Pictorialism

By Mélon Marc émmanuel HANNON ÉDOUARD (1853-1931)

Photo hobbyist, born in Ixelles, in the suburbs of Brussels, of a family of the Belgian upper middle classes, Édouard Hannon made studies of engineer at the university of Ghent. The famous firm of chemicals Solvay charged it, in 1877, with founding a branch with Dombasle, in French Lorraine. At the time of this stay, it discovers the workshop of glassmaking and cabinet work that Emile Gallé had just founded in Nancy. Its sensitivity to the Art nouveau engaged it, as of the beginning of the years 1890, to join the rows of the photo hobbyists eager to make recognize photography like an art. It was the beginning of what is called today the school of the pictorialism in photography, a movement born in the mobility of the Art nouveau and which, in the same spirit, sought to make apply to photography, always regarded as an industrial art, criteria of appreciation in force for the fine arts.

This dichotomy whose still photography at the end suffered of the XIXe century, Hannon made the experiment in its photographic practice of it even. As a photo hobbyist, member of the Association Belgian of photography, and thus in favour of the theses pictorialists, Hannon carried out a work which one can describe as “erudite”, because referring to the rules of the composition, framing and contrast. He used the techniques of pulling sophisticated in vogue near the photographers artists (pulling with coal, with dichromate gum) and invented with ingeniousness some processes making it possible to return the effects of screen and blur, so much at the time required. Beside this official work, which was entitled to the ogee mouldings of the living rooms, Hannon carried out as an engineer an important collection of stereotypes taken during its many voyages abroad where the Solvay company sent it to control the installation of its subsidiary companies.

These photographs, which one knows the negative ones but few pullings, are presented in the form of travel souvenirs, traces of the visited places, without apparent concern of the composition nor of framing. But what, in the spirit of Hannon, was not to undoubtedly be that a book of notes seems today a report of an exceptional quality on the social life - mainly urban life of the underprivileged classes - from Europe, the United States and especially of Russia tsarist of the end of the XIXe century. As a testimony, the work of Hannon takes seat at the sides of the great names of documentary photographic, like Lewis Hine or Walker Evans. However, the high informative value of this report should not occult its astonishing formal qualities. Indeed, the stereotypes of Hannon are as unfinished sketches if one compares them with his photographs pictorialists tallied, drawn and exposed with all the care required for a work of art. But with the passing of time, one discovers that these sketches in fact are controlled in a way surprisingly meticulous person and that they are subjected not to a pictorial esthetics, but with a specifically photographic esthetics, based on the off-registration, the out-field and the against-composition. Hannon must have an incredibly premonitory vision of what would be, thirty years later, the movement of the pure photography, exaltée by Strand and Stieglitz in the United States, or by Feininger and Renger-Patzsch in Germany. The work of Édouard Hannon was rediscovery and studied by the Belgian photographer Gilbert De Keyser, then safeguarded and preserved by photographic Space Contretype, center of contemporary photography, installed since 1988 in the old private mansion of the photographer, in Saint-Gilles, Brussels.

This beautiful residence Art nouveau was built in 1903 by a friend of Édouard Hannon, the architect Jules Brunfaut. Photographic Space Contretype devoted several exposures to Hannon, in particular É. Hannon and the new art, in 1993.

hoto hobbyist, born in Ixelles, in the suburbs of Brussels, of a family of the Belgian upper middle classes, Édouard Hannon made studies of engineer at the university of Ghent. The famous firm of chemicals Solvay charged it, in 1877, with founding a branch with Dombasle, in French Lorraine. At the time of this stay, it discovers the workshop of glassmaking and cabinet work that Emile Gallé had just founded in Nancy. Its sensitivity to the Art nouveau engaged it, as of the beginning of the years 1890, to join the rows of the photo hobbyists eager to make recognize photography like an art. It was the beginning of what is called today the school of the pictorialism in photography, a movement born in the mobility of the Art nouveau and which, in the same spirit, sought to make apply to photography, always regarded as an industrial art, criteria of appreciation in force for the fine arts.

This dichotomy whose still photography at the end suffered of the XIXe century, Hannon made the experiment in its photographic practice of it even. As a photo hobbyist, member of the Association Belgian of photography, and thus in favour of the theses pictorialists, Hannon carried out a work which one can describe as “erudite”, because referring to the rules of the composition, framing and contrast. He used the techniques of pulling sophisticated in vogue near the photographers artists (pulling with coal, with dichromate gum) and invented with ingeniousness some processes making it possible to return the effects of screen and blur, so much at the time required. Beside this official work, which was entitled to the ogee mouldings of the living rooms, Hannon carried out as an engineer an important collection of stereotypes taken during its many voyages abroad where the Solvay company sent it to control the installation of its subsidiary companies.

These photographs, which one knows the negative ones but few pullings, are presented in the form of travel souvenirs, traces of the visited places, without apparent concern of the composition nor of framing. But what, in the spirit of Hannon, was not to undoubtedly be that a book of notes seems today a report of an exceptional quality on the social life - mainly urban life of the underprivileged classes - from Europe, the United States and especially of Russia tsarist of the end of the XIXe century. As a testimony, the work of Hannon takes seat at the sides of the great names of documentary photographic, like Lewis Hine or Walker Evans. However, the high informative value of this report should not occult its astonishing formal qualities. Indeed, the stereotypes of Hannon are as unfinished sketches if one compares them with his photographs pictorialists tallied, drawn and exposed with all the care required for a work of art. But with the passing of time, one discovers that these sketches in fact are controlled in a way surprisingly meticulous person and that they are subjected not to a pictorial esthetics, but with a specifically photographic esthetics, based on the off-registration, the out-field and the against-composition. Hannon must have an incredibly premonitory vision of what would be, thirty years later, the movement of the pure photography, exaltée by Strand and Stieglitz in the United States, or by Feininger and Renger-Patzsch in Germany. The work of Édouard Hannon was rediscovery and studied by the Belgian photographer Gilbert De Keyser, then safeguarded and preserved by photographic Space Contretype, center of contemporary photography, installed since 1988 in the old private mansion of the photographer, in Saint-Gilles, Brussels.

