The Death of Painting

"From today, painting is dead," cried Paul Delaroche in 1839 when first shown a daguerreotype. He spoke too soon. For two generations there was life, vigor -- sometimes -- in the stricken body. Even today in odd corners painters may still be found plying their ancient craft for the pleasure of a few impoverished private patrons. But for the professional critics, the public committees, the directors of galleries, the art is indeed dead, picked white; not a smell survives. It is noteworthy that a Frenchman first saw the significance of this French invention. France was the scene of the death agony. Delaroche's prognosis was sound enough. But it was based on a false diagnosis.

Nearly twenty years later an Englishman wrote: "Photography is an enormous stride forward in the region of art. The old world was well nigh exhausted with its wearisome mothers and children called Madonnas . . . its wearisome nudities called Nymphs and Venuses . . . Then a new world slowly widens to our sight, a very heaven compared to the old earth . . . There will be photograph Raphaels, photograph Titians..."

That was the prospect Delaroche feared. Here were a box, a lens, a bath of salts and with them the common man could effortlessly accomplish all that the great geniuses of the past had attempted. For until the present century the whole history of European painting was determined by man's striving to reproduce and arrange visual appearances. The critics of the last fifty years have been busy in imputing quite different motives to the Masters and in identifying quite different achievements. There is no evidence of these preoccupations in the rather sparse documents. Most of the letters and recorded precepts of the Masters deal with prices, models, and technical devices. When they speak of their aims they are unanimous. Leonardo da Vinci wrote: "That painting is most praiseworthy which is most like the thing represented" and "When you wish to see whether your picture corresponds with that of the object presented by nature, take a mirror and set it so that it reflects the actual things, and then compare the reflection with your picture." Nicholas Hilliard wrote: "Now knowe that all painting imitateth nature or the life in everything." Piero della Francesca: "Painting is nothing but a representation of surfaces and solids foreshortened or enlarged." Poussin: "Painting is nothing but an imitation of human actions, one may also imitate not only the actions of beasts but anything natural." In the court of Louis XV it was disputed whether two perfect painters, observing the same scene, would not produce identical pictures, painters by inference differing only in their faults. There were certainly at different periods some differences of opinion about the rights of selection of the artist, about the modifications he might make in his model in the interest of ideal beauty, what details he might eliminate in the interest of grandeur. Painters represented things they had never seen, such as cherubim on the wing. Some, such as Bosch, portrayed pure fantasy but all the objects were imagined as concrete, visible and tangible and painted as such. It was never questioned that the painter's prime task was to represent. Actual illusion was never achieved except in amusing toys--dog-eared papers apparently pinned to the wall so that the fingers itch to remove them--but there is no reason to doubt that had a full-scale trompe l'oeil ever been effected, it would have been applauded without reserve.

Today high honors and high prices are given to the practitioners of "non-representative art." Patronage is in the hands of people who no longer seek joy in possession; the directors of public galleries conceive it as their duty to instruct by exemplifying "movements," however repugnant they may find the task. In the early days of the Post-Impressionists there were ingenious journalists who tried to demonstrate that the new painters were logically developing the discoveries of the Masters; that true aesthetic emotion had always existed in some unexplored subconscious area and was only at that moment (circa 1911) becoming articulate; that all original artists had begun by shocking the Philistine. As the scrupulously accurate drawing of Holman Hunt and the early Millais looked "deformed" to Dickens, so a few years were needed before the common man could see Leger with new eyes. That particular bit of humbug has not worn well. In the last fifty years we have seen the drawings of savages, infants and idiots enjoying fashionable favor. The revolutionaries have grown old and died. No new eyes have grown in new heads. The division between the painting and sculpture of this century and its predecessors has become more pronounced, as more observers in other spheres recognize the evils of the time. There have been no sensational recantations of the kind prevalent among political writers, but the critics on the whole now admit that while Giotto and Tintoretto and Rembrandt and Degas were all in their enormously different ways practising the same art, the activities--call them what you will--of Leger belong to an entirely different order. Can this revolution be attributed to photography?

That invention certainly failed in the claims originally made for it. It has been an humble assistant to the Arts. There are mosaics and frescoes so placed that they can be seen imperfectly and then only with great fatigue. Photography has disclosed new beauties in these. The camera can reveal certain things that are invisible to the naked eye, such as the hitherto unrecognizable stains on the Holy Shroud at Turin. As in the classic hypothesis of the apes typing eternally until they write the sonnets of Shakespeare, the millions of plates exposed have inevitably, but quite fortuitously now and then, produced an attractive composition. But in its direct relations with painting, photography has never been a rival. The allegorical groups and costume-pieces produced in the '50s and '60s -- such as Rejlander's celebrated The Two Ways of Life and Mrs. Cameron's illustrations to The Idyls of the King -- are what Delaroche feared, and they proved to be wholly ludicrous. The mortal injury done to painters was something quite other; it was both technical and moral.

