THE PARAGONE BETWEEN PAINTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY
The art of painting has died, as this is life itself, or even something more elevated.
—Christian Huygens, looking through a camera obscura in 1622
The paragone—Italian for “comparison”—was used in the Renaissance to claim the superiority of one of the arts over the others. Leonardo, for example, drew up a paragone between painting and the other arts, like poetry, music, sculpture, and architecture. The upshot was that painting emerges as superior to all the rest. The whole point of the exercise was to enhance the circumstances, social and material, of actual painters like Leonardo himself. In a way, painting was in fact the dominant art in New York when the Abstract Expressionists flourished, and while I know of no paragone that was argued in their usual hangout, the Cedar Bar—painters versus sculptors, say—there was an undeniable attitude that women were not suited to practice this art. Women took this as a truth, and when they began to study art in a serious way, the question focused on what arts were suitable to their sex. Needless to say, women and perhaps their male supporters vilified painting so that, in the seventies, sculpture and photography were acceptable for women, and painting for men—but painting lost the glamour it had. Today, of course, art is not neatly divided, and it is difficult to imagine that collage outranks installation, and that performance outranks both. But there was a fairly long paragone in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between photography and painting. No one can say that this will have been the last paragone in the history of art, when that history is intertwined with the history of politics, but it differed from the typical paragone, in which the terms of the comparison were forms of art, but there was some lingering resistance to classing photography as an art. This seems to have been settled rather quickly in France, where photographs were shown for the first time in the 1857 Salon, along with painting and sculpture—the daguerreotype had been invented in 1839—whereas Alfred Stieglitz still felt rejected as an artist in 1917. There is no record of photographs being rejected in the 1917 exhibition of Independent Artists, held in New York, notorious mainly for having rejected Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (see chapter 1). The exhibition was modeled on the French Society of Independent Artists, which committed itself to the principle of no jury and no prizes, to forestall another Salon des Refusés and its fiercely exigent jury of 1863. So whether photography was one of the fine arts was still moot in America when the First World War broke out and at which time Stieglitz closed his gallery. I think it was considered moot by philosophers when it had been settled by art museums: a collection of Stieglitz’s photographs was acquired by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1930, and the Museum of Modern Art proclaimed its modernity by establishing a department of photography in 1940, curated by Edward Steichen. But as late as 1958 William Kennick could still suggest to a philosophical readership that photographs were a borderline case of artworks. This is doubtless because the range of photographs go from a yellowing snapshot of Aunt Sadie and Uncle Al on their honeymoon at Cedar Point, to Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II, Diptychon, which sold for $3,340,456 at Sotheby’s in 2008. So perhaps the complication did not arise immediately in France, since the photograph in question would have been an early daguerreotype, probably pricier than the average miniature hand-painted portrait by some artisan, albeit on ivory.
The paragone was instantly conceded when the painter Paul Delaroche, on first learning of Louis Daguerre’s invention, supposedly said, “As of today, painting is dead.” No one, so far as I have been able to determine, has established that Delaroche actually said this nor knows, accordingly, what he did say. Delaroche was a major history painter, when history painting was still considered the most prestigious genre of painting by the various academies of art, so as he practiced it he was scarcely threatened by photography, inasmuch as most of the events he depicted took place in the past, and he was more interested in telling a good story than in depicting the past wie est eigentlich gewesen—the way it actually took place, to use von Ranke’s famous definition. Thus Delaroche depicted in 1833 the execution of Lady Jane Grey as taking place in a dungeon, contrary to the historical record. This option for painting was to become central in the ensuing paragone between painting and photography from 1839 until about 1930, when the paragone ended and photography was grudgingly granted the status of art. What Delaroche would almost certainly have had in mind was that it is simply irrational for human beings to have to learn to use instruments like pencils and brushes to create pictures of the world when a portrait or landscape surpassing what most artists could achieve in realistic conviction could be produced by clicking a shutter—requiring no skill at all. Such was the attitude of William Henry Fox Talbot, the coinventor of photography, who simply wanted souvenirs of sites he was not up to drawing for himself, and so he invented a way for nature to draw itself—hence “the Pencil of Nature,” as he called it. Obviously there is more to the matter than clicking a shutter. A daguerreotype is a mirrored metal plate, coated with silver halide particles deposited by means of iodine vapor. An image is projected, which sets up a chemical process, and the image is fixed after an exposure of some seconds. Moreover, there is something uncanny in the way a complete likeness could form on a metal plate with a daguerreotype. This technique is magic in the further sense that it captures detail invisible to the naked eye, unlike Fox Talbot’s photography, which uses paper negatives.