This beautiful residence Art nouveau was built in 1903 by a friend of Édouard Hannon, the architect Jules Brunfaut. Photographic Space Contretype devoted several exposures to Hannon, in particular É. Hannon and the Art nouveau, in 1993.

The esthetic statute of photography appears of an exceptional ambiguity. It gave place to no great general theory, but it is the fact as many estheticians as professional experts. The expression even of “beautiful photograph”, pejorative at much of them, remains laudatory among amateurs, who - exceptional fact as regards art - adopt each day this activity more. “A fortuitous sunbeam or a shade through the way, a oak desiccated by time, a covered stone of foam can wake up a series of thoughts, feelings and imaginations picturesque”: this sentence of the pioneer William H.F. Talbot (1800-1877), who discovered the latent image - compared by Paul Valéry with the emergence of worms perfect out of the “inner language” -, could be contresigned by any gifted amateur of some sensitivity. “Art” is not whereas the pretext with “associations of purely individual ideas”. While the cinema, which, to the eyes of the layman, passed a long time to be only “photograph moving”, has already, and for a long time, its statute of art, for which one invented since 1920 a “tenth MUSE”, photography, after one century and half of existence, remains marked tares of its birth.

1. Firt discussions, first mistakes

We can enumerate three of the tares which marked the beginnings of photography: contradiction between its origins of nature experimental, scientific, in any case free from ideas preconceived on the role of the “daguerreotype”, and the appetites of “realism” to the vague direction, extra-artistic appetites of the public; exhausting the controversy which was established from the start to know a priori if photography were an art, if it destroyed art as the painter Paul Delaroche affirmed it since 1839 or if it could remain without being defined between these two positions; finally the fact that, last the “heroic” period about which one will speak only briefly, the photographers themselves never have, except extremely rare exception, sought to be defined beyond some vague and not very effective proclamations of “originality”, up to one very recent time (which coincided besides with their least chance to be made recognize as artists, because of the increase striking down in the number of the amateurs). It is notable that this phenomenon occurred inside the market governed by the laws of capitalism in time when, even more expensive, cinematographic industry succeeded in being made accept as an art, while obeying more narrowly still the laws of this same market. It is symptomatic that the oldest today remaining daguerreotype is a “work of art” to the second degree; Jacques Daguerre had there the elements which symbolize rather well the cultural luggage which could be it his, apart from the purely scientific concerns: an ancient imitation of nymph, two heads of cherubs, a wrapped bottle of wicker, pointing out the craft industry of the artistic country par excellence, Italy, a sentimental lithography and two other plasters. This “still life”, independently of the tastes which it reveals in its author, opens a way which for a long time was hardly attended. Indeed, at the beginning of photography itself, it is the portrait which triumphs. It is essential to remember that it literally submerged all the other attempts at development of photography during several years. That means, on the aesthetic level, a desire to compete with the painters of portraits, which one knows today who at the time post-romantic the major concerns were not exactitude that their models claimed and besides obtained. The desire of exactitude in the reproduction corresponds, one often noted it, with the final rise of the middle-class (under the reign of Louis-Philippe) which prepares positivism. It is striking to note that holding them of integral realism, out of literary and pictorial matter, were wary of photography; thus, Champfleury exclaimed: “What I see between in my head, goes down in my feather and becomes what I saw [...]. The man, not being machine, cannot return the objects automatically. The novelist chooses, group, distributes; does the daguerreotype try hard so much?” Confused and naive argumentation where the concept of realism reveals its own ambiguities spontaneously (one will reproach in the same way the surrealist “automatism” for being given up with the “facility”). The sarcastic remarks of the largest esthetician of the time, Baudelaire, are of another class. How the portrait, more than the “study” - Delacroix which he likes and even severe Ingres that he admires in make! -, it aims at the first “reconstitutions” of “tragic or gracious” scenes of the history, these groups “of funny and hussies” disguised, who insult “at the same time the divine painting and the sublime art of the actor”. Realism however is not saved: “The company immonde rua, like only one Narcisse, to contemplate his commonplace image on metal.” And to the dandyism of Baudelaire comes to mix its puritanism, when it condemns the stereoscope at a rate of the embarrassing exploitation which was made at once by it by skilful tradesmen: “The love of the obscenity, which is as long-lived in the heart of the man as love of oneself, did not let escape a so beautiful occasion to be satisfied.” On a point, the memories of Nadar give reason to Baudelaire: photographic industry was the “refuge”, if not of “all the missed painters, too badly gifted or too lazy”, at least of a good number of them, and especially of representatives of this Bohemian socially unclassable, at the same time concerned of material and rubbed freedom artistic culture, where coudoyaient themselves “missed painters, missed sculptors, clerks in bankruptcy” (Nadar). Admittedly Baudelaire is unjust towards Delacroix, which in 1854 considers it regrettable that the photography “came so late”, as it had been for Charles Nègre, which about 1860 naively transposed on the fabric its excellent photographs so, supreme honor, to expose to the Living room, as it had been for more specific research of Degas. But, large or small, the painters preserve in front of photography a total attitude which explains its rapid derives from “realism” towards claims of another kind. Full with goodwill, some criticize exceeded the non-problem raised by the exactitude of the “drawings”, as Disderi (1819-1891) believes still necessary to call its tests and even its “photographic calling cards” to the patented format, which enormously lower the cost price of the “portrait”. The example of Lamartine is completely interesting, if one thinks of the real influence which its Course familiar of literature (1859) can have where, having initially pronounced a vigorous anathema against photography, it suddenly changes opinion after having seen the tests on bluish paper of “sculptor” A. Adam-Solomon. It exclaims: “Photography, it is the photographer [...]. It is better than an art, it is a solar phenomenon where the artist collaborates with the sun!” As of this time, photography is thus summoned outside to transform itself into art: juridically, it is allowed like such, “at least in certain cases”, by a decree of the Court of Appeal of Paris (Apr 10, 1862) concerning a business of “plagiarism”. The dominant esthetics which, born in France, was spread at once in all Europe, especially in Great Britain, ratifies the misinterpretation which the expression pictorial photography summarizes. Thus, Nadar - pseudonym of G.F. Tournachon (1820-1910) -, whose certain remarks announce those that the theorists of the “new objectivity will hold” after 1920, is seen decreeing the title of “Titien of photography”, because it also uses “to him” very beautiful velvety blacks in its portraits - what testifies as much to an ignorance of the genius of Titien that his clean. Nadar takes the first air photography in 1858, the first underground photography in 1861; in 1886, it is the first “photographic interview”, where it is made take vis-a-vis the scientist Chevreul centenary; it is necessary to still quote its effigies of Nerval, Baudelaire and Dumas, inter alia.

