HF The History of Photography 600pág

The aesthetic movement 467
to the aesthetic movement, and in February 1899 even the Royal Academy in Berlin
embraced photography. So before the end of the nineteenth century the longstanding
prejudice of the art world against photography was, at least temporarily, overcome.
At no time during its entire history was photography held in such high esteem by
painters as during its decadent .fin-de-siecle period. This rapprochement was a marriage
of convenience from which each partner expected to profit: the photographers by
recognition, the painters by photographic subject matter, for by this time most
well-known painters-including Millais and Lenbach-had dark-rooms attached to
their studios.
Lichtwark and Juhl had every reason to be satisfied with the results of their efforts.
The former stated that 'in barely five years the German amateur photographers,
until then the last, have come to the fore and brought to Germany, too, the decorative
quality of photography as manifested in artistic expression and form.'6 There is no
innovation that does not find its detractors, and many people, mostly photographers,
rightly disapproved of 'photo-paintings', which manipulated prints in the main were.
Robert Demachy wrote of heated discussions at an exhibition in Paris in 1902 of the
work of the young American painter and photographer EDWARD STEICHEN. One
photograph was a self-portrait in the style of Lenbach, with palette and brush, more
hand-work than photography. Another was the memorable picture of Rodin sil- Pl 304
houetted against the luminous whiteness of his statue of Victor Hugo, contemplating
his 'Thinker'. (Six years later Steichen photographed by moonlight Rodin's statue
of Balzac, silhouetting it against the night sky; the result was a misty, soft outline
which surprisingly Rodin liked, although it was the complete antithesis of what
the sculptor tries to achieve-plastic form.) There were also in the I902 exhibition
a number of murky female nudes who looked-said G.B.S.-as though they had been
posed in a coal cellar. A visitor complained of a particular picture : 'If this were a
charcoal drawing it would be excellent, but as it is a photograph, it is horrible.'
When Ernst Juhl, for many years art editor of the Photographische Rundschau, in
July 1902 wrote a short article on this exhibition, illustrated with twelve of the
photographs that had caused such a sensation in Paris, the magazine was inundated
with complaints from people threatening to cancel their subscriptions unless the
artistic direction were changed. WhereuponJuhl resigned his position, and in view of
this opposition the photographic exhibitions at the Hamburg Kunsthalle ceased in
1904.
Juhl's successor at the Photographische Rundschau was FRITZ MA TTHIES-MASUREN,
formerly a painter, and since I893 a tireless supporter of the new photography in
Germany both as editor of informative and superbly illustrated magazines7 which
stand on a par with Stieglitz's famous Camera Work, and author of Die Kunstlerische
Photographie (I 907).
In Italy the first exhibition of artistic photography held in Florence in 1861 had
been forgotten by l 89 5 when another one was arranged there and claimed as the first
in which the creative possibilities of photography were apparent. This, and subsequent
exhibitions in Turin in 1897 and particularly in 1900-the first international
exhibition of artistic photography in Italy-aroused a widespread desire for photographic
picture-making. The most prominent of the Italian pictorialists was GUIDO
REY, others being CESARE SCHlAPARELLI, GATTI CASAZZA and GIACOMO GROSSO, an
artist whose painting '11 Supremo Convegno' was a succes de scandale at the first
Venice Biennale in 189 5.
The Association Belge de Photographie, founded in Brussels in 1874, was, like
most other societies, rather technically orientated, and it is not surprising that the