Yousuf Karsh: Portraits of Artists and Facing Artists: Twentieth Century Portraits from the Collection February 26, 2009

The RISD Museum of Art Presents
Yousuf Karsh: Portraits of Artists and
Facing Artists: Twentieth Century Portraits from the Collection

Friday, February 27 through Sunday, August 23, 2009

PROVIDENCE, RI—The RISD Museum of Art presents Yousuf Karsh: Portraits of Artists and Facing Artists: Twentieth Century Portraits from the Collection, two complementary exhibitions which highlight portraits of artists by the photographer Yousuf Karsh and other artists such as Andy Warhol, Lucien Freud, and Pablo Picasso. The two exhibitions are presented in adjoining galleries and offer the visitor the opportunity to make connections between the two presentations.

The Karsh exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yousuf Karsh (Canadian, born Armenia, 1908–2002), one of the most celebrated portrait photographers of the twentieth century. More than 15,000 people sat in front of Karsh’s camera—from ordinary citizens to such influential figures as Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. Karsh made a concerted effort to record the century’s most accomplished individuals, especially those in the arts. A selection of twenty-seven photographs of visual artists and designers comprise this exhibition; all are promised gifts to The RISD Museum from the artist’s wife, Estrellita Karsh.

Karsh’s portraits are collaborations. His charming manner and ability to connect with his sitters come through in the images, which reveal as much about his admiration for his subjects as they do about the subjects themselves. As fastidious as he was spontaneous, Karsh researched his subjects and planned his shots before every sitting, but he was always alert to the opportunity of the moment and eschewed choosing any single portrait convention. When he photographed Jasper Johns, for example, he changed his initial plan to show him with one of his paintings, instead tightly framing the artist’s penetrating gaze to better capture his cerebral nature. For his portrait of Josef Albers, Karsh posed the artist seated in profile, creating a geometry within the frame that echoes Albers’s celebrated Homage to the Square painting behind him. In the nearly full-length portrait of Russell Wright, the designer gazes out a window in a domestic setting that perfectly suits his dishware and furniture.

Karsh wrote about his sittings in a diary. Several of his entries are included with the portraits on view, offering insight into his experience of his collaborations.

The exhibition of portraits drawn from the Museum’s collection consists of portraits of literary, performing, and visual artists by a broad range of twentieth-century artists associated with the genre. It is intended to give context to the Yousuf Karsh’s photographs in the adjacent gallery by grouping the works by portrait type so that viewers will see how artists have embraced the conventions of portraiture and how they have expanded its parameters. Some of the portraits on view include Marlene Dietrich by Cecil Beaton; Stephen Spender by Lucien Freud; Brassaï by Pablo Picasso; and Mick Jagger by Andy Warhol.

The RISD Museum of Art, a world-class museum in Providence, RI, was founded as part of Rhode Island School of Design in 1877. Its permanent collection of more than 84,000 objects includes paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, costume, furniture, and other works of art from every part of the world, including objects from Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and art of all periods from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, up to the latest in contemporary art. In addition, the Museum offers a wide array of educational and public programs to more than 100,000 visitors annually.