Details
HELEN LEVITT (1913–2009)
Untitled (Graffiti, New York), c. 1939
gelatin silver print
signed, dated and inscribed 'this is my photograph' (verso); credited, titled and dated on affixed exhibition labels (frame backing board)
image: 838 x 512 in (21.3 x 13.9 cm.)
sheet: 878 x 638 in. (22.5 x 16.2 cm.)
Provenance
Collection of Walker Evans;
Collection of Harry Lunn;
Sotheby's, New York, October 13, 2000, lot 162;
acquired from the above sale by the present owner.
Literature
W.M. Hunt, The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious, Aperture, New York, 2011, p. 146.
Exhibited
Lausanne, Musée de l'Élysée; Amsterdam, FOAM Fotogafiemuseum, Sans Regard or No Eyes: Photographs from W.M. Hunt / Collection Dancing Bear, 2006-2007.
Ocala, Appelton Museum of Fine Arts, The Unseen Eye: Photography from the Collection of W.M. Hunt, November 7, 2010–January 2, 2011.
Rochester, George Eastman House, The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the W.M. Hunt Collection, October 1, 2011–February 19, 2012.
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Lot Essay

'Great art is insistent. It demands a response: unease, awe, relief. And it calls for contemplation. It resonates. The earliest mark making strikes me as a spiritual response to living, a primitive attempt to find or to create meaning.
Albert Einstein got it right: ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.’
If you are given only a part of the information, if something is withheld or hidden, then you, the viewer, have to come to the picture and imagine and create for yourself a truth for what is there. You invest your own soul and experience. You become a collaborator. Seeing becomes unique, personal and charged with life.
A collector also wonders, when initially encountering a work, will it sustain viewing after viewing? Will it reveal itself differently over time? Will he want to look at it over and over? These are considerations, although if the initial impact of a photograph is powerfully and personally charged, the work will hold up.' – W.M. Hunt

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The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the W.M. Hunt Collection
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