ART REVIEW : Epiphanies Out of the Corner of Helen Levitt’s Eye : For the past 50 years, the New York photographer has rarely been in the direct line of the art world’s vision. A touring retrospective at the L.A. County Museum of Art is changing that.

In “New York” (circa 1945), one of 84 photographs of life in the modern city that make up the enchanting Helen Levitt retrospective newly opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, four men are arrayed across a shallow picture plane like mythological figures on a classical Roman frieze.

Three stand at a railing, one sits on a stoop. Three look off to the side at something (or some things) unseen beyond the camera’s range of vision; one peruses a newspaper, his back to the viewer.

Self-contained and isolated from one another, despite a close proximity enhanced by the visual compression of lighting and composition, all four men are engaged in a solitary but intimate practice: observing and being observed. It seems a distinctly urban trait, this paradoxically connected quality of individual isolation. The urbanism of the activity makes apposite the otherwise generic title of the photograph.

The three male faces that we can see on this urban frieze conjure “the ages of man”--youth, middle age, old age--a continuity given a quiet spin by the single mystery-man who is turned away from us. The specificity of New York life in the 1940s is transformed, becoming most any city, most anywhere, most any time.

Given the foreground prominence of these men, it takes a moment to notice a fifth person in the picture. From an open window at the rear, a little girl, her curly-haired head resting on her hand, looks bemusedly out on the scene at which we are gazing from the other side.

Like a female version of a heavenly putto in a Baroque painting, this cherubic child dreamily observes these half-mythic, half-mortal men below her. She assumes an ambiguous place in the scheme of things, somewhere between the innocent blank-slate of childhood and an all-knowing realm of divinity.

Pointedly, the photographic jolt of the picture is carried by this unobtrusive little figure hovering in the background. For we soon realize that the artist has orchestrated her casual, street-side scene to let us know that, finally, this child mirrors us.

Helen Levitt is not a popularly well-known photographer, but as this single picture so vividly attests she is certainly an extraordinary one. A quintessential “artists’ artist,” she is highly regarded among her peers. The distinction fits the tenor of her work.

The show overflows with images of an unusual tone: Banal at first glance, her views of life in the unglamorous streets of the metropolis tend to blossom slowly, finally deepening with a peculiarly intimate resonance.

Part of Levitt’s uniqueness lies in the difference between her photographs and those of well-known American social documentarians of the 1930s, the era of great social crisis when she began to make pictures. She photographed almost exclusively in a variety of decaying neighborhoods of New York--the city of her birth, which she has rarely left during her 80 years and which she has used as the title for almost all her work. Yet, her photographs do not speak of public issues as much as intimating private meditations.

Hers are visual poems, not polemics. Her friendship with the likes of writer James Agee and painter and art historian Janice Loeb, and her admiration for the photographs of Walker Evans, Weegee, Cartier-Bresson and others testify to the lyrically poetic interests of her art. As is common in our own turbulent moment, such work is easily swamped by the noisier clamor of more contentious art.

And then there are the children. Children are Levitt’s great subject. They appear in about two-thirds of the black-and-white and color pictures in the show--in the background, on center stage; playing, fighting, daydreaming; disappearing into shadowed doorways or reflected in storefront windows.

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As with the latter-day putto observing the urban frieze of New York, Levitt’s children are both remote in the half-remembered mystery of their youthfulness and conceived with an almost shockingly blunt intimacy. Levitt doesn’t sentimentalize children--or, rather, sentimentality becomes just one among a panoply of facets through which children are fully seen.

One way Levitt was able to capture the feeling of the childlike quality of a consciousness-in-formation was through her choice of camera. In 1936, she bought a Leica--the small, hand-held camera that, unlike a boxy view-camera, for the first time allowed photographers a degree of obscurity on the street.

To make herself even more inconspicuous, Levitt fitted the camera with a right-angle lens. She could face in one direction and shoot, but her camera would be taking a picture 90-degrees to the side.

The result is subjects who, if they are aware of the photographer’s presence at all, are not actors playing to or shying away from the camera. When you look at her photographs you see the world out of the corner of her eye.

That’s where Helen Levitt has been for the past 50 years, too, as far as the art world goes--over there, in the corner of its eye, never completely out of sight but rarely ever in the direct line of vision.

The retrospective is changing that. Its thoughtful installation at LACMA is provocative in juxtaposing earlier work of the 1930s and 1940s with more recent, often color pictures made since the end of the 1960s. (Levitt made few photographs during the 1950s--a film shot and edited with Agee and Loeb and released in 1952 is in the show, but technical difficulties prevented its preview--while a studio burglary in 1966 obliterated all evidence of her 1959 return to still-camera pictures.) The juxtapositions of past and present underscore the continuity of her artistic concerns.

The show, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is now concluding a two-year national tour. (It coincides with a rare L.A. gallery show of her work, at Paul Kopeikin Gallery.) Together with an excellent catalogue by the show’s curators, Sandra S. Phillips and Maria Morris Hambourg, it goes a very long way toward establishing Levitt as a superior artist of her generation.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through March 27. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. * Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-0765, through Feb. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.