Nadar raising photography to the height of art

ROSA BONHEUR, Plowing in the Nivernais, 1849

Rosa Bonheur was one of the most renowned animal painters in history. Her earliest training was received from her father, a minor landscape painter, who encouraged her interest in art in general and in animals as her exclusive subject. He allowed her to keep a veritable menagerie in their home, including a sheep that is reported to have lived on the balcony of their sixth-floor Parisian apartment.

Bonheur's unconventional lifestyle contributed to the myth that surrounded her during her lifetime. She smoked cigarettes in public, rode astride, and wore her hair short. To study the anatomy of animals, Bonheur visited the slaughterhouse; for this work, she favored men's attire and was required to obtain an official authorization from the police to dress in trousers and a smock. Because of this recognition from official sources, she was then awarded a commission from the French government to produce a painting on the subject of plowing. Exhibited in the Salon of 1849, it firmly established her career in France.

Figure 22-31 ROSA BONHEUR, The Horse Fair, 1853–1855. Oil on canvas, 8’ 1/4” x 16’ 7 1/2”. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The artist was praised by Napoleon III and Delacroix for her very realistic, yet passionate, studies of animals. This was a sensation at the 1853 Salon. It was reworked until 1855 and then it toured England and the U.S. for three years. She sold the painting and its reproduction rights. When an engraving was made of the work, it made the owner of the painting a lot of money since many people bought inexpensive reproductions of it. Her art, as did most Academic art, reached a broad audience through the mass medium of the print.

NIEPCE, View from His Window at La Gras, c. 1826

The very first photograph ever taken. Niepce used a mixture of natural, light-sensitive elements on a piece of pewter placed in a camera obscura and left it to daylight exposure. It rendered this image called a heliograph because it was exposed to the sun. Helio = sun, graph = writing, in other words, “sun writing.” Photo = light, thus photography is “light writing.” Even though this image is blurry and hazy, we can still see the rooftops, trees, and sky.

LOUIS DAGUERRE, Boulevard du Temple, Paris, c. 1838

In 1839, Louis Daguerre patented his process of fixing images on a copper plate called a daguerreotype. It is the earliest form of creating portraits. These portraits were placed under glass, framed and placed in a hinged box for the owner to cherish. Daguerreotypes are one-of-a-kind and cannot be duplicated. The image rendered in this fashion was extremely crisp and detailed. Tt came in different sizes from very small (2” x 2 1/2”) to what we would consider to be a normal sized picture for a portrait, (6 1/2” x 8 1/2”).

However, this image is not of a person/persons. It is of a busy street scene, yet there are almost no people (there’s a person getting his shoes shined in the lower left quadrant of the image). Because it took 20-30 minutes for an image to “fix” itself onto the metal plate, anything moving would not be captured.

Daguerreotype: A photograph made by an early method on a plate of chemically treated metal; developed by Louis J.M. Daguerre.

HENRY FOX TALBOT, The Open Door, 1843

Talbot developed the first paper negative that could be printed on paper called the calotype. This process produced a much softer effect that was adored by the Romanticists. Photographers could also manipulate the image before it was printed onto another piece of paper. Talbot was the first photographer to really investigate the possibilities of photography as a vital art form. He produced the first photographic essay called The Pencil of Nature. In this photograph he positions the handmade broom handle parallel to the diagonal shadow of the door. This photograph was supposed to capture the quickly disappearing agrarian lifestyle, ironically captured by the modern method of photography.

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Figure 22-50 NADAR, Eugène Delacroix, ca. 1855. Modern print from original negative in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

The albumen print combined details and clarity of the daguerreotype with the reproducibility of the calotype; It incorporated a wet plate process in which the photographer would use chemicals called collodion on a glass plate, would then treat it with silver nitrate to sensitize the plate for exposure, expose the plate to the subject at hand through the camera, and then use another mixture of volatile chemicals to fix the negative image in order to print positive images onto prepared paper.

