Art: Man with a Camera

Sanford Harrison Roth is a short, cocky, square-jawed man who has made a career of taking candid photographs of artists and musicians. This week, after nearly 80,000 people had trooped past a showing of his photos in Chicago’s Art Institute, Roth was in an understandably satisfied mood. Said he: “Even if everybody else did not like my pictures, there is always one person who does — me.”

Next to Roth himself, his biggest fans are his subjects. Most of them—Picasso, Utrillo, Giacometti, Cocteau, Dufy, Leger, Milhaud—gave Roth nearly all the time he needed to make his pictures. The result: his portraits have a quality that seems to capture a sense of his subjects’ work as well as their personalities.

Bikes & Bags. At 46, Sanford Roth is a relative newcomer to big-time photography. Born in Brooklyn, he went through the public schools and New York University, spending most of his time bicycle racing (“I loved the competition—I like to be better than anyone else—and I liked the glamour and those sweaters we wore”). After college, Roth got a job with a ladies’ hat-and-bag retail chain, and in a few years was vice president in charge of the chain’s West Coast territory. By 1946, he was making better than $30,000 a year.

But Roth was becoming less interested in hats and more intrigued with his new hobby—photography. Says he: “I looked about me and realized that I was getting old and not having any fun. The other men who were in the hat business were not friends of mine. I liked the arts and good music . . . I decided that I would quit.” He talked it over with his wife Beulah, and gave his boss a year’s notice. In 1947, on his own at last, Roth took his wife and camera to Europe.

Berserk & Brilliant. In Paris, he met an art dealer friend who offered to introduce him to Utrillo. “So I went out to Utrillo’s house,” he explained. “We sat around and talked, and pretty soon I was taking pictures.” Utrillo liked the pictures and introduced Roth to Vlaminck —and it went on from there.

Roth’s acquaintance with well-known artists has given him some interesting footnotes to his pictures. Samples:

Utrillo: “I was able to capture all the violence and the pathos of his life. We don’t know many men who started getting drunk when they were only eight months old.* Today, Utrillo is either asleep, drunk or berserk. If it weren’t for Lucie Valore [TIME, Aug. 25], he’d be dead. He told me: ‘I hate my house. It’s full of bourgeois furniture and servants. One day I’m going to run away and go back to Montmartre where I belong.’ It was the saddest thing I’d ever heard . . .”

Matisse: “The rudest man I’ve ever shot. He refused to cooperate. He browbeats his servants and treats his nurse dreadfully. But he’s a sick man, and maybe that excuses him in a way.”

Picasso. “An old, old man. Because he is so brilliant, he is sad. I shot him in his studio, with sweaters and coats on. He was very solemn.”

Dufy: “The first time I saw him he was thin and unhappy. He could hardly move. Then he began taking cortisone injections, and when I saw him again, he was jollier and 60 Ibs. heavier . . . He proudly walked the length of his studio like a child, and he flexed his stubby fingers for me.”

*Utrillo’s mother, says Roth, “used to soothe him with an occasional dram of Pernod.”