DAFYDD KEMP

Photography and Impressionism. A different history of art

This text was written a few years ago but I still think it’s valid and I still think there’s a historical anomaly in the history of modern art.

The role of contemporary art in our society has been the subject of debate for a number of years. This perhaps reached its climax in mediatic and financial terms with Damien Hirst’s record breaking sale at Sothebys, which drew the headlines not only for the incredible figure that the sale achieved, but also that he’d done it without a dealer or gallery as his representative.

When talking about contemporary art invariably we mean conceptual and installation art, for these are the two dominant art forms that fill contemporary art museums world wide. They have been established as the official art of our time.

The history of art of the 19th and 20th Centuries reveals tremendous changes in the notion of art itself, but it makes certain omissions with regard to photography and cinema. And while some volumes leave a section dedicated to them, photography and cinematography seem to appear at the end as an after thought. They've never been at the pedestal of what is celebrated as art, yet they've never needed to be, as they’ve both been consolidated by commercial success since their conception.

In modern times, there has always been a struggle between the ‘establishment’ that manages and promotes the art of the day, and the artist trying to get recognition. The Impressionist’s struggles are the stuff of legend, some garnering some success in their lifetimes, while their works have gone on to shine in immortality in museums and galleries the world over. It was hence accepted that the real art of modern times is on the periphery and not in the main stream. This is in stark contrast to the success of such masters as Tiziano, Velazquez and Rembrandt, who all enjoyed wealth and recognition in their own lifetimes.

The Impressionists represent the beginning of the process of change in painting, the catalyst for everything else that came. They were a marginal group of painters whose style was not accepted by the official line, but were given the chance to exhibit at the Salon des Refusés (French for “exhibition of rejects”) in 1863. Subsequent requests for further exhibitions were rejected, so they staged their own show in 1874 (11 years later), held in the studio of the photographer Felix Nadar and organized by the Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs (Anonymous society of painters, sculptors and engravers), composed of Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Guillaumin and Berthe Morisot. The rest is history as they say, but it’s strange to see that this exhibition was held in a photographer’s studio.

Very little has been written about photographer Felix Nadar’s relationship with this group of painters, but he supported their cause, and was at that time a successful photographer and entrepreneur involved in many other fields.

In 1857, he made the following observation on photography at a tribunal:

"The theory of photography can be taught in an hour; the first ideas of how to go about it in a day. What can't be taught... is the feeling for light - the artistic appreciation of effects produced by different...sources; it's the understanding of this or that effect following the lines of the features which required your artistic perception. What is taught even less, is the immediate understanding of your subject - it's this immediate contact which can put you in sympathy with the sitter, helps you to sum them up, follow their normal attitudes, their ideas, according to their personality, and enables you to make not just a chancy, dreary cardboard copy typical of the merest hack in the darkroom, but a likeness of the most intimate and happy kind...." Almost painterly in his reference of light and likeness, he could have been talking about the portraits of Velazquez.

At that time photography had developed into a primitive commercial form yet it was still very much in its infancy, cameras were large and cumbersome to manage, exposure times were still long (a few minutes) and the process required a darkroom at hand in order to develop the plate immediately after exposure.

The camera itself was really a reduced version of the camera obscura, a tool employed for centuries by painters to make preliminary sketches, and came to be quite sophisticated, using a system of lenses to enhance and focus an image. It has been debated to what degree this influenced painters, but nonetheless it was there and was used. David Hockney has argued that it was extensively used in his book Secret Knowledge, arguing that many paintings in the past were done using cameras. The fact is that the realism achieved in painting had reached an incredible level.

In 1790, Charles - François Tiphaigne de la Roche conceived the idea of photography, its premise appearing in a story titled Giphantie (which is an anagram of his name), about a race of secret supermen in an imaginary wonderland who could fix a reflected image onto a canvas coated with a sticky substance.

In the 1820’s when this was finally achieved, the knowledge that art and science had finally found a way of creating an image on a material using light, chemicals and the camera obscura would have affected the very psychology of painting. It also affected their livelihoods. From Robert Leggat:

“Some painters dubbed the new invention "the foe-to-graphic art." Certainly those artists who specialised in miniature portraits suffered; in 1810 over 200 miniatures were exhibited at the Royal Academy; this rose to 300 in 1830, but thirty years later only sixty-four were exhibited, and in 1870 only thirty-three.”

While the first recorded photograph dates from 1826, commercial photography was born in 1839 when the french government bought painter Louis Daguerre’s patent for the first commercial process and gave it as a gift to the world at the Paris expo of 1839. It was a huge moment and from then on photography in a myriad of forms spread like wildfire through studios throughout Paris and indeed the world.

So there can be no question as to the impact that photography was having, and this precedes the first impressionist exhibition in 1874. So is Impressionism above all a psychological response to this? They were driven outdoors and away from realism because the artist’s studios in Paris were invaded by cameras.

Painters were moving away from the traditional method of realism, because they needed to reinvent themselves. They liberated themselves from the constraints of the past, championing a new artistic freedom. The bold brush strokes and pure colours took it to a new level, a poetic visual narrative that saw many further isms derived from it. The impressionists and the subsequent generation orchestrated a visual fanfare unrivalled in the history of painting. But while painting will always exist, it was really the beginning of the end, and those that followed like Picasso and Matisse were able to further the possibilities, photography came to replace painting’s commercial place in the visual arts.

