hung hai | women and education |
For Artists, a Hand-Held Revolution of Point and Click'Snapshot: Painters and Photography,' at Phillips Collection
"Snapshot" features paintings and photographs by artists who experimented with early hand-held cameras. From left, "On the Beach," an 1899 oil painting by Félix Vallotton, and "The Two Sunshades," a 1902 photo by Vuillard. More Photos »
By KAREN ROSENBERG
Published: April 5, 2012
- Sign In to E-Mail
- Reprints
WASHINGTON — " Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard ," at the Phillips Collection, celebrates some early adopters of the handheld camera. The first one, introduced by Kodak in 1888, freed artists to take pictures without worrying about tripods, glass plates or chemicals. And, to judge from the photographs here, it turned skilled painters into bumbling amateurs. That too was liberating.
Multimedia
Slide Show 'Snapshot'
Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.
- Go to Arts Beat »
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
- Go to Event Listings »
By focusing on Bonnard , Vuillard and a few other Post-Impressionists, "Snapshot" brings some order to an unwieldy topic: the competitive relationship between painting and photography at the dawn of the 20th century. And throughout, its more than 200 photographs and 70 paintings, prints and drawings press us to think about our own fast-changing photographic culture.
The show, which comes to the Phillips from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and travels to the Indianapolis Museum of Art this summer, originated with dissertation research conducted some 30 years ago by Elizabeth W. Easton. Ms. Easton, who now directs the Center for Curatorial Leadership in Manhattan, discovered a trove of photographs by Vuillard in his family archive.
Her project grew to encompass Vuillard's brethren in the Post-Impressionist Nabis movement: Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Félix Vallotton and Henri Rivière, as well as two more obscure contemporaries, the Dutch painter George Hendrik Breitner and the Belgian Henri Evenepoel. Breitner is little known outside of the Netherlands; Evenepoel worked in Paris alongside Matisse but died in 1899, at 27, on the cusp of Modernism.
These artists were by no means united in their approach to the camera. Some took pictures in preparation for paintings or prints. Others reversed that equation, making photographic versions of existing paintings. Their commitment levels varied too. Bonnard abandoned photography after a couple of years; Vuillard stuck with it, and even did his own printing (or had his mother do it, under his supervision).
While perusing the photographs in this sprawling show, you ought to keep in mind the differences between the early hand-held cameras and the clunkier tripod models used by Degas and the Impressionists. The Kodak was much easier to carry, but it gave the photographer less control over the image. Artists had to hold it at waist height, peering into a circular reflecting viewfinder; they could not frame or focus their shots with precision.
But, as the smartphone has taught us, amateur photographers will happily trade perfection for convenience. And the Kodak's drawbacks might actually have endeared it to the Nabis; the blurry, awkward images it produced weren't much of a threat to painting.
Few of these photographs were meant for exhibition. They were intended to document family life or gather material for prints or paintings, or to serve more prurient interests. Their subjects are unremarkable: city views, children playing outdoors, friends and intimates, nude women.
Bonnard's photographs, mainly of his paramour and eventual wife, Marthe de Meligny, feel especially cloistered. When the dealer Ambroise Vollard commissioned lithographs to accompany the erotic poem "Daphnis and Chloe," Bonnard had Marthe pose naked in the garden. Indoor pictures show her crouched over a washtub, a more aloof and limber version of one of Degas's bathers.
Near the Bonnards are sleazier nudes by Breitner, who encouraged Sapphic displays of affection from his models. With an eye to the craze for Japanese art, he also took pictures of girls lounging around in kimonos. (These pictures, unlike the nudes, were setups for paintings.)
Of greater interest is Breitner's street photography, which reminds you how new this genre was. He crept up on anonymous pedestrians along Amsterdam's canals and bridges; in one picture, a servant girl carrying a large bundle turns and looks over her shoulder accusingly.
More vertiginous city views appear in Rivière's pictures, taken from the upper levels of the Eiffel Tower as it neared completion. In them the building's interlaced iron girders evoke the shadow-puppet theater Rivière created for the Paris cabaret Le Chat Noir.
Photographs by Evenepoel and Denis amount to early Kodak moments; the artists dote on chubby toddlers and slightly exhausted-looking mothers. But Evenepoel also shows the frightening side of parenthood, in shots of a sick child in bed.
Thus far, the relationship between the artists' photographs and their paintings isn't very complicated. That changes with Vallotton and Vuillard, who understood that the snapshot altered sights as much as it preserved them.
Vallotton seems to have used the camera as an editing tool, one that could serve narrative by flattening shapes and blurring extraneous details. In that spirit he imposed his own changes, cutting and pasting details from his photographs as he adapted them for the canvas. Working from a shot of his wife seated before a fireplace, for instance, he removed a patterned drapery in the background and placed a small child at the foot of the chair.
Vuillard, meanwhile, found that photography could complicate his paintings. His interior scenes amplify the natural distortions of the camera's lens with teasing spatial ambiguities. In the foreground, figures seem to lurch toward the viewer; in the background, they fade into the heavily patterned wallpaper. Either way, Vuillard's closely inscribed circle of friends and family starts to feel alarmingly claustrophobic.
On their own, the photographs in "Snapshot" aren't great. The Post-Impressionists, it turns out, succumbed to the same basic impulses as most contemporary amateurs. (You wonder what they would have done with Instagram.) But behind their dilettantism is a drive to understand what the hand-held camera would do to art; to ascertain whether, as Vuillard once said, "painting would always have the advantage over photography of being done by hand."
"Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard" continues through May 6 at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington; (202) 387-2151, phillipscollection.org.
