Degas’s images often resemble snapshots, but works such as The Rehearsal (1874) were painted before cameras could take instant photographs
Degas and the ballet: Picturing movementRoyal Academy, 17th September to 11th December, Tel: 020 7300 8000
Gerhard Richter: PanoramaTate Modern, 6th October to 8th January, Tel: 020 7887 8888
Think what it took to take a photograph in 1890. Imagine a big, cumbersome camera, and then all the necessary paraphernalia: the tripod, the heavy plates, the chemicals, the black shroud. Then, too, the difficulty of getting the light right, and the necessity of making one’s subject—a ballet dancer, let’s say—remain absolutely still not just for a second but for minutes at a time. After that, the dark room, more chemicals, more fuss—a thousand and one ways to go wrong.
Now picture a modern, handheld video camera—a cool and ergonomic camera phone, perhaps. Someone pulls it from his pocket during rehearsal and hands it to the dancer in question. She presses her thumb to the small screen, then holds it as she pivots en pointe, turning and turning, faster and faster, as her fellow dancers, the theatre, the lights, the smattering of bystanders in the audience all blur into one streaming image of abstract colour and light.
When I think of Edgar Degas and Gerhard Richter—both towering artists of their eras, both deeply conscious of photography, and both the subjects of major shows in London this autumn—I try to keep in mind the difference between these imaginary scenarios—one of them stilted, slow, yet intriguingly alchemical; the other high speed, frictionless, dizzying, effortless, evanescent.
Born in 1834, just one year before the appearance of the first daguerreotype, Degas witnessed the invention of high-speed stop-motion photography just as his career was peaking in the late 1870s. Less than two decades after that, he saw the first moving pictures by the Lumière brothers.
Photographs themselves were ubiquitous in Paris throughout most of his career. They were used in advertising and on the cartes de visites that became the rage after they were patented by André Disdéri in 1854. These cheap two-and-a-half by four inch photographs were used for personal images of relatives and loved ones, as well as to promote celebrities and politicians. They even helped to make some of the ballerinas Degas depicted into celebrities.
Degas was trained in the classical tradition, but in his art he frequently responded to the culture of photography. He based a portrait of Princess Pauline de Metternich, for instance, on a carte de visite, and on another occasion depicted a ballerina posing for a photograph.
He learned from Eadweard Muybridge’s and Etienne-Jules Marey’s experiments with stop-motion photography—most famously the sequential photographs which revealed how the legs of horses moved when they trotted, cantered, and galloped. He even took up photography himself for a brief period in the mid-1890s. When Degas painted a dancer standing en pointe, he did so in the knowledge that he was doing something photography could not: no dancer could maintain the pose long enough for the 19th-century camera to produce a legible image. Degas revelled in this knowledge. His relationship with the camera was curious on the one hand, but it was also intensely competitive.
The same goes for Gerhard Richter. The only difference is that while Degas was working during the relatively innocent early decades of the medium, Richter has spent his life mulling over what it might mean to go on painting in the midst of a growing tsunami of photographic imagery.
Richter, who was born in Dresden in 1932 and began painting seriously in the early 1960s, is regarded by many as the most influential painter alive. There’s no way to talk about his work without discussing its relationship with photography. Of the many strands of Richter’s work, the two most important are his representational paintings capturing the look of slightly blurred photographs, and an ongoing series of abstract images in vivid colours. The latter, which are made by dragging a flat, smooth rubber blade (known as squeegee) loaded with paint along the surface of his works, can seem weirdly reminiscent of Degas’s late pastels, with their vivid, streaming colours, often applied—like Richter’s—in cross-hatched layers.
Richter keeps an expanding archive of (mostly other people’s) photographs called “Atlas” (the archive was the subject of an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2003-04). Like Degas, he also takes photographs himself—including hypnotic, black-and-white close-ups of his own abstract paintings. Degas, too, was curious to know the effect of photography on his paintings, and bequeathed to us at least two photographs of his own images of dancers.
But of course, in comparing these two artists, who in many ways cry out for comparison, one must not forget the different potentialities of the camera from one fin de siècle to the next. Those differences revolve not just around subtle shifts, but around radical advances and outright oppositions: stasis versus movement, black-and-white versus colour, analogue versus digital.