Nadar opened his first photography studio in 1854, but he only practiced for six years. He focused on the psychological elements of photography, aiming to reveal the moral personalities of his sitters rather than make attractive portraits. Bust- or half-length poses, solid backdrops, dramatic lighting, fine sculpturing, and concentration on the face were trademarks of his studio. His use of eight-by-ten-inch glass-plate negatives, which were significantly larger than the popular sizes of daguerreotypes, accentuated those effects. At one point, a commentator said, "[a]ll the outstanding figures of [the] era--literary, artistic, dramatic, political, intellectual--have filed through his studio." In most instances these subjects were Nadar's friends and acquaintances. His curiosity led him beyond the studio into such uncharted locales as the catacombs, which he was one of the first persons to photograph using artificial light.

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Figure 22-49A HONORÉ DAUMIER, Nadar Raising Photography to the Height of Art, 1862. Lithograph, 10 3/4” x 8 3/4”. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The public liked photography, but many artists thought of it as a threat. By 1863, photography had taken Paris by storm. In this image Daumier is showing that all the buildings of Paris were photography studios, much like the one’s the famous Nadar had set up. Nadar was the first photographer to photograph Paris from the air. Daumier is playing with the fact that Nadar went up into a balloon, thus elevating photography literally as well as artistically.

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Figure 22-51 JULIA MARGARET CAMERON, Ophelia, Study no. 2, 1867. Albumen print, 1' 11" x 10 2/3". George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.

In 1864, at the age of forty-eight, one of her daughters presented her with a camera (then a relatively new invention) as a gift. She began to take photographs with a passion from that day forth, becoming expert in the use of what is called the collodion wet-plate process. Within a year, she had become a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. She made extensive alterations to her home to accommodate her new hobby, converting an old coalhouse into a darkroom and a chicken shed into a studio with windows that allowed her to control and regulate the light. Over subsequent years she developed a unique style - her images often slightly out of focus to emphasize the emotional dimension of her subjects. For models she used friends, servants and neighbors. Many of these were prominent figures of the times, including the scientists Charles Darwin and John Herschel, and the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. Her associations with artists from the Pre-Raphaelite school, meanwhile, immediately became apparent in her unique style of photographic portraiture which became atmospheric, moody and often highly allegorical.

She was an accomplished mistress of self-promotion and was also very well-connected. This led in 1865 to the first one-person exhibition of her photographs in London and also a presentation of a collection of her photographs to the British Museum. Throughout the 1860s she continued to produce numerous portraits of “famous men and fair women” for which she has become justly renowned. In 1874, the great Victorian poet Tennyson commissioned her to provide illustrations to his Idylls of the King and Other Poems.

Figure 22-52 TIMOTHY O’SULLIVAN, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863.

6 3/8" x 8 3/4". The New York Public Library, New York.

This photography rejects the pageantry of war and reveals the stark reality of battle. O’Sullivan worked for another famous Civil War photographer, Matthew Brady, and was tired of his boss taking credit for his photographs, so he broke free and started his own business. This photograph is part of a multi-volume photographic essay on the Civil War and marks the start of documentary photography.

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Figure 22-33A ADOLPHE-WILLIAM BOUGUEREAU, Nymphs and Satyr, 1873. Oil on canvas, approx. 8’ 6” high. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Academic painters faced the challenge of photography head on and achieved remarkable facts of photographic realism in their art – the most popular paintings of the period as they reflected the ideals and values of the society that regarded them so highly: the new middle-class of the Industrial Age or bourgeoisie; however, painting still had three advantages over photography in the 19th century: color, size, and composition

Paintings were being compared to photographs and paintings were said to owe a debt to photography – indeed, as artists were using photographs to create some of their works

Painting could also add in emotion whereas photography lacked it; however, the French poet and critic Baudelaire (who coined the term imagination) equated photography and Academic painting as observable fact that rendered no emotional or imaginative qualities – he didn’t like either form of art

Bouguereau’s work is an excellent example of how the boundaries of painting were pushed by photography. He became famous for his erotic scenes and soft-focus fantasies that predate modern magazine photography. This work is a mild version of this type of work. It incorporates the three things photography couldn't do: color, size, and subject matter.

