Untitled (Fresh Eggs), NYC, c. 1939
Gelatin silver print mounted to aluminum (printed 2000)
39 ¾ × 30 inches
Edition 7/7
Signed on label
August 2, 2026
An advertising image of an egg carton is transformed into a cheerfully sociable gathering—complete with one "egghead" dispensing an Einsteinian formula (there’s one in every bunch).
In 1937, Helen Levitt was commuting to East Harlem for a Federal Art Project teaching position and became fascinated by the children’s chalk drawings scrawled onto neighborhood sidewalks and walls. While her teaching position was short-lived, these early encounters sparked a career-long focus on the imaginative world of children, a subject that often verged on collaboration. Surrealism had reached American shores in the 1930s and, coupled with Freud’s newly popularized concept of the "unconscious mind," practices like automatic writing and drawing were in the air. Rather than merely referencing Modern art, Levitt’s work pulls directly from one of its key sources: the unfettered creativity of children.
Produced in 2000, this large-scale print is part of a unique body of work revisiting those early photographs. Levitt didn’t typically print on anything larger than an 11 × 14-inch sheet, but here she supervised the creation of a larger print that reproduced the image at a roughly life-size scale. This choice emphasizes a connection to Modernist painting and this image even functions as a kind of proto-Pop Art, anticipating Warhol's later collaborations with Basquiat.