2. The “escape out of reality”

At that time where the stakes of impressionism are posed occurs a vice of effects of blur, final improvements, complicated chemical treatments, the purpose of which are all acknowledged or unavowed to make it possible photography to compete with painting. The vogue of the new art follows the curve of the general evolution of the company: triumphing positivism a certain “escape succeeds” towards historical phantasms or symbolic systems which are used as counterweight with new problems. At the same time as of innumerable photographers drown their models in the fogs more or less sophisticated where, Bernard Shaw in 1902 will say, “the figures become suddenly indistinct and nonsubstantial, in a way as not very convincing as irrational”, the modern style relaying impressionism, others multiply sets able to compete with those painted by Thomas Couture or Ernest Meissonier. One represents using actors Don Quichotte in his library, or even of the allegorical scenes in the taste of the préraphaélites; H.P. Robinson, whose theoretical works (Picture Making by Photography) will be republished until 1916, did not hesitate to draw vast paperboards, grouping several figures heavily symbolic systems, before carrying them out in its studio using alive models; J.C. Strauss, in Germany manufactures of Frans Hals “on order”; F. Boissonas, in Geneva, pastiche (inter alia) Honore Daumier! In comparison, underhand erotism of the reverend Charles Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, guard all his freshness, if one thinks that the childish models that it made pose around the topics of Alice to the country of the wonders often did not have for them that the charm of their age. There is no solution of continuity between its work with legendary half (itself destroyed the major part of it) and, beyond the artistic photographs “naked” the laboriously manufactured one since the daguerreotype, according to the taste of each generation, research of authentic artists such as Hans Bellmer (the Headstock, 1936, series of variations), Man Ray, or certain Anglo-American photographers, such Bill Brandt. Thanks to them, the erotism became an authentic component of the esthetics of the light. Thus, about 1860-1900, no ground of discussion was offered which made it possible to the best photographers - in particular Parisian “documentarists” - to continue as artists. The most interesting research remains of a scientific nature (rifle chronophotographic of Étienne Jules Marey, which breaks up the movement, announcing the cinema) or exaspèrent the tendency to “imaginary” (unquestionable spiritistic “photograph” phantom and ectoplasms; Fixed Auguste Strindberg on the plates its experiments of alchemy thanks to the overprinting) in time even where the objective, clinging to the telescope or the microscope, reveals, beyond the utility role that Baudelaire assigned to him in these fields, of new beauties “in a rough state”. 3. End of photography-painting Although also influenced by the style of the British photographers, American photography had had its own evolution, marked in particular by a very sharp taste of the reports, which culminates with the admirable documents on the American Civil War due to Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy Sullivan, where the scenario writers of westerns will regularly come to seek sources of inspiration. About 1900 however, the “international style” (exported to Japan) included the documentary truth in the rhetoric of the effects: the “matter” (papers of luxury, final improvements by suppression or addition of details, etc) took precedence over the light. It is the time when a esthetician, Robert of Sizeranne, exclaimed: “Photography exceeded the promises of science; it had promised only truth to us, it gave us the beauty”, confusing with this one a vice of tricks (dichromate gum, fatty inks) which pastichent the charcoal, the aquatinte or the washing. About 1907, the American Alfred Stieglitz broke brutally, thanks to a precise theoretical argumentation, with “artistic” photography. Having created, since 1902, a dissenting group of the Camera Club of New York, it condemns not only the final improvement, but the enlarging: it works with a portable apparatus, even under the most difficult conditions (photographs taken in snow). In 1910, an art gallery opens its doors with its group (Photo-Secession), however that Stieglitz plays a part of foreground in the diffusion of paintings cubists in the United States: one could say that it photographs some sometimes undertook to make cubism according to nature. The choice of apparently dehumanized subjects, the importance of framing, the introduction of repetitive elements intended to support the impression of rate/rhythm or on the contrary the juxtaposition (for example of large letters of poster and an angle of leprous wall) explain why Picasso has, in its turn, recognized a research close to his in its work. But it is not a question of a banal transposition of the sights cubists by another medium: in 1921, Stieglitz leaves to the conquest the “pure” photography which rests, to each test, in each “plan”, the same problem: “a maximum of details for a maximum of simplification”, that it less solves in a “realistic” direction, as one could believe it, than Platonic. It photographs clouds which it calls of the “songs of the sky” and of the “equivalents of emotion”. The Photo-Secession group had only a few years of existence, but it is thanks to him that the originality of photography like artistic medium could be marked without return. Independently of their particular concerns, the artists who composed it indeed introduced the problem of the illusion of reality, problem today in the center of many discussions of the theorists of the cinema. Their activity was in a field where this problem was not encumbered by the data concerning “continuity” in the space and the time, which affect cinematographic criticism today. On the other hand, it is notable that Paul Strand, the most gifted photographer that about 1916 the Photo-Secession revealed, passed in a second part of his career to the film corealisation. It brought there the same power, the same party taken to reach essence starting from a banal or quasi abstract detail: “Objectivity is the genuine gasoline of photography, its contribution to art and also its limitation. The problem of the photographer is to clearly see the limits and the potentialities of its medium.” With him “pure” photography joined the dumb life of the objects: “If you are alive, a vegetable, a barrier mean something for you.