ADOLPHE-WILLIAM BOUGUEREAU, Les Noisettes, 1882

Another example of painting that looks like a photograph by Bouguereau.

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HENRI FANTIN-LATOUR, Portrait of Edouard Manet, 1867

Birth of the Avant-Garde:

Introduction to the avant-garde: from the military term for those who go out and explore unknown territory; a revolutionary, artistic patter that is experimental and adventurous

Myth of the autonomous individual with the emphasis on both personality and change: this is perhaps the most important myth in modern art that becomes an integral part of who the artist is; the key is to understand that the unique eye of the artist, subjective and intelligent, is what is important in the creation of art from this point on in the avant-garde

This is a portrait of the artist, Edouard Manet (don’t confuse him with Claude Monet - he’s in the next chapter) by an academic artist named Henri Fantin-Latour. Manet was a man of independent wealth, we can see it in the way he presents himself. He a reluctant rebel as he did not seek to rattle the Academy to the core, but that’s exactly what he ends up doing. As a Realist, he wanted to bridge the gap between the Academy and the real, contemporary lives of Parisians.

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EDOUARD MANET, The Guitarist, 1860

This painting, sometimes known as The Spanish Guitarist, was accepted in the Salon of 1861 and Manet received honorable mention for it. As it was customary for aspiring artists to do so, Manet traveled to Italy and Spain to study from old master paintings like Titian, Raphael, Velazquez. We can see the influence of Velazquez in this work, even the red jug at the bottom right corner is reminiscent of The Water Carrier of Seville.

Manet had no clue what was in store during the next Salon.

Avant-garde: French military term literally meaning “advanced-guard”; in art, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists who develop new concepts in their work.

Figure 22-32 ÉDOUARD MANET, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863. Oil on canvas, approx. 7’ x 8’ 10”. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

This is the painting that was the impetus for the first ever Salon des Refuses (Salon of Rejected Works) which featured 4,000 works that were rejected from the juried exhibition. This served as the centerpiece. What do you think are some of the reasons the members of the jury hated it so much? It is based on earlier works from the Renaissance, but I don't think people made that connection. Is she naked or nude? Why?

Please watch: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/realism/v/manet-le-d-jeuner-sur-l-herbe-luncheon-on-the-grass-1863

TITIAN, Pastoral Concert, c. 1510

Remember this painting? He is using this as inspiration for his work.

RAIMONDI, Judgement of Paris (after Raphael), c. 1520

This print was also an inspiration for Manet’s work. Look at the three figures on the lower right part of the print - it is the same arrangement of figures.

Figure 22-33 ÉDOUARD MANET, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 4’ 3” x 6’ 3”. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

This was painted the same year as Luncheon on the Grass, but was accepted into the Salon of 1865. It became the scandalous centerpiece of the “official” Salon. It is also based on a Renaissance work by Titian, Venus of Urbino from 1538. People did not want to see contemporary life as is, they wanted idealized images. Since both works were based on Renaissance works, people expected to see a homage to Renaissance ideals and were disappointed and disgusted when that didn’t happen. Manet abandons perspective and photographic realism in order to achieve more realism in his art. What is this a painting of? Who is the woman? Please watch: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/realism/v/manet-olympia-1863-exhibited-1865

TITIAN, Venus of Urbino, 1538

Manet’s inspiration. She may be “Venus,” but remember that the model for this work was the mistress to the Duke of Urbino.

Compare and contrast. Look at the positioning of the bodies, what does the body language tell you? What are the other figures doing in both paintings? What about the pets in the painting? What are dogs symbols of? Black cats?

JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES, Odalisque with Slave, 1842.

However, this is the kind of “classicizing” nudity that was seen as appropriate for Salon audiences. How does her body language speak to the viewer? Why is this seen as appropriate? Is she real?

