In Montreal, a Primer on Yousuf Karsh, Canada’s Great Portraitist

The Museum of Fine Arts does a fine show of his sleek and penetrating photos of serious people — Churchill, Albert Einstein, and Helen Keller among them.

I love Montreal but haven’t visited since the Covid hysteria locked Canada’s doors to Americans and everyone else. For a year and a half, it seemed the country disappeared. With the border now open, and a good exhibition at Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts, I drove north to see The World of Yousuf Karsh: A Private Essence. Stimulating the exhibition is a gift to the museum of 111 vintage photographs printed by Karsh (1908–2002). His widow, Estrellita, still alive and in Boston, made the gift in part to remedy the MFA’s Karsh deficiency. He’s Canada’s Eakins, its greatest portraitist, yet the museum had only one of his photographs.

I should say he’s Canada’s closest thing to Eakins since Karsh was a citizen of both Canada and America. I’ve always thought of him as international given his subjects, but he worked in Ottawa whenever he stood still. And Canada is light on artists of Karsh’s fame and quality. Since it’s Christmas, I’m all for sharing. Karsh was born in what is now southeastern Turkey. He and his family fled their home during the Armenian Holocaust, some of whose atrocities he saw. By 1924, Karsh was in Canada living with his uncle, a portrait photographer.

Karsh wasn’t image maker to movie stars, though he photographed some. They had the Hollywood studios and, later, the paparazzi and tabloids for that. Rather, Karsh focused his camera on political elites, the best writers and artists, serious cultural icons such as Helen Keller and Frank Lloyd Wright, Pope John XXIII, and, at least a dozen times, Queen Elizabeth II. About 20 of his portraits appeared on the front cover of Life magazine.

The show is chronological, running from a 1936 portrait of the unique Ruth Draper, whose one-woman stage performances were a literati sensation, to a photograph of Nelson Mandela from 1990. Functionally, though, it starts with Karsh’s photograph of Winston Churchill, a defining portrait if there ever was one. Churchill was in Ottawa in late December 1941, having just spent Christmas in the White House with his freshly minted wartime ally, Franklin Roosevelt. Karsh was then a young society photographer in Ottawa but much favored by William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s prime minister. King wasn’t art-smitten but knew that a good photographer is nice to have if you’re a politician.

Churchill, in the Speaker’s chambers, had just finished a speech to the House of Commons and a scotch and was working on a cigar. King had hired Karsh, very much unknown to Churchill, to photograph the great man. Karsh had already commandeered a small, adjacent room and prepared his camera and lighting. Churchill, at King’s request, agreed to a few clicks, cigar in mouth. Karsh positioned him, decided the cigar had to go, plucked it from the great man’s lips, noted that Churchill looked as if he’d devour him in fury, and released the shutter, all in seconds.

It was as much Karsh’s photo op as Churchill’s. After a 40-year career, Churchill already was famous. As much as the portrait conveyed Churchill’s bulldog resolution, the newborn star was Karsh himself. Word was soon out that Karsh was the artist for the serious and stately look but modern nonetheless.

During the war, the Churchill photograph had limited circulation, but it was so good and so compelling that, before long, the wartime leadership class had Karsh on speed dial. King, his patron, governed one of the key Allied combatants, so key people among the leadership class, including Churchill, visited Ottawa and Toronto. Soon after the Churchill portrait, Karsh photographed King George VI and Eleanor Roosevelt. The Churchill photograph appeared in Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples and The Second World War, both huge best sellers in the late 1940s and 1950s. The two Churchill book series made Karsh the best-known photographer among the public.

I enjoyed the exhibition. It’s not a profound academic enterprise. The gallery interpretation is light and informative, based on Karsh’s notes on his subjects. I learned a lot about Canada’s movers and shakers in politics and the arts. Even in Churchill’s case, Karsh’s notes are positive. He kept detailed records for every one of his many thousands of sittings. I’m sure if I read them all, and many are available online, I’d find “mucky old battle-axe cow” once or twice.

The catalogue has a short explanatory essay by the show’s curator, followed by good illustrations of the objects in the show and the wall labels. Karsh 100, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ 2008 retrospective, did the scholarly job on Karsh. The museum owns his archive, and Karsh, his estate, and Mrs. Karsh endowed the MFA’s two photography curators. A Private Essence, for Montrealers and for me, is a time to see some of his best work and to think about the state of portraiture in Karsh’s time and ours. The show’s a Karsh primer. I suspect most of his subjects are unknown to the under-50 crowd, Canadian or American.