Die Welt STI schön (“the world is beautiful”), this title of a album-proclamation of the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch (1928), reveals well the internal contradiction of the “illusion of reality”: Renger-Patzsch condemns any faking, any research of the “effects”, all the more remarkable attitude as it is almost contemporary crisis expressionnist of the German cinema; but while privileging more subtly than the Masters of the Photo-Secession such detail of nature (a branch in flowers, a heap of old stones), it introduces the thesis according to which the beauty of the world depends on the choice made by the eye which looks at it. The photographic image, by its “objectivity” or its “mechanical character”, which is that answers best the remark of Spinoza: “I allot to nature neither beauty nor ugliness, convinced that I am that the things are beautiful or ugly only compared to our imagination (faculty to create images).” A third current of this time is represented by the researchers who are at the origin of the first “abstract” stereotypes completely. Since 1913, Alvin Coburn breaks traditional space by its sights in diving of New York and especially by its triangle of mirrors placed in front of the objective. The painter Christian Schad obtains in Zurich, in 1918, of the images without camera in illuminant of the objects posed on significant surface. In Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy remains attached to graphics. However these three currents converge towards an “etymological” definition of the photographic art: it would be a “description of the light” by itself, the support (prone, material pseudo-pictorial) being gradually tiny room to the state of pretext. The emotion or the reflexion would have to even be born from the luminosity. It is from this point of view that it is necessary to appreciate the rather exceptional theoretical contribution of Man Ray. With him, the divorce between painting and photography are paradoxically consumed, since it uses the two techniques, by radically excluding them one from the other. By its invention of the “rayographes”, photography does not have any more a support of the whole and, according to its beautiful formula, there is “the new one under the sun”. If it is being at the same time excellent and meticulous portraitist and the author of “technical” successes which must much with pure poetic imagination, it is not only with the influence of the Photo-Secession, of dadaism and of surrealism that it must, it is also with this conferred freedom, according to its own statements, by a “practice absolutely familiar of the trade”. Freedom which recently enabled him to turn over its proclamation of 1937: “Photography is not art” while saying: “Art is not photography.” Cultivated by amateurs as of the origins, the photomontage and the photocollage which lead to lend to a preliminary unreal composition “all appearances of something of reality which was photographed”, were integrated from the start in the current of renewal of the forms which started with the cubism and during the period 1910-1920. From a sometimes hard imagination, they passed to political propaganda with John Heartfield and El Lissitsky. The prevalent tendency since 1930 combines a certain poetic taste, even fantastic, taste of the strangeness, with the social realism, which finds the verism of Eugene Atget (1857-1927), the acuity of the “new glance” not excluding an artistic will. That one thinks of the school Czechoslovakian, remained remarkably faithful to the surrealist influences of his origins (1935), and better still in Brassaï (1899-1984), precursor of all the current French school, which mixes freshness with the emotion with humour and picturesque social, in particular, at Izis and Robert Doisneau. This last tendency at the same time “is sublimated” and exceeded by Henri Cartier-Bresson (born in 1908), who integrates his plastic concerns into the report, conceived like a research of the “decisive moment”, excluding the anecdote and transferring the instantaneous one to the permanent one.

4. Trend(Tendency) the most recent

After the backward flow of “pure photography”, a convenient simplification consisted in classifying the photographs in “abstract” and “realistic”. But this simplification violated the inevitable phenomenologic relation: there are not two reports/ratios different from the eye (or the objective) to an object whatever it is. At most it was seen supplanted by its own image at a rate of the “deformation” of this one. Many modern painters were subject to the influence of “page-settings” of photographers however realistic, but who cut out space in an unexpected way. As Rene Huyghe noted it about 1950, the objective for of “eye of fish” (eye-fish) immediately carries out the spherical prospect which required formerly painters of hard calculations and short cuts cunning. The dispersion of the current tendencies was accentuated under the effect of extra-artistic events. The first is placed before the Second World war: it is the birth of the great report, with all the constraints which it involves and also its possibilities of “return to the subject” more or less with feeling, but also if necessary deeply human, such as Robert Capa (1913-1954) imposed it, witness of the tragedies of our time. A little later, at least with regard to the reflexion of the photographers on their activity, one attends the development of the photography known as scientific, which had already modified the aesthetic sensitivity by revealing unknown aspects of the Universe. This one allowed creation (at the price of light fakings, like the “catch continues”) images which, by their strange aspect, acquire an aesthetic value. More recently, it let play the imagination of some creators, starting from structures studied under all the aspects, such the “adventures of matters” of Jean-Pierre Sudre (1962). It is necessary to evoke, finally, the push of “subjectivism” which, at the end of the Second World war, caused the attempts at Otto Steinert (1915-1978) creating in 1949 the Fotoform group (it was flattered to increase the field of photography and to even reverse the step of it in “going up” psychological analysis until the image) and those, frankly irrational, of Minor White (1908-1976), whose “mirages” communicate to rare forms unexpected significances and influenced a whole group of American photographers who believe in the “magic” possibilities of the objective. The color could have appeared a determining element of renewal of photographic esthetics. Enough curiously, the artists was a long time reticent in its connection, showing it “to distort” the purely plastic reports/ratios suggested or underlined by the “black and white”. More spectacular than really conclusive, Essays d' Erwin Fieger (born in 1913) announce an extreme attempt to violate this taboo, using “phantasmagoric” receipts which are unaware of reality deliberately. Perhaps it is about a non-problem, due to a kind of timidity in front of a whole of processes which, announced since 1869 and independently one of the other by Charles Cros and Louis Ducos de Hauron, were developed with chances of infallibility only during the time 1940-1950. The example of Gjon Mili (1904-1984) shows that the passage from one “technique” to another does not modify ipso facto an aesthetic design. When it photographs colors the jump of a frog in water, or Picasso drawing in the air with a flashlight, or the “successive installations” of a dancer moving, it continues to want “to contradict” the word of Brassaï: “Photography is the opposite of the movement.” The same tendency is found in the young Italian school (Fontana) which stylizes to the extreme of the fragments of reality and obtains an equivalent of “paysagism abstracted” with the pure colors, subtly granted or désaccordées. The opposite school all the candid photography which works in ambient light without worrying neither about the values neither of the framing nor of the angle of catch (two concepts too often confused), although being able to claim precursors such as Edward Weston in 1937, aims in fact “to exceed” any aesthetic quarrel. It is interesting to note that it coincides in time with the beginnings of the crisis of the American cinema. One can raise, on this subject, that the photographic anthologies of on the other side of the Atlantic often opened their pages with large “directors of the photography” (operators chiefs) of Hollywood, from which the varied styles are transposed of the screen to the ordinary objective. One of most eminent, John Alton (born in 1901), published about 1950 two theoretical works which became “bibles” on the other side of the Atlantic: Photography and Lighting and Painting with Light. Lastly, the diversity of the aesthetic tendencies underwent the “recoil” due to the apparent standardization of photography as regards cinema, mode and publicity. 5. Sociology of photography One already saw how much the development photography was related to the evolution of capitalism in France and England. As it is not astonishing as the first signs of a change of design occurred in the United States in one period when this country lived its first great crisis. The goal of Brady and his assistants was characteristic besides: to show the war to avoid its return. This tradition persisted and grows in the United States. About 1900, in fact photographic investigations bring the destruction of the slums of New York. Roosevelt will call upon famous photographers to support some of his social campaigns. Meanwhile, the example will have been followed by the U.S.S.R., on scale quantitatively less but aesthetically such an interesting, especially because of the influence of futuristic and modernistic during the first years which followed the revolution of October. This use of photography like social tool was later on victim of its diffusion even and the conditions of commercial operating of the great report. It is however necessary to recall the splendid exposure of “planetary sociology” organized in New York by a veteran of the Photo-Secession, Edward Steichen, in 1955: The Family of Man. It selected there, on two million tests received from 68 countries, 503 photographs which constitute the panorama of contemporary humanity, “condemned” to the unit and fraternity. One can consider the sociology of photography in opposite direction, i.e. by taking the point of view of the public. It was noticed that the request had been limited very a long time to the portrait, to which were added rudiments of information (portraits of celebrities, “picturesque” sights) and certain social requirements (photographs of group). This request could not have in theory of artistic exit, and it persisted by maintaining a craft industry; but it in addition completely changed under the influence of other activities, primarily publicity and the fashion: a typical case is that of Richard Avedon who, large photographer of mode, became a portraitist in turn moving (Marylin Monroe) and extremely wild for some of its models belonging to the “high society”. For a long time there was not in Europe of very real request with regard to the photography conceived like an independent art (single tests or with limited pulling). It is probably because each one thinks of being able to be a photographer and that the material required to be it is acquired easily: since 1968, more half of the French hearths had an apparatus. Reciprocally, the majority of the professionals, after having had to support to see illustrations drawn or engraved “according to a photograph” by pseudo-artistic prejudice, in general agreed to sell their photographs at agencies which always did not mention their signature; but since the years the 1980 photographs of agency are not anonymous any more. A number growing of them try to become their clean “producers” to maintain their copyright on their works. The teaching of photography exists in the United States, but it is absent or embryonic almost everywhere else. There still, one can note that the assimilation, indefensible in healthy logic, of the cinema with photography finds a justification practical in the fact that the majority of the photo hobbyists tend to be transformed into scenario writers amateurs. The empirical statute of the fixing of the “privileged” moment - this moment was a fragment of object - is taken again and denied by the desire to fix “at the same time” the moment and the movement which is its negation. As well with regard to its social diffusion as for the few aesthetic reflexions as it caused, photography seems thus condemned to vegetate in margin of the medium much more powerful which developed from it.