ALEXANDRE CABANEL, Birth of Venus, 1863.

Shown at the same Salon as Olympia, this was seen as a triumph of art and class. Why?

ÉDOUARD MANET, The Fifer, 1866

I like to include a work by Manet that has nothing to do with unclothed women. Ha! This painting is indicative of Manet’s style. Notice how incredibly flat looking the figure is against the background. There’s nothing that tells us the difference between floor and wall. The lighting is really frontal, like that of photography at the time, so very few shadows are cast.

HOKUSAI, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, c. 1828

A lot of the flatness and linearity that Manet uses is inspired by Japanese color woodblock printing called ukiyo-e (translates into “images of the floating world” - not a great translation). Ukiyo-e artists captured contemporary life, much like the French Realists, but they did it in a style that was very flat and linear. France was experiencing a Japanese craze at this time, so many people, including artists were collecting these prints. These types of Japanese prints would continue to influence the Impressionists in the next chapter

Japonisme: The French fascination with all things Japanese. Japonisme emerged in the second half of the 19th century.

Figure 22-23 THOMAS COLE, The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm), 1836. Oil on canvas, 4’ 3 1/2” x 6’ 4”.

19th Century American Landscape Painting: The last section of lecture is going to deal with American landscape painting and its relationship to early film (movies). This may seem like a stretch, but stay with me:

The beginnings of film developed out of photography and awe-inspiring landscape painting; truly is the combination of both

Daguerre and dioramas: large scale scenes that were painted on translucent canvas – one scene would show if the light was shown onto the canvas and another image would show if the light was shown through the canvas from behind; accompanied by music, it added drama; people paid money; all done before photography

American landscape painting had the feel of dioramas because of the vastness of space they portray

These landscape paintings were so detailed that it was a common practice to use opera glasses to become absorbed within the imagery

Panoramas became popular (moving paintings) and then artists combined dioramas with panoramas

Landscape painting such as these examples were also part of the 19th century American belief in their continent as a biblical land of promise; westward movement – Manifest Destiny

Thomas Cole was the founder of an American school of landscape painting, the Hudson River School. Cole and others like him, wanted to glorify the beauty of the natural landscape and raise the public awareness of the destruction of America’s natural beauty in the wake of rapid industrialization and resource consumption.

Please watch: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-americas/us-art-19c/romanticism-us/v/cole-oxbow

Figure 22-24 ALBERT BIERSTADT, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, 1868. Oil on canvas, 6’ x 10’. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

Albert Bierstadt's beautifully crafted paintings played to a hot market in the 1860s for spectacular views of the nation's frontiers. Bierstadt was an immigrant and hardworking entrepreneur who had grown rich pairing his skill as a painter with a talent for self-promotion. He unveiled his canvases as theatrical events, selling tickets and planting news stories—strategies that one critic described as the "vast machinery of advertisement and puffery."

A Bierstadt canvas was elaborately framed, installed in a darkened room, and hidden behind luxurious drapes. At the appointed time, the work was revealed to thunderous applause. This painting was made in London and toured through Europe to St. Petersburg, fueling Europeans' interest in emigration. Buoyed by glowing reviews, Bierstadt then offered the painting to American audiences who could take pride in an American artist's skill and in the natural splendors of their young nation.

A work like this of the American West (the Sierras in California) would have been sensational to the public on the East Coast who hadn’t traveled west. People would come to look at the painting and use things like opera glasses (like binoculars) to fully immerse themselves into the work of art. It was about feeling like you were there, being part of the landscape. Is that not what a good movie does? It makes you feel like you’re somewhere else for a couple of hours. That’s what these artworks aimed to do.

Figure 22-25 FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH, Twilight In the Wilderness, 1860s. Oil on canvas, 3’ 4” x 5’ 4”. Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio

Originally a part of the Hudson River School, Church traveled all over the world capturing landscape scenes. Some of his most famous are of the Andes in South America, but this painting is just a figment of his imagination, but we can imagine this comes from years of practice as a master landscapist. Those clouds surely look they do when the sun sets.

