M2006.24

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When Saul Leiter gave a slide talk about his work in the late 1950s, he suggested that abstraction was a feature of ordinary life to be found in partial glimpses and accidental views on common streets—not something invented by artists. This viewpoint was new to many of the artists in attendance, but images like this one strongly support Leiter’s statement. Leiter’s sustained engagement with the contemporary world through the language of color and form was an approach that dovetailed with that of postwar painters like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others Leiter knew through his association with the Tenth Street Group. In grounding the abstract gestures of postwar painting in the real world, Leiter found piquant artistic territory in the humble details of urban life. More than that, he revealed art to be less a method of making than a mode of seeing.

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