Karsh is a very, very good artist. He’s a photographer, and he never underestimated the residual prejudice that high-end academics and critics hold against photographers. His patrons are titans of yore in politics and the arts. Dissing them is part of looking hip today. The curator, bless him, skips the PC anti-colonial, anti-racist, #MeToo crap in presenting portraits of Churchill, Picasso, Hemingway, and King, who was eccentric indeed, with a secret passion for the occult and who, like Roosevelt, interned thousands of Canadians of Japanese descent during the war. Karsh isn’t in the canon of significant artists but belongs there. Portrait paintings aren’t much of a factor in contemporary art anymore, notwithstanding the two Obama portraits, which I like a lot. But portrait photographs thrive.

My only quibble with the show is how little art history there is. Needed is a wall panel asking, “Why is Karsh important in the history of art?”  Answer: “Karsh took the high establishment style of portraiture — serious, reserved, neither swaggering nor flattering, and showing intellectual and moral heft — and translated it into photography.” This and his technical mastery of pose and lighting make him well worth studying today. I know the exhibition honors Mrs. Karsh’s splendid gift of vintage prints, but I would have added a small supplementary loan show of Karsh’s portraits of Queen Elizabeth, after all, Canada’s sovereign, and the eight or nine American presidents Karsh photographed. They’re very formal and what you’d expect of head-of-state portraits, but they’d add dazzle as a coda and diminish my sense that his late work is too corporate.

Karsh was a teenage photography whiz, leading his portraitist uncle to send him to Boston to work for John Garo, a fellow Armenian and one of Boston’s best portrait photographers. Garo taught Karsh his exacting technique and through Garo immersed him in the Boston aesthetic, which, with passages of evolution and permutation, stems from the direct, precise portraits of Copley.

Karsh’s palette is black and white, with light controlled to create every shade of gray in between. Backgrounds are simple, clothing everyday formal. Einstein and Hemingway wore sweaters, but neither was a suit-and-tie guy. Both Garo and Karsh worshipped Edward Steichen for his compositional elegance combined with simplicity.

Garo’s Boston and Karsh’s Ottawa were, aesthetically and culturally, outposts of London. Portraits of Churchill, Dr. Schweitzer, George Bernard Shaw, Carl Jung, Humphrey Bogart, Christian Dior, and Glenn Gould have the look of eminent Victorians, and some, like Churchill, Schweitzer, and Shaw, were vintage Victorians.

I thought about the Victorian portraitist George Frederick Watts’s reserve and seriousness, to be sure, but his sitters have the look of the 19th century, as they should. They’re not tanned and toned. They’re not clean-cut, either, and they often suffer from crazy hair. Among Karsh’s oldest subjects, sweeping, iron-gray hair, bristly, big mustaches and beards, and deeply grooved faces date a subject but are aesthetic bonuses, too. Karsh is at his best with this look.

“There is a moment,” Karsh said, “where all there is in a man’s mind and soul and spirit is reflected in his eyes, his hands, and his attitude. . . . This is the moment to record.” Karsh didn’t flatter, and he wasn’t a courtier, but he observed closely and did his research. Keeping room for experimentation and spontaneity, he generally knew what he wanted. He conveyed the public face of his sitters, not their inner turmoil, but his was an era of reserve. Shaw is mischievous and witty. Jung, at his desk in his campus office with an unusual background of stained-glass windows, is suitably academic. Karsh photographed Helen Keller in 1948. It’s a very beautiful work. Her eyes are closed, and her hands frame her face. For Karsh, it’s an extreme closeup, but Keller’s hands worked overtime. She’d touch a person’s face and his vocal cords while he spoke to create her own image.

