Painting and Photography: A Glance (Part One)

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength,

and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much,

and what is done in love is well done.”

(Vincent Van Gogh)

Also this time I want to answer those who asked me to talk about painting and its relationship with photography. I do it with great pleasure.

I am certainly not an art critic, but since I was a child I have always loved drawing and painting, even if I have quit for many years.

However, during high school, the art and literature lessons were among my favorites. And I have never hidden this passion, even now, both in my seminars and in my books.

I am firmly convinced that in our photographs, as in any artistic production, content and inspiration does not come only from what is close to us, but from everything we like and are passionate about. My photos are full of the photos I loved to see, as well as the painters, songs and books that inspired me.

I believe that there must be no limited territories in art, so what is visual refers to the visual as well as what you listen or read, but everything mixes within us, in a warm magma of inspiration.

There is a term that well describes this idea of mine, borrowed from literary criticism, and much loved by French Decadentists such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud: synaesthesia, or that perceptive-sensorial phenomenon which indicates a contamination of the senses in the description; for example, to a situation in which auditory, olfactory, tactile or visual stimulation is perceived as two sensory but coexisting events. In poetry and literary criticism the expression “hot words” or “green silence” is called synaesthesia.

This is the way I conceive art, without borders or sectors.

 

Intimately, it is inevitable that photography owes a lot to painting, because it was born from it and it's the technological version, with the need for fidelity to reality, immediate and duplicable. There is always a talk on filling an empty rectangle with images and meaning.

Just as the debts of large photographs and paintings are sometimes explicitly declared, not to mention those who have alternated the two forms of art during their profession, to the point of abandoning photography to return to just painting: without a doubt the most famous case is that of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who has always declared his love for Surrealism in painting; the same goes for Man Ray.

Salvador Dali. “Lugubrious Game” (1929)

Henri Cartier-Bresson. “Trieste” (1933)

Man Ray. “Noire at blanche (black and white)” (1926)

Here I want to offer you comparisons between some famous paintings and photographs, a suggestion of mine, without dwelling too much on stories and interpretations. It is always better to leave images to suggest rather than too many words.

Moreover, the first forms of photography were, as we have seen in previous articles, those of Pictorialism, which was a painting on photography, almost a sign of the passage of testimony between the two arts, which have nevertheless walked in parallel to the present day .

 

I would like to start with Paul Gauguin, because his inspiration varies from painted themes to colors.

Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin will be among the most famous painters of his time to leave Europe in search of an uncontaminated and primitive world that he will find in Tahiti, where he will move permanently in 1895, to die in 1903 in the Marquesas Islands, in Polynesia.

His Tahitian paintings are mysterious, symbolic, with a powerful color; as well as his famous portraits of women, which are a concentrate of sensuality, mystery and intimacy with distant and different worlds.

As in the pose of the model of the first photographs of Alvid Coburn in 1905 which pushes the 19th century pictorialism towards a more modern photograph.

In the same way, it is impossible not to rush with thought to Gauguin's paintings looking at the portraits of Bernatzik, the first photographer with an anthropological approach who documented and studied the tribal populations of South East Asia in 1930, crossing Thailand, Burma, Indochina, Laos up to Bali.

 

Paul Gauguin. “Te faaturuma (The silence)” (1891)

Alvin L. Coburn. “Nude” (1905)

Paul Gauguin. “Woman with fruit (Where are you going?)” (1893)

Bernatzik. “Jaray woman”, Indochina

 

But Gauguin is also color. “Color, like music, captures in its vibrations the most universal, therefore indefinite, exists in nature: its secret energy,” he writes at the end of his life.

And those bright and complementary colors were the moment of transition from black and white to the color of Alex Webb, who in a different land, in Haiti in 1975, discovered a new way of photographing:

“Three years after my first trip to Haiti, I realized that there was another emotional aspect I had to take into account: the intense and vibrant color of those worlds.

I understood that the color goes beyond the color itself. Color is emotion. If black and white come from the heart and the head, “the color comes from the stomach”, as Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert once said. It is more sensual than black and white. A red can be reassuring, or threatening, depending on the sensitivity, experiences or provenance of the beholder.”