The art and digital collage

A new aesthetic collage with digital technology
New technologies are winning over more and more artists who are dedicated to where the art of collage or painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography. They use digital technology as a tool in the context of their artistic production. Often the use of this technology is so subtle that it is difficult to distinguish between digital and analog.
Digital allows manipulation and combinations of several techniques such as photography or video is sometimes an art lover finds it difficult to distinguish the different mediums used.
The appropriation and collage techniques that have their roots in Cubist, the dadaists and surrealists in the early twentieth century, already enjoy a long history, the digital has opened up new horizons. Thanks to digital technology, new opportunities open for artists to the art of collage and technology composites. The invisibility of fittings simulates a new reality and gives these images a very new, where the elements were not real transitions between them.

Collages and digital composite images have marked a turning focusing erasing borders. Among the artists who are increasingly using the computer to create complex is the American actor Scott Griesbach art multimedia collage.


By remaining in the art of collage and venturing into that of the image advertising. The latter is no longer a simple representation of a mark but the image carries a concept or a value. Digital technology has contributed greatly to the development of this "consumer culture" of images and art often refers to this theme.
Widely used in the advertising digital collage also calls into question the realism by making it possible realities simulated where hyper realities. The fact that we can also compose a digital image by combining realities of different art forms tends to blur the boundaries between mediums, including painting and photography. The textures are created by printing ink jet on suitable media that rival paint brush.
The elements of the process of composing, writing software, the use of software remain forms of expression that s apparentent the work of collagistes papers but who brings a signature aesthetic entirely new.

Photomontage and assembly

History and Future Directions
It was in 1910 that the German Dadaïsts Georg Grosz, John Heartfiled , , Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoöch have the first use of photomontage in reaction to the painting which he denounces the increasing abstraction. These photomontages are part of the will to protest and shock. This new art in 1920 is regarded as a major form of modern realism. Indeed photomontage reconciles imitation and composition.
That view dominates in the middle of Berlin Dadaist who opposes German Expressionism, which is a dominating power, reducing the figure of the artist to that of the image editor (Hausmann, Heartfield), close to the technician , against a devout vision of art and against sensible figure of the artist creator. Blend, off, poem, poster are all practices that put deconstructivist derided art and his claims. Heartfield evolve into a new kind of producer of art: the artist activist whose work is entirely driven by its function, its social purpose. At Hausmann one is in a playful space, in a consciousness that agrees to submit to the impulse visual imagination and automated. At John Heartfield, photomontage leads to a class. It articulates them pieces of a real outbreak, in order to make intelligible to that plunged into chaos in the world. It represents the removal from the point of view of the bourgeois class to the benefit of the proletariat. In the Soviet photomontage ( El Lissitzky , Alexander Rodtchenko ) is a space-perspectiviste and anti-naturalist, combining text and visual. It aims to have on the viewer the greatest possible action. The photomontage is tilted in its entirety by language: in Dadaist poem Hausmann, political slogan among Heartfield and the Soviets. At Hausmann the title does not change the meaning of the table but, as part of the collage, opens up a space to the subjectivity of each. At Heartfield slogan and it is injunction, which is extracted from speech, proverb or quote, as a piece of reality glued to the reality that piece of the picture. In Soviet there is a real sensitivity to the letters of alphabets and typography.

The collage was soon applied to photography through photomontage in the aesthetic of the fragment and shock. There are also attempting to cross painting, photography and drawing, photography and writing.

