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Re: BIG



On Sun, 8 Oct 2000, Rod Fleming wrote:

> Hi
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Judy Seigel" <jseigel@panix.com>
> 
> > Aside from all the modifications of painting's "reality" throughout
> > history -- from the Etruscans to the Egyptians to the Euphasians, the
> > function of "art" changed greatly with the introduction of photography.
> 
> No it didn't. The "function of art" remained exactly the same- what happened
> was that as a result of the changes in society brought about by the
> Industrial Revolution and the increasing wealth of the middle classes, the
> patrons of art changed. New patrons had new tastes.
> 
> 
> > For a while at least, painters struggled mightily exactly to show painting
> > was NOT just "an imitation of reality"
> 
> 
> No again. Prior to the mid 19thC Western painters had come from an academic
> tradition which trained them to draw and paint by copying the works of
> artists who had gone before. Artists would spend years simply copying
> drawings before they were allowed to tackle drawing from life. So a very
> refined and stylised view of the world was trained into these artists from
> the beginning. Photography, and the discovery of other ways of depiction,
> for example Japanese prints, did have a huge influence- but men like Monet
> were actually trying to be _more_ honest to "reality", not less so. Their
> new styles, full of vibrant energy, caught the imagination of newly wealthy
> buyers and the rest, as they say, is history.
> 
> The central, and oft repeated, misconception is that painters were trying to
> imitate reality prior to the invention of photography. They most
> emphatically were not. They were using a complex visual language, which had
> evolved over centuries, and which required years of training to learn, to
> create metaphors and equivalents, just as composers do. (Not to mention to
> remove the boils and warts from portrait subjects). Photography simply
> opened their eyes to new ways of seeing and working.....in this case ways
> which depended on understanding the effect of light rather than the
> understanding of underlying form. It has nothing to do with "glossing over"
> and everything to do with the revealing the  "essence of" the real.
> 
> Monet, Seurat and DeGas were convinced that their representations were more
> "real", not than a photograph, but than the academic style which had come
> before, and in which they had all been trained. They were definitely not
> trying to move away from representation of the real, rather to tackle it!
> They saw the photograph as a useful and liberating tool, not as a threat.
> (DeGas 
  ^^^^^^^

Who he? European spelling of "Degas"?

	was himself a very enthusiastic photographer, as were many other
> painters.) 

> BTW one of the main reasons that painters like big canvases  is that oil
> paint is a sod to use on a small scale............


I see no profit in arguing semantics with Rod, but for those interested in
the topic, "Before Photography," by Peter Galassi, and much of Clement
Greenberg shed light -- among many others, including I daresay Lady
Eastlake and Wm Henry himself. Greenberg is trashed for "formalism" & some
terrible boners when he got drunk with power, but always rewards reading,
for instance, on the difference between "realistic, illusionist art" and
"modernist" painting:

"...Manet's paintings became the first modernist ones by virtue of the
frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were
painted....Whereas one tends to see what is *in* an Old Master before
seeing it as a picture, one sees a modernist painting as a picture first."

That's from epigraph to a Janet Malcolm essay Dec 4 1978 N Yorker. (Source
not cited.) Malcolm is also trashed in photo circles, but this essay,
ranging from Robert Frank, to Harry Callahan, and relation between Siskind
& de Kooning, is brilliant. 
 
Judy