Contemporary art practice in context - Technologies of the image; The visual culture of the 19th century.

There was an massive impact through new technology that lead to huge societal and cultural change during the 19th Century, after the years of enlightenment, (1750s), - approaching the early 1800s.

Traditionally the capture of image had developed slowly over the previous centuries, and by the 1800s, oil paintings had become a highly developed yet principle technology for recording events and people; as well as landscapes and other scenes, of both religious and imaginary nature.

A late example of the typical imigary and composition from the 18th century and to be considered below in the example, is the painting by George Stubbs in 1786 of “The Farmer's Wife and the Raven”.


George Stubbs was perhaps considered as one of the greatest artists of horses and equine scenes that has ever lived each took great care in the study of anatomy of horses which he carried out through dissection in his own laboratory. Is intention was to capture the beauty and musculature of horses whilst standing or in movement. However, the example above suggests that this scene of the farmer's wife about to be thrown from her horse who has stumbled perhaps at the site of the Raven is rather static and staged.



During the 18th century the emerging technology to copy paintings or scenes was continuing and have developed into in grave in both in silver plate and copper stop engravings can allow an artisan or printer as they became known to reproduce an image multiple times. For example William Hogarth in 1735 created a series of eight engravings which narrated a rakes progress here we look at plate eight the madhouse (which was retouched in 1763).
 
  The original work was taken from a painting...



You can see on the left that the Painting is the reverse image of the engraving... The mirror effect caused by the engraving transfer of course.

The next event in the reproduction of images on a mass scale, was the invention of lithography in 1796, by Alois Senefelder and based on the molecular repulsion of oil and water. (Ref; Meggs, Philip B. A History of Graphic Design. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1998. p 146)

(The impact of Lithography on Art and culture has since been extensively written about by Walter Benjamin, in his seminal book the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (see page 213 in Illuminations, London: Cape 1970)).

The march of technology continued into the 19th century at a much faster pace. With regards to projected images, magic lanterns were seen very much as a novelty, but with little or no other application. These were made from glass plates and a mechanism moved the plates in front of a light source, which in turn made the appearance of the subject (which had been hand-painted and very primitively copied onto the glass). By switching the plates, or slides from one to another, this gave a very basic suggestion of movement of the subject.

Last week we talked about the fascination in the 18th-century for the Gothic. This curiosity for the macabre and supernatural, naturally led to some smart inventor creating a photographic projection of a phantom or suchlike. In 1797 Etienne Gaspard Robertson produced a “Phantasmagoria” in a Paris cloister of a church. The audience were totally shocked and in awe of the exhibition. In 1801 a gentleman called Paul De Philipsthall presented the “phantasmagoria” in London, much to the excited 'horror', (or morbid curiosity) and surprise of the British audience. He was simply appealing to what the punters wanted and no doubt made a lot of money very quickly!

From these early experimental uses of light and translucent images the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce (born Joseph Niépce March 7, 1765 – July 5, 1833), an inventor who is now generally credited with the invention of photography, created a "camera obscura" (From the latin, Dark Chamber) in 1830.
(Extracted from http://www.wikipedia, 13th Dec. 2014), Although the image on the right is on a paper background, the process of capture was through the use of light sensitive bitumen, and a complex type of lithographic acid etched engraving, and was very time dependant and rather unreliable and so wasn't a practical means of reproduction.

(At right; One of the three earliest known photographic artifacts, created by Nicéphore Niépce in 1825. It is an ink-on-paper print, but the printing plate used to make it was photographically created by Niépce's heliography process. It reproduces a 17th-century Flemish engraving.)

Luis Daguerre then found a way of capturing an image projected onto a glass plate (through much of the exploratory work done by Niepce), created through the invention of the camera obscura. Degurre then solved the way to permanently keep the image on glass plate by using silver oxide (again, credited now to Niepce) and other chemicals to “fix” an image. (Henry Fox Tolbert in 1839 also developed something similar to photography calling it the photogenic drawing).

The real progress in photography and its' link as an art-form, came as a result other very interesting yet curious man called Eadweard Muybridge. His “new art” using photography and the use of it, created a mechanism in order to capture multiple images of movement. He understood that a series of images through time, triggered in sequence, if then replayed to the viewer at the same rate would appear to show “real” movement. He went on to produce and develop the Zoepractoscope. This invention stunned the Victorian audience, keen to try out new thrills and experiences. The very first moving pictures were thus born. It has been said that Muybridge was the first person to “be photographing verbs not nouns”.