And yet, even after all these differences are taken into account, what is astonishing is just how much these two artists shared. Both fought fervently against the dominance of photography, even as they were seduced by its special capabilities. Above all, their works reveal similar sensibilities that continually waver between hot romanticism and icy detachment.
***
Since Degas’s images often resemble snapshots, the tendency is to assume that he was heavily influenced by the “snapshot aesthetic”—arbitrary cropping, visual disjuncture, a sense of instantaneity, an impersonal, even-handed quality, and a tendency toward voyeurism.
However, cameras were not capable of taking snapshots when Degas contrived his brilliant compositions. They were too primitive. Exposure times, which typically required several minutes, made the sharp instantaneity of the modern snapshot unimaginable. Photographs had to be carefully staged, and photographers at the time, conscious of the inferior status of their medium, overwhelmingly chose to replicate the kinds of classical compositions familiar to them from traditional art. Symmetry and strong hierarchies of subject matter were in; asymmetry and off-centred subjects were frowned upon.
That’s not to say that photographic “accidents” (blurry images, off-kilter compositions) did not arouse the curiosity of artists. But it is worth noting that Degas himself, at the height of his fascination with photographs in 1895-96, favoured staged, classical compositions which had nothing to do with the “snapshot.”
So what accounts for his radical compositions, which are so weirdly prescient of the prevailing style of modern photography?
The simple answer is Japanese prints, which fascinated Degas, and which were all the rage among his Impressionist confrères. The Japanese print emerged from a tradition which had nothing to do with the hierarchies of western art. Artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige had not only embraced everyday life, they had explored compositional techniques like idiosyncratic cropping, inconsistent perspectives, and asymmetry.
All of this appealed enormously to Degas. In the mid-1860s—prompted by his friendship with Manet and by his readings of writers like Baudelaire, Zola and Edmond Duranty—Degas saw in Japanese prints solutions to pressing new pictorial problems. How to capture the movement, the fleeting beauty, the visual and psychological discordances of the modern city?
Movement was all-important. Ever since the demise of Napoleon and the rise of Romanticism, movement had become one of the key terms of the zeitgeist. Set against what many perceived as the paralysing stasis of tradition, movement came to be synonymous with imagination, with progress.
One only has to contrast the imperiously calm, coolly static work of Ingres with the dynamism and agitated colour of Delacroix to see why Degas’s contemporaries might have associated movement with “life, life at all costs.” “More imagination, and thus more movement,” went the Romantics’ cry.
The urban imagery for which Degas became famous in the 1870s and 1880s—imagery which succeeded so brilliantly at capturing the movement, dissonance, and constant change of the modern city—was really Degas’s riposte to photography. Why? Because of photography’s technical limitations, and above all the requirement that its subjects remain still. Degas had set about inventing an idiom that showed us the world in the way the camera could not.
If Degas felt photography was a challenge or threat, early in his career the medium’s technical limitations were such that, for the most part, he felt safe mocking it.
Things changed, however, as the century came to a close, and photography became more sophisticated. Degas, growing old, turned inward. His relationship with photography became closer, more intimate, more agitated. He gradually let go of his ambition to be the “painter of modern life,” in Baudelaire’s famous phrase, and focused instead on an interior vision of dancers in rehearsal or bathers washing and drying themselves.
These images are incredibly beautiful, and emotionally both hot and cold: hot, because of their extreme intimacy and the ravishing colour; cold, because Degas’s eye, like the camera’s, was ruthlessly unsentimental. He talked about wanting to show women caught unawares, as if they were animals licking themselves.
Thanks to the invention of high-speed photography, the “snapshot” aesthetic was just a few years off. This would become the signature look of photography in the 20th century: dynamic, impersonal, showing us life caught “on the fly,” not unlike Degas’s own imagery of the 1870s and 1880s.
Ironically, then, the very territory Degas had set out to conquer with his urban imagery, in the belief that the slow and laborious camera would never be able to compete, by and by became photography’s special contribution to modern culture. So, faced honestly, this crucial early skirmish between painting and photography appears in retrospect as a defeat for painting—one of many more to come.
***
As the new century opened, painting found itself in a state of crisis. In those early conflicts between the two media, painting, with its vast historical resources and inherited prestige, had always seemed to have the upper hand. But more than half a century later, when Gerhard Richter walked into the arena, what he saw bore all the signs of a comprehensive rout.
