What came first the art or the photograph?
Over the last couple of days I’ve been following and contributing to a blog post by David ward about taking photographs (or not).
The comment thread drifted off into a discussion of David’s photographic influence and whether he is influenced mostly by modern art. I don’t want to comment about David’s actual influences but a point was raised that abstraction in the landscape only really became popular in the 20th Century with post impressionism.
Now I’m far from being an expert on the subject but I was sure that I had seen many 19th Century art that was non-figurative and wasn’t trying to fit in with accepted norms for what was then mostly a commercial enterprise (i.e. most artists were in it for the money .. sort of)..
The artists that immediately sprang to mind were the Japanese woodblock genius Katsushika Hokusai whom most of you will know from his famous tidal wave and also his many illustrations of mount Fuji but is also a master of composition and simplification (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 also see Hiroshige). Other artists were obviously Turner and Whistler but I wanted to find out where the links were and who else to think about. Reading around a bit I discovered Gustave Courbet whose Wave and The Grotto of Loue are classic photographic style compositions. It turns out that Gustave was a fan of and was influenced by photographic vision. The link between Hokusai is also confirmed in that many impressionists were obsessed with these recently imported artworks (especially Monet, Degas and Toulouse-lautrec).
Looking at all of this, it seems that the birth of modern art was midwifed by photography and graphic art. The first allowed a gestalt perception and the latter gave the grounds with which to break with tradition, to show that there are no bounds and that different environment can create different perception.
Once this started happening, photography and art walked hand in hand for many years, probably until the 1920’s, 30’s or even 40’s – surrealism lived with photography for instance (at least a common law relationship).
Anyway this was mostly me wanting to record my thoughts outside of David’s blog..
I also found some earlier landscape art which doesn’t fit in with this post but is of interest Carl Gustav Carus and Caspar David Friedrich (and possibly Claude Lorrain are well worth looking at for an observational viewpoint. And whilst I’m at it .. Klimt’s forests remind me of Mr Burkett.
