David Hockney

 Don and Christopher, Los Angeles, 6th March 1982

David Hockney’s work shows an infatuation with the Polaroid, which led him to “re-explore the riches of the space-time equation investigated by Braque and Picasso in Analytical Cubism” (Wheeler, 1991 p. 159).

     Photographing Annie Leibovitz While She Is Photographing Me, 1982
photographic collage, 25 7/8 x 61 3/4 in.

In a conversation between David Hockney and Paul Joyce they explore the way in which technology influences the way we see:

Paul Joyce: So called reality accords with a programmed way of looking which goes back to what you were saying earlier, that the photograph has influenced the way we look. If we are presented with a photograph we say: well, that’s life. But it may not only be still photog4raphers that are responsible for that. Movies have influenced our way of seeing as well, but they are not life at all. They show a world confected, glamorized, changed.

Still Life Blue Guitar, 1982  composite polaroid, 24 1/2 x30 in.

Mother, Bradford Yorkshire 1982, composite polaroid, 56x23 1/2

David Hockney: I do think it’s true that all depictions must be stylized, what we call stylized. There is no way they can’t be. After all, they are not really reality. They are put on a flat surface as stylizations of some kind.

Listen to this [quotes from Leo Steinberg*]

Surveying Picasso’s lifelong commitment to women as solid reality - a commitment relaxed only during the cubist episode – one arrives at a disturbing conclusion. That Picasso, the great flattener of the Twentieth Century painting has had to cope within himself with the most uncompromising three dimensional; imagination that ever possessed a great painter. And that he flattened the language of painting in the years just before World War I because the traditional means of 3D rendering inherited from the past were for him too one-sided , too lamely content with the exclusive aspect in other words- not 3-D enough.

Amazing, isn’t it! Picasso shows you both front and back, and this must be about memory because…

 

PJ: You must retain one when you are looking at the other. Of course, when we walk around in an object, such as a jacket that’s on a peg, we are also dealing with what we expect it to be like. We have seen a jacket before and our imagination and our memory are stimulated by something already seen and known.

 

*Other Criteria by Leo Sternberg (Oxford University Press, 1975).

Sources:

Joyce, P., (1988) Hockney on Photography London: Jonathan Cape

Wheeler, D., (1991) Art Since Mid-Century London: Thames and Hudson

Abstraction and Photography: 1

This is a subject that I should have discussed for project one since many of my posts deal with one kind of abstraction or another.  Pictorial abstraction is conventionally defined as “a work of art with no recognizable subject”. This seems totally at odds with nature of photography which is essentially realistic and representational/ figurative.

The two approaches that have explored include the exaggeration of single characteristics like subjects form or its texture. The other approach generally includes the use of extremes close-ups, distortions and lighting effects. These effects transform the subject in such a way as to make it unidentifiable.  Although not strictly photographic, project one included lighting effects, blurring and numerous references to abstract art.  Project 2, is more photographic, but the imagery is distorted and is often unidentifiable or at times difficult to identify and abstract in nature. Certainly with the automatic-joiners that project 2 have produced, the imagery shifts from the representational to the abstract. 

“From the moment Cubism emerged in Europe, around 1907-8, its radically stylized geometric shapes prompted photographers- who were also influenced by Japonisme, Constructivism, and Wassily Kandinsky’s of abstraction (1913)- to imitate what then seemed the essence of Modernism (Mora, G 1998, p.39).  

Alvin Langdon Coburn The New York Octopus 1912

Alvin Langdon Coburn was said to be the first to intentionally abstract photographs. Evidence of this can be found in his 1912 series New York from its Pinnacles. The New York Octopus is a good example. Although many would deny Cubism is abstraction, its stylization of reality led photographers like Coburn to experiment with light and refracted mirrors in 1916. These works were called vortographs by Wyndham Lewis one of the key figures of Vorticism. 

Alvin Langdon Coburn Vortograph 1917

In 1916, Paul Strand made abstracts such as Porch Shadows. These works in turn inspired Fancis Bruguier and members of the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of America. There was an eagerness to link their photography to the avant-garde that was emerging from Europe. 

Paul Strand. Porch Shadows, 1916. 

The move towards abstraction quickly shifted towards the figurative and the stylization of the human body. This approach was associated quite strongly with the Clarence H. White School of Photography. From 1914 many of the professors and students like Laura Gilpin, Paul Outerbridge  Jr., Karl Struss, Margaret Watkins    and  Bernard S. Horne would produce photography informed by experimental abstraction.

 

Bernard S. Horne Design - Princeton

1917 (ca) Gelatin silver print

11 7/8 x 9 15/16

Margaret Watkins The Clarence H. White School of Photography: Design for Marble Floor, "Blythswood," Glasgow 1919

The work of the staff and students =were often reproduced in the magazine Photo=Graphic Art.

Sources:

Mora, G., (1998) Photospeak,  New York: Abbeville Press.

Picasso's Collages

Pablo Picasso Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass 1912

As I work on my digital collages I am reminded of Clement Greenberg's essay on collage: "The Pasted-Paper Revolution" (or as it is known "On Collage"). Greenberg's article is still amazing. In it he discusses a number of cubist works by Braque and Picasso.

In the Autumn of 1912 Pablo Picasso began a series of works using a range of materials such as wallpaper, imitation wood grain, newspaper, a charcoal drawing and sheet music. This is one (above) of the earliest collages and perhaps even the first.

Clement Greenberg in his "The Pasted-Paper Revolution" of 1958 argued that pictorial allusion gave way to what he called an optical illusion. In his sophisticated formalist reading of the work he argued that the various elements, the lettering, the charcoal lines and the coloured papers "begin to change places in depth with one another, and a process is set up in which every part of the picture takes its turn at occupying every plane, whether real or imagined, in it."


Art News 1958

Source:

Frascina, Francis and Harrison, Charles (1987) Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology New York: Harpers and Row pp.105-108.

Braque

Le Guéridon

Le jour (1929)

L'Atelier III, 1949

The Classicism of Braque’s painting of the twenties and thirties and beyond are interesting for a number of reasons. The works “reactionary nature” is connected to Braque’s “collapse into calm” (Wheeler,D., p.64). The works representation of calm is partly due to the process of the “reassembly” of the still-life tradition that Cubism “helped to shatter” (Hughes, 1991 p. 146). His subject was the studio. For Braque “the studio is a sanctum, imagination’s cave, and its clutter of bottles, pots and oddities suggests the alchemists cell with its alembics and stuffed crocodile” (Hughes, 1991, pp. 146-49). The studio or at least the image of it is one of “a privileged place of transmutation, memory and contemplation… the key to the paintings of Braque’s old age, the Ateliers of 1949-54, with their calm transparency and baffling layers of images” (Hughes, 1991 p. 146).

A further discussion on Braque is available here.

Sources:
Hughes, R., (1991) Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson.
Wheeler, D., (1991) Art since Mid-Century, London: Thames and Hudson.