PAINTING WITH LIGHT AT THE TATE BRITAIN
PAINTING WITH LIGHT at the TATE BRITAIN
This exhibition at the
Tate Britain traces the influence of photography in the 19th century through to
the modern era. Some of the great names of early photography such as William
Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), are present in the exhibition but there are also
unexpectedly obscure figures who are given prime position.
The first room introduces
us to the photographer Robert Adamson (1821-1848) and the painter David
Octavius Hill (1802-1870) who established one of the first photographic studios
in Edinburgh. Photography had been invented in 1839 although the camera obscura
had been invented in ancient China and had been utilised by the artists of the
Renaissance. During their four-year partnership Adamson and Octavius Hill took
more than 4000 photographs in Edinburgh but it was their collaboration on the
Disruption Portrait (1843-1866) a depiction of the rebel assembly that founded
the Free Church of Scotland that initiates this exhibition. Cameras of this era
lacked wide-angle lenses and were thus incapable of depicting such an event, so
Adamson provided photographic portraits of many of the 423 members of the
Assembly to Octavius Hill. The work took 23 years to complete and today its
technical dimensions are clearly the reason why it is even viewed for it is
hardly a stunning artwork. At this stage photography was a necessary adjunct to
painting since both forms struggled to encompass their own limitations both in
terms of realism and inherent technical problems. A partnership was therefore
not only necessary but vital.
Another major figure in
the development of 19th century art in Britain, John Ruskin (1819-1900) who
also interacted with and influenced the Pre-Raphaelites, is represented in his
work The North-West Angle of the Façade of St Mark’s Venice (c1850). Ruskin was
attempting to re-construct the architectural history of Venice in his three
volume work Stones of Venice which celebrated the Gothic period rather
than the preceding Byzantine period when Christianity was the major rationale
for building in the city. This work, completed with watercolour and graphite on
paper, is contrasted with a daguerreotype plate, photographic images captured
on silver coated copper plates, depicting the same feature of St Marks, and
completed by his valet John Hobbs (1825-92). Ruskin clearly regarded
photography as mere documentation, tellingly left to his servant to complete,
and not as the art form it was to become.
Parallel developments in
art and photography resulted in an intensifying of the debate between arguments
for art and truth and the deliberate creation of a conscious aesthetic as
opposed to the instantaneous and spontaneous nature of photography. Photography
itself was in its infancy and still in a continuous technological development.
Access to photographic equipment was still restricted to professionals and
experts unlike today when most people can take photos with their mobile phones
and share them via Instagram or Facebook. Critical attempts at realism were
still relevant although an awareness was dawning in the art community that
parallel dimensions of “realism” had appeared in both arts.
The scientific study of
geology and geography became a subject of artists who supposed that such
studies could reveal spiritual truths. William Henry Fox Talbot’s work The
Geologists, (Chudleigh, Devon, c1843. Salt print from calotype negative).
The salt print technique was developed by Fox Talbot. This entailed making
paper photogenic by wetting it with a solution of table salt and then coating
the obverse side with silver nitrate.) takes over the genre piece of a couple
surrounded by nature (as in Gainsborough’s work Mr and Mrs Andrews 1750, a work
which is also meant to imply the relationship between the couple and their
property and therefore, their rights and entitlements) but this time a couple
are examining a geological formation. The nineteenth-century implied a
reformulation of tradition in terms of the new fad for scientific theories such
as Darwinism. Other works such as Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of
October 5th, 1858 (?1858-60 oil on canvas) by William Dyce
(1806-1864) where Dyce’s family are gathering shells but overshadowed by the
cliffs with their carefully depicted rock strata and eroded faces. Donati’s
comet hurtles through the sky overhead contextualising the work again within
cosmic rather than human limits. Glacier of Rosenlaui (1856 oil paint on
canvas) by John Brett (1831-1902) is really a study of the minute details of
rocks whereas the same scene, a photograph, albumen print on paper, by
Friedrich von Martens (1809-1875) in 1855 is contrastingly a conventional
landscape. The albumen print method was the first commercially exploitable
method of producing a photographic print on a paper base from a negative,
binding the photographic chemicals to the paper using the medium of albumen,
the substance found in egg white. This technique was the dominant form of
photographic positives from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the
twentieth.
In his work Nocturne:
Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (c1872-5) by James Abbott McNeill
Whistler (1834-1903), a unique rendering of light, colour and detail is
created. The technique of cropping the photographic image to accentuate subject
matter or change aspect ratio is implied in this work which was also featured
in the infamous libel case between Whistler and Ruskin. The critic Walter Pater
summarised the effect of this painting: “impressions, unstable, flickering,
inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them.”
In this period photography often tended to imitate the effects of painting to
lend it the gravitas of an art form but here the obverse is true.
The exhibition charts the
initial general response by artists to photography than the more sophisticated
response of various art movements such as the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetes,
but these movements are also foregrounded in subsequent rooms. Works by
Rossetti, Millais and others are contrasted with the photographs that they were
based upon.
Tableaux or depictions of
literary subjects and themes was also important in the development of photography.
Subjects such as Chatterton (1856 oil paint on canvas) by Henry Wallis
(1830-1916), a depiction of the 18th century poet who committed suicide after
being exposed as fraudulently faking medieval poems became wildly popular and
hundreds of thousands in Britain paid a shilling to view it. James Robinson
(active 1850s and 60s) created a stereograph The Death of Chatterton (1859
two photographs, hand tinted albumen prints of stereo card.) obviously to
exploit the popularity of the original. The stereograph is two photographs but
looked at through a viewing device known as a stereoscope, creates the
perception of a three-dimensional effect just as our eyes create a similar
illusion of depth. Legal proceedings were brought against Robinson to prevent
him from limiting the artist’s income. This was one of the first art copyright
cases, but it did not stop the imitation of paintings for commercial
exploitation by stereographers.
Painting with Light
is an exhibition that is gigantic in scope and ponderous in its conclusions. It
is difficult to summarise because its baggy enormity seems to shoot off in all
kinds of directions, but the scientific details are not foregrounded merely the
aesthetic. Another exhibition might have provided the kind of detail that
photographers rather than painters find fascinating.
Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, August 2016
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