Kasmin's Camera

An intimate collection of private photographs of artists and writers, friends and family by a legendary art dealer

John Kasmin, known to all simply as Kasmin, was the most important dealer in contemporary art in Britain in the 1960s. At the eponymous Kasmin Gallery on New Bond Street, he worked with many of the leading British and American artists of the day, notably Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Robyn Denny, Gillian Ayres, Howard Hodgkin, and David Hockney. In the process, he transformed the London art world and became almost as recognised as his gallery artists.

Less well known is that Kasmin was also a trained photographer, having started his working life as an assistant to the celebrated portrait photographer Ida Kar. Throughout his life, he has always carried his camera with him, constantly photographing - and being photographed with - his bohemian artist and writer friends and family members.

This remarkable book is the first time he has shown a collection of intimate and private photographs. We see Newman, Frankenthaler, and others in their studio; we join Hockney as he travels, works, and holidays with Kasmin and their shared circle. We follow Kasmin as he and his close friend, the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, voyage to Africa and the Caribbean. Each image, whether a posed portrait or a hastily grabbed snapshot, reveals something new, something private about some of the best-known names in postwar art and the world in which they lived and worked.

Art historian and curator Chris Stephens writes about Kasmin's circle of artists and friends in the 1960s and 1970s, while his long-time friend Judith Goldman writes a more personal account of Kasmin and his life.