CAUGHT IN THE LIGHT: YOUSUF KARSH PLACED HIS SUBJECTS ON THEIR RIGHTFUL PEDESTALS
Sarah Kaufman

The Washington Post
July 26, 2009 Sunday
Every Edition

Pick your dreary image: It’s a holding cell, a decompression chamber,
a place so formidably austere you’d think no fantasies could ever form
there. But however grim the small, darkened gallery at the Canadian
Embassy appears, walk around the 28 photographs by Yousuf Karsh on
display in "Karsh at 100: Portraits of Artists," and you’ll find that
the space feels more like a sculpture garden.

It’s a garden of heroes. Sculpted from shadows and reverence and,
when needed, just the right prop — a half-smoked cigarette or, in the
case of Andy Warhol, a house-painting brush with bristles as glossy as
his own pale comb-over. Light is their enemy, so the room is dimmer
even than its battleship-gray walls. But time has been kind to these
faces. Karsh, who died in 2002 at 93, photographed them up to 60 years
ago, when folks believed in heroes. There is no irony here. Instead,
there is lyrical idealization. These photos memorialize our mid-century
faith in the nobility of art, and in the goodness of greatness.

Karsh, an Armenian emigre who lived most of his life in Ottawa,
made pictures the way the old sportswriters used to ply their trade,
mythologizing and storytelling Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio right up
onto their pedestals. Don’t God up the ballplayers! legendary sports
editor Stanley Woodward used to say, pressing for a more nuanced and
honest approach. But what does a little well-placed puffery hurt? From
Winston Churchill (his first great portrait) to Bill Clinton, Karsh
Godded up his subjects, none more so than the artists in this show.

Take Joan Crawford. Cigarette dangling from one hand? Check. Padded
shoulders? Check. And the dark lipstick, the glamorous wrap, every
fingernail filed to a point and as polished as a Pontiac. With that
waxy full mouth and agate-hard eyes, her face an unlined mask — no
smoker’s creases, no smile lines — she looks just as untouchable and
unblemished as her public wished her to be. In 1948, nobody wanted to
know Mommie Dearest’s secrets. Here, she is more than a movie star —
she is the entirety of what the fan magazines were selling back then,
the Hollywood dream with a bungalow on the lot and Frank Sinatra
on the dial and nervous assistants bringing coffee. Karsh packaged
Crawford as a lifestyle.

Karsh’s portraits seem so much like sculpture not only because
of their mythic contexts but also because of their textures, the
contours and solidity of illuminated bone structure. He brings out the
weightedness of these faces, and turns it into moral weight. Marian
Anderson gazes just over our shoulder. It’s 1945, and she’s the black
Madonna, patience and trials writ in her eyes, looking beyond our
sins. That velvet skin whose color figured in a national uproar is the
story here, lighted by Karsh to glow as if from within — but not to
glisten. She’s cool, flawlessly matte, neither wary nor judgmental. The
slopes and planes of her face — the biggest close-up in the room —
have a solemn majesty that echoes the grandeur of that voice.

Some of the portraits are less face, more drama. Francois Mauriac is
captured in profile, but the French novelist’s features are dark,
limned in a thin glow as if he were in partial solar eclipse. The
back story is that Paris was experiencing a power outage on this
day in 1949; the fading afternoon sun was all Karsh had to work
with. The light traces Mauriac’s silhouette as if it were a curl of
smoke from a Gauloise, drifting around his high intellectual forehead
and double-humped nose, his little brushy mustache and those drawn-in
lips, made tight, one supposes, from all those frontal Gallic vowels
in overuse.

Martha Graham is one of the few full-torso photographs, though she,
too, is mostly in profile. Like Crawford’s, her broad-planed face
resembles an impenetrable mask, but it’s not a pose; it’s held in
listening, inner-directed stillness. All the tension is in her
muscular fingertips. (An interesting detail to capture, from a
dancer — one that a lesser photographer might overlook. But Karsh
was famous for the attention he paid to hands.) She’s sacred above,
profane below, as the serpentine arrangement of her body hints, the
way her hip slides away from her spine, the pronounced curve of her
breast. A difficult, tempestuous drinker? Not this Martha. This is
the discipline-hard goddess.

She and Georgia O’Keeffe are soul mates, at least to Karsh. O’Keeffe in
her desert studio is staged like a cutout in one of Joseph Cornell’s
boxes, like a little work of theater: She’s in her spinster’s black
dress, her fingers curved just so, like the wind-twisted hunk of tree
at her side. There’s a steer skull hanging overhead; the New Mexican
strata can be spied through the rough-hewn doorway. The composition
is an assemblage of all the familiar O’Keeffe totems. Everything
looks so dry, you can almost feel the dust in your mouth. Of course,
O’Keeffe’s paintings gorged on life — those fat flowers, the rich,
joyous colors. Sensuality written all over them. But Karsh frames the
artist as an ascetic, exactly as we’d imagine her to be, serving her
muse in that hard-baked landscape.

That’s the reality of Karsh’s work. If you’re looking for penetrating
insights, you won’t find them here. He states the obvious. He does it
beautifully. He states the obvious better than anybody else working
with big names in luxuriantly silver-rich paper. (Even if Mies van der
Rohe contemplating triangles seems much too obvious.) There’s Hemingway
in Havana, turtlenecked (in the tropics? But it’s a dandy sweater,
gorgeous suede front), weathered and a bit tortured around those
dark eyes. There’s Henry Moore, shoulder to shoulder with one of his
marble sculptures, which itself looks a little like a self-portrait,
its bulges echoing his strong nose and cheekbones. A grandfatherly
Picasso still looks boyish and playful, as if he’s got something up
the crisp, creased sleeve of his new shirt.

Christian Dior, half-hidden in shadow, looks past us in silent
judgment, finger to his lips, one brow cocked above an appraising
eye. He’s just this side of stern; he looks like he might just approve
— and secretly, of course, we imagine he would approve if that eye
flicked in our direction. Karsh knows we’d like to think this, and
he gives us the Dior of our dreams.

Karsh dealt in dreams. It seems like an old-fashioned attribute,
now. We don’t see the famous this way anymore — serene,
knowing and pearlescent — and what celebrity today could pose so
unself-consciously heroically as Anderson, or Crawford? But so it
was once upon a time, when we put our hearts in DiMaggio’s hands and
he lifted a nation with his hitting streak; when we put our faith in
Walter Cronkite (whom Karsh also photographed, though that portrait
is not in this show), and he told us the way it was; and we put our
heroes under Karsh’s lights and he gave them back to us, strong,
perfect and immortal. That was the way we needed it to be, in our
imagination as well as his.