Yousuf Karsh's Portaits Celebrated at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts

Written by Oliver Summersby Friday, 26 August 2011 15:35

Kalamazoo, MI.- The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts is pleased to present "Yousuf Karsh: Regarding Heroes" on view at the KIA. Through his portraits, Yousuf Karsh helped to create our collective visual memory of 20th century statesmen, artists, musicians, writers, actors, and celebrities, including Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol and many others. Yousuf Karsh admired individuals of high achievement and his notion of what constituted a genuine hero was affected by his optimistic outlook on society, even in the darkest days of World War II. Karsh's defiant and scowling portrait of Winston Churchill became an instant icon of Britain's stand against fascism. While styles in portraiture changed after the war, Karsh's images, with their engaging lighting and indelible character study, consistently display one of the most recognizable, signature styles in portrait photography.

Throughout his long career, Karsh put aside a selection of his own favorite prints of his favorite subjects that are now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. This exhibition contains 100 prints drawn from that collection, accompanied by a catalogue with essay by David Travis, exhibition curator and former Chair and Curator of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Karsh was a master of studio lights. One of Karsh's distinctive practices was lighting the subject's hands separately. He photographed many of the great and celebrated personalities of his generation. Throughout most of his career he used the 8×10 bellows Calumet (1997.0319) camera, made circa 1940 in Chicago. Karsh had a gift for capturing the essence of his subject in the instant of his portrait. As Karsh wrote of his own work in Karsh Portfolio in 1967, "Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize." Karsh said "My chief joy is to photograph the great in heart, in mind, and in spirit, whether they be famous or humble." His work is in permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Bibliotheque nationale de France, the National Portrait Gallery London, the National Portrait Gallery of Australia and many others. Library and Archives Canada holds his complete collection, including negatives, prints and documents. His photographic equipment was donated to the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. Karsh published 15 books of his photographs, which include brief descriptions of the sessions, during which he would ask questions and talk with his subjects to relax them as he composed the portrait.

Some famous subjects photographed by Karsh were Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Muhammad Ali, Marian Anderson, W. H. Auden, Joan Baez, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Humphrey Bogart, Alexander Calder, Pablo Casals, Fidel Castro, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Joan Crawford, Ruth Draper, Albert Einstein, Dwight Eisenhower, Princess Elizabeth, Robert Frost, Clark Gable, Indira Gandhi, Grey Owl, Ernest Hemingway, Audrey Hepburn, Pope John Paul II, Chuck Jones, Carl Jung, Helen Keller and Polly Thompson, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Peter Lorre, Pandit Nehru, Georgia O'Keeffe, Laurence Olivier, General Pershing, Pablo Picasso, Pope Pius XII, Prince Rainier of Monaco, Paul Robeson, the rock band Rush, Albert Schweitzer, George Bernard Shaw, Jean Sibelius, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright, and, arguably his most famous portrait subject, Winston Churchill. The story is often told of how Karsh created his famous portrait of Churchill during the early years of World War II. Churchill, the British prime minister, had just addressed the Canadian Parliament and Karsh was there to record one of the century's great leaders. "He was in no mood for portraiture and two minutes were all that he would allow me as he passed from the House of Commons chamber to an anteroom," Karsh wrote in Faces of Our Time. "Two niggardly minutes in which I must try to put on film a man who had already written or inspired a library of books, baffled all his biographers, filled the world with his fame, and me, on this occasion, with dread." Churchill marched into the room scowling, "regarding my camera as he might regard the German enemy." His expression suited Karsh perfectly, but the cigar stuck between his teeth seemed incompatible with such a solemn and formal occasion. "Instinctively, I removed the cigar. At this the Churchillian scowl deepened, the head was thrust forward belligerently, and the hand placed on the hip in an attitude of anger." The image captured Churchill and the Britain of the time perfectly — defiant and unconquerable. Churchill later said to him, "You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed." As such, Karsh titled the photograph, The Roaring Lion. However, Karsh's favourite photograph was the one taken immediately after this one where Churchill's mood had lightened considerably and is shown much in the same pose, but smiling.

In 1924, the Kalamazoo Chapter of the American Federation of the Arts incorporated as the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts to present classes and establish legal responsibility for the ownership of art objects.  In 1947 the KIA gained a permanent home when it purchased and a renovated a Victorian mansion at 421 West South Street. In the 1930s and 40s, distinguished guest lecturers such as Diego Rivera, Thomas Hart Benton, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier challenged and informed local audiences about the contemporary art world. An eclectic schedule of exhibitions included work by Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee, Japanese prints and ceramics, African Art, Dutch old masters, and even an international kite collection that became a traveling exhibition. Annual juried competitions and exhibitions by local artists and students helped promote and encourage both new and established artists. In 1961, the KIA built a new facility, the Gilmore Art Center at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts at its current location. In 2006, the Art School was named the Kirk Newman Art School to recognize the artist and former Art School director who contributed so much to its development. Today over 100,000 visitors each year enjoy exciting temporary exhibitions, an outstanding permanent collection of nearly 4,000 works, programs, and events at the KIA. Nearly 3,000 students enroll annually in Kirk Newman Art School classes. The collection, originally developed to complement the KIA's art school, focuses on American painting, sculpture and ceramics, American and European works on paper from the 16th century onwards, photography and American art, from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraiture and landscape painting to modern and contemporary abstraction and figurative works, is the strength of the KIA's permanent collection. Significant works by Alexander Calder, William Merritt Chase, Dale Chihuly, Richard Diebenkorn, Janet Fish, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline and Andy Warhol are part of the collection. In recent years, the collection has been expanded to include Oceanic objects, Pre-Columbian gold and ceramics, African art and East Asian art. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.kiarts.org

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~