In this sense the superiority of the camera over the hand-and-eye method of representing connects with a tradition that had more or less vanished with the Renaissance. The tradition is brilliantly tracked by Hans Belting in his masterpiece, Bild und Kult, where the kinds of pictures people were interested in were made not by an artist’s hand but by mystical intervention, as in the case of Veronica’s Veil, where Christ’s perspiring face appeared by magical transfer, as was believed to be the case with the Shroud of Turin. And of course there was also the portrait of the Virgin that Saint Luke—with skills the Virgin knew were not up to the task—set out to paint, so she, through a miracle of tenderness, permitted her likeness to form on his panel, which of course resembled her perfectly. That is what I believe Saint Luke is demonstrating in the wonderful painting by Guercino—not his painting, but something the Virgin brought about, so lifelike that the angel in the painting has the illusion that it is tangible. The image is internally related to the Virgin, the way a mirror image would be. The Virgin is present in the image, so you are directly praying to her in praying to the picture, and there is accordingly the possibility that the wishes could be granted. Possibly the “portrait” itself is an answered prayer of Saint Luke. In any case, to say that you would have thought it was done by a camera is, in effect, to say, it looks as if nature painted itself, as if the artist had nothing to do with it. It takes great skill to make your painting look like photography.
Delaroche generously helped get a government pension for Daguerre, whose real achievement, in his own mind, was his other invention, the diorama (he took up photography only because he thought it might help in creating improved dioramas). Delaroche wrote in his 1839 recommendation to the government on behalf of Daguerre that “Daguerre’s process completely satisfies all the demands of art, carrying essential principles of art to such perfection that it must become a subject of observation and study even to the most accomplished painters.” With this, we can begin to construct the paragone, which consisted in photography’s boast that it was, more than painting, able to show how things really look when produced in a way that cannot be bettered. The rather obscure American Pre-Raphaelite painters William Mason Brown and John William Hill are good examples of this. I became interested in them because Russell Sturgis, the Nation’s first art critic and one of the founders of professional art criticism in the United States, thought the future of American painting lay with them, and not with the art being turned out by the members of the American Academy of Design. Like the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which had secured the endorsement of John Ruskin, England’s leading art critic, they believed in what they called “visual truth.” Ruskin wrote in the London Times in 1851 that, since Raphael, artists had sought to “paint fair pictures rather than stern facts,” but that these artists were resolved to paint only what they see “irrespective of any conventional rules of picture making.” The highest compliment the American Pre-Rafs, as they called themselves, could pay one another was that one would have thought, looking at their work, that it had been made by a camera, which raised the question, I suppose, of why not just use the camera, instead of painstakingly painting what the camera achieves without effort. The camera, presumably, showed only what the eye sees and nothing more. Hence it had to set the criterion of visual truth. Its relevance to art was to show what visual truth was in any given instance.
It struck me only recently that nineteenth century painters must have believed that visual truth was defined by photography, however alien to human vision what the camera reproduced often was. A good example of this would have been Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of horses in motion. Painters decided that Muybridge’s images showed what horses really look like when they run, and in effect copied Muybridge’s photographs in their paintings of horses, even though that is not at all the way we see horses when they run. We really don’t see animals move the way Muybridge shows them moving, or else there would have been no need for the photographs in the first place: Muybridge hit upon his awkward but seemingly authoritative experiments that were really designed to answer such questions as whether all four of a horse’s hooves ever touch the ground at the same time—in other words, phenomena the human eye could not perceive. Muybridge’s published images had an impact on artists like Thomas Eakins and the Futurists, and especially on Edgar Degas, who sometimes portrayed a horse moving stiff-legged across the turf, exactly the way it can be seen in Muybridge’s photographs, but never in life. Degas, who took up photography himself, would have argued that the photographs teach us how we must see, even if the images look quite unnatural. This confuses optical truth with visual truth. Muybridge mocked Victorian painters, whose depictions of horses racing were visually far more convincing than his optically correct photographs could have been. They showed horses stereotypically.
