Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [72]
PHOTOGRAPHY’S IMPACT ON PAINTING
When the French romantic pointer Delaroche, known for his painstakingly detailed scenes, heard of the first photograph, he proclaimed, “From this day, painting is dead!” The art of painting miniature portraits was immediately doomed, replaced by the ubiquitous daguerreotypes which could be ready in fifteen minutes for 12½ cents. The Fauve painter Vlaminck spoke for fearful painters when he said, “We hate everything that has to do with the photograph.”
Other artists viewed photographs as helpful adjuncts. Delacroix used them as studies for hord-to-hold poses, saying, “let a man of genius make use of the Daguerreotype as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.” His bitter rival, Ingres, denied that photographs could ever be fine art but also used them as portrait studies, admiring “their exactitude that I would like to achieve.” His portraits have a silvery style similar to daguerreotypes.
Soon many painters saw the advantage of using photographs for portraits instead of interminable sittings. After artists had reproduced the camera likeness, the subject had only to sit for final color touch-ups. Bierstadt found photos useful models for his panoramic landscapes, while Courbet and Manet also used them. Degas’s frozen-action shots helped him devise unusual poses and unconventional compositions. Within three generations after the invention of photography, painters abandoned the image for abstraction.
Gradually photographers began to insist their craft was more than a trade of snapping portraits or groundwork for painting but a fine art in itself. As the writer Lamartine put it, photography was “more than an art, it is a solar phenomenon, where the artist collaborates with the sun.” The camera excelled at reproducing images realistically, but photographers aspired to imitate painting. To compete with the artist’s imagination, “art photographers” began to shoot images slightly out of focus, retouch negatives, odd point to prints, superimpose negatives, and otherwise manipulate the mechanically produced images. A new art form for the post-Industrial-Revolution world was born.
IMPRESSIONISM: LET THERE BE COLOR AND LIGHT
The movement known as Impressionism marked the first total artistic revolution since the Renaissance. Born in France in the early 1860s, in its purest form it lasted only until 1886, but it nevertheless determined the course of most art that followed. Impressionism radically departed from tradition by rejecting Renaissance perspective, balanced composition, idealized figures, and chiaroscuro. Instead, the Impressionists represented immediate visual sensations through color and light.
Their main goal was to present an “impression,” or the initial sensory perceptions recorded by an artist in a brief glimpse. They built on Leonardo’s observation that a person’s face and clothes appear green when walking through a sunlit field. Color, they discovered, is not an intrinsic, permanent characteristic of an object but changes constantly according to the effects of light, reflection, or weather on the object’s surface.
To meet the challenge of portraying such fleeting qualities of light, they created a distinctive short, choppy brushstroke. These brightly colored spots formed a mosaic of irregular daubs throbbing with energy like the pulsebeat of life or the shimmer of light on water. At close range, the Impressionists’ daubs of pure color side by side looked unintelligible, causing critics to charge they “fired paint at the canvas with a pistol.” At a distance, however, the eye fused separate streaks of blue and yellow, for instance, into green, making each hue seem more intense