These days, the boundaries between forms of visual art are permeable. Artists produce work that resists being relegated to strict categories, cheerfully combining paint, photo-based imagery, computer manipulations, three-dimensional construction, found objects, video projections, and a host of processes I probably can’t even guess at, without concern for how the result might be classified. Once, however, distinctions between mediums were extremely important, for all sorts of reasons ranging from the aesthetic to the sociological. The paragone—the comparison of the worth of painting and drawing—had been a serious topic of discussion from classical times to the eighteenth century, with drawing usually deemed superior because, the reasoning went, an outline without color still could be a convincing image, while color that was not organized by drawing (pre-Abstract Expressionism, at least) would be meaningless. In the Renaissance, the relative merits of painting and sculpture were rigorously considered. In an effort to distinguish their work from that of mere artisans, painters declared themselves to be intellectual practitioners of a liberal art, in contrast to sculptors, who were essentially manual laborers. As Leonardo pointed out, sculptors got hot and dusty, while painters, dressed in elegant clothes, dipped their brushes in beautiful colors and listened to learned discourse. Moreover, as he wrote in his notebooks, sculpture was incapable of achieving painting’s illusionistic effects. How could a sculptor evoke, say, a running stream, with plants, rocks, and swimming fish seen under water, by carving stone, as a painter could with pigment?

All of these arguments are rooted in the assumption that the artist’s role is to reproduce what can be perceived, so it is not surprising that the debate intensified with the advent of a new medium—photography—that, initially at least, seemed to be the ultimate mimetic tool. Once photographs had become something other than technological curiosities, artists often regarded the new phenomenon with suspicion. Painters who had spent years learning how to reproduce the world around them with fidelity were frequently hostile to a new “mechanical” device that seemed to confer that hard-won skill on just about anyone. No photograph, many held, could rival art. Photography, it was assumed, replicated everything placed before the camera, accurately but unselectively, according equal emphasis to whatever came within the mechanical eye’s field of vision; artists, by contrast, no matter how dedicated they were to being faithful to appearances, constantly arranged, adjusted, altered, and shifted emphasis, in order to make visible an ideal world (by correcting nature’s imperfect parts) or to heighten expressiveness.

No photograph, many held, could rival art.

But photography’s potential as a way of making art, as well as a means of uncritical documentation, rapidly revealed itself. Some early photographers strove to make pictures that looked as much like paintings as possible, choosing motifs that painters would have selected, softening focus, and exaggerating contrast to simplify tonal range in an effort to suppress details and make the result look “painterly.” Others reveled in the camera’s ability to record detail, attempting to rival the most accomplished—and high-minded—Academicians by staging history paintings and allegories with live models. (The preposterous results are now often prized as monuments of High Camp.) Artists, too, were fascinated by the alluring new medium. By the 1850s, Gustave Courbet, whose understanding of the power of self-promotion would serve him well if he were working today, had already grasped photography’s usefulness as a way of recording and publicizing his paintings. By the early 1860s, he routinely had photographs made of his major pictures and sold them both to promote the work and to generate additional income beyond the sale price of a single painting; later he sold the rights to photographic reproduction of certain works. As a mature, established painter, Edgar Degas became an avid photographer who obliged his friends to pose to the point where they complained. A few surviving prints also suggest that he took photographs to use as starting points or aids to making work in other mediums; a handful of tantalizing images of dancers and nudes seems unquestionably to be the bases of pastels and sculptures. Still later, Thomas Eakins, probably inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s “stop-time” sequences, used photography as a means of studying the human body in motion, exploiting its ability to capture transitional poses that eluded the draftsman’s pencil.