The collage is conceived as a means to penetrate the lines within a single image from reality (with Brecht: the image alone does not put enough emphasis on the World, only the introduction of extra photographic elements
The effectiveness of photomontage art is not limited by the photographic recording. The assembly is designed to make situations irreprésentables photographically. He is working to raise public awareness in the new social and political situations as well as the caricature. The gap and the detour artifice are facilitated by digital technology.
The digital photomontage operates a passage in the world of cut paper, glue and assembly manual to a World logical-mathematical that enables artists photomontage to tap into a set of images larger and accessible. The world of photomontage ignored the matter and move to a digital infinitely calculable. If the digital photography sees its documentary value compromised by the processing techniques and concealment much easier. The digital photomontage that was already in the pastiche, amalgam, the sensitive copes very well with digital.
But with the development of digital images are all, regardless of their source, something in common. Un air de famille, which is difficult to describe but helps unify the area and to provide air kinship to all images passing through the computer. This style digital is quite present in the photomontage advertising.
But photomontage remains for the artists a way to offer condensed and simultaneous situations and developing a new creativity.

The Mosaics

The origins of Mosaic with collage and metaphor for globalization
Archaeologists have found the earliest form of mosaic made of small stones black and white and sometimes red pebbles assembled by mortar. The Mosaic archaic appears to be the first form of collage assemblage. The oldest date back to Asia Minor VIII century BC. These forms does not called Mosaic at the outset. This name appears in the 1st century BC and his trademark booming, which will continue until fifth century evolving into geometric forms and figurative to decline in Italy and the West in general and later to almost disappear.

The mosaic appears rediscovered by painters like Cezanne and some impressionists from the late nineteenth century. Through their research work on the form and volumes they open up new avenues of research that will put the cubists on the agenda modern mosaic.

Artists from the beginning of a new century discernible contribution at all, and its fragments. The unit together and discontinuity heterogeneity of constituents of a work, harmony result of this activity assembly fascinates artists.

With this report at all with the mosaic fragments also has a predisposition to become metaphor. According Lucien Dällenbach explosion in the use of the mosaic coincides with the explosion of new communications and globalization. It gives an aesthetic dimension at the same time as political. There is talk of state mosaic speaking from Switzerland who form a unit despite a very different languages, customs and tradition. In terms of globalization and the Mosaics esthétise face of the world and makes it presentable. It gives a visible form in the world, it would be so beautiful that the world is a mosaic from which its success and development.

Exhibition to the centre Pompidou Jacques Villeglé

A particular approach of a street entertainment which expresses itself by the Laceration and of takeoff of posters Of September 7th, 2008 - January 5th, 2009

Jacques Villeglé is originally a painter. He studies to the art college of Rennes where he(it) gets acquainted of Raymond Hains who will follow him all the life. He works as A to he gets acquainted with the questions of town planning and public space, before studying the architecture. In 1947 he begins to harvest on the seasides fragment, twisted chains, at which he considers as sculptures.

To leave 1949 he directs his appropriatif behavior to the only torn up posters. For him, the real artist is " lacérateur unknown person ", the collection which can be made by whoever: he so announces the moment of the disappearance of the face of the artist, giving up the place(square) to the "collector" or the collector. " The taking, he says, is the parallel of the centring of the photographer ", and himself wants, as Hains, simple collector of fragments whom he is only choosing and signing. In 1958 he drafts a development on the torn up posters entitled By The collective Realities, the prefiguration of the manifesto of the New Realism considered as the historian of Torn up unknown person, entity which he creates in 1959.

The exhibition of the Centre Pompidou collects more than hundred of works of the 1940s in our days. He approaches in a thematic way the course of the artist since the typographic explosion and the big abstract compositions colored with the debuts, until the recent rhythmic juxtapositions stemming from posters of concerts.

He limits voluntarily his plastic initiative in the taking of torn up posters, then in their transfer on painting, so making exist anonymous and collective productions in the world of the art.


Jacques Villeglé is not an author of " ready-made ", even if he does not intervene (except by rare "helps") on the posters which he takes in streets for maroufler from painting. his work consists rather in letting appear from the urban chaos the beauties hidden in the thicknesses of paper torn by anonymous hands, which sometimes also wrote on posters or dirtied them.

The poster modifies according to the successive humors, its message deteriorates and mixs to those of the posters which it covered until become illegible. Fragments of lower coats(layers) appear, provoking on the surface a carrier chaos of colors and signs of affects: a new plastic language appears which converts the surface of the poster in a symbolic arena messages of which would quarrel the ascendancy.

Photography and technical material of full light.

After the second world war, in an artistic context marked by the development of the naive art or informal, number of photographers makes a commitment in a celebration of the very material. In 1956, Pierre Cordier invents the chimigramme, a technique which in full light and without enlarger, combines the physics of the paint (varnish, wax, oil) and the chemistry of the photography (revelation, fixative spray).

Eminent member of the revival of the German experimental photography according to war, Heinz Hajekhalke makes a commitment at the same time on the ways of the photographic abstraction.

Using techniques very differences as the collage(sticking) or the pictorial covering(collection) of the photographic surface, the English artist Nigel Henderson also realizes in this period some matériologiques experiments. After the series of graffiti, begun(affected) in the 1930s, Brassaï pursues its long survey(investigation) on the walls of cities.

Fascinated by the wealth of textures and structures of these taken the freshness, scaled, cracked surfaces, he devotes indefatigably to the fact that the philosopher Gaston Bachelard described glue of " musing on the material.

Digital collage, photo collage and digiscrapbooking

Digital collage and photo collage

Kurt Schwitters realized its collages with lost property train tickets, button, sheets etc. Kurt Schwitters which would have a computer would make numeric collages with images found on internet, scanned commonplace images, who would be intended to be thrown in the numeric garbage cans. Numerous more and more simple software allows to recycle these images and to realize easily digital collages.

The software of photo collage is applications which allow to realize diverse creations, from its own photos or scanned photos. The beginners and the experts, can so realize collages assembly(editing), It’s is as to make of the scrapbooking with scissors, to create greeting cards, invitations or personalized images.

Added to it there are tools of retouch photo which assures you a quality result. All these creations can be naturally protected to be sent or printed.