 

Alex Webb. “Gouyave”, Grenada (1979)

If Gauguin is color and exoticism, Caravaggio is the Light. With Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio, we go back in time, at the end of the 1500s, to Italy. Cursed painter with a disorderly and violent life, who used prostitutes as models to depict the Madonna, who portrayed his face in the beheaded heads almost to predict his violent death, as a result of a malignant fever and after being stabbed and beaten in blood for a quarrel.

But it is thanks to him that the world of art knew a new way of conceiving light: tragic, theatrical, like a sword that affects bodies and things in the darkness, to which every photographer will always respect and pay tribute .

Caravaggio. “Dinner in Emaus” (1606)

Salgado. “Abéché Hospital”, Chad (1985)

With Caravaggio, Johannes Vermeer is one of the painters I love most intensely. Only 35 works remain of the painter born in Antwerp in 1632, but his meticulous detail, the splendor of the use of light and the narration in his paintings made him immortal and a source of inspiration for many artists.

It's Steve McCurry himself, in the documentary “Vermeer, the painter's eye”, who tell how the famous portrait of the “Girl with a pearl earring” was the main inspiration for his best known photograph, photo of the Afghan refugee Sharbat Gula, which became an icon worldwide as a cover for the 1985 National Geographic.

The inclination of the head, the light, the gaze full of emotions of the young girl immediately remind McCurry of Vermeer's painting. That photograph was a tribute to his painting.

Vermeer. “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (ca. 1665-1667)

Steve McCurry. “The Afghan Girl” (1984)

From the Dutch interior of Vermeer, we move to the Parisian Belle Epoque of the late nineteenth century with Toulose-Lautrec.

Another existence devoted to excess is that of the painter suffering from dwarfism, alcoholic, sick of syphilis, who began to draw at four years of age and who was the singer of the Moulin Rouge, of unrestrained dancing, of alcohol and of the sex of the Parisian suburbs . With a unique and recognizable style he was among the forerunners of advertising graphics, creating the posters of the shows of the famous Parisian venue, ironic and full of life, finds in Giorgio Caproni's words a perfect portrait:

“Lautrec did not even think about wanting to change the world, and for this reason perhaps it has contributed significantly to modifying it. Beautiful or ugly it was, good or bad, guilty or innocent, he was only interested in one thing: do not miss the beautiful opportunity offered to him with his birth, and look at it, see it, discover its secret.”

These words, the lifestyle and the atmospheres of his works cannot fail to bring to mind the famous “Café Lehmitz”, the 1978 book by the Swedish photographer Anders Petersen. The young photographer, who moved to Hamburg in 1967, learns of this place where the inhabitants of the working-class neighborhood meet: prostitutes, poor people, marginalized people.

He lives there for three years, photographing every moment of it, without the slightest moral guidance but being part of that same family.

It will become one of the most famous and admired photography books in the world.

 

Toulose-Lautrec. “Marcelle Lender dancing in the Bolero in Chilperic” (1895)

Anders Petersen. “Kleinchen with Dock Worker” (1968)

For now I will stop here, but it will continue...

 

About Vermeer and Steve McCurry:  Views on Vermeer

Salvador Dalì in “Arte Fantastica” (Taschen, 2005)
“Gauguin” (L'Unità – Elemond Arte, 1992)
“Caravaggio” (Electa, 1993)
“Vermeer” by Norbert Schneider (Taschen, 2016)
“Toulouse-Lautrec” (L'Unità – Elemond Arte, 1992)

 

Henri Cartier-Bresson: “L'Esposizione \ The Exhibition” (Contrasto | Centre Pompidou, 2015)
“Fotografia del XX Secolo” (Taschen, 2008)
Bernatzik: “Southeast Asia” (5 Continents Editions, 2003)
Alex Webb \ Rebecca Norris Webb: “Street Photography e Immagine Poetica” (Postcart \ Aperture, 2014)
Sebastiao Salgado: “Per la liberà di stampa” (EGA, 1996)
“Steve McCurry” (National Geographic, 2010)
“Anders Petersen”(Bokforlaget Max Strom, 2013)

Italian version