Artists still painted, but no one was quite sure why. If art was still capable of showing us the world afresh, few people expected this to be achieved in the medium of paint. Avant-garde painting had retreated into the cul de sac of abstraction, and then finally caved into the camera-inspired, commerce-derived seductions of pop art.
This was when Richter entered the fray. It was the 1960s. In the struggle between competing ways of seeing, photography and film were in the ascendant, as they are today. The camera ruled over almost every field of activity, from medicine and the military to advertising and news. Painting, in the eyes of many, was dead.
The response from many artists was to seek out, like Degas, territory for painting on which photography could not compete. The hermeticism of minimalist sculpture and the obscurity of conceptualism were two alternatives that gained traction.
Artists wanting to engage with society were left with no choice but to embrace photography as a way of “letting the world back in.” The phrase was used by the critic Leo Steinberg to address the work of Robert Rauschenberg, but it might just as easily have applied to Andy Warhol, or Sigmar Polke, Richter’s compatriot and co-founder of the Warhol and pop-inspired movement they called “Capitalist Realism.”
Richter eventually settled into a space somewhere in between these tendencies. Like Degas, he felt the camera’s seductive force, but he also felt it as a threat.
And it was truly an existential threat. What was the point of painting in an era so dominated by photographic ways of seeing (by which I also mean film and television), when all the basic formal moves that constitute modernism seemed to have been played out, when the choice appeared to be between reprising old, stale formulae and ditching painting altogether for other forms (sculpture, installations, performance, photography, video)?
All of Richter’s work can be read as a profoundly ambivalent, doubt-wracked response to these questions. He kept painting, but seemed convinced by none of the earlier, heroic models of what it might mean to paint. He was a Romantic—someone in love with the capacity of paint to create dazzling beauty—but his romanticism has always had a belated, elegiac quality.
If, in the 19th century, images of movement were synonymous in the minds of Romantics with imagination, by the late 20th century these images had accelerated and proliferated to such a degree that they were more likely to represent banality, blur, and the death of imagination. In the wake of the political catastrophes of the 20th century, and in the midst of the information revolution and growing consumerism, Richter was sceptical about buying into the great figurative tradition of western art.
Attracted by abstraction, he nonetheless felt sceptical about the rhetoric of freedom, individual agency, and transcendence that surrounded abstract expressionism. His own squeegeed abstractions, which seem to blur the visual field, disavow the notion of individual expression that is so crucial to the work of Pollock or De Kooning. They embrace, instead, the unpredictable outcomes of an essentially mechanical motion. And in this sense, although they are frequently as ravishing in their beauty as a Rothko or a Pollock, this beauty is as random and mechanical as a blurry photograph’s. Indeed, they have a high-speed, frictionless quality, exactly like a video camera rotating on the spot at high speed.
Yet Richter’s art is not simply a long lament for the demise of painting. Like the work of Degas, his art has a searching and curious quality. He is fascinated by photography’s special aptitudes, and seems to feel a kind of affinity for them, as if something about the camera’s way of seeing matches some essential aspect of his temperament.
In the end it is the arbitrariness inherent in photography—and in visual culture in a mass media age generally—that Richter presses home again and again. And yet, amid the arbitrariness—one image no more valuable, poignant, or meaningful than another—Richter has also come up with a number of iconic images that cannot fail to move us by virtue of their extreme beauty and intimacy. The most famous of them is “Betty”(left), a slightly blurred image of a seated young girl in a red and white sweater turning away from the…“viewer”? One wants to say so, but the better word may be “camera,” because although the image is a painting, it looks like a photograph and was based on a photograph.
In any event, it is a painting of human gorgeousness virtually unequalled in recent art: a singular human presence, full of youth and potential, who is nonetheless no longer with us, who seems to be on the cusp of dissolving into the visual field around her, like a young warrior wandering off into the early morning mist, never to be seen again.
We cannot see her face, we do not know—beyond the work’s title, “Betty”— who she is. And it is this impersonal, oddly detached aspect that is, I think, the crucial quality Richter has in common with Degas, and with photography.
Richter is so important to younger artists today because he nailed the dominant sensibility of our era: icy aloofness in tension with secret romanticism. In many ways Degas—the first artist to really see these conflicting qualities in photography—was the crucial precedent.