By the 1870s, using photographs to supplement direct observation of the motif had become widespread, although few artists seem to have mastered the process of taking their own pictures, as Degas and later Eakins did. The laws of supply and demand being what they are, sellers of photographs filled the gap, providing images for artists’ use. Testimony to how established the practice had become by the late 1870s is provided by a notice placed by the well-known publisher, editor, and seller of photographs, Auguste Giraudon, announcing that he had “commissioned a painter” (who wished to remain anonymous) “to do a series of photographic studies of peasants at work in the forest near Barbizon.” The results were to be sold to artists to be used as generating images for their own efforts. The market for such studies, as scholars of the period have pointed out, can be inferred from the location of Giraudon’s gallery—on the rue Bonaparte, across the street from the Ecole des Beaux-arts.

The fruits of this interesting commission were recently discovered in a private collection in France.

The fruits of this interesting commission were recently discovered in a private collection in France. It is a remarkable group of works, a series of iconic images of rural France or perhaps more accurately, of an idealized, invented rural France, a celebration of the virtues of outdoor labor in “la France profonde.” Many of the images are powerful in their own right; their arresting compositions and rich orchestrations of texture and tone are evidence that a sensitive eye was at work. But what is specially interesting is that the series has uncanny parallels with paintings of the period. Picture after picture of sturdy young shepherdesses, peasant girls, and young men in smocks, all with clumsy sabots, recall the works of Jean-François Millet, Camille Pissarro, and even Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, a correspondence that both confirms the intimate relationship of photography to painting at the time and raises interesting questions about that relationship.

During the month of December, this relationship was suggestively probed in “The Figure and the Forest: Nineteenth-Century French Photographs and Drawings,” a tightly focused, well-chosen exhibition that brought together a broad selection of photographs by “Giraudon’s artist” and drawings by Corot, Millet, and members of the Barbizon School, including Theodore Rousseau and Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Pena, among others. (The exhibition was organized by a trio of dealer/scholars with admirable expertise in nineteenth-century drawings and photography: Jill Newhouse, Howard Greenberg, and Charles Isaacs.)¹ The show’s bold, richly inflected drawings made as rapid responses to the complexity of landscape, along with its equally compelling photographs, offered abundant aesthetic rewards and suggested provocative comparisons, yet the effect of the whole was larger than the sum of its parts. Together, the works in the two disciplines made us consider the nature of reality, the role of photography in creating myth as well as in recording ostensible fact, the similarities and differences between the painter’s and the photographer’s eye, and much more.

If there is still anyone who believes that photographs can provide an unmediated, dispassionate view of the world, the images by “Giraudon’s artist” in “The Figure and the Forest” would be enough to disprove the notion. Far from being truthful views of peasants going about their normal activities, it is plain that the photos were as carefully composed and staged as any studio set-up. Just as in Millet’s paintings and drawings, the protagonists of the images appear to be so absorbed in their work or so stupefied by their labor that they are oblivious of the presence of any observer—an obvious impossibility, no matter how potent the illusion, given the cumbersome equipment and slow exposures of the period. In one startling exception, a young woman bent under a load of firewood smiles at the photographer, while in another, a self-possessed girl, resting on sort of wheelbarrow, stares at him, as boldly as Manet’s Olympia. The photographs as a group offer further clues to the artifice that underlies them. The same hedgerow is used as background for different motifs, and there are multiple versions of related activities; even the animals seem posed. In one very beautiful picture, a woman bends forward, pretending to shear a newly shorn sheep. And so on. To heighten the illusion of indifference or lack of acknowledgment of the viewer and to intensify the sense of introspection and absorption, figures are seen in profile; they bend so their faces are obscured or turn away from the camera’s intrusive eye. Confronted by these deliberately contrived contrasts, we remain convinced of the truth of what has been captured even as we take into account how carefully the images were crafted.

Many images are hard to forget.

