[Portrait of a Woman]
Artist
Ilse Bing
(American (born Germany), 1899 - 1998)
CultureAmerican | German
Date1934
MediumGelatin silver print
DimensionsOverall, Image: 11 1/4 × 8 3/4 in. (28.6 × 22.2 cm)
Overall, Mat: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm)
Overall, Mat: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm)
InscribedSigned upper left corner in black ink: Ilse Bing 1934
Credit LineGift of the Ilse Bing Estate
Object number2004.13.37
Not on view
Label TextIlse Bing
American (b. Germany, 1899-1998)
Portrait of a Woman, 1934
Gelatin-silver print
Gift of the Ilse Bing Estate 2004.13.37
Born in Frankfurt, Ilse Bing built her career in 1930s Paris. There she worked as both an avant-garde and a commercial photographer. She applied the modernist vocabulary of tunnel perspectives and abrupt cropping to her work in fashion and advertising. In the mid-1930s she began a series of tight-focus self-portraits, their simplicity and directness bordering on the severe. Portrait of a Woman exemplifies her uncompromising self-scrutiny through its close-up, tightly-cropped presentation. Bing rapidly built an international reputation, exhibiting her work in France, Germany, and the United States, where in 1937 she took part in a landmark exhibition of contemporary photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Exhibition History"Women of the Chrysler: a 400-Year Celebration of the Arts," Large Changing Gallery, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., March 24 - July 18, 2010.
