Leon Levinstein

Leon Levinstein (1910–1988) was an American street photographer best known for his work documenting everyday street life in New York City from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Contents

1. Early Life and Education

2. Career

3.  Publications

4. References

5. Bibliography

6. External Links

Early Life and Education

Leon Levinstein was born on 20 September 1910 in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small college town with a population of about five thousand.   Leon began attending high school in September 1923 at Baltimore City College, which was a public college-preparatory school.    During his senior year in high school, he began attending evening classes at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore.  In the fall of 1927, after graduating from high school, he enrolled as a part-time student at the Institute, taking courses in drawing, calligraphy, and design.  In his application for a 1955 Guggenheim fellowship he mentions taking courses at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh; no school records for the period could be found to confirm this, but in light of his subsequent career as a graphic artist it is reasonable to assume that he did study there, as it was primarily a commercial art school.

Career

His first job in advertising, with the Hecht Furniture Company in downtown Baltimore.  From 1934 to 1937 he worked there as an assistant art director, doing layouts for newspaper advertisements.  He then set out on his own as a freelance graphic artist and designer.   Layouts were to be his forte throughout his career in advertising.  In the fall of 1948 he took an advanced workshop with the school's director and one of its most influential teachers, Sid Grossman.  As a walker and a loner, it was only natural that Levinstein would prowl the streets of New York and the beaches of Coney Island, like numerous other photographers before him. Levinstein was studying with Grossman in 1950 when Lisette and Evsa Model attended the class, and from 1954 until 1960 Levinstein was a student in Evsa Model's painting workshop.  One of his photographs was included in U.S. Camera Annual 1951, and two were chosen the following year.  In 1956 he was among six featured photographers of the annual, together with Richard Avedon, Wynn Bullock, G.E. Kidder Smith (an architectural photographer), Eugene Smith, and Brett Weston.  Over the course of the decade, his work would also be in five Popular Photography annuals.  In 1952 he was the winner of Popular Photography's international photography contest, with a prize of $2,000.  Another supporter was Helen Gee, the founder of the Limelight Gallery, the first American gallery devoted solely to the exhibition and sale of photographs.  In the seven years that the Limelight was open, Helen Gee mounted more than sixty exhibitions, including work by Berenice Abbott, Bill Brandt, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, Eugene Smith, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Minor White, as well as work by historical figures such as Eugene Atget and Julia Margaret Cameron.  In 1955 Levinstein's work was included in a summer group exhibition. The following January, Levinstein got his own show, and Gee recalls that the show created a lot of excitement and a few prints were even sold.  There were favorable reviews one of which by Wright from the Village Voice.  In 1980, Gee included his work in the exhibition Photography of the Fifties.  The following year she was instrumental in arranging the sale of a substantial number of prints to the art dealer Harry Lunn.  In the late '70s and '80s Levinstein travelled abroad to photograph, only to return to the United States and stay in his Baltimore apartment.  Harry Lunn did purchase a large group of Levinstein's photographs, and his work was being included in important exhibitions of postwar documentary photography, beginning in 1978 with New Standpoints at the Museum of Modern Art. Still not widely known, Levinstein has gradually come to be acknowledged as a key figure from a very significant era of American photography.

Publications

Benton-Harris, John "Leon Levinstein, 1913-1988” Creative Camera, July 1989, pp.18-19.

Charlottesville, Bayly Art Museum, University of Virginia.  Black through Time: Photographs of Black Urban Life 1937-1973. Text by Stephen Marguilies.  1992.

"Coney Island."  Photographs selected by Grace M. Mayer. Camera, March 1971, pp. 6-45.

Deschin, Jacob.  "'Family of Man': Museum of Modern Art Prepares Global Collection for January Opening."  New York Times, 12 December 1954.

References

1.  Howard Greenberg; Bob Shamis (1 June 2014). Leon HYPERLINK "http://books.google.com/books?id=dSaDtQAACAAJ"Levinstein.

2.  Shamis, Bob, and Max Kozloff. Leon Levinstein: The Moment of Exposure. Musée des beaux-arts du Canada/National Gallery of Canada, 1995.

Bibliography

Shamis, Bob, and Max Kozloff. Leon Levinstein: The Moment of Exposure. Musée des beaux-arts du Canada/National Gallery of Canada, 1995.

External Links

http://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2010/06/14/127831723/levinstein

June 14, 2010

Leland, John.  http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/recognition-from-the-art-world-he-shunned-in-life/ Dec. 1, 2012

References

• http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2010/leon-levinstein
• http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/06/14/127831723/levinstein
• http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/recognition-from-the-art-world-he-shunned-in-life/
• http://www.stevenkasher.com/exhibition/75/#!2249

Further reading

• Howard Greenberg; Bob Shamis (1 June 2014). Leon Levinstein. Gerhard Steidl Druckerei und Verlag. ISBN 978-3-86930-443-4.
• Shamis, Bob; Max Kozloff (1995). Leon Levinstein: The Moment of Exposure. National Gallery of Canada.