Karsh’s look is of-his-time modern. He’s not a Pictorialist like Steichen, so his figures aren’t gauzy. His look is exact, not impressionist, simple, not decorative, not flashy like Sargent sometimes is, and not dazzling like, say, Boldini. He’s sleek but serious. Sometimes his subjects invite a variation on his basic approach. Gratien Gélinas was a Canadian playwright and director and, as an actor, Canada’s rough parallel to Charlie Chaplin. Karsh’s 1945 portrait of him starts with a sad, characterful figure at the base topped by pairs of hands in action, both creating and expressing. It’s a Surrealist touch but also Karsh’s tip of the hat to Eakins. Eakins often linked hands and head, the head spotlit since that’s where great ideas fermented, and the hands that, through writing or fabrication, made ideas real. Peter Lorre, a thoroughly nice guy, according to Karsh, is presented as cryptic and sinister. The French novelist and critic François Mauriac, photographed in 1948, is a silhouette drawn from light and set against ink-black.

Karsh’s subjects aren’t silly people. They aren’t riven by guilt. They don’t pimp outrage or fear. They aren’t paper pushers, mediocrities, or grifters. Whether or not they should, they don’t apologize. Their every secret hasn’t been plumbed by tabloids, and they’re not of a confessional age. They’re not warm and fuzzy. What I’m saying is they’re not of our time. His look is Victorian, at the very tail end of that era. It’s an aesthetic that’s moving in the 1940s into the 1970s. It’s a look of authority and intellectual heft that had far greater currency then. After that, the look disappears and doesn’t mean as much. Life-worn faces are out. Authority’s debunked. Some of his subjects, like Dr. Schweitzer, might seem to march through uncertainty, but we know they’ll emerge both certain and stronger. Famous people today are more likely to look fragile, muddled, and tinny. Even the autocrats seem like peacocks on the verge of feather dusters. Celebrities come and go.

Karsh’s portrait of Mandela, a great man indeed, is without oomph. It’s as if, after the ’70s, everyone looks like a corporate executive. Brigitte Bardot was a sexpot with a brain, but Karsh’s 1958 portrait of her gets stuck on the sexpot aspect and doesn’t work. The boobs ruin it, and Karsh’s lighting genius left him. The subject, not Bardot but the type, eluded him. I think conventional beauty, the beauty of youth, or zaftig beauty bored him. The same year that he snapped Bardot, he photographed Anna Magnani and conveyed her toughness, battered, sexy, and unbowed. His 1963 photograph of his wife, Estrellita, is powerful, too, evoking the classic beauty and strong will of a Greek goddess.

I wandered through the Karsh Center site looking at other portraits, mostly from the 1980s. The look’s more conventional and cautious. The artist didn’t always work in black and white. It’s not in the exhibition, but his 1964 color portrait of Barry Goldwater depicts him in the Arizona desert, backed by man-size cactuses, in a cowboy hat and holding a rifle. It’s fantastic and on target.

Karsh sometimes did scenes of everyday life. In 1953, Maclean’s magazine commissioned Karsh to create his Face of Canada portfolio. Karsh traveled throughout the country, producing work that presents Canada as a dynamic, big, multifaceted country. Robert Frank’s Americans, from 1958, is more pointed, showing racism and poverty along with patriotism and grandeur as expressing the country. Karsh’s work emphasizes epic achievement and unity of purpose. He counted every minute after his escape from Turkey a blessing.

The art is almost entirely limited to Mrs. Karsh’s gift to the museum, so it is what it is, and it’s not exhaustive. That’s fine. The exhibition is intelligently and sensitively arranged in two galleries. Portraits line the walls, but each gallery has three freestanding walls, in the center of which one large photograph reigns in isolated splendor. This sets off works such as the portrait of Churchill and of Eleanor Roosevelt. The wall colors are appropriately dark, suggesting the serious ambiance of the photographs. Fitting for a Karsh exhibition, the lighting’s superb, dramatic but not obtrusive.

I spent the afternoon at the museum, looked at all its special exhibitions, but, aside from the Karsh show, want to say something about Outside the Frame: Works by Artists Among Us. It’s a lovely two-gallery show of art made by people on the museum staff. Museums tend to have lots of artists working there, in all types of jobs, simply because people drawn to the museum world tend to be creative. I thought the art was very good. I won’t talk names because I liked everything I saw. The two spacious, high-ceiling galleries worked perfectly. They’re part of the museum’s second building, which opened a few years ago. I think every big and medium-sized museum needs to recognize its artist-workers in this way.

I wonder what Karsh would have made of Joe Biden. Working with Jerry Lewis, he photographed dozens of poster children. That might have given him an access point to our most debilitated president.