HF The History of Photography 600pág

The aesthetic movement 46 5
Indeed, at this period imitating the style of the Old Masters was the curious
ambition of many pictorial photographers. They took great pains to achieve historical
accuracy and most of their pictures are remarkably clever imitations photographed
in a straightforward realistic way. J. c. STRAUSS, an American, in 1904 started a whole
series of 'Portraits after the Old Masters' -Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Van Dyck, Pl 292
Gainsborough and others. The Italian GUIDO REY made genre pictures in the style of
almost every century, from Graeco-Roman tableaux in the manner of Alma-Tadema
and Leighton, to the French Empire, a period which also attracted COMMANDANT
PUYO. FRED BOISSONNAS of Geneva delighted in staging elaborate composition
pictures such as 'Faust in his Study', whilst the Dutchman RICHARD POLAK specialized Pl 293
in seventeenth-century Dutch genre pictures. Others imitated the puerile academic
painting at the turn of the century-Alma-Tadema, Leighton, Bouguereau, Klinger,
Stuck, Griitzner and others. Grecian maidens, Roman senators, Cleopatras in shapeless
robes clutching a stuffed snake, knights in armour, carousing monks, and even
sacred subjects suitable only for the artist with brush or pencil appeared. The
Americans F. HOLLAND DAY and LEJAREN A HILLER, and L. BOVIER in Belgium, composed
Crucifixions and Entombments-extraordinary aberrations of taste when made
for exhibition.
Impressionistic photography and imitation paintings became epidemics obscuring
the judgment of many gifted photographers. Both misconceptions of the purpose of
photography arose out of a misdirected ambition to win recognition as artists-a
repetition of the mistake made by the High Art photographers of the mid-nineteenth
century. Whenever one art borrows the characteristics of another and forsakes its
own distinctive qualities, it is decadent; and that the art photography of the art
nouveau period certainly was.
The Salon formed by the fashionable Photo-Club de Paris in I 894 had a similar
effect in France to the Salon of the Linked Ring in England. MA URI CE BUCQUET, its
founder and president, made exquisite pictures of street life full of atmosphere, Pl 29 I
achieving his effects by purely photographic means. ROBERT DEMACHY, a banker,
and COMMANDANT EMILE JOACHIM CONSTANT PUYO achieved international renown
with their gum prints. With inventive genius and elegance of style-though not with- Pls 294-296
out occasional lapses of taste-they portrayed feminine grace, and also took many
delightful landscapes with figures. Demachy's ballet dancer has the charm of a Degas Pl 294
pastel-but is it Degas or Demachy we admire? Puyo, a squadron leader at the School
of Artillery at La Fere, even left the army in 1902 in order to devote himself entire! y
to his hobby. His balcony scene with Montmartre in the background was inspired by Pl 295
Edvard Munch's painting entitled 'Rue Lafayette' (1891). A leading French art critic,
R. de la Sizeranne, supported the French group and 'les procedes d'art en photographie',
under which title Demachy and Puyo published a book.
The most prominent members of the Vienna Camera Club, which organized its
first exhibition in 1891, were HEINRICH KUHN, DR HUGO HENNEBERG, PROFESSOR
HANS WATZEK and DR FRIEDRICH SPITZER. Like the French pictorialists, the Austrian
group had become affiliated to the Linked Ring by 1895. The most important was
Kiihn, an amateur since 1879 and a prominent exhibitor of portraits and landscapes.
In 1897 he introduced the multiple gum print in which various pigments could be
used to give several colours to the picture in a number of superimposed printings.
Kuhn's Venetian canal scene, a gum print in charcoal colour, has much the appearance Pl 299
of a reproduction of a watercolour by John Singer Sargent. Watzek's lively studies
of peasants seem to come straight from Wilhelm Leibl. PAUL PICHIER, another Pl 298
Austrian, created Bocklinesque landscapes with cypress trees and figures.