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Artful
artificiality: Steichen’s The Black Vase (1901),
from the collection of the Troob Family Foundation.
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The
Feeling Is Real
By
Meisha Rosenberg
Pictorial
Vision: American and European Photography
Clark
Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., through Aug. 17
From
photography’s beginnings in the 19th century, its relationship
with painting has been much like a sibling rivalry. As this
exhibition shows, at times the two forms have aped one another,
with photographers borrowing painting’s conventions, and painters,
even before the invention of the Daguerreotype in 1839, using
photographic images to make drawings. Sometimes the two forms
have threatened to undermine one another: In 1859, Charles
Baudelaire called photography a “great industrial madness”
and argued that it was “art’s most mortal enemy.”
From the 1880s until the end of World War I, photographers
such as Eduard Steichen, Peter Henry Emerson, and Alvin Langdon
Coburn defined photography as an art form as capable of aesthetic
harmony as painting. Practitioners of pictorialism emphasized
techniques such as the use of soft focus, platinum printing
and photogravure (photographic etching) to distinguish their
work from straight, unenhanced photography. The invention
of the Brownie camera and roll film in the early years of
the 20th century suddenly meant that anyone could use a camera.
As Coburn (whose portrait of Steichen is here) wrote, “Now
every nipper has a Brownie. . . . What we need is more respect
for our medium.” Pictorialism was at its weakest a nostalgic—even
elitist—look backward as the technology zoomed ahead. But
this exhibit, organized by Sarah Hammond, a student in the
Clark/Williams graduate program in the history of art, concentrates
on its strengths.
Pictorialism was an international movement, and this nicely
balanced, small exhibit includes photographers from America,
Britain, France, and (what was then) Czechoslovakia. As different
as these artists were, theirs are almost all photographs you
can get lost in: Gorgeous tones, striking details, and artful
compositions emphasize the drama of the moment.
This exhibition distills pictorialism through 15 sublime,
not-often-seen works from the Clark collection and the Troob
Family Foundation. Either through the framing of a scene,
the printing technique (exemplified by the lush platinum print
Marshman Going to Cut Schoof-Stuff by Emerson, 1886),
or the artificiality of the setting (as in the dark, mystical
portraits of women, The Black Vase by Eduard J. Steichen,
1901, and The Black Bowl by George H. Seeley, 1907)
these works show us the importance of the photographer’s eye.
There’s an undeniable tactility here, as in the Portrait
of Eduard Steichen by Coburn (1901), with a young, sensuous
Steichen seen against a textured wall patterned with ivy.
From a distance, Marshman Going to Cut Shoof-Stuff
(a thatching material) looks like a charcoal drawing, it’s
so smoky and moody. The grooves in the mud, rain clouds and
tall, lined boots of the marshman as he walks toward his boat
all evince a careful framing. The exhibition text relates
that Emerson was influenced by French realist painter Jean-François
Millet, some of whose scenes of village life hang right around
the corner in the Clark collection.
Moodiness dominates other works, such as George H. Seeley’s
small works, Barn and Factory (both 1917), part
of a portfolio he made of life in Stockbridge. Barn
merges all shapes into darkness so that a tree looks as if
it is growing right from the middle of the building.
Manipulating effects was what most pictorialists liked, and
what better new effect than color? Alfred Stieglitz (his quarterly,
Camera Work, published some of the best works of the
pictorialists) wrote in 1907, “Soon the world will be color-mad,
and Lumière will be responsible,” adding his pictorialist
concern that “The difference between the results that will
be obtained between the artistic fine feeling and the everyday
blind will even be greater in color than in monochrome. Heaven
have pity on us.” The autochrome, developed in 1904 by the
Lumière brothers, was the first practical photographic process
to use color: the humble potato provided the chemical (starch)
that held colors in tiny grains on a glass plate. Pushing
a button lights up two autochromes on display here. Maybe
because the technique was still new, these autochromes are
more impressive as technology than as art, although Seeley’s
Still Life With Grapes (1908) plays up an almost surreal
contrast between tangible shiny grapes and an impressionistic
haze.
Pictorialists also borrowed from painting’s new preoccupation
with abstraction, as in Pierre Dubreuil’s Venetian Rhapsody
(1912), showing a grouping of the steel prow ornaments typical
on gondolas. In the marvelous River Scene, Winter (1920s)
by Czech photographer Jaroslav Krupka, a geometric arrangement
of canoes sinks into the water, echoing a long perspective
of the course of the river as it flows under a bridge.
One of the most compelling works here is the photogravure
Brigitta (1910) by American Frank Eugene. Brigitta,
seated at a low table with an embroidered tablecloth, wears
a large bow and an intense expression. The result is a riveting
blend of painting’s formal composition with photography’s
visceral presence. Similarly striking is Alice Burr’s Portrait
of Harry Overstreet (1915), showing her handsome, jaunty
brother-in-law in profile. These subjects impress us with
their timebound realness—an effect unique to photography.
By the end of World War I, pictorialists realized that photography
had gifts of its own and were abandoning any strict adherence
to painterly aesthetics. A vigor and freshness animated photography
in the following decades; and the pictorial aesthetic continues
to influence photographers today, for whom manipulation and
artifice can yield astonishing artistic truths.
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