Another example is portraits. Most of what the human face shows is not so much the kinds of physiognomic expressions—grief, joy, anger—that academic artists had to master in order to show in narrative paintings how persons felt, but transitions between expressions. With a film speed of ASA 160 and shutter speeds of one-sixtieth of a second we could now capture the face appearing in ways which the eye never sees—“between expressions,” as it were. That is why we reject as not “really me” many of the images on a contact sheet, which don’t look like what we see in the mirror. The result is that faces are defamiliarized by the camera, as in the typical portrait by Richard Avedon. What it really amounts to, with the modern camera, is that the photographer is stopping movement, hence making stills, with results that never arose or could have arisen with painted portraits. (Degas’s horse is a three-dimensional still.) The still shows “optical truth” but it does not correspond to perceptual truth, namely how we see the world stereotypically. I first realized this when I saw Avedon’s photograph of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who was a friend of mine. The picture in no sense captured how Isaiah looked to anyone who knew him, but shows instead an unrecognizable and invisible sourpuss. It is, moreover, false to say that he “sometimes” looked like this. He never looked like this to the eye. He did so only to a camera set to ASA 160, F22 at one-sixtieth of a second—which of course one does not see. The camera shows, on this view, the eye’s limitations. It shows how things would really look if we could but see them the way the lens does. So you can take a shot from a contact sheet in the confidence that it really shows the real as it is, better by far than the false image of a smiling subject asked to “Hold it! Hold it! That’s it!”
These ideas came home to me vividly when I was thinking about Edouard Manet’s painting of the execution of Maximilian, done in five versions, from 1867 to 1869, shown together in John Elderfield’s great didactic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in May 2006. There was no photograph of the event, since that was forbidden by the Mexican authorities. Manet depended on newspaper accounts, and the details kept changing as the reports came in. At first, Manet supposed that the execution was carried out by Mexican guerillas, and he painted the firing squad wearing sombreros. Gradually, it became known that the firing squad was made up of Mexican soldiers in uniform—though far more tattered, as we know from a contemporary photograph, than Manet’s final and official version shows. It all at once occurred to me that Manet was seeking to show the event the way it would look if it had been photographed. He painted it just at the moment when the muskets were fired—there is smoke coming out of their muzzles—and one of the victims being executed at the same time as Maximilian is depicted falling to the ground, fatally wounded. Photography was not yet capable of recording events happening this quickly—the Leica was not to be invented until the next century. Film was too slow, exposure times were long. But certain things peculiar to the photograph appear in the way the painting is organized.
In the brilliant essay “Abstract and Representational”—a sketch of the history of what he designated Modernism—the critic Clement Greenberg wrote in 1954:
From Giotto to Courbet, the painter’s first task had been to hollow out an illusion of three-dimensional space. This illusion was conceived of more or less as a stage animated by visual incident, and the surface of the picture as the window through which one looked at the stage. But Manet began to pull the backdrop of the stage forward, and those who came after him . . . kept pulling it forward, until today it has come smack up against the window, blocking it up and hiding the stage. All the painter has left to work with now is, so to speak, a more or less opaque windowpane.
No one else, as far as I know, described the shift from traditional to Modernist representation in these terms, nor would anyone else have credited Manet with having begun the Modernist program in quite this way, but I find it a very clarifying approach, however much I otherwise differ from Greenberg. The question for me is what explains this momentous reconception of pictorial space on Manet’s part, and what I want to do is conjecture that it was the effect of photography, which most will grant is the truly revolutionary invention in the history of representational technology in modern times.
