[Chalk Drawing, New York]
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.The streets of New York were both Helen Levitt’s home and a foreign land waiting to be explored with her small 35 mm Leica. Born in Brooklyn, she emerged in the mid-1930s as a savvy street photographer inspired at first by the comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd and later by European and Soviet cinema. On the way to and from a Federal Art Project teaching job in Spanish Harlem during the late 1930s, Levitt recorded neighborhood children at play, as well as their expressive graffiti and elegiac chalk messages soon to be washed away by their parents or the rain.
Artwork Details
- Title: [Chalk Drawing, New York]
- Artist: Helen Levitt (American, 1913–2009)
- Date: ca. 1940
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: Image: 11 5/16 × 7 3/16 in. (28.8 × 18.2 cm)
Framed: 15 × 19 in. (38.1 × 48.3 cm) - Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
- Curatorial Department: Photographs