Can-can Dancers, 1931
Ilse Bing
Vision of A Century
March 26 - May 9, 1998
Vision of A Century
March 26 - May 9, 1998
Ilse Bing passed away on the 10th of March of this year, just two weeks shy of her 99th birthday. Born in 1899 in Frankfurt, Germany, Bing studied art history at Frankfurt University, and in 1926 began to take photographs for use in her Ph.D. dissertation. By 1929 she gave up academia for photography and in 1930 she moved to Paris to pursue her career.
During the 1930’s Bing achieved great success and a considerable reputation in the avant-garde of the Paris art world. Exhibiting along with such contemporaries as Man Ray, Andre Kertesz, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Cartier-Bresson, Bing was known as one of the pioneers of photography’s Golden Age.
She was widely exhibited in Europe, the United States and Japan. In 1936, Bing was included in the first modern photography exhibition held at the Louvre. Exclusively using the newly developed Leica camera, Bing took photographs which embraced spontaneity and technical difficulties. Tilting the camera straight down in a perspective distorting view, recording the blurs and whirling movement of modern life, or pushing into the darkly lit clubs and streets of Paris without a flash were among the qualities captured in many of Bing’s greatest images. Undoubtedly the best known work of Bing’s Paris years, however, is a self-portrait with her Leica taken in 1931.
One of the most widely reproduced self-portraits of the 1930’s, this image shows a young woman fractured by reflections in two mirrors which show her looking straight at the viewer and in profile at the same time. The camera lens is a third eye in a composition that has come to epitomize the modernist role of photography in creating a "new vision".
Bing’s fame spread to New York by 1932 when the art dealer Julien Levy started to collect her work. Bing was included in Levy’s exhibition "Modern European Photography: Twenty Photographers", in 1932. She was first invited to New York in 1936 by the author Hendrik Willem van Loon. Following her return to Paris, examples of Bing’s work were selected by Beaumont Newhall for the landmark 1937 photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Bing and her husband were sent to internment camps in France in 1939. When she was released in 1940 she sailed for the United States, and settled in New York. For many years, like a number of European refugee artists, Bing’s European fame did not follow her to post-war New York.
Only in 1977 did her rediscovery begin. The Art Institute of Chicago presented her work in the landmark show "Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection", and gradually a steady stream of exhibitions, publications and honors followed. Among her numerous shows, Bing received a retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1985, and a separate retrospective at the Musee Carnavalet, in Paris, in 1988.
Ilse Bing’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Houston Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and most leading institutions in the United States, Europe and Japan. Bing was the first recipient of The Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement awarded by The National Arts Club (Gramercy Park).