In technique it was the instantaneous snapshot, not the studio exposure, which proved revolutionary. Movements which before had eluded the eye were arrested and analyzed. The simplest example is that of the galloping horse. Draughtsmen had achieved their own "truth" about the disposal of its legs. The camera revealed a new truth that was not only far less graceful but also far less in accordance with human experience. Similarly with the human figure. In posing a model a painter was at great pains to place her. His sense of composition, her sense of comfort, the feasibility of maintaining and resuming the pose, were important. It was a frequent complaint of young artists that their elders were content with repetition of art-school cliches. They struggled to build up from sketches entirely novel attitudes. Then came the camera shutter to make permanent the most ungainly postures. The "slice of life" became the principle of many compositions at the end of the 19th Century. At the same time "gum prints" were invented by the photographers, a process by which the surface of painting was imitated. For a decade or more painting and photography were very close. There are "gum prints" by the Parisians Demachy and Bucquet made at the turn of the century which at first glance may be mistaken for photographs of Impressionist canvases. How far the founders of Impressionism worked from snapshots is conjectural. Their followers were quite open in the matter. Sickert used to translate photographs into paint in just the same way as Victorian ladies translated paint into needlework -- and in both cases with very pretty results.

Many early photographers, among them the herald of the "photograph Titians" quoted above, were unsuccessful painters. There was a fair livelihood to be made out of the new device, especially by a man with the airs of an artist; nothing comparable, certainly, to the splendid earning of the popular painters, but the photographer did not have to work for it, as they did. Perhaps no painter in history worked so hard as the eminent Victorians. They knew little of the easy student days of Trilby or of the versatile apprenticeship of the Renaissance. Painting had become a profession: respectable, rewarded, specialized. They trained as hard as for the law or for medicine, and they kept in training through the long years of rich commissions and hereditary honors. The physical exertion of covering their great canvases was immense. They used "assistants," but very furtively. Not for them the teeming studios of Rembrandt or the factory of Alan Ramsay. The English patron who was paying two or three thousand pounds for a picture demanded that it should be all the artist's own work.

Photography provided the ideological justification for sloth. The camera was capable of verisimilitude; it was not capable of art; therefore art, the only concern of the artist, was not verisimilitude. Verisimilitude was what took the time and trouble. Art was a unique property of the spirit, possessed only by the artist. You could be awfully artistic between luncheon and tea. So the argument ran.

In 1877 Ruskin denounced Whistler's pretentious Nocturne in Black and Gold with the felicitous expression: "a coxcomb flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." The prospect of enlarging this opinion in court was "nuts and nectar" to him. "The whole thing," he wrote to Burne-Jones, "will enable me to assert some principles of art economy which I've tried to get into the public's head by writing, but may get sent over all the world vividly in a newspaper report or two." Alas, that great projected trial came to nothing. Ruskin was too ill to appear. Whistler was given contemptous damages without costs; Ruskin's costs were paid by public subscription. But it was not the hoped-for triumph of high principle. The pert American scored some verbal points and gentle Burne-Jones reluctantly gave evidence that Whistler's work lacked "finish." This clearly was not the point at issue with the early and life-long adulator of Turner. What a tremendous occasion had Ruskin, at the height of his authority and eloquence, stood up to warn the world of the danger he acutely foresaw! Something as salutary as Sir Winston Churchill's utterance at Fulton, U.S.A., and perhaps more efficacious. By a curious aberration of popular history the trial was for more than a generation represented as a triumph of Whistler against the Philistines. Today, it is reported, there is an honored American painter who literally "flings" pots of paint at his canvas. What would Whistler have to say about that? Ruskin, we may be sure, would be serenely confident in his early judgement.

The German demagogues of the '30s attempted an exposure of "decadent" art, so ill-informed and ill-natured and allied to so much evil that honorable protests were unheard or unspoken. The art dealers were able to appeal to a new royalty; if one hinted that Klee was the acme of futility one proclaimed oneself a Nazi. That phase is ended. Today we need a new Ruskin to assert "some principles of art economy." First, that the painter must represent visual objects. Anatomy and perspective must be laboriously learned and conscientiously practised. That is the elementary grammar of his communication. Secondly, that by composition, the choice and arrangement of his visual objects, he must charm, amuse, instruct, edify, awe his fellow men, according as his idiosyncrasy directs. Verisimilitude is not enough, but it is the prerequisite. That is the lesson of the photographer's and of the abstractionist's failure.