With their interface in color, the software of photo collage the images treat with an incredible ease. You choose to open one or several projects at the same time. Of the calendar at your choice of wishes by way of the letter, the poster, confusedly or the only image, about fifty models are pre-recorded. You adapt the weft to your project.


To incorporate its own photos becomes a children's game via a double-click in frames or a simple to slide to put down. It results from it the digiscrapbooking, new which is a digital scrapbooking Which consists in making of the digital scrapbouking and the possibilities seem multiplied tenfold with this technique. A publishing software often includes very useful functions which allow to zoomer, to re-centre(re-suit), to revolve or to add shadows. It is also possible to change the frame around every photo and to add effects of filter (vagueness, flash, grey, etc.).

To insert of the text, the cliparts and the simple geometrical forms can be the final touch to be brought to your work before protecting it in the size(format) embellish with images (BMP, JPEG, JPG, PNG, TIFF) or keep it to the state of project. Always a tab " to Print collage " allows to vary the layouts and the orientation of the page.

In a bank of datum of photos can be placed the favorite photos included then in an artistic compilation. With the software of Collage of photo, you can make big collages, or quickly and easily - with armatures of photo and the special effect of mask. And every work can be repeatedly printed. A range of available tools, including the harvest, the flick, the shade. Effects of mask of Collage of photo can improve still photos very quickly. Furthermore in texts a multitude of polices can be added to the digital paintings. Hundreds of images kinds cliptart quite give can again improve the digital assembly.

Of very good works, even can be leaders of works can be to realize with this software. Andy Warhol did not make of immortal portraits with the mechanical process of the screenprinting. But all the same attention on the uniformity of the processes which make that many assemblies will be alike by the style and the composition imposed by the technique.

The software of photo collage will realize very often also what we call in paint(painting) a crust, remain to find another word for the numerous collages photo so realized.

Assembly

The assembly became a very important aspect of the art when a more and more important number of artists questioned the idea of the work as a quite homogeneous, unified, obeying the hierarchical criteria associated with the traditional materials. It was not still evident that any material can enter by rights the artistic field and be assembled with the other one. The principle of the assembly consists of the configuration of diverse material, phenomenon which knows a progressive extension throughout the century. A step had already been exceeded this way by Kurt Schwitters who indicates in 1919 which used lost property as materials. This conception collided with Clément Greenberg's ideas who wanted a shape of "purity" of paint opposing in it to the principle of Pop Art which was going to appear after the second world war. For Robert Rauschenberg " the error it is to isolate the paint(painting), it is to classify her(it), j used(employed) materials others than the paint(painting), so that we can see things in a new way "

Appropriation, recovery, are decisive notions from the moment are developed the practices of the assembly, where confirmed the tendency assimilating the most heterogeneous materials corresponding to our urban society.

The Surrealism: the urban wastebasket and the oedipian dream. Its contents were updated to include accessories of showers, tires, television set, fragments of rusty engines and signboards of neon (on this point the assembly joins the pop). But usually these elements appear by fragments, where all the group of fragments establishes(constitutes) a fragment of common reality, in the style of the late Cubist; and so we constantly are playing by our current answers with the first quarter of this century. The experimental art on 1966 In 1950 the assembly is very appreciated by the new realists. Among others, Arman realizes garbage cans, where pile up rubbish, garbage through a window, and accumulations where are collected the functional objects of same one family, more or less worn. Through the accumulation, Arman introduces besides the dimension of the quantitative which contributes to divert(hijack) the status of the object envisaged in its peculiarity as well as the functions(offices) which are attributed(awarded) to him(her), advancing(moving), not her reduction, plastic consequences which begin working for and by themselves. The confrontation of several materials and techniques is a line of inescapable strength of the modern art connected in tendency widely investigated by the fact that have him sometimes indicated under the generic name of mixed techniques.

Of the usage of the collage in the Pop art

The standpoint on Pop art shows that theoretical work on the modern everyday life had preceded pop art. It was attached to the concept of popular of transitory, quickly forgotten, good market and bulk product of spiritual and sexy. This artistic concept was seen soon recovered by “établishment the” artistic one. The pop one was born in England at the beginning of the years 1950 pennies the influence from intellectuals and artists who became aware of the influence of the mass media and technology. This group thought of the change under influence of the Americanism of this period according to war. The groups raised the question of the widening of the means of representation about the new theories posed by the time with people like Richard Hamilton specialist in industrial design and Eduardo Poalozzi expert of the textile design
The artists of pop reacted to the modification of the visual perception caused by the media. The technical complex, mass media and mass culture constituted to some extent the program exposing the individual within the company, defining a concept artistic again.
The topics of meeting of this English artistic movement will also relate to the artistic techniques whose joining seems to be a major element. Poalozzi realized in 1947 a series of joinings starting from comic strips, of cuts of store, advertising images. The artists expressing itself with joining will be an important component of the movement. Joining as painting was also renewed with pop art. . Pop American develops this movement. Pop vigorously taken again American art the movement born in the United Kingdom. From kooning representing expressionnism S abstracts was launched in tests of joining and included/understood perfectly the intentions of the young artists Pop New-Yorkais. Robert Rauchenberg in 1953 after the gesture celebrates obliteration of a drawing of Kooning launches out in an assembly run joining. It works on the print and is also inspired by the step John Cage. Its assemblies will make the effect of a detonator on the evolution of Pop art. It knew to continue the Dada movements of Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp. Joinings of Rauchenberg want to be a confrontation of graphic elements. It shocked by a composition based on the chance (influence of John Cage) which made burst the former pictorial order. The symbols are drawn from realities distant from/to each other and combined with waste, bone, feathers. The things thus put in report/ratio are dematerialized. This style of joining is also present at at George Brecht, Marisol, Tom Wesselmann in a different style. Resurgence of the pictorialism through the Pop one The pop one makes transparent the usual one by the means of the images, makes conscious and freezes the elements of a manipulative creation. The artist reverses and denatures the relationship between the things and their form in the advertising world. The basic technique employed is photography but the artists denature it. The series of serigraphies of portrait is connected with the pictorialism which in my opinion passes by again with the posterity with the Pop one thanks to Andy Warhol and Martial Raysse. New realistic the Pop ones and collage. Gathered in France around Pierre Restany the French artists open a new way of Pop by creating the movement of new realistic. It will be characterized by a rupture between the generations. Arman one of eminent representing of this just movement of the bottles objects, masks, limp of Coke Cola. Rotella, Hains carry out takeoffs of posters. The new realistic ones with its many artists assemblers not to say collagist is a parallel demonstration of Pop Art insofar as it integrates to him also the concept of culture popular waste, technology, the mass media publicity and the original way to design the artistic object. Conclusion Pop collage With the Pop one one also attends an adaptation of the art of collage to the new media company and consumption. The pop one is an art “factualist”. The artists work with techniques of manufacture (painting collage screen prints…) who can be also mechanical. These processes apply or use things, objects which become tables and works of art, is not this step there the object of the artistic collage which abolishes the distance between art and the life. But the Pop one is especially an ironic attitude with regard of the company and a very marked direction of the reality of the facts. It put an end to the institutional reign abstract expressionnism putting a term can be temporarily with all chattering on the introspection and the interiority of art and the end also of a negative general attitude towards collage.

