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| Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art |
"It looks just like a photograph,” said one middle-aged man
to another while viewing Sargent’s affecting 1905 portrait of the 100-year-old
Spanish singer Manuel Garcia at the IBM Gallery on 57th
Street some years ago. It was around noontime. The two gentlemen were dressed in suits and
looked respectable and polite, so I was encouraged to interject, “No it
doesn’t. It looks just like life
itself. No photograph can even come
close to that.”
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| Antwerp Cathedral, Belgium |
But artists know that the highest praise John Q. Public can
bestow on a figurative painting today is, “It looks just like a
photograph.” Aren’t we glad that Rubens
lived in an age when painting was supreme among all the visual arts and he
could paint “The Descent from the Cross” and not worry about Photorealism, Hyperrealism
or any other shady art marketing gimmick.
I blame photography for a lot of the evil visited upon
figurative painting over the past 100 years in the guise of artistic freedom. When photography was new in the 19th
Century, Degas and many other painters were fascinated, and they enjoyed
sampling from this magic elixir. A few of
the academic realists, including plein air painters like Dagnan-Bouveret, even painted
figures based on photographs, a shocking discovery for some of us in the late
20th Century.
The best figurative painters in the 19th Century continued
to paint from life, though, and seemingly ignored this potential threat to
their livelihoods. The existence of
photos of subjects painted by Sargent does not prove by any stretch of the
imagination that he used them in his figure work, but a couple of his later
landscapes look rather suspicious.
Other brilliant bravura painters, like Zorn and Sorolla, appeared
to have good reasons for employing photos of people on occasion to help with
some of their more challenging subjects. Zorn seemed to have used reference photos for his paintings
of pulchritudinous nudes posing sweetly unabashed in a Swedish forest or
stream. But the paintings bear (sic)
little resemblance to the photos, praise the Lord.
Sorolla’s beach scenes in brilliant sunlight, with their
precise, late-afternoon cast shadows on the animated figures, could easily have
been abetted by the use of photos. But
if he did use photos, nobody seems to have reported seeing him do so. The great Boldini thought Sorolla painted
from snapshots. Sorolla’s father-in-law
had a photography studio. One of
Sorolla’s American students recalled that he would always be shooed off at a
critical point so he never saw Sorolla apply the finishing touches to a
painting. Hmmm! But other painters firmly declared that Sorolla
never painted from photographs. The best
19th Century figurative artists did not need to use photographs anyway
because their painting and drawing skills were so secure, honed from an early
age.
Despite its many advantages over oil painting as a visual
record-keeper, photography sucks the life out of life. Humans don’t see their world like a camera
does, so there is no visceral connection with a still photograph in the way
there can be when an oil portrait, landscape or still life is powerfully
executed from direct observation of nature.
Many of today’s figurative painters are willing slaves to the
photographs that have enabled them to paint dogs, horses, and humans in the
first place. Some of them do very well
financially, thank you very much. But speaking
from experience, most of them begin their serious studies too late in life to develop
the presumed extraordinary hand to eye coordination of the earlier painters,
who started at age 12 or younger and kept right on going, with no time off to
attend an Ivy League finishing school.
As a consequence, most of today’s painters are unable to expand convincingly
on the enforced parameters of the flat photograph, with its foreshortening
absurdities. Nor can they compensate for
the photo’s utter lack of atmospheric perspective (visual effects created
by the air we breathe, particularly depth perception and color
modification). This is the thing that
ultimately brings life to the painted image when carefully observed from nature
and suggested on canvas by a sensitive artist.
The worst part of all this is the painters don’t see anything wrong with
copying photographs, usually claiming they are “interpreting” them, and the
buying public doesn’t either!
Quite a growing number of young artists in America
and elsewhere are currently attempting to work from life in the style of
Bouguereau and other 19th Century French academic artists. They attempt to follow what is known about
the French academic method in their portrait and figure sketches, which are
often very accomplished. In their more
polished works, while they may they get the surface look of those earlier
paintings, they miss the feeling. I
think they spend too many hours zeroing in on details that are captured better
by high-resolution digital cameras. In
fact, it occurs to me that a futile competition with an “iron horse” might be playing
out here. The old painters were
admonished to subdue or ignore those details.
It used to be said that it took two people to paint a picture – one to
paint it and the other to tell him when to quit. Nobody believes that anymore!
Another issue I have with these neo-Bouguereau painters is their
high-contrast figures often appear to be cut out from the surrounding space,
which is rendered without a satisfying illusion of depth. And attempts to inject poetic narrative into their
figurative paintings, so commonplace in the 19th Century, seem merely
to be awkwardly executed tributes to those earlier painters, at least in my
jaundiced view. Take a good look at the Art
Renewal Center
website and judge for yourself.
Ultimately, of course, we are all caught up in the maelstrom
of high-definition this and that now dominating our visual world. So maybe it’s inevitable that many of today’s
painters, even when they work entirely from life, end up with paintings that
really do look “just like a photograph!”