The tension between our fictive sense of being an omniscient beholder of real life and our simultaneous awareness of the unreality of what has been recorded was a considerable part of the pleasure offered by the Giraudon photographs, but in purely visual terms, they offered even more. Many images are hard to forget. A pair of young women resting on sheaves of hay, against a background of coarse leaves, became a sculptural exercise in opposed postures: one figure, her back to us, leans into the space of the image and the other shifts slightly out of strict profile, head lowered, eyes downcast, arms resting on her knees. A variant on the theme showed the same pair of women, each holding a sheaf, one lost in thought at the bottom of the composition, the other, in profile, creating a powerful triangular shape with her bundle of hay, both playing their role in a gorgeous orchestration of linear patterns and subtly modulated tones. A mysterious photo of birdnesters centered on two boys, one standing on the other’s back to reach the branches of a tree, against a blurred orchard. The boys turn into a kind of totem made more eloquent by the contrast between the sense of transient, brilliant light and the palpable sense of weight, transferred downward from the standing boy to the back of the hunched companion supporting him. Some specially beautiful images seemed to enter into a dialogue with Pissarro and Millet. In Two Women Harvesting, the figures, one facing forward, one in profile, are so sharply bent at the waist that they are reduced to little more than the light rectangles of their caps, the vertical strokes of their arms, and the curves of their backs. In Peasant Standing in Dappled Light Holding a Rake, a young woman extends one arm and decorously touches her throat with her other hand, turning her head sharply into profile, like a figure in an archaic frieze. The rich, subtle tonal range and staccato rhythms of dark and light seem the equivalents of the broken, close-valued color of Impressionist paintings of the period. It is unlikely, given the Romantic view of peasant life announced by these images and their rather self-consciously “artistic” poses, that their author was a particularly progressive painter. Yet there is ample evidence in his images that in the overtly modern medium of photography, at least, he rejected the Academy’s hierarchical adulation of the antique in favor of a celebration of one aspect of ordinary life, however artfully manipulated and presented. That the way of life he claimed to report on in his photographs was itself already beginning to change, under the pressures of the industrial revolution and growing urbanization, adds poignancy to the images, although it is probably an exaggeration to assign such awareness to him.

Since all of the drawings in “The Figure and the Forest” predated the photographs by “Giraudon’s artist” and since most were of landscape motifs, rather than of figures, the correspondences between the works in the two mediums did not seem, at first acquaintance, to be always ideal. When there were real overlaps, the effect was dramatic. An economical pen and ink drawing by Millet, Two Shepherds Conversing (1866), for example, had such uncanny resonance with the photograph Two Boys Resting, from the bent-legged pose of one figure to the kicked-off sabots, that it made you long for more such extraordinary comparisons. Yet from another point of view, the Barbizon School landscape drawings that were the mainstay of the show were, in fact, closer to the photographs by “Giraudon’s artist” than they first appeared to be. Rousseau’s vigorous ink studies of trees were done en plein air to capture the artist’s response to nature and to inform his work on canvas, while the photographs by “Giraudon’s artist,” described as études d’après nature, were intended to serve a similar function. The photographic études represent an effort to adapt a new medium to traditional practice. Both drawings and photographs are artfully considered interpretations, carefully selected constructions, intended to bridge the gap between raw, unedited actuality and art. It’s worth noting, too, that despite the differences in date and of subject, many of the same visual qualities were present in the works in both mediums, most notably the restless play of light on foliage. It’s a recurring theme in the photographs, where ivy-covered walls and leafy backgrounds set off the simplified shapes of peasant clothing, and it’s the main building block of the Barbizon drawings, reconstituted as a flicker of pen marks across the surface of the paper.

The myriad connections between technological developments and aesthetic evolution in the nineteenth century are an endlessly absorbing subject. The advent of photography was only one element in a complex disruption of established norms that ranged from how artists changed their practice once stable, commercially prepared paint became available in easily portable tubes, to the way increasingly rapid travel by railroad affected perception and an artist’s choice of subject matter. But it is obviously impossible to unravel cause and effect during the years when innovations in the arts and technology were inextricably bound up with each other—and with sociological and economic change, as well—but that’s another matter. The interesting combination of works in “The Figure and the Forest” underlined the difficulties of clarifying cause and effect. In the end, however, trying to reach a decision about what influenced what seemed unimportant. Whatever the sequence of cause and effect, it was an absorbing, thought-provoking exhibition.

Notes
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