Meanwhile towards the latter half of the 19th century other figures were emerging who were equally interested in the concept of photography. Ettienne Jules Maray created a photographic “gun”, capable of taking a series of 12 images in one second, in 1882. With this he created some beautiful images. An example of a photograph on a single plate of a flying pelican is one of the more famous. It still remains a beautiful object even in today's world of advanced technology (see Iverson and 2012, Index, Design and Graphic taste – From the Tate archives).



Through all these developments of the 19th century together with the effects of the new availability of education to the masses, a massive change was also emerging through art and its future direction. Muybridge and his films of “artistic studies” of men and women, (- which were being measured against the grid in order to compare the human body, in various poses and shapes), was in his opinion, a very detailed scientific research. But too many sightings of scantily clad or even nude women and men, was too much for the sensibilities of Victorian taste.


Muybridge's Woman Descending a Staircase inspired Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, some 20+ years later
(Courtesy of philamuseum.tumblr.com )

This “value” of taste in the Victorian era was, however, changing culture too. The austere laboratory conditions of Muybridges works were genuinely a scientific study; they were analysis on the grid (the fundamental tool used by artists since the Greeks) after all. These new images of anatomically recorded movement, went on to influence later artists such as Duchamp, Francis Bacon and Sol Le Witt, who each of which, also had a huge influence in their own contemporary time, both in taste, and art.
(Later, these studies would also influence the representation and rendering of movement in animation too).
A further single development from the Luminaire Brothers, based on Muybridges (some say) genius, and their new “cinematographic” machine to crete "Moving Pictures" or Movies, further affected what was seen as traditional art by the introduction of film. (See Dziga Vertov etc for later compositional and artistic / creative developments...).
 To place this in context of the late 19th century the Impressionist movement of painters in France had already begun to explore the effects of light and mood in painting. For example, the works by Claude Monet in 1849 of Rouen Cathedral in France, where he studied the same subject through the substance of paint itself, together with light and colour.

Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight 1892
National Gallery of Art
Washington, D.C., USA



Rouen Cathedral,red, Sunlight 1892
National Museum of Serbia
Belgrade, Serbia



La Cathédrale de Rouen. Le portail et la tour Saint-Romain, plein soleil ; harmonie bleue et or
1892-1893
Musée d'Orsay
Paris, France



La Cathédrale de Rouen. Le portail, soleil matinal; harmonie bleue 1892-1893
Musée d'Orsay
Paris, France

(See the discussion by John Berger in his book 'Ways of Seeing' and his critique of art (page 18) (1972). He explains the development from the invention of the camera and how future art would be different, in terms of its affect altogether. In essence he said “Art was broken”.
At the end of the 1890s Paul Cézanne, who classically bridges the gap between Impressionism and Cubism, wanted to capture paintings with more “informed” views of the world around him. For example - His study in 1901, of “Pyramid of Skulls” Oil on Canvass.
These advances in art, and the concepts of “image” provided the stimulus for Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque to develop Cubism. Consider Picasso's painting “Girl with a Mandolin” (1910), Oil on canvas, - currently held at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
Meanwhile, printing technology had also developed considerably through the 19th century. The introduction of half-tone printing for example, was used extensively in newspaper production.
Senefelder had experimented during the early 19th century with multicolour lithography; in his 1819 book, he predicted that the process would eventually be perfected and used to reproduce paintings. (Reference; Meggs, Philip B. A History of Graphic Design. (1998) John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p 146).

 Lithographic printing with colours was introduced by a new process developed by Godefroy Engelmann (France) in 1837 known as chromolithography. (Reference; Meggs, Philip B. A History of Graphic Design. (1998) John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p 146). In this process, a separate plate was used for each colour, and a printed sheet went through the press separately for each colour to be applied by each plate or stone. The main challenge was to keep the images aligned (in register). This method lent itself to images consisting of large areas of flat colour, and resulted in the characteristic poster designs of this period. The ongoing development of lithography, to now include colour, became the medium of choice used by Toulouse-Lautrec. It was used, not only for opera and theatre posters, but later, started to be used for propaganda posters for the First World War.

The 1903 Charles Marion Russell (1864 – 1926), painting below is a Lithography colour print. (In it, you can see that the early Lithographic process tended to fade or bleed colours at the edges of the paper. Originally, this was seen as a problem, but in many ways it has the effect of focussing the eye into the centre of the painting, where the colours are most vibrant).

The Custer Fight (lithograph, 1903). Depicts the Battle of the Little Bighorn from the point of view of the Native American combatants

Mass production of art ensued....
 According to John Berger's statements in his book Ways of Seeing, “arts had lost its bogus religiosity”. So original objects of art became overvalued, as their reproduction made the image more popular and more in demand. Berger says "what matters now is who uses an image and for what purpose". (John Berger, "Ways of Seeing", (1971) pages 21 and 23).