LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART II  / 

80

HELEN LEVITT (American, b. 1918) UNTITLED (NEW YORK) signed

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HELEN LEVITT (American, b. 1918) UNTITLED (NEW YORK) signed
HELEN LEVITT (American, b. 1918) UNTITLED (NEW YORK) signed "Helen Levitt" in pencil on verso vintage gelatin silver contact print 2 3/8 x 3 5/8 in. (6 x 9.2 cm) 1930s PROVENANCE From the artist to the G. Gibson Gallery, SEATTLE Private Collection, WASHINGTON In this affectionate view of the New York City streets, we enter Levitt's world "where children play, where mothers tend their children, where old people gossip and observe. No one seems to work there, and, although there is deprivation, no one suffers from it. Anger, sorrow, and tension exist but only as moments in a grand and harmonious continuum. (No one is privileged or even middle class.)" (Phillips, HELEN LEVITT, San Francisco, 1991, p. 19). Levitt's preferred subject matter is children at play. She always remains at a discrete distance, which, in this case, seems to be from an elevated apartment window, and she uses a right angle viewfinder on her small, 35mm Leica. Levitt's images are too self-contained to make any social commentary. Because of this modest, lyric examination of life on the streets, the images are universally understood and appreciated. Levitt finds beauty in the poorer neighborhoods, since their residents spend more of their time outside, active on the city streets. In THE BULLETIN OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, Nancy Newhall writes about Levitt's first exhibition there: HELEN LEVITT: PHOTOGRAPHS OF CHILDREN (1943). "Helen Levitt seems to walk invisible among the children. She is young, she has the eye of a poet, and she has not forgotten the strange world which tunnels back through thousands of years to the dim beginnings of the human race." Here, in the foreground, a large group of children sit together in a driverless carriage, while adults observe from afar and children are seen scattered on the sidewalks, peeking in carriages and drawing with chalk. The size of the photograph forces the viewer to become physically intimate with this tender subject.
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