Degas and the ballet: Picturing movementRoyal Academy, 17th September to 11th December, Tel: 020 7300 8000
Gerhard Richter: PanoramaTate Modern, 6th October to 8th January, Tel: 020 7887 8888
Think what it took to take a photograph in 1890. Imagine a big, cumbersome camera, and then all the necessary paraphernalia: the tripod, the heavy plates, the chemicals, the black shroud. Then, too, the difficulty of getting the light right, and the necessity of making one’s subject—a ballet dancer, let’s say—remain absolutely still not just for a second but for minutes at a time. After that, the dark room, more chemicals, more fuss—a thousand and one ways to go wrong.
Now picture a modern, handheld video camera—a cool and ergonomic camera phone, perhaps. Someone pulls it from his pocket during rehearsal and hands it to the dancer in question. She presses her thumb to the small screen, then holds it as she pivots en pointe, turning and turning, faster and faster, as her fellow dancers, the theatre, the lights, the smattering of bystanders in the audience all blur into one streaming image of abstract colour and light.
When I think of Edgar Degas and Gerhard Richter—both towering artists of their eras, both deeply conscious of photography, and both the subjects of major shows in London this autumn—I try to keep in mind the difference between these imaginary scenarios—one of them stilted, slow, yet intriguingly alchemical; the other high speed, frictionless, dizzying, effortless, evanescent.
Born in 1834, just one year before the appearance of the first daguerreotype, Degas witnessed the invention of high-speed stop-motion photography just as his career was peaking in the late 1870s. Less than two decades after that, he saw the first moving pictures by the Lumière brothers.
Photographs themselves were ubiquitous in Paris throughout most of his career. They were used in advertising and on the cartes de visites that became the rage after they were patented by André Disdéri in 1854. These cheap two-and-a-half by four inch photographs were used for personal images of relatives and loved ones, as well as to promote celebrities and politicians. They even helped to make some of the ballerinas Degas depicted into celebrities.
Degas was trained in the classical tradition, but in his art he frequently responded to the culture of photography. He based a portrait of Princess Pauline de Metternich, for instance, on a carte de visite, and on another occasion depicted a ballerina posing for a photograph.
He learned from Eadweard Muybridge’s and Etienne-Jules Marey’s experiments with stop-motion photography—most famously the sequential photographs which revealed how the legs of horses moved when they trotted, cantered, and galloped. He even took up photography himself for a brief period in the mid-1890s. When Degas painted a dancer standing en pointe, he did so in the knowledge that he was doing something photography could not: no dancer could maintain the pose long enough for the 19th-century camera to produce a legible image. Degas revelled in this knowledge. His relationship with the camera was curious on the one hand, but it was also intensely competitive.
The same goes for Gerhard Richter. The only difference is that while Degas was working during the relatively innocent early decades of the medium, Richter has spent his life mulling over what it might mean to go on painting in the midst of a growing tsunami of photographic imagery.
Richter, who was born in Dresden in 1932 and began painting seriously in the early 1960s, is regarded by many as the most influential painter alive. There’s no way to talk about his work without discussing its relationship with photography. Of the many strands of Richter’s work, the two most important are his representational paintings capturing the look of slightly blurred photographs, and an ongoing series of abstract images in vivid colours. The latter, which are made by dragging a flat, smooth rubber blade (known as squeegee) loaded with paint along the surface of his works, can seem weirdly reminiscent of Degas’s late pastels, with their vivid, streaming colours, often applied—like Richter’s—in cross-hatched layers.
Richter keeps an expanding archive of (mostly other people’s) photographs called “Atlas” (the archive was the subject of an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2003-04). Like Degas, he also takes photographs himself—including hypnotic, black-and-white close-ups of his own abstract paintings. Degas, too, was curious to know the effect of photography on his paintings, and bequeathed to us at least two photographs of his own images of dancers.
But of course, in comparing these two artists, who in many ways cry out for comparison, one must not forget the different potentialities of the camera from one fin de siècle to the next. Those differences revolve not just around subtle shifts, but around radical advances and outright oppositions: stasis versus movement, black-and-white versus colour, analogue versus digital.