Many painters have experimented with photography since its conception, even the Pablo Picasso train was to be derailed by it. Having turned painting on its head with his ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907), and subsequently elaborated a complex visual language that came to be known as cubism, Picasso confounded critics and the public alike by another change in his style from 1916 when he would do realist and figurative paintings taken from photographs.

But it is the American photographer Edward Steichen that bridged the two mediums unlike any other. From Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts:

“Steichen is perhaps best known for his photography, a medium he began to explore in 1895. He simultaneously painted and produced photographs for more than two decades, until 1922 when he made the radical decision to burn all of his paintings that remained in his possession and devote himself completely to photography. Steichen lost his faith in his ability to effectively make art out of painting, believing that photography would allow him to better make contact with life. Due to that decision, few of Steichen’s paintings are extant.”

A few survive, among them is Moonlit Landscape – 1907:

“A masterpiece of this style, Moonlit Landscape, contains the various elements that epitomize the objectives of the movement: a landscape painting in a subdued, uniform tone—in this case, a soft teal—conveyed with a dreamlike quality. Four figures at lake’s edge anchor the painting near its bottom; they are rendered deftly but faintly, dwarfed by the enormous weeping willow at right, which is blurred but still distinguishable. Steichen’s palette, his subtle, light brushwork and the brooding moon reflected across the lake’s surface combine to create an ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere. Steichen adds to the richness of mood by his choice of perspective: the moon appears to be level with the viewer, the lake and the figures below. Only the tree at right traverses the entire composition. This elevated viewpoint, possibly obtained from a balcony, effectively conveys a mystical aura to the painting: the sense that the viewer is aloft in the air.”

This work is complemented by a photograph of a similar scene, The Pond-Moonlight (1904) of which is written:

“Steichen took the photograph in Mamaroneck, New York near the home of his friend, art critic Charles Caffin. The photo features a wooded area and pond, with moonlight appearing between the trees and reflecting on the pond. While the print appears to be a color photograph, the first true color photographic process, the autochrome process, was not available until 1907. Steichen created the impression of color by manually applying layers of light-sensitive gums to the paper. In 1904, only a few photographers were using this experimental approach. Only three known versions of the Pond-Moonlight are still in existence and, as a result of the hand-layering of the gums, each is unique”. At auction, one of the existing prints was sold for three million US dollars, a record at the time for the sale of a photograph.

The two pieces beautifully illustrate the link between painting and photography, and the dilemma of an artist as he is torn between the two. It is symbolic that a sunrise should be the referential painting for impressionism, and Steichen’s moonlit scenes are perhaps like the dawn of the age of photography. And while he initially exhibited his works in a gallery, in the same way as a painter, the development of the printing press and mass media gave him a role that drew him and photography away from the sphere of what is considered art, for he became the pioneer fashion, portrait and advertising photographer for Conde Nast publications. Yet there is no reason to think that because he gave up painting, he stopped being an artist. He didn’t produce his art in the traditional way, but then neither did anyone else. During these years he was the best paid and most famous photographer in the world.

It is also interesting to note that Steichen’s ‘defection’ to Conde Nast caused an irreparable rift between himself and Alfred Stieglitz, who condemned photography’s commercialisation after decades of painstaking work promoting it as a fine art form. It is also noteworthy that the first Cezanne’s, Picasso’s and Matisse’s to be exhibited in America were through his (Stieglitz) photography gallery. It was also he that captured the only existing record of Marcel Duchamps ‘Fountain’ (see below) before it was lost or thrown in the rubbish bin.

The printing press essentially marginalised photography from the notion of art because it commercialised it, and reproduced it on a huge scale. The printing press also began to dictate the notions of art, for it enabled contemporary movements to be reproduced in books and magazines with images to illustrate; it was no longer necessary to see them in the flesh, and in a way trivialised their whole appreciation, thus generalising the whole notion of art.

According to most modern art history volumes, the most influential work of art of the 20th Century is R. Mutt’s ‘Fountain’ (1917), an industrially produced urinal inserted into an exhibition of art by Marcel Duchamp as a form of protest against the ‘establishment’. A practical joke that ironically became the founding brick for the establishment that followed. The object in question was lost or thrown out after the exhibition, and the only evidence of its real likeness is thanks to the surviving photograph that Stieglitz took of it. The establishment saw fit while Duchamp was still alive to commission him to recreate replica works to be housed in museums worldwide. An industrially produced object that can be reproduced infinitely like a photograph is for the first time ‘authorised’ for acceptance into the worlds galleries and museums... 

A hundred years later, art has changed little, ideas are recycled, essentially illustrating the same thing: an individuals search for recognition through controversy. And while all these objects that fill contemporary art museums criticise and ridicule the society we live in, there is nothing to suggest that they are as valuable as the price tags that accompany them.

With impressionism, the art market got used to the idea of having to purchase ‘underground’ items as works of art, as their example had shown. It is this speculation that has perverted and conditioned what is considered to be ‘art’ ever since.

To what degree did the arrival of photography influence the changes in the course of art history? The truth is that the changes in visual arts would not have happened were it not for photography acting as a catalyst.

What bearing does this have on the ‘art’ of our time? Contemporary art relies on impressionism’s immaculate conception of the virtuous artist fighting with the establishment. But photography fathered impressionism, and this truth makes contemporary art pretty much worthless as an art-form.

September 2011