Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at the Tate Modern
Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and
Abstract Art
Tate Modern
“Unless
photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the
other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.” – Alfred Stieglitz
This
exhibition offers no background information to the long 20th century
but goes straight to the early pioneers of abstract art and photography. In the beginning photographers followed where
artists had led but the inter-relationship of the two arts was later to
change. The point of innovators and
practitioners was to make photography into an art form rather than a scientific
process.
In
America photographer Alfred Stieglitz launched Camera Work (1903), a journal promoting photography as a fine art
and his gallery 291 in New York City with the same aim. At first Stieglitz’s photographs embraced
painterly techniques but later he began to take photos with qualities essential
to the medium. His relationship with
Georgia O’Keefe underlines the new connection between painting and photography.
In
Britain abstract photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966) worked alongside
American writer Ezra Pound and the Vorticists, a group of artists founded by
iconoclast, writer and painter Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) in London in
1914. The group espoused geometrical designs
over realist ones to suggest modernity and the urban environment as in Lewis’s
painting Workshop (1914-15, Oil paint
on canvas). Coburn invented a device
known as the ‘vortoscope’ to create a prism that fractured the photographic
surface producing kaleidoscopic effects.
Form is beginning to take the place of content in his Vortographs (1917,
photograph, gelatin silver print on paper).
Brazilian
photographer German Lorca (1922 -) sought to reproduce the effects of paintings
like Piet Mondrian’s (1872-1944) Composition
C (No.111) with Red, Yellow and Blue (1935). His Mondrian
Window 1960 (photograph, gelatin silver print on paper) seeks to relate
Mondrian’s effects to the viewer by making choices of perspective, cropping and
lighting rather than pointlessly imitating Mondrian’s effects which are
intrinsically photographic anyway. Lorca
is teasing out the possibilities of the new medium rather as Mondrian is
presenting a light bulb in contrast to the candle of previous art.
Parity
of influence of the two mediums is demonstrated by Pierre Dubreil (1872-1944)
who said: “Why should the inspiration that comes from an artist’s manipulation
of the hairs of a brush be any different from that of the artist who bends at
will the rays of light?” Dubreil’s work Interpretation Picasso: The Railway
(c1911 photograph gelatin silver print on paper) attempts to realise the cubist
dynamic of Picasso and Georges Braque (1882-1963) as in his work Mandora (1909-10 oil paint on
canvas). Dubreil achieves the
fragmentation implied by cubism through photographic processes as a challenge
to the medium’s claim to objectively represent reality. Cubism was challenging the assumed centrality
of the subject as a recorder of reality, implying that the subject was more a
collision of viewpoints suggesting a three-dimensional form. Photography was following the new claims of
art to break down centuries old assumptions about artwork and viewer.
In
the 1920s artists began to create a new visual language, to present a new
vision of the world. The German Bauhaus
movement, visionary figures like Aleksandr Rodchenko in Russia and theorists
and practitioners like the Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy sought to create an
independent photographic language.
Moholy-Nagy, a self-taught Modernist of great influence who was
introduced to photography by his wife, said: “We have – through a hundred years
of photography and two decades of film – been enormously enriched…We may say we
see the world with entirely different eyes.”
Moholy-Nagy recognised the medium’s ability to capture the emblems of
modern life, from skyscrapers to the inner workings of machines. Technical innovations such as the use of 35mm
celluloid cinema film to make photographs meant that photographers were given
new freedom of expression. Experiments
with perspective led Moholy-Nagy, for instance, to adopt ‘bird’s eye’ and
‘worm’s eye’ view of the modern city.
Abstract compositions like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s (1895-1946) View from Berlin Radio Tower (1928-10
photograph gelatin silver print on paper) and Theo van Doesburg’s (1881-1931) Counter-Composition VI (1925 oil on
canvas) seem to celebrate architectural innovation and begin to present the
world in new and surprising ways unknown to previous generations. Architectural space is suggested by
Doesburg’s composition and the flow of dynamic wires and interfaces.
In
the 1920s Moholy-Nagy began to create Photograms, a technique known to
photographers from the earliest experiments with the medium by laying objects
onto photosensitive paper without a camera.
Instead of reproducing reality photographers like Jean Arp were
exploring photography’s capacity to create new realities through the
manipulation of light, chemicals and paper.
Photograms were taken by the surrealists and proto-surrealists like
Brassai and Man Ray to further undermine the realist claims of
photography. A further development were
Chemigrams created by manipulating photographic chemicals and light-sensitive
paper. Materials like wax, polish and
varnish were used to block chemical reactions to create new effects. Images were created with no objective
referent, hanging listlessly like Rohrschach diagrams, open to any vague
interpretation.
“Naturally
while working in the darkroom I could not resist the magic of light, its
miraculous ability to create an image of its own on photographic paper or plate
– an absolute photography. How little is
needed for its creation!” Bela Kolarova
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, August 2018
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