Greenberg is famous for saying that the defining essence of the medium of painting is flatness, which means, in effect, the denial of the illusory space that was a necessary condition for the great creative achievement of painting “from Giotto to Courbet.” It was this observation, whatever its problems, that encouraged Greenberg to propose that Modernism began with Manet. What is needed to put these two thoughts together into a causal narrative is the recognition that photography played an operative role in the transformation of art from traditional to modern. What, after all, could have been more modern than the photographic camera, with its ability to fix images, which until then were ephemeral and fleeting, as in the camera obscura? The camera shortened depth—“brought the background forward”—and flattened forms, largely, I think, because the lenses of the period were often telescopic, which showed things closer together than they would look to the eye—almost on top of one another. In a way, the firing squad looks like it has physically placed the muzzles of their guns much closer to the victims than they are. We see this today in watching baseball games on television—the camera of necessity is at a distance requiring telescoping, which puts the pitcher and the batter on top of one another. Manet’s Maximilian painting was inspired by Francisco Goya’s El Tris de Mayo (Third of May), which also shows an execution and which Manet saw on a trip he made to Madrid. But the camera did not exist in 1808 when Goya painted his execution scene. The distances are not distorted in the name of visual truth.
Manet also tended to suppress transitional tones, which emulate the way the frontally illuminated object in a photograph drives the shadows to the edges, inevitably flattening forms, an effect which Manet seized upon in painting his portraits. Greenberg writes that “for the sake of luminousness Manet was willing to accept this flatness” (The Collected Essays and Criticism: Clement Greenberg, vol. 4, 242). A further truth is that the lenses tended to give a forward central thrust to the image, as in Manet’s Gare Saint Lazare, in which everything is crowded into the foreground. I would wager that Manet’s painting owes a lot to discussion with the photographer Nadar, in whose studio the first Impressionist exhibition took place in 1874. The camera made Modernism happen.
Honoré Daumier created a wonderful caricature of Nadar in a balloon over Paris. Nadar was the first to do aerial photography, using balloons, and had a clear sense of what happens in telephotography. Daumier titled his picture Nadar Elevant la Photographie à la Hauteur de l’Art,” which is a joke—“Nadar elevates photography to the level of art.” My conjecture amounts to substituting Manet’s name for Nadar, and reversing the terms. The irony of Greenberg’s theory of flatness, set forth in his 1960 essay “Modernist Painting,” is that it was supposed to rest on the reduction of the medium of painting to its essence—which turns out to have been an artifact of another medium altogether, namely photography. So much for the purity of media that was meant to be the foundation of his theory of criticism. My conjecture is that Manet imitated the camera by painting as if visual reality were artifacts of the photographic processes at the time.
Coincidentally, the Museum of Modern Art simultaneously mounted two shows—one of Manet’s Execution, in which we can look for signs of the beginnings of Modernism, and the other of Brice Marden, beginning with his gray-in-gray monochromes, which I saw as the end of Modernism as a period style. They are exactly gray in gray, with shadowy markings of darker gray that had served other painters, such as Jasper Johns or Alberto Giacometti, as backgrounds against which they painted the objects or figures that carried the primary interest of their works. Marden seems to have brought them forward to coincide with the surfaces of his paintings, making his surfaces his subjects, turning his paintings into objects. The history of Modernism is the history of narrowing the space between background and foreground, just as Greenberg says—a progress in which important stages are Cézanne’s tipping the surface of his tables up toward the viewer, creating the kind of space the Cubists exploited, especially in their collages; the American trompe l’oeil paintings, in which flat objects like newspaper clippings and paper money are pinned or pasted on flat surfaces, enabling painters to eliminate shadows and thus to short-circuit depth. Then there is the inevitable flattening with Paul Gauguin and the Nabis, who prioritized decoration and adopted the highly decorative format of art nouveau, as in the case of Vincent van Gogh, whose work borrowed, in addition, the flatness of forms in the Japanese woodblock print. The Pre-Rafs, in attempting to emulate the camera, had also eliminated depth, almost in the way that happens when one looks at an object through a microscope.
