Yousuf Karsh (Canadian, 1908-2002) Picasso Photograph

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By Myers Antiques

Apr 30, 2023

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• Lot Description

  Yousuf Karsh (Canadian, 1908-2002) Photograph. Title - Pablo Picasso. Original silver gelatin photograph from 1954. Signed lower left Y. Karsh. Stamp on the reverse reads, Photograph by Yousuf Karsh has title in pencil - Pablo Picasso 1954. Image size measures 19.75 inches high, 15.75 inches wide. Paper size measures 28 inches high, 22 inches wide. Scattered visible surface scratches have been retouched.
  
  From Askart.com: Following is The New York Times obituary of Yousuf Karsh, July 14, 2002. Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002), whose photographic portraits of the famous and the powerful are known to millions throughout the world, died yesterday at 93. He died after surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said his nephew, Sidney Karsh.
  
  Best known for his World War II portraits of Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower and other leaders of the Allied cause, Karsh of Ottawa, as he was called professionally, traveled all over the world to photograph political and military leaders, as well as celebrated writers, artists and entertainers. His portraits were reproduced widely in newspapers and magazines as well as in books, and many of them have become the best loved and most familiar images of their subjects. His most famous portraits include: the 1941 picture of Winston Churchill as an indomitable wartime leader; George Bernard Shaw as quizzical old sage in 1943; Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1946 as a five-star general and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force; Ernest Hemingway in a turtle-neck sweater in 1957; Georgia O'Keeffe in her New Mexico studio in 1956 and Nikita S. Khrushchev swathed in fur in 1963. He also photographed Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro and Andy Warhol.
  
  Mr. Karsh was a master of the formally posed, carefully lit studio portrait. Working with an 8-by-10 view camera and a battery of artificial lights (he was said to carry 350 pounds of equipment on his trips abroad) he aimed, in his own words, to stir the emotions of the viewer and to lay bare the soul of his sitter. He characteristically achieved a heroic monumentality in which the sitter's face, grave, thoughtful and impressive, emerged from a dark, featureless background with an almost superhuman grandeur. As the historian Peter Pollack put it in his Picture History of Photography, Yousuf Karsh, in his powerful portraits, transforms the human face into legend.
  
  Yousuf Karsh was born of Armenian parents in Mardin, Turkey, on Dec. 23, 1908. In 1924 he immigrated to Canada, where his uncle, a studio portrait photographer, taught him the basis of his profession. After a three-year apprenticeship to John H. Garo of Boston, a well-known portrait photographer of the era and a fellow Armenian, Mr. Karsh settled in Ottawa and opened his own portrait studio in 1932. He learned the dramatic use of artificial light that became the hallmark of his mature portrait style by studying theatrical lighting at the Ottawa Little Theater, of which he was a member. In Garo's studio he had worked with natural light. At the theater he met the son of Lord Bessborough, the Governor General of Canada, who persuaded his father to sit for Mr. Karsh, initiating a long and close relationship between the photographer and successive Canadian political figures. The next governor general, Lord Tweedsmuir, introduced him to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who brought him in to photograph Winston Churchill during the latter's wartime visit to Canada in December 1941. The Churchill portrait was a turning point in Mr. Karsh's career. He was given only two minutes to take it, during which he is said to have angered the visiting statesman by taking away his cigar before shooting. However, the portrait that resulted, showing the British prime minister glowering at the camera with a bulldog like tenaciousness, seemed to epitomize the determination of the British to defeat Hitler, and catapulted Mr. Karsh into international fame. The Canadian government sent him to London to photograph the other leaders of wartime Britain. Life magazine assigned him to photograph the American war leaders. By the end of the war, when he published these portraits in his first book, Faces of Destiny, he was known throughout the world as a sympathetic portrayer of famous and powerful people. After the war, while continuing and expanding his work as a portraitist, he collaborated with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and others on a series of books on various aspects of the Roman Catholic religion, and in 1966 he published In Search of Greatness: Reflections of Yousuf Karsh. In addition to Faces of Destiny (1946) his books of portraits included Portraits of Greatness (1959); Faces of Our Time (1971); Karsh Portraits (1976). Two other books, Photographs of Yousuf Karsh: Men Who Make Our World (1967); Karsh: A Fifty-Year Retrospective (1983), accompanied exhibitions of his work. He had one-man shows in Ottawa (1959), Montreal (1967), New York (1983) and elsewhere. The 1967 exhibition, at the Canadian Pavilion of Expo '67, toured Canada, the United States and Europe. Mr. Karsh's photographs also were featured in group exhibitions, among them Photography in the 20th Century, Ottawa, 1967; Fotografische Künstlerbildnisse, Cologne, 1973; Life: The First Decade 1936-45, New York, 1979.
  
  His work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the government of Alberta; the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, in Rochester; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the National Portrait Gallery in London; the Saint Louis Art Museum. Mr. Karsh received many official honors for achievements as a photographer. Those included the Canada Council Medal, 1965; United States Presidential Citation, 1971; Gold Medal, National Association of Photographic Art, 1974, and the Achievement and Life Award, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1980, as well as numerous honorary degrees from Canadian and American universities. He had visiting professorships at Ohio University in Athens and at Emerson College in Boston, and was photographic adviser for Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. He was an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of London, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and an officer of the Order of Canada.

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