Unit 3: Secret history

In my opinion, the camera did not kill art and did, in fact, improve it and force artists to be more creative and find new ways of expressing themselves through their paintings as well as creating new artistic techniques, such as capturing emotion and light, impressionism, breaking everything down into geometric shapes, cubism and photorealism which turned out to be incredibly popular techniques that revolutionized the artistic world.

 

The invention of the cameras forced artists to stop focusing on realism as they were slowly becoming cheaper with the pass of time and were more effective at capturing realism. The first artist to drift away from this technique was J. M. W. Turner, who decided to capture emotion and light instead of realism. His works of art were oil paintings in which he used watercolour technique to create lightness, fluency and ephemeral atmospheric effects that would transmit his feelings and views towards specific situations, moments in time or his personal beliefs. For example, some of his paintings are about boats in storms, which shows that Turner must’ve been fascinated by the violent power of the sea. Turner also based the lighting in his paintings on his belief of God, and whether his spirit was present during the time in which that painting was taking place, which caused the paintings that had natural catastrophes such as a storm be dark, whilst other paintings that had a lighter tone to them without any disasters in them would be lighter.

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After J. W. M. Turner, the next big movement was Impressionism, which was focused on trying to capture a feeling or experience rather than to achieve an accurate depiction. One of the main artists involved with the impressionism movement was Claude Monet, which based his paintings on various observations of the same subject from different times of day captured in numerous sequences of paintings. One of Monet’s paintings, “San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk” shows how Monet preferred to capture the experience of observing this landscape throughout the day instead of capturing a realistic feel and look of it. This painting was done in six various lighting conditions which focused on the nature of the experience, which in this case it was Monet’s impression of the Venetian sunsets, which he greatly enjoyed and was impressed by them. To depict these various points of view he used a variety of colours which were white, yellow, vermilion, blue and green; these colours were chosen to capture the sunset’s experience through the overall visual effect of the light, instead of showing a detailed and accurate representation of the sunset, which was what the newly invented cameras were accurately showing to the world. Monet’s painting stood out above photographs, as the colours in it were more vibrant, lively and therefore provided something that cameras could not, which was a unique experience shown in a unique way that could not be captured by anybody or anything else, only by Claude Monet.

 

Paul Cézanne, a French artist, decided to draw attention away from the cameras by adding a new point of view to the artistic world, one in which the focus were geometrical shapes. Cézanne used geometrical shapes such as spheres, cones and cylinders to describe the nature of his scenes while using different shades of colours to represent the depth in which each object was situated. These techniques were also used to represent the various points of view from which he painted his images. This was an effective movement because of the options that it offered against those of the camera, as this technique allowed Cézanne to express what he saw in a unique way that could also tell those that contemplated his paintings what he was like. This technique was something that cameras could not achieve, as cameras could not manipulate the environment’s shape to show how the landscape would be if designed solely through these geometrical shapes, and thus gave Cézanne’s pieces of art a unique touch that only he could achieve.

 

Cubism, possibly the most popular movement to be caused by the invention of cameras, was pioneered by Georges Braque, a French painter, and Pablo Picasso. Picasso was the most famous of the two, and had the biggest impact on art through his cubist artwork. One of my favourite works of art from him, as we are both Spanish, is the Guernica as it was based on a bombing on a northern village on Spain. Picasso used cubism to indirectly express his views towards this event and, to this day, publicly denies that this was his intention. However, some of the characters he implemented into this painting were used in other works of art to interpret various points of view. As an example of this statement, two of the main characters included in the Guernica are the bull and the horse, which are known as some of Spain’s iconic animals and features as well as some of Picasso’s most famous icons throughout his paintings. In this specific piece of art, it is believed that the bull shows the peaceful side of some as its matador (bullfighter) is dead on the ground whereas the horse shows the aggressiveness of the scene as his tongue is shaped as a knife and seems to have spit out some sort of blade. This shows that cubism was a great movement to get through the crisis caused by the cameras to art, as it allowed to express things in an abstract way that forced others to closely contemplate the paintings and thoroughly think about what is going on in the painting, what the artist is trying to express as well as what the painting is about. This is something that is not possible through cameras, as they only show realism and cannot express someone’s own personal and private viewpoint, specially through an abstract and extremely unrealistic point of view.

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The most recent movement to be created, and possibly the one that’s closest to the cameras themselves, would be photorealism. However, photorealism was not created against the camera, and was instead created as a response to the previous movements that were based around idealism and abstraction. Photorealism was developed to express a strong interest in realism in art and included pieces of art that attempted to position art within the sphere of mass media. This movement, in my opinion, could be a union between photographers and artists as photorealists used cameras to take a photograph of something they wanted to portray through art and then projected it onto a larger canvas in which they recreated this photograph with incredible amounts of details that were never before seen in paintings, surpassing even those of past times.  The resulting images are usually direct copies of the original photograph making this style incredibly tight and precise, thus proving that the camera could not harm art and would, if anything, enhance it and create countless possibilities for artists to take photographs, project them and add their own touch to it, making the photograph and painting their own while keeping the realism in it. This movement is currently incredibly popular, as it shows the technical prowess of the artists by accurately depicting shadows, lighting and the geometry of objects that are lifelike which make these paintings look like photographs when they are not.

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It could also be said that cameras have been directly involved with art for a longer time than we thought, as the Hockney-Falco thesis suggests that in the 1420’s a sudden “improvement” in art was done through lenses instead of the eyes of the artists. Some of these artists were Caravaggio, Velázquez and Anthony van Dyck. This was suggested by many factors. Caravaggio created the style "chiaroscuro", which is a high contrast between light and dark. One of these were the detailed patterns and shine on robes as well as detailed curves and folds and incredibly complex geometrical shapes, that were not possible to be drawn through human eye sight and through the manual techniques that were around at the time. Another strong piece of evidence was the strong lighting, contrast and deep shadows that were included in some of these realistic paintings as well as how detailed the faces were, as it seemed like the artist was up close when painting them when he was far away from them. Coincidentally, the size of the best spot from the projections was 30cm, which was also the size of the paintings that depicted this “realism”. There were also some objects that were out of focus, which would be impossible to draw if they were basing the painting off what they were seeing as the human eye does not go out of focus, which they were not as some bodies also became out of proportion, further proving that they were not using their eyes and were in fact using a mirror lens. Due to the mirror lens, there were also some optical distortions made as well as causing the paintings to be reverse, which led to most of the people included in the paintings to be left handed instead of right handed which was incredibly uncommon in society at the time as there was an overwhelming amount of right handed people over left handed, which look unnatural. The reversions got to the point where, in one painting, even a monkey was left handed. It’s open for debate whether this technique counted as cheating.

 

In conclusion, I believe that the camera enhanced art and forced many artists’ creativity to flourish as well as creating a new form of art called photorealism that took realistic paintings to a whole new level and made those that took on this technique be more artistically skilled.