And yet, even after all these differences are taken into account, what is astonishing is just how much these two artists shared. Both fought fervently against the dominance of photography, even as they were seduced by its special capabilities. Above all, their works reveal similar sensibilities that continually waver between hot romanticism and icy detachment.
***
Since Degas’s images often resemble snapshots, the tendency is to assume that he was heavily influenced by the “snapshot aesthetic”—arbitrary cropping, visual disjuncture, a sense of instantaneity, an impersonal, even-handed quality, and a tendency toward voyeurism.
However, cameras were not capable of taking snapshots when Degas contrived his brilliant compositions. They were too primitive. Exposure times, which typically required several minutes, made the sharp instantaneity of the modern snapshot unimaginable. Photographs had to be carefully staged, and photographers at the time, conscious of the inferior status of their medium, overwhelmingly chose to replicate the kinds of classical compositions familiar to them from traditional art. Symmetry and strong hierarchies of subject matter were in; asymmetry and off-centred subjects were frowned upon.
That’s not to say that photographic “accidents” (blurry images, off-kilter compositions) did not arouse the curiosity of artists. But it is worth noting that Degas himself, at the height of his fascination with photographs in 1895-96, favoured staged, classical compositions which had nothing to do with the “snapshot.”
So what accounts for his radical compositions, which are so weirdly prescient of the prevailing style of modern photography?
The simple answer is Japanese prints, which fascinated Degas, and which were all the rage among his Impressionist confrères. The Japanese print emerged from a tradition which had nothing to do with the hierarchies of western art. Artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige had not only embraced everyday life, they had explored compositional techniques like idiosyncratic cropping, inconsistent perspectives, and asymmetry.
All of this appealed enormously to Degas. In the mid-1860s—prompted by his friendship with Manet and by his readings of writers like Baudelaire, Zola and Edmond Duranty—Degas saw in Japanese prints solutions to pressing new pictorial problems. How to capture the movement, the fleeting beauty, the visual and psychological discordances of the modern city?
Movement was all-important. Ever since the demise of Napoleon and the rise of Romanticism, movement had become one of the key terms of the zeitgeist. Set against what many perceived as the paralysing stasis of tradition, movement came to be synonymous with imagination, with progress.
One only has to contrast the imperiously calm, coolly static work of Ingres with the dynamism and agitated colour of Delacroix to see why Degas’s contemporaries might have associated movement with “life, life at all costs.” “More imagination, and thus more movement,” went the Romantics’ cry.
The urban imagery for which Degas became famous in the 1870s and 1880s—imagery which succeeded so brilliantly at capturing the movement, dissonance, and constant change of the modern city—was really Degas’s riposte to photography. Why? Because of photography’s technical limitations, and above all the requirement that its subjects remain still. Degas had set about inventing an idiom that showed us the world in the way the camera could not.
If Degas felt photography was a challenge or threat, early in his career the medium’s technical limitations were such that, for the most part, he felt safe mocking it.
Things changed, however, as the century came to a close, and photography became more sophisticated. Degas, growing old, turned inward. His relationship with photography became closer, more intimate, more agitated. He gradually let go of his ambition to be the “painter of modern life,” in Baudelaire’s famous phrase, and focused instead on an interior vision of dancers in rehearsal or bathers washing and drying themselves.
These images are incredibly beautiful, and emotionally both hot and cold: hot, because of their extreme intimacy and the ravishing colour; cold, because Degas’s eye, like the camera’s, was ruthlessly unsentimental. He talked about wanting to show women caught unawares, as if they were animals licking themselves.
Thanks to the invention of high-speed photography, the “snapshot” aesthetic was just a few years off. This would become the signature look of photography in the 20th century: dynamic, impersonal, showing us life caught “on the fly,” not unlike Degas’s own imagery of the 1870s and 1880s.
Ironically, then, the very territory Degas had set out to conquer with his urban imagery, in the belief that the slow and laborious camera would never be able to compete, by and by became photography’s special contribution to modern culture. So, faced honestly, this crucial early skirmish between painting and photography appears in retrospect as a defeat for painting—one of many more to come.
***
As the new century opened, painting found itself in a state of crisis. In those early conflicts between the two media, painting, with its vast historical resources and inherited prestige, had always seemed to have the upper hand. But more than half a century later, when Gerhard Richter walked into the arena, what he saw bore all the signs of a comprehensive rout.
