Gita Lenz passed away on Thursday, January 20th, 2011 at a nursing home in New York City.
Lenz turned 100 in October and lived to see her work published by Candela Books. We recently had a successful exhibition of her photographs and are proud to have helped her work get into several important personal and public collections. We owe a great debt to Timothy Bartling (Gita’s friend and neighbor) and his friend Gordon Stettinius (a publisher and photographer) for introducing us to such a wonderful artist. Through their efforts and ours, we hope that Gita’s art will continue to enrich the lives of many.
Gita Lenz lived most of her life in Greenwich Village on the corner of Carmine and 7th Avenue. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, Gita Lenz created a body of work that withstands comparison to many of the better-known photographers. She spent much of her time making images of the people and the city around her. Yet Lenz also explored abstraction, both in nature and in the urban environment, frequently making complex and beautiful images of mundane and dilapidated subjects. Some images are tender, demonstrating a sense of empathy and respect, and others are dynamic, suggesting a modernist and sometimes surreal perspective.
In 1951 at the Museum of Modern Art Edward Steichen curated the exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America and included Lenz’s work alongside notable photographers of the period. The first major exhibition of Lenz’s work was in a three-person show, The Third Eye with John Reed and Don Normark, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1952. Soon after, in 1955, Edward Steichen included her work in another exhibition at the MoMA, this time in the landmark exhibition, The Family of Man. Her work appeared in periodicals of the time, including The American Annual of Photography, American Photography, Photo Arts and US Camera.
