Hamburg, Germany.- The Deichtorhallen is proud to present “Saul Leiter: Retrospective”, on view from February 3rd through April 15th. This exhibition, the first restrospective of the artist’s work to be held includes more than 400 works and includes early black and white and color photography, fashion photography, over-painted nudes, and Leiter’s paintings in his never before shown sketchbooks. The last section of the exhibition is devoted to new photographic works by Saul Leiter that he continues to create on the streets of his neighborhood in New York’s East Village.
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a well known Talmud scholar and Saul studied to become a Rabbi. His mother gave him a Detrola camera at age 12. At age 23, he left theology school and moved to New York City to become an artist. He had developed an early interest in painting and was fortunate to meet the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart. Pousette-Dart and W. Eugene Smith encouraged Saul to pursue photography and he was soon taking black and white pictures with a 35 mm Leica, which he acquired by exchanging a few Eugene Smith prints for it. In 1948, he started taking color photographs. He began associating with other contemporary photographers such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus and helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s.
Leiter’s earliest black and white photographs show an extraordinary affinity for the medium, and by 1948 he began to experiment in color. Edward Steichen included Leiter’s black and white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Stranger at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar. Leiter continued to work as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova. Leiter has made an enormous and unique contribution to photography. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries. Perhaps this is because Leiter has continued through the years to work as both a photographer and painter. His painterly sensibility reaches its fruition in his painted photographs of nudes on which he has actually applied layers of gouache and watercolor.
Martin Harrison, editor and author of “Saul Leiter Early Color”, writes, “Leiter’s sensibility…placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternate way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.” Saul Leiter’s work is featured prominently in Jane Livingston’s “The New York School” and in Martin Harrison’s “Appearances: Fashion Photography Since 1945”. His work is in the collections many prestigious public and private collections. In 2008, The Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris mounted Leiter’s first museum exhibition in Europe with an accompanying catalog. Saul Leiter is represented in New York by the Howard Greenberg Gallery.
The Deichtorhallen are one of the largest exhibition venues for contemporary art and photography in Europe. The two historic buildings, built in 1911/13 impress with their open steel and glass architecture, and today offer spectacular space for large international exhibitions. Since 2011, the two buildings at the interface of Hamburg’s Kunstmeile and Hafencity have been supplemented by a satellite in Hamburg’s Harburg district, the Sammlung Falckenberg. The Deichtorhallen were originally constructed between 1911 and 1914 on the grounds of the former Berlin train station, built as the Hamburg counterpart to the “Hamburger Bahnhof” in Berlin, and served as market halls. They are among the few remaining examples of industrial architecture from the period of transition from Art Nouveau to the expressive forms of the 20th Century.
The two halls are open steel structures with a combined floor space of 5,600 square meters. Körber-Stiftung gifted the restored Deichtorhallen to the City of Hamburg, which has owned them ever since. In 1989, they were assigned to a limited liability company: Deichtorhallen-Ausstellungs GmbH. On Nov. 9, 1989 Deichtorhallen’s international art exhibition program opened with the show “Einleuchten”, curated by Harald Szeemann. Down through the years, Deichtorhallen Hamburg has emerged as an exhibition center for photography and contemporary art with three pillars of activities, three institutions under the single Deichtorhallen brand. Since 2009, Dr. Dirk Luckow has been Artistic Director of Deichtorhallen Hamburg. A design shop, the photography bookshop and the award-winning restaurant “Fillet of Soul,” complete the picture of the Deichtorhallen. Located at the junction between art district and port city, they offer an ideal starting point for cultural activities. Visit the Deichtorhallen website at … http://www.deichtorhallen.de