Painting and Photography: A Glance (Part Two)

“Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery 

lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom."

(Luis Bunuel)

Romanticism was a current that ignited every form of art in the nineteenth century, from literature to music, from poetry to painting.

One of the themes addressed by the Romantics was that of the relationship with nature, with its destructive power, capable of reminding us of our smallness in front of its beauty capable of dazzling as well as of terrifying for the threatening force of its bad weather.

The term to define all this was “sublime”: what makes us petrified and takes our breath away with wonder and horror. 

William Turner (1775-1851) painted large quantities of sea storms and typhoons, storms, dark and frightening skies, always with colors dominated by dark hues.

The same feeling you get when you see the incredible landscapes photographed by Michael Kenna, always in black and white and devoid of any human presence. The photographer, born in England in 1953, has never stopped traveling the world in search of the most beautiful landscapes that tell as if his camera was that brush he gave up as a young man to start his career as a photographer.

Once again the photographer's eye coincides with that of the painter.

William Turner

“Fishermen at Sea” (1796)

Michael Kenna

“November Clouds” Mont-Saint-Michel, France (2000)

If Romanticism was an artistic current close to the soul and feelings, Impressionism changed the way we see and approach painting, its physical gesture. 

Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, began a different discourse with light and time; their paintings seemed really like photographs: instants stolen from time, immediate strokes of the brush to stop the light that changed with each passing minute. 

It is known how the term Impressionism was given by Parisian journalists, in a derogatory sense, to the first collective exhibition of 1874 in which 165 works were exhibited, with all the most important exponents of this pictorial genre, including Renoir, famous for his lines soft, round, delicate colors and always sweet smiles. 

Saul Leiter has always been inspired by these artists, as we have already seen about his book: the beauty of his colors and the frame of his images demonstrate the same sensitivity of those young visionaries who revolutionized forever the way of seeing the world, and that will kick off contemporary and abstract painting.

Renoir “Les parapluies” (1881)

Saul Leiter “Red Umbrella” (1958)

If Impressionism had its eye on the constantly changing surface of reality, like a water lily on the mirror of water, Metaphysics was aimed at what is beyond the physical appearance of reality, beyond the senses. 

The term, taken from the Greek Aristotle, means more than (meta) the physical, this pictorial current of the twentieth century, which had its most famous exponent in Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978), was closely linked to the inner world and studies of Psychoanalysis which became increasingly important in those years. 

De Chirico's famous “metaphysical squares” are often used as a metaphor for surreal situations of emptiness, in which the air seems rarefied, oppressive, and where the human being is only a small presence or a long shadow on the ground. 

Never as in these months of imprisonment for the infection, the historical squares of our cities, usually crowded, have reminded us of those painted by the Italian painter. 

When an artist enters our visual imagination in such a domineering way until it becomes an adjective of certain atmospheres, it is not difficult to find it in many photographs. Like this one by Franco Fontana, better known for his landscapes with chromatic patterns that are more reminiscent of Mondrian than De Chirico, but when the human being appears in his photographs then the atmosphere becomes magically metaphysical. 

The same also applies to some photographs of Herbert List.

Giorgio de Chirico

“Squares of Italy” (1950)

 

Franco Fontana

“Houston2 (1985)

Herbert List

“Veiled Royal Monument” (1937)

 

We have arrived at Edward Hopper, an inevitable artist in every discourse related to the influence of painting on photography (and vice versa). 

Hopper, born in a New York city in 1882, has left a visual legacy that many photographers and filmmakers have nurtured (Wim Wenders above all). 

With its acid and cold colors the American artist has staged solitude, incommunicability, emotional emptiness. The faces of the people in his paintings look like masks, they are rigid and dazzled by the light that is always carefully studied in Hopper, who by the way writes:

“Maybe I'm not very human. My goal is simply to paint the light on a wall.” 

Many times he has been accused of not being a good painter, of low quality, but he is interested in something else, he is interested in investigating what has been called the “realism of the subconscious”. His style has inspired many photographers, and in some cases the emotional and tonal similarity is striking, as in the American photographer William Eggleston (1939).

Edward Hopper

“Morning sun” (1952)

William Eggleston

“Untitled” (1969\70)

 

But, to say, I happened to buy a short story book by Carver, famous for his essential style with which he tells the fierce banality of the American province, and the illustration of the cover is a classic homage to Hopper.

“Room in New York” (1932)

Carver's book (Einaudi Super ET)

We have come to the end of our visual journey, with the most devastating example of aesthetic and emotional twinning between painting and photography. 

The one between Francis Bacon and Antoine D'Agata. 

The Irish painter was a rebel since he was a boy, and growing up he will alternate painting with a life dedicated to vice: gambling, alcohol, drugs. 

His exasperated expressionism fell after the Second World War, from 1945 onwards. While abstraction is in vogue, Bacon still works on the image, or rather on image fragments, often also with photographic images. At the origin of many of his paintings there is not a real figure but a frame taken from a film, from photographs with a famous painting from the past. 

What matters, for him, at the start, is not the reality itself but the intense, distracting emotion. 

Like a punch on the nose. 

Bacon is commonly described as the painter who more than any other has managed to represent the terror, horror and anguish of our time. 

To those who accused him that his paintings were too violent, he replied: “It is life that is violent.” 

The same goes for Antoine D'Agata, of which I reserve the right to talk about him in the future, because he deserves a separate discussion. 

Looking at his photographs means going down to the underworld of the psyche. 

A young punk who lost an eye during the clashes with the police, and then a life marked by the use of all types of heavy drugs and by the attendance with prostitutes, also AIDS disease, to whom he will dedicate films and many shots. 

The bodies moved, deformed, in total darkness, are a lethal mix between the light of Caravaggio and the horror of Bacon. 

But where there is no redemption, or salvation. 

Hell is only Hell.

 

Bacon from “Triptych: Three studies on the human body” (1949)

Antoine D'Agata “Vilnius” (2004)

Giulio Carlo Argan: “History of Art” (Sansoni, 1988)

E. H. Gombrich: “The Story of Art” (Phaidon, 1950)

“Realism” by Kerstin Stremmel (Taschen, 2004)

“Renoir” (L'Unità - Elemond Arte, 1992)

“Hopper” by Orietta Rossi Pinelli (Giunti - Art Dossier, 2002)

“Bacon” (Peruzzo, 1988)

“Michael Kenna: Images of the Seventh Day” (SKIRA Photography, 2010)

Saul Leiter: “All About Saul Leiter” (Thames & Hudson, 2018)

Franco Fontana: “Behind the Invisible” (Silvana Editore, 2018)

Antoine D'Agata: “Anticorps” (Editions Xavier Barral, 2013)

Italian version