Ida Kar’s retrospective exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1960

Whitechapel Retrospective 1960
Ida Kar: Portraits of Artists and Writers in Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union

A retrospective exhibition which opened at the Whitechapel Art Gallery on 22 March 1960 marked the height of Kar’s success. It was first one-person photographic show to be held in a major London art gallery. Kar received critical acclaim and her boldly presented work also proved to be a popular success, with 10,000 people visiting the exhibition.

Ida Kar at her Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition, 1960
by Mary Eagles
© Reserved

Visitor to Ida Kar's exhibition
by Anthony Panting, 1960
© Reserved

Letter of Commendation
by Bryan Robertson, 11 May 1959
In the run up to Kar’s exhibition, Bryan Robertson, the influential Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1952–68) supported her ambitions by writing a letter of commendation. Robertson’s letter awarded Kar with sittings with Leonid Leonov, Nikolai Tomsky, Ilya Ehrenburg and Dmitri Shostakovich made in Moscow in 1959. In the spring of 1960 she photographed Eugène Ionesco, Georges Braque and André Breton in Paris.

Ida Kar Archive, National Portrait Gallery
© Whitechapel Art Gallery, London

Exhibition Catalogue
Ida Kar: Portraits of Artists and Writers in Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union

A self portrait taken in 1955 was used on the cover of the catalogue which lists the 114 photographs taken throughout the 1950s and in the first months of 1960.

Excerpts from the catalogue

Preface by Bryan Robertson
The value of Ida Kar’s own work as a photographer is self-evident as a record for us and for the future, but her intelligence and integrity are behind every picture and so her photographs go further than records: we look at these faces and are engrossed by them because each face seems to be formed by that effort to project a particular life and experience into a particular kind of work which we find reflected in artists’ faces. We feel, in fact, some slight sensation of what it is to be an artist. And the range of human expression is so wide in her photographs that they make us look with a fresh awareness at faces around us, in life.

Introduction by Colin MacInnes
This gift – to woo and win intimacy without any loss of courteous defence – is one Ida Kar possesses because of her own gift for life and unaffected love of it, which will explain, as much as any photographic talent, the immediate charm and psychological simplicity of the images she makes. Her subjects stand revealed: but never mockingly ‘exposed’ or ‘glamourised’ with patronage, or loaded by any egotistical obsessions of the photographer. She tells us what kind of man it is who’s posed for her, a great deal about the quality of his own work and, indirectly, quite a lot about herself.

Whitechapel exhibition Catalogue
cover photograph self-portrait, 1955
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Installation photographs

Kar’s large-scale, high-contrast black-and-white prints, which were mounted onto blocked board and for sale as one-offs, bore comparison with paintings. The unframed photographs were arranged in an irregular but structured formation on the white walls of the gallery, influenced by her visit to Edward Steichen’s exhibition, The Family of Man, which travelled to London’s Royal Festival Hall in 1956. The bold presentation of Kar’s work set a precedent for subsequent photographic exhibitions, including a Cecil Beaton retrospective designed by Richard Buckle and held at the National Portrait Gallery in 1968.

Click on the thumbnails to your right to explore Ida Kar's exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1960

Ida Kar and her husband Victor Musgrave at the private view, 22 March 1960
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Exhibition Reviews

Photography is being accepted by the rarefied world of serious art this is the first time a photographer has actually been invited by an art gallery to give a show.
Winifred Carr, The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, 4 March 1960

This is photography at its best and portraiture at its most human.
The Guardian, 26 March 1960

(Kar) talks rapidly while looking around, then starts shooting a single roll of film of twelve shots only, from which the best are selected for printing. The job takes half an hour so that no one has time to get bored. She relies mostly on available natural light and likes strong contrasts. The results: simple, powerful, unaffected, but often dramatic formal revelations of character.
Jasia Reichardt, Art News and Review, 26 March–9 April 1960

From The Times

The photographs [in Kar’s Whitechapel Gallery exhibition] are brilliant and large, some being over four feet wide, revealing beyond further argument that on rare occasions photography can rise to the level of an art in its own right. They also show that personal vision is much more important than obsessive mechanical skill in making that immediate visual impact which marks a good photograph – especially in portraiture where aesthetic success depends far less on technique and costly equipment than on visual sensibility, instinctive choice of the significant split-second at which to press the trigger and that rapport which the photographer must establish with his subject.
Eric de Maré, ‘Art from a Camera’, The Observer, 27 March 1960

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. This would be irritating if her vision of these faces were something idiosyncratic interposed between me and the sitters. But Miss Kar does not use her sitters as ‘grist for her particular mill’. She has fixed them as they are, accurately and centrally … To bring out artists and writers, cutting across their view of themselves, is a very remarkable gift indeed.
David Sylvester, BBC Radio programme, The Critics, 24 April 1960

Henry Moore visits the exhibition
Henry Moore wrote to Kar to thank her for the invite to the private view. As he couldn’t attend he visited the exhibition with Kar the following week.
Henry Moore and Ida Kar, 1960
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Henry Moore Letter
© Reserved
Ida Kar signing a catalogue for Henry Moore, 1960
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Moscow, 1962
Artist with a Camera

In April 1962 Artist with a Camera, an exhibition of seventy-six large Whitechapel prints travelled to Moscow’s House of Friendship as part of a government-sponsored cultural exchange programme.

The catalogue includes text by Photo historian Helmut Gernsheim and an introduction by Nikolai Tomsky, People’s Artist of the USSR, who wrote of Kar’s ‘ardent love of art, in whose atmosphere the whole of (her) life is spent.’

In 1966 the photo-historian Helmut Gernsheim, a friend and long-term supporter of Kar’s work, acquired 124 of her exhibition prints, many shown in her Whitechapel exhibition for his collection, which is now housed at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.

Click within the image to enlarge works held in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

Whitechapel Art Gallery, March 1960, by Ida Kar, NPG x134002 © National Portrait Gallery, London
<- Back to installation photographs
Click within the image to enlarge works held in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

Whitechapel Art Gallery, March 1960, by Ida Kar, NPG x134003 © National Portrait Gallery, London
<- Back to installation photographs
Click within the image to enlarge works held in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

Whitechapel Art Gallery, March 1960, by Ida Kar, NPG x134007 © National Portrait Gallery, London
<- Back to installation photographs
Click within the image to enlarge works held in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

Whitechapel Art Gallery, March 1960, by Ida Kar, NPG x134008 © National Portrait Gallery, London
<- Back to installation photographs
Click within the image to enlarge works held in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

Whitechapel Art Gallery, March 1960, by Ida Kar, NPG x134009 © National Portrait Gallery, London
<- Back to installation photographs
Click within the image to enlarge works held in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

Whitechapel Art Gallery, March 1960, by Ida Kar, NPG x134005 © National Portrait Gallery, London
<- Back to installation photographs
Click within the image to enlarge works held in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

Whitechapel Art Gallery, March 1960, by Ida Kar, NPG x134004 © National Portrait Gallery, London
<- Back to installation photographs

Whitechapel Retrospective 1960 exhibition feature