When the art critic David Sylvester visited Ida Kar’s landmark solo photography exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960, he remarked: “To bring out artists and writers, cutting across their view of themselves, is a very remarkable gift indeed.” Unfettered understatement, especially in the light of the artists and writers whom Kar had travelled around Europe to capture for her big moment. Here were the greats of international culture — the dramatist Eugène Ionesco, the artists Georges Braque, Jacob Epstein and Augustus John, even fellow photographer Cecil Beaton, who wrote to Kar to commend her portrait of him, standing in his conservatory surrounded by plants (though he was less complimentary of himself, saying: “It was stupid of me not to put the hat on with more of a dash.”) Great men all, with big egos and big personalities. And yet Kar’s camera managed time and again to step around the self-image of her subjects and look past it.
Kar’s show was the first solo photography exhibition to be held at the Whitechapel Gallery — indeed, at any major London art gallery. That she was a woman made it even more exciting — but might be the reason that she isn’t better known today. Her big show was held in the same year that the now ubiquitous David Bailey was first contracted to Vogue, but frustratingly for Kar, it also proved to be the peak of her career. She was never able to capitalise on her success and watched her star wane, in part because of a later struggle with bipolar disorder. This new exhibition, drawing heavily on the National Portrait Gallery’s excellent holdings of Kar’s work, is the first museum exhibition devoted to her since the Whitechapel show.
Born Ida Karamian in 1908 in Tambov, a city 250 miles southeast of Moscow, Kar was the only child of Armenian parents. The family moved to Alexandria in Egypt in 1921, where Kar studied at the Lycée Français, then left for Paris to study medicine and chemistry. But Kar fell in love with the bohemian set on the Left Bank (the artists Piet Mondrian and Yves Tanguy were among her friends) and gave up her studies, preferring to focus on singing and the violin. She was introduced to photography by the surrealist Heinrich Heidersberger, whose work influenced her early photographs. On her return to Egypt, she married and embarked on a career in photography, opening a studio with her first husband, Edmond Belali. In Cairo, however, Kar was pursued by the young poet Victor Musgrave, for whom she eventually divorced Belali, and moved to London, where she and Musgrave slowly built an artistic and literary scene around their Gallery One.
This show is a sort of who’s who of this scene and its outstretched arms across Europe. Here is Epstein in close-up at his studio, his muscular sculptor’s hands curled around each other. Yves Klein is shown at Gallery One at his first London exhibition in 1957, standing in front of one of his monochromes. The show was highly controversial; one newspaper review was headlined “The artist who paints nothing”.
Kar was not the easiest of people. She had a very strong sense of her worth as an artist — she cajoled, persuaded, flirted and, quite often, bullied her subjects into complying with her artistic vision for them (the poet Royston Ellis, whose portrait is shown here for the first time, found the experience thoroughly intimidating). But rarely do they look uncomfortable in her arrangements; rather Kar seems to have the knack of finding the precise setting that will draw out her sitters. “Miss Kar does not use her sitters as ‘grist for her particular mill’,” said David Sylvester. “She has fixed them as they are, accurately and centrally.” He added: “There are several familiar faces which I don’t think I shall be able to see again without thinking of Ida Kar’s photographs of them.”
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There is a purity about her photographs. The ideas are not complicated, but they are generally subtle and effective. In her shot of the sculptor John Milne, she has him seated on the floor in the centre of a rug, teacup and saucer before him. It’s a simple set-up, but his position elevates the objects around him, such as a large floor-standing glass bottle, drawing attention to their sculptural qualities. His friend and fellow sculptor Barbara Hepworth is shown working, grappling with cane, string and wire.
Some almost seem a bit obvious. The writer Iris Murdoch sits on the floor leaning against the bed, surrounded by the manuscript of her fourth novel, The Bell, fag in hand, serious and donnish. And there are perhaps slightly too many great men of letters perched owlishly amid their books and papers. Le Corbusier was no doubt delighted with his portrait, leaning against his desk with drawings in the foreground and his paintings (which he always felt were unappreciated as the key to his work) in the background.
At best Kar’s portraits are both affecting and revealing. Her image of the artist Marc Chagall, who once said: “If I were not a Jew, I wouldn’t have been an artist,” seems to show a man carrying the weight of his heritage on his shoulders, while her portrait of Augustus John is downright startling. The painter fixes the viewer with a piercing gaze — mad-eyed but missing nothing. And Kar captures families particularly well, without any of the odd stiffness that can come with photographing children. Her image of the dramatist Bernard Kops and young son Adam is full of comfortable joy.
The one unfortunate aspect of this exhibition is that the National Portrait Gallery should choose to mount it now. Granted Kar’s Whitechapel show was 50 years ago but it may well suffer by being held alongside their other major show, which focuses on the early-20th century Austrian photographer Emil Hoppé. They are, on paper at least, a bit too similar — black and white images of the cultural great and good; both photographers spent much of their careers in London. The gallery makes a half-hearted virtue of their seeming similarities, offering a joint ticket, and each exhibition is well-worth visiting in its own right, but I’m not honestly sure how many casual visitors will feel inclined to do both.
Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 (npg.org.uk), from tomorrow to June 19