Helen Levitt – the god of urban gestures

(Click on images to see them larger.)

Helen Levitt died in her sleep on Sunday. She was 95. Lovely Margarett Loke obit in the New York Times here.

For someone who had a long and distinguished career, Levitt seldom had much to say about it. If she grew tired of having critics exclaim over her early work and ignore her later, she rarely expressed this view in public.

In the late 1930s and 1940s, she captured the animal radiance of an urban childhood – the chaotic fun of hanging out where lots was happening. As far as we know now, which isn’t enough, she didn’t work much in the 1950s and 1960s but came back big in the 1970s.

Her career charts a course from the specific to the nearly abstract, from black-and-white to color. In later years, she liked to lift the edges off objects and give them a shake.

I remember a print of a woman dressed neatly in a grid of crisscrossing checks leaning into a cab. The car’s checkered trim seems to have wondered off her skirt. In another, three motley roosters stroll down a street, heading for a clump of cheap chairs with gold and red floral patterns blooming with startling force under plastic wrap.

Her unifying thread is a focus on gestures. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Weegee, she specialized in the fleeting, spontaneous and tossed off.

In her early work, children rule. They are ruffians with the grace of angels. In what is probably her most famous image, three of them stand staggered on the steps of a brownstone, two in face masks, the third struggling to tie hers on.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard hit the same theme, but his kids are grotesques. Hers is tender. He put the masks on the children and posed them. She found them as they moved outdoors and caught them in the act of being themselves.

In Seattle, Levitt’s work is at the G. Gibson Gallery.