Ilsa Bing was a famous German photographer in the 1920's. 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. She died in 1998 at age 99 years. The Sackners met her in 1979 at a New York bookfair where she was selling her books from a table display. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.