The llama of course, what else? No other motif by the photographer Inge Morath is as famous as that of the llama being chauffeured across Times Square in New York in the 1950s and sticking his head out of the window. Linda – that’s the name of this animal It-Girl – was a real New Yorker and lived in Manhattan. Their owners were animal trainers who loaned the llama and other four-legged friends to TV shows, commercials and Broadway.
Also on the day that Inge Morath made the recording that would become one of the icons of her artistic work, Linda was on her way home from a television job at New York’s ABC studios. For her, like the entire neighborhood, it was natural for her to ride in a car. Should she have walked the whole way through the already busy city on four legs?
That so much is known about Linda is due to the fact that Morath provided detailed captions for the series of photos that were taken at the time, and the story on December 2, 1957 in the Life Magazine had been published. Today, the motif of Linda the llama, drawn up in large format, marks the start of the exhibition in honor of Inge Morath in the Kunstfoyer in Munich.
Was that still the sex symbol that enchanted everyone, or was it more of a woman who was tormented by depression? Marilyn Monroe on the set of “The Misfits” 1960.
(Photo: Inge Morath / Magnum Photos / courtesy CLAIRbyKahn)
She came “from a horrible, mythical past”
That Morath became so well known with such a cheerful motif was not at all a matter of course. Because the Austrian – Inge Morath was born in Graz in 1923 – was, as her daughter Rebecca writes in the catalogue, “a woman who came from a horrible, mythical past”. And she continues to write about her mother: “She was forged in a cauldron of abysmal evil, had lived in the hottest part of hell – Nazi Germany – and bore lifelong internal scars from looking into the belly of the monster.”
The daughter’s words may sound over-dramatic, one thing is clear: Inge Morath may have had a beautiful childhood, but it was not an easy youth. She grew up in Darmstadt and Berlin because her parents – both natural scientists – often worked at different laboratories and universities. The total work of art at Mathildenhöhe near Darmstadt made a great impression on her.
Inge Morath, Wedding Party at Magnum Office New York, 1962.
(Photo: Wayne Miller)
The exhibition “Degenerate Art” in 1937 awakened her love for modern painting, through which she trained her artistic vision. But then the high school graduate came to work in Masuria – with camp life, daily checks, spying and latrine service as punishment, as well as National Socialist training.
Back in Berlin, she began studying. The war raged, she lost three cousins, had to go to a screw factory for the next labor service. When her parents moved back to Salzburg from Berlin in the last year of the war, 22-year-old Inge stayed alone in Berlin to finish her studies. Then the Russians were at the gates of Berlin, and she set off to make her way to her parents in Salzburg.
The 1953 photograph of Mrs. Eveleigh Nash on Buckingham Palace Mall in London is among Inge Morath’s icons on display in the art foyer.
(Photo: Inge Morath / Magnum Photos / courtesy CLAIRbyKahn)
Audrey Hepburn with her dog Mr. Famous on the film set of “The Unforgiven” in Mexico 1959.
(Photo: Inge Morath / Magnum Photos / courtesy CLAIRbyKahn)
The writer Pablo Neruda leaves a boutique in Greenwich Village/New York in 1966, where he has just bought a pair of very funny sunglasses.
(Photo: Inge Morath / Magnum Photos / courtesy CLAIRbyKahn)
In the chaos of the war, she lost all courage and wanted to drown herself in a river, but a war returnee prevented her from doing so. – This is roughly how Inge Morath later described the terrible experiences of her youth. The memories of that must have stayed with her for the rest of her life. That’s why she never photographed wars, as she later wrote.
After 1945, Inge Morath worked as a translator and journalist. In 1949 she was invited by Robert Capa to work for the newly founded Magnum photo agency. She sorted, edited and wrote accompanying texts for the photos of Cartier-Bresson and the other founding members. She learned a lot and decided in 1951 to work as a photographer herself from now on.
Four years later, she was the first woman to join the previously exclusively male group of Magnum photographers. In the years that followed, she traveled through Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the USA and South America for various magazines, published photo books – including about Iran – and worked as a photographer on numerous film sets worldwide.
In the streets of Pamplona in Spain during the 1954 San Fermin festival.
(Photo: Inge Morath / Magnum Photos / courtesy CLAIRbyKahn)
Waiting for the July 14 parade in Paris, 1953.
(Photo: Inge Morath / Magnum Photos / courtesy CLAIRbyKahn)
She met Arthur Miller on the set of “The Misfits”, where intense footage of a seemingly lost Marilyn Monroe was created. After Miller’s divorce from Monroe, the two married in February 1962. In September of the same year, daughter Rebecca was born – who became an internationally renowned director, actress and artist. Inge Morath died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 78.
However, it was not the 20th anniversary of his death, but the 100th birthday on May 27th, 2023, that gave Isabel Siben from the Kunstfoyer and Anna-Patricia Kahn from the photo gallery Clair reason to design the comprehensive exhibition with 170 works, which is to be published by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag an even more comprehensive catalog has been published. The two were able to obtain around 80 vintage and lifetime prints from the Inge Morath Estate, although for reasons of conservation it is extremely reluctant to use the original material.
The other photographs shown are later but authorized prints. Including a few color photos. Some of the motifs were enlarged enormously so that details become visible which perhaps not even Inge Morath could see on the contact sheets that were common at the time.
The exhibition not only shows icons such as Linda, the llama on the streets of New York, or Mrs. Eveleigh Nash, a lady of London society, who is draped in fur. There are also numerous portraits of writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, fashion designers and actors – a real who’s who of the second half of the 20th century.
In addition, there are portraits and self-portraits by Inge Morath, many shots that were taken on film sets, as well as street scenes from New York, London, Madrid, Pamplona, Moscow and Leningrad that document Inge Morath’s flair for street photography, landscape and industrial photography from Iran as well as Recordings made during a theater tour with her husband Arthur Miller in 1983 and an earlier trip to China in 1978.
Model and actress Nancy Berg hurries down Fifth Avenue early one morning in 1956.
(Photo: Inge Morath / Magnum Photos / courtesy CLAIRbyKahn)
It is an almost narrative black and white in which Inge Morath sets her photographs. Her works are not characterized by harsh, dramatic contrasts. The pictorial compositions are characterized by the golden ratio of painting, which she got to know and admired in her youth, by foregrounds and backgrounds, even if she places the portrayed in the central perspective in the portraits, which happens seldom enough.
In a film that documents a reading held before her in Berlin in 1994, one can also follow Inge Morath’s autobiographical story in the exhibition – in a wonderfully Austrian intonation, which the well-travelled woman never lost her life.
Inge Morath – Homage, until 1 May 2023, Art Foyer, Maximilianstr. 53. The book accompanying the exhibition, edited by Isabel Siben and Anna-Patricia Kahn, will be published in a bilingual English/German edition by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag: 58 euros. The museum edition in the art foyer costs 50 euros.