Picasso and art of collage

No need to introduce Picasso the most famous artist of the XXème century. One of most inventive, it admirably knew to adapt to the large currents of its century like the cubism. It invents it artistic joining in 1912 with George Braque.

In homage to Tristant Tzara theorist and poet of the movement Hobby-horse Picasso and Braque call this new technique “stuck papers”. The first work to be raised of joining was the Still life in the caned chair of Picasso.

This table emphasizes a piece of oil-cloth representing itself a cane-bottoming of chair. It exploits after fully the innovative character of this technique

After these first experiments any materials can be integrated in the fabrics of the painters cubists drink, charts to be played, subway ticket. These tables can be connected with the first artistic assemblies. This technique will have thereafter an influence in the cinema although it is not the subject of a theorization.

These first tables cubists are characterized by a research on the geometry and the forms represented: all the objects are found divided and reduced into simple geometrical forms, often of the squares. That means in fact that object is not represented such as it appears obviously, but by codes corresponding é its known reality .

In the Thirties Picasso is interested in the frames (photogramme in French) surely encouraged by Brassaï and Dora Maar. While treating and by recopying photographic plates. It reveint with the technique that frame at the beginning of the Sixties and realizes with André Villier of the assemblies of photographs and frames: it is about cutting of Picasso that Villier copies by combining them with its clean photographs. It is resulted from it 200 operations.

See Picasso Guitar

See collage Women in their toilet

Picasso widens the register of application of the principle of the papers stuck by using the newspaper. October 1912. Picasso creates a first sculpture of assembly, this “Guitar” out of paperboard, cord and wire, which it will take again during the winter 1912-1913 with sheet and wire. These principles will be taken again largely by the artists of the second part of the XXème century. Matisse at the end its life will be carried out also stuck papers.

Picasso is buried in the park of the castle of Vauvenargues in the Bouches du Rhone.

Hannah Höch 1889-1978

After studying painting at Charlottenburg Hannah Höch quickly became a famous artist practicing bonding assembly in 1919 in Berlin in Germany of the Weimar Republic. She uses scissors to select subversive in magazines its raw materials are the pieces that image. She realizes with these montages with fragments of human bodies and mechanical workings. It is remarkable by manipulating the variations of scale and the diversion of expressions. She quickly Dada movement by becoming a friend of Raoul Hausmann (founder of the Dadaist trend Berlin).

It occupies a special place in the Dadaist movement. There are two trends in his collages. The first is oriented policy. In this it is a neighbor to the work of John Heartfield. The second is oriented documentary. In his motion Dada she meets Kurt Schwitters with which it disseminates Dada movement across Europe.

Nicolas Schöeffer assembly

Nicolas Schöeffer he was a researcher curious of all new technologies.
He began to develop into a painting with basic forms. It Submits his work at the Salon d'Automne in 1937 and at the Salon des Independents.
He is also known for his invention of spatiodynamisme, that can be defined as "constructive and dynamic integration of space in the plastic work. ".
Modern technology should be used not sculptors contemporary sculptors Also sculptor of the twentieth century must utilize computer technology, electrical and electronic equipment which are used in industry. The cybernetic, is an essential part of his work, he said "awareness of the vital process that secures balance all phenomena."
By studying aspects of the work of multiple incredibly Nicolas Schöeffer have also retains his job on the assembly in its present sculptures consisting of technical objects that have artistic effects. The use of scaffolding in the company's Mill to design these sculptures are an example.
His work has been taken as an example by Maude Ligier PhD candidate in art history, University of Paris Sorbonne Paris IV at the symposium "back of the art of assembly in March 2008

Erro and the collage

Erro was born in Ólafsvík, Iceland Gu ð mundur Gu ð mundsson in 1932 his artist's first name of Ferro. Very early he meets artists, writers and critics bound to the surrealist movement: Breton but also Matta, Brauner, Masson, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Miro and Duchamp. He realizes mosaics and papers of the poems publish " Mecanismo, mécamanifeste ", " 100 mechanical poems.

The subjects of the plastic works of Err ó are inspired by images of my comic strips and in faces(figures) of despotic politicians. He also brings back the faces of the universe of Wal Disney side by side with Greek gods and madones. We see appearing with these last ones, we see appearing the German dictator Adolf Hitler together with sound of filing down of Saddam Hussein and the Chinese communist leader Mao Tsé-Toung.





Combining paint and collage, in works which join the principles of the narrative representation, Erro proceeds gladly by kaléidoscopique juxtaposition of images borrowed from the media universe, with strong political connotations.

There are sorts of laws which allow series of images to live from the moment when they found it the others to work picturalement. So I look, sometimes for a long time, for one or several documents which are going to give life to these stored images. So that the marriage between documents can finally come true, I have to feel the possibilities of a contrast or a common tension. It also happens that the agreement likes by the strength of their confrontation.
To contemplate the works of Err ó, it is as to assemble a puzzle even if are no collages.

Numerous reviews were dedicated to him. To the museum of modern art of the City of Bets and to the national gallery of the Real tennis. In 2005, the Museum of modern and contemporary art of Palma of Majorca. Mac Val to Vitry on the Seine in Val-de-Marne exposes regularly its collages.