PHOTOGRAPHY PUSHED PAINTING INTO MODERNISM
In Celebrating 100 Years of American Modernism 1913-2013, attention is focused on the photographic roots of Modernism, for had photography not been invented, doubtless painting would have continued on its classic trajectory, based on Renaissance perspective. On January 7. 1839, Jacques Louis Mande Daguerre demonstrated the first photographic process to the French Academy of Sciences. The minor painter De La Roche declared, “From Today, Painting is DEAD’.
First, the artist was assaulted by the ‘truthful’ photographic portrait. Then followed a ‘trick’, a natural proclivity of the lens – the flattening of the subject -giving artists yet another way of seeing. Within decades, the ability to print halftone photographs along with type in the newspapers, magazines and books, where once artists’ renderings were needed to picture events thru the medium of woodcuts or engravings, became a reality. In 1895 there was film; the moving image, first investigated as a child’s toy in the Zoetrope and flip book had matured. Finally, the last bastion of the classical artist collapsed with color photography, the Lumiere autochrome process became available in 1903. Invention is unending, most recently, computer enhanced or fully generated art is today’s reality.
Painting didn’t die. Modernism evolved; not in one gigantic leap, but by many baby steps being felt in Europe, but not until the ARMORY SHOW OF 1913 ‘blew’ the cover off the ‘new’ to Americans, did modernism come to America’s shores.
Between 1900-1912 Alvin Langdon Coburn was the perfect messenger. Protégé of George Bernard Shaw, was the conduit of the ‘isms’ creeping thru Europe’s most avant garde art circles, member of Alfred Stieglitz’ Photo-Secessionists, 26 photogravures reproduced in Camera Work, all frontispiece illustrations for The Complete Works of Henry James in 24 volumes, author/illustrator of New York and London frequent exhibitor at Alfred Stieglitz’ Gallery 291, which showed the works of American’s John Marin and Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Europeans Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse; all before 1913.
The influence of photography on American Modernism is highlighted in the exhibition Celebrating 100 Years of American Modernism. The exhibition includes paintings and works on paper by John Graham, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield, George Bellows, Oscar Bluemner, Abraham Walkowitz, Charles Sheeler, Perle Fine, Hans Hofmann, Romate Bearden, Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning and David Smith, photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn from 1906-1912, Man Ray 1927-1935, Aleksander Rodchenko 1935, Lewis Hine 1930, Weegee 1950. Four avant gard films by Man Ray are screened at 2 and 5 pm daily. For Americans, the 1913 Armory show was a breakout moment. The exhibition climaxes with a heavy emphasis on the works of Milton Avery the last great American Modernist, and continues to the present post WWII Modern and Contemporary artists. August-September 2013 Vered Gallery, East Hampton NY www.veredart.com
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I'm not sure we can be so certain that painting would have continued along the Renaissance trajectory had photography not been invented. There were various factors influencing mid- to late 19th century European painters. Photography was certainly one of them but so, too, was the influx of prints and other visual material from Japan. The impact of Japanese art can be seen in both the painting and the photography of this period. Alvin Langdon Coburn's 1909 album 'London', for instance clearly shows the influence of printmakers such as Hiroshige and Hokusai. In fact, many of the traits which are associated with photography - flattening of forms, arbitrary cropping, etc - which appear in the work of Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and so on, were long established in the Japanese pictorial tradition.