So one can trace the Greenbergian narrative of Modernism from Manet to Marden as the triumph of flatness over illusionist space, culminating in the triumph of two-dimensionality over three-dimensionality. But the paragone followed a more zigzag path. The painter might concede the camera’s superiority in capturing visual truth. But Delaroche could have argued that painting’s superiority lies in its not being tethered to dull old truth. Painting could create its own truth. Nature’s pencil simply traces what is set before the lens, without creative imagination. The photographer can represent only what is there, whereas the painter is free to use his imagination and show things in ways other than how they are or were. Thus the liberties Delaroche took with historical truth. The painter selects the moment at which to represent an event, as in The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, where the victim is blindfolded and begins to search in a kind of panic for the executioner’s chopping block. It is a very cruel painting. She wants a swift, clean death and pleads with the axman to give her that. Delaroche paints the straw that will soak up Lady Jane’s blood and receive the head. But for effect he sets the scene in a dungeon rather than outside on a scaffold. In another painting he shows Roundhead soldiers blowing pipe smoke in the face of King Charles. He treats painting fictionally. Photographers were not slow to show that they were quite capable of doing the same with a camera lens and hence should be considered artists, if that were the criterion. The Victorian photographer Henry Peach Robinson hired actors, constructed an emotional scene, and photographed it, as in Fading Away, the dying moment of a young woman. Peach Robinson’s compositions have influenced Jeff Wall’s large backlit photographs, in connection with which “Is it art?” has little purchase. With the advent of Impressionism, photographers showed ways in which they could achieve something of its effects through soft focus, coated lenses, and heavy paper. But Stieglitz was still stuck with the wide refusal to consider photography an art, despite Delaroche having granted it that status in his letter of support for Daguerre’s pension. Fortunately, the controversy became irrelevant when Modernism made it irrelevant—when it stopped being important to win contests with cameras. Wall exhibits the Postmodernist—post-Greenbergian—thesis that whatever works is OK. Wall’s inspiration to use backlighting came, after all, from bus stops.
Meanwhile, it is clear why photography was denied the status of art, mainly through the fact that everything that seemed to make painting an art was subtracted from what we may as well call pictography: for manual skill you needed nothing more than the ability to push a button or squeeze a bulb. That meant that the hand was as pictographically irrelevant as the foot. All that was needed now was to make the eye irrelevant, which brings us back to Duchamp, who reinvented the concept of art, making both hand and eye, as well as aesthetics, irrelevant to the definition of art. It is in the spirit allowing us to make art out of bus stop advertisements that I want to conclude by discussing one more use of the camera, namely in the photographic silk screen in the 1960s.
The silk screen print went particularly well with what one might think of as Warhol’s personal philosophy. “I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know if my picture was mine or somebody else’s,” he said in 1963. Thus, according to the authors of Warhol’s catalogue raisonné, “Not only did [Warhol] deflect those who would attempt to know his work or to discern his hand in it, he disputed the role of the artist as the author of a work of art.” He also “challenged art connoisseurship as a way of knowing objects through their visual characteristics” (Danto, Warhol). Since there is no “touch” by means of which anyone can tell whether a given silk screen is his or, say, Gerard Malanga’s, the artist’s hand, like the artist’s eye, plays no role to speak of in the work of the Factory. Warhol literally stopped drawing from 1963 to 1972.
The first big project of the Silver Factory years was making the facsimiles of Brillo shipping cartons and their lesser companions for the April 1964 show at the Stable Gallery, which made an immense impression on me. That show would have been unthinkable without silk screen: the boxes were made with stencils from photographs of the top and four sides of the Brillo box, for example, and then ink was pressed onto the sides of fabricated plywood boxes through the mesh, turning out replicas of actual shipping cartons.
My philosophical preoccupation with contemporary art began when I visited that exhibition. I more or less accepted that the boxes were art, but immediately wondered what the difference could be between them and the real Brillo cartons of the supermarket, which resembled them visually. The question was not whether one could tell the difference, which was an epistemological question, but rather it was what made them different, which is what philosophers call an ontological question, calling for a definition of art.
The great thing about the sixties was the dawning recognition that anything could be a work of art, which was something evident in all the main movements of the time—in Pop art, Minimalism, Fluxus, Conceptual art, and so on. What accounted for the difference? The big mantra in the art world was Frank Stella’s sullen “What you see is what you see.” But there was not a lot of difference between what you see when you see a Brillo Box by Warhol and the Brillo boxes designed by James Harvey for the Brillo people to use for moving their products about. So: why weren’t they artworks if Andy’s Factory-produced boxes were? I have answered this in my first chapter, so what I want to do now instead is to marvel at the way in which the camera helped give form to the philosophical question that had been kicking around for a few millennia, “What is art?,” and to explain why the photography-painting paragone had to be the last paragone. By the time Duchamp and Warhol had left the scene, everything in the concept of art had been changed. We had entered the second phase in the history of art, broadly considered.