Artists still painted, but no one was quite sure why. If art was still capable of showing us the world afresh, few people expected this to be achieved in the medium of paint. Avant-garde painting had retreated into the cul de sac of abstraction, and then finally caved into the camera-inspired, commerce-derived seductions of pop art.
This was when Richter entered the fray. It was the 1960s. In the struggle between competing ways of seeing, photography and film were in the ascendant, as they are today. The camera ruled over almost every field of activity, from medicine and the military to advertising and news. Painting, in the eyes of many, was dead.
The response from many artists was to seek out, like Degas, territory for painting on which photography could not compete. The hermeticism of minimalist sculpture and the obscurity of conceptualism were two alternatives that gained traction.
Artists wanting to engage with society were left with no choice but to embrace photography as a way of “letting the world back in.” The phrase was used by the critic Leo Steinberg to address the work of Robert Rauschenberg, but it might just as easily have applied to Andy Warhol, or Sigmar Polke, Richter’s compatriot and co-founder of the Warhol and pop-inspired movement they called “Capitalist Realism.”
Richter eventually settled into a space somewhere in between these tendencies. Like Degas, he felt the camera’s seductive force, but he also felt it as a threat.
And it was truly an existential threat. What was the point of painting in an era so dominated by photographic ways of seeing (by which I also mean film and television), when all the basic formal moves that constitute modernism seemed to have been played out, when the choice appeared to be between reprising old, stale formulae and ditching painting altogether for other forms (sculpture, installations, performance, photography, video)?
All of Richter’s work can be read as a profoundly ambivalent, doubt-wracked response to these questions. He kept painting, but seemed convinced by none of the earlier, heroic models of what it might mean to paint. He was a Romantic—someone in love with the capacity of paint to create dazzling beauty—but his romanticism has always had a belated, elegiac quality.
If, in the 19th century, images of movement were synonymous in the minds of Romantics with imagination, by the late 20th century these images had accelerated and proliferated to such a degree that they were more likely to represent banality, blur, and the death of imagination. In the wake of the political catastrophes of the 20th century, and in the midst of the information revolution and growing consumerism, Richter was sceptical about buying into the great figurative tradition of western art.
Attracted by abstraction, he nonetheless felt sceptical about the rhetoric of freedom, individual agency, and transcendence that surrounded abstract expressionism. His own squeegeed abstractions, which seem to blur the visual field, disavow the notion of individual expression that is so crucial to the work of Pollock or De Kooning. They embrace, instead, the unpredictable outcomes of an essentially mechanical motion. And in this sense, although they are frequently as ravishing in their beauty as a Rothko or a Pollock, this beauty is as random and mechanical as a blurry photograph’s. Indeed, they have a high-speed, frictionless quality, exactly like a video camera rotating on the spot at high speed.
Yet Richter’s art is not simply a long lament for the demise of painting. Like the work of Degas, his art has a searching and curious quality. He is fascinated by photography’s special aptitudes, and seems to feel a kind of affinity for them, as if something about the camera’s way of seeing matches some essential aspect of his temperament.
In the end it is the arbitrariness inherent in photography—and in visual culture in a mass media age generally—that Richter presses home again and again. And yet, amid the arbitrariness—one image no more valuable, poignant, or meaningful than another—Richter has also come up with a number of iconic images that cannot fail to move us by virtue of their extreme beauty and intimacy. The most famous of them is “Betty”(left), a slightly blurred image of a seated young girl in a red and white sweater turning away from the…“viewer”? One wants to say so, but the better word may be “camera,” because although the image is a painting, it looks like a photograph and was based on a photograph.
In any event, it is a painting of human gorgeousness virtually unequalled in recent art: a singular human presence, full of youth and potential, who is nonetheless no longer with us, who seems to be on the cusp of dissolving into the visual field around her, like a young warrior wandering off into the early morning mist, never to be seen again.
We cannot see her face, we do not know—beyond the work’s title, “Betty”— who she is. And it is this impersonal, oddly detached aspect that is, I think, the crucial quality Richter has in common with Degas, and with photography.
Richter is so important to younger artists today because he nailed the dominant sensibility of our era: icy aloofness in tension with secret romanticism. In many ways Degas—the first artist to really see these conflicting qualities in photography—was the crucial precedent.
