![]() ![]() ![]() (Image credit: © Saul Leiter Foundation, Howard Greenberg Gallery) Names like Hokusai, Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Hon’ami Kōetsu, with their use of calligraphy, block statements of colour, and ma – a Japanese spatial concept of negative space, ‘the nothingness where, infact, everything happens’, as the Japanese historian Kōtarō Iizawa terms it. He became immersed in the ornate minimalism of Japanese art, particularly the revolutionary ukiyo-e printmakers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Leiter’s early paintings are awash with colour, in the lineage of expressionists like Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline and impressionists like Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. Leiter was fascinated by abstract art, and, at the age of 23, to the horror of his devout family, he dropped out of theology school, got the bus to New York, found a home in the Manhattan’s East Village and enrolled in art school. Leiter dutifully did so, spending his early twenties immersed in the teachings of the Talmud at a theology school in Cleveland.īut an interest in another kind of deity kept pulling at him. ![]() His family expected him to follow his father – to attend theology school and become a Rabbi. Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh, the son of a renowned Jewish theological scholar. ![]()
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