It’s not really cheating, is it?
The relentlessly meandering masses at Digg It managed to snag my attention with one of their group discoveries, the whimsical “re-paintings” of José Manuel Ballester. I usually avoid things like Digg It — far too much time wasted — but last month images originally posted at a Spanish site called Fogonazos (Flashes) were worth a chuckle.
He meticulously deletes all living creatures from familiar paintings. Below is Brueghel’s “Winter Landscape” alongside Ballester’s version, shorn of people, in a bid to “purge all human anecdotes from historical landscape painting and invert the hierarchy, giving priority to the background”. Dunno why. Must be an environmental thing.
He’s also “done” Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation”, Botticelli’s “The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti” and more. The originals are at the Prado in Madrid; his renditions are currently on view down the street at Galería Distrito Cu4tro. And his website is here, where his own original landscapes are brutally rough and sparse, and even more ghostly.
But far more interesting than all of that was another link on the Fogonazos page dated November 2006. This one tracks to a seemingly anonymous site, also Spanish, based at the University of Seville.
Here, someone’s gone to a lot of trouble unearthing the photographs on which several impressionists based some of their paintings. The idea of painting from a photograph makes “purists” wince, of course, but artists have been doing it ever since the first roll of film came back from the Fuji kiosk.
The Dutch masters painted from camera obscura projections, and dear old Dali was known to rely on photographic studies too.
At the top of the post are Paul Gauguin’s 1890 painting “Mother and Daughter”, and the snapshot he lifted it from, taken by one Henry LeMasson. Below is “Young with Fan”, from 1902, alongside a picture that Louis Grelet took in Gauguin’s studio in Hivaoa.
The website also features Seurat, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Van Gogh and, most prominently, Toulouse Lautrec, but even so, it seems to reach a bit far with its overview:
“No invention of the Industrial Revolution influenced impressionism more than the camera … Photography inspired impressionists to capture the moment.”
The site quotes Gauguin in 1897: “The machines arrived and the art went away; I am far from thinking that the photography will be to us propitious.”
But he’d already made good use of photos by then, even copying the camera’s composition and foreshortening. Even his 1893 “Self-portrait with Trowel” is faithful to a picture someone snapped of him.
