Erb writes that in the first year after Saul’s passing she found his painted nudes under tables, buried in boxes, between shelves and on top of cabinets. The ephemeral traces of Leiter’s life evident throughout the apartment somehow have the look of an outsider, even though Leiter is widely known for iconic color photographs that he made in the 1950s and 60s. The objects on his walls, his notebooks, all his little drawings-each are equally amazing. Walking through the rooms, with birdsong and a faint September breeze coming through open windows, it was easy to imagine any number of possible exhibitions. The archive is indeed bewildering because it serves as evidence that the diversity of Saul’s creative work is far greater than anyone not close to him could have imagined.
Having long admired Leiter’s photographs, last summer we had the good fortune of visiting Leiter’s old apartment where Erb and others are in the process of organizing his vast output of photographic transparencies, paintings, watercolors, painted silver prints and hundreds of little painted notebooks that he made over the years. They are another of Saul’s great mysteries left for me and the world to ponder as his archive takes new shape in his home in New York’s East Village.” Their existence in such great numbers is bewildering. They were a true obsession, and he produced hundreds of the painted nudes from the 1970s until about 1990. “They come from private interior spaces, and they represent some of the most quiet moment’s in Saul’s life and also some of his most creative.
“Saul Leiter’s painted nudes are intensely intimate,” writes Margit Erb, director of the Saul Leiter Archive and assistant, collaborator and close friend to Leiter in the last years of his life. Ampersand is pleased to present Painted Nudes by Saul Leiter, one of the first solo exhibitions dedicated to this mostly unknown body of work.
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