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Figure 22-36 THOMAS EAKINS, The Gross Clinic, 1875. Oil on canvas, 8’ x 6’ 6”. Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia.

Eakins took the photographic realism of Academic painting and photography itself to their absolute limits. He studied with Jean-Leon Gérôme in Paris as a private student. He stayed there for four years and was his best student.

This is an example of his objective portraiture, yet it is melodramatic. A poor man is undergoing a free operation (the gray socks he wears were charity issued). Eakins studied anatomy as a medical student before his art career. The American people didn’t like it and it was rejected by the jury of Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Realism meant objective visual truth for Eakins and most of his paintings were uninteresting to the American public at this time.

THOMAS EAKINS, The Swimming Hole, 1883

Eakins used photographs in rendering his realistic images in painting (see next slide). Photography became a very useful tool for painters in capturing motion and particular moments in time, like the diving man in this painting.

THOMAS EAKINS, Eakin’s Students at the Site for “The Swimming Hole”, 1883

One of the photographs Eakins took of students for his paintings.

Figure 22-53 EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, Horse Galloping, 1878. Collotype print. George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.

Muybridge was hired by a former governor of California, Leland Stanford, to photographically prove that a running horse had all four feet off the ground. He would be commissioned by Stanford to do more motion studies of animals and people.

For this particular study, he set up 16 cameras around a horse track and as the horse and rider ran past, the horse tripped a thin wire that caused the shutter to release and capture the image onto the chemically-treated glass plates inside the cameras. When you put all the images together, they look like film strips. If you were to put them in a zoetrope, the horse would appear to be moving, thus the beginning of moving pictures.

THOMAS EAKINS, Chromo-photograph taken with a 2-disk “Marey Wheel” camera, 1884

Eakins was fascinated by Eadweard Muybridge’s rapid-succession photographs. He did his own study of movement using a Marey Wheel camera: a rifle shaped camera that could take 12 images per second on a single photographic plate, later on roll film.

Early Film:

Most powerful new mass media art form was the movies

Thomas Edison was one of the inventors of the modern movie as his moving images used a kinetoscope at first, but by 1896, a lantern and screen arrangement enabled the film image to be viewed by a group audience

However, this kind of technology was being invented prior to Edison’s discovery: the Lumière brothers from France were the first in 1895 to project short films of everyday subject matter: called it cinématographie

The projector that was designed for the Lumière brothers used a claw like device to pull the film through at the required speed; similar projectors were designed about the same time in England and America

George Mélies: caricaturist, set designer, actor, and producer, he approached film as a magician and artist; special effects that were derived from his career as a magician; by 1900 made over 200 1-2 minute films

Applied one of the most commonly used devices used in filmmaking today: the jump-cut: Mélies discovered it completely by accident when the film in his camera jammed and when he resumed shooting, the bus in a frame had turned into a hearse

A Trip to the Moon was film that was double in length from 2 minutes to 5 minutes and inspired a century of space movies including Star Wars

Edwin S. Porter: The Great Train Robbery from 1902 was the first to use a classic chase scene; first illusion of riding on a train; shock of seeing a passenger being shot by a bandit and then turning the gun into the audience; but most importantly, he was the first to edit

In 1905:

the first nickelodeon was opened in the U.S. (nickel for the cost, odeon, the French word for theater – was dedicated to showing movies)

halftone process was adopted to make it possible for photographs to be printed in mass publications like newspapers in magazines – prior to this, mass-media images were woodcuts or etchings done from actual photographs of current events

the French government dropped its sole sponsorship and dominance of the Academy and Salon system

Films were popular entertainment for the lower classes which included many immigrants who could understand the universal plots in early films

By WWI, theaters were built to cater to the middle-class

Please watch these examples of early film (you won’t be disappointed!):

Lumière Brothers films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nj0vEO4Q6s

A Trip to the Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FrdVdKlxUk

The Great Train Robbery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0oBQIWAfe4