Even in his 80s, when he was belatedly acknowledged as a pioneer of colour photography, Saul Leiter – who died aged 89 in November 2013 – steadfastly refused to be canonised by the art world. “In order to build a career and be successful,” he said, “one has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and paint when I feel like it.”

As an intriguing new book shows, Leiter felt like painting a lot of the time. Painted Nudes collects 70 of the several hundred works Leiter made between the 70s and 1990 by applying gouache, watercolours and casein to his black-and-white nude photographic portraits of women friends and models.

The results, even if you’re familiar with his painterly street photography, are surprising. There are shades of Klimt in the ornate eroticism of some works, and of vintage 50s pin-ups in the faux-coyness of others. Often, only an outline of a figure remains from the original photograph; the face, body and backdrop are covered with splashes and strokes of vivid colour – bright yellows, oranges and pinks, browns and reds.

Unlike the soft poetry of his colour photographs, Leiter’s painted nudes are all about energy and vitality. They turn monochrome into a riot of colour, almost obliterating all trace of the medium for which he is now most celebrated. Perhaps more importantly, though, they cast new light on his beautifully evocative, almost abstract colour photographs of New York.

Leiter imbued street photography – the images for which he is known were all taken within a few blocks of his East Village apartment – with a painter’s instinct for composition and tone. The clamorous streets of Manhattan were transformed in his intimate observations of passersby glimpsed through the rain-splashed or steamy windows of diners and shops. What emerged was a New York of the imagination: blurred or brightly coloured, and glowing with an altogether more magical light than the city captured by, say, Garry Winogrand or William Klein, who was also drawn to the neon beauty of the nocturnal city streets.

Like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leiter trained as a painter – he also trained to be a rabbi – before taking up a camera. But one senses that, like Cartier-Bresson, he secretly saw painting as the more satisfying pursuit. As far back as 1947, one of his paintings was included in a prestigious group show, Abstract and Surrealist American Art, at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In an essay for his retrospective photobook, Leiter’s assistant, Margit Erb, remembers the pivotal moment in 2009 when she unearthed a trove of 50 watercolours “in a large black portfolio under a heap of items in Saul’s bedroom”. It precipitated a bigger search for forgotten paintings. “We found them under tables and behind chairs; in old portfolios purchased from Sennelier in Paris 50 years ago,” she wrote.

Leiter began painting over his photos in the 70s, just after he walked out of a lucrative job at Harper’s Bazaar, where for 10 years he had shot fashion spreads alongside the more lauded Richard Avedon. Depressed by an increasingly corporate world, he retreated to his studio and on a whim began looking through a large set of vintage prints of nudes he had taken over the years, many of which were of his lover, muse and fellow artist, the eccentric Soames Bantry.

The prints were originally intended for a book that for some reason was never published. According to Erb, he “just couldn’t resist … applying watercolours to the shiny surfaces of his photographs”.

After Leiter’s death, she undertook another epic excavation, finding several hundred of his painted nudes. For the two so-called lost decades of his life, in which he often said he’d been “doing nothing”, he had been meticulously painting over his nudes.

Painted Nudes reveals yet another hidden aspect of the strange life of the quiet man of American postwar photography, this reluctant and mysterious pioneer of colour. The images that work best for me are the ones in which the photograph is still essential to the finished work. In one such piece, a woman lies outstretched on bedsheets, her monochrome body scratched with blues and yellows and reds, which are echoed in the fragments of colour that interrupt the darkness in which she lies. Here, the photographic portrait remains somehow intact and powerful in its new hybrid form.

Elsewhere, you long to see the original photographs alongside the painted nudes – or given a book of their own – but it seems clear that Leiter saw the finished works as standalone paintings rather than painted photographs.

Leiter, it seems, was a painter at heart. But for me, the atmospheric colour photographs he made in the 50s – two decades before Eggleston or Stephen Shore finally made colour legitimate – remain his greatest works. In pictures like Red Umbrella, Snow Storm or the minimalist T – in which the single letter floats bold in a frosted window – you see how the painter’s eye informed and transformed his photographic imagination, allowing him to make enduringly great art. Sixty years on, that work is finally getting the recognition it deserves – and the received history of American colour photography is being revised accordingly.



• Painted Nudes is out now, published by Sylph Editions.

