Utah Museum of Fine Arts’ inspired twin bill of Blue Grass, Green Skies, Photo-Secession – The Utah Review

Double exhibitions have become a specialty well mastered at The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) and the latest examples produce one of the most fascinating engagements with art history in a fresh perspective that resonates effectively with contemporary visitors. 

Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art comprises just 17 paintings but the visual feast is spectacular on a grand scale. The exhibition highlights American artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were pioneers of the Impressionism and Realism movements — including George Bellows, Mary Cassatt, Frederick Carl Frieseke, John Grabach and Childe Hassam. In fact, it was 150 years ago when the first exhibition of Impressionism took place in Paris. Blue Grass, Green Skies was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) with generous support by the Art Bridges Foundation. 

The second exhibition, Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography is just as fascinating, for the reciprocating conversation it sparks between painting and photography. The exhibition, representing the same period as Blue Grass, Green Skies, highlights the first substantial wave of situating photography as an art on level of artistic merit with painting.

Together, the two exhibitions, which are open through Dec. 29, give UMFA visitors a comprehensive opportunity to see how American and European artists responded to a world that was transforming at an unprecedented rapid pace and their influence which continues to reverberate for artists in the 21st century. 

The title for the exhibition of paintings comes from a phrase in a New York Tribune review of the first exhibition of Impressionism in the U.S., which was in 1886:  “ blue grass, violently green skies, and water with the coloring of a rainbow.” In a talk given when the exhibitions opened at UMFA in August, Alisa McCusker, the museum’s senior curator and curator of its European and American art collections, elegantly articulated the connection between painting and photography as it emerged. “Ironically, they [Impressionists and Realists] owed their freedom to explore these possibilities to humanity’s newest art form that created the

most realistic images ever made to date—photographs,” she said.“Americans visiting and living in France were open to the potential that the new imaging technologies of photography offered them to forge a new path in painting. They absorbed the lessons of the Impressionists and Realists, and many of them returned to the United States and cultivated a new style of painting with a spirit of experimentation and reflected changing life in this young country.”

As the detailed overview of both exhibitions, published below, demonstrates, painters and photographers during this period were solving the problems to overcome being dismissed by traditional institutional gatekeepers who prized Academicism for judging artistic merit. About that first Impressionism show in Paris in 1874,  “it is not mere coincidence that they held their show in the home and studio of the famous Parisian photographer, Félix Nadar,” McCusker noted. “From the beginning avant-garde painters and photographers were close colleagues and sometimes even close friends.” As for photographers — “who also wanted to secede from centuries-old traditions of image-making,” as McCusker explained — they were concerned about their work viewed exclusively as mechanical art and the fact that by the 1880s camera technology had advanced to becoming affordable and accessible for amateurs.

The Utah Review presents sidebar reviews of both exhibitions:

Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

In the decades following the Civil War, American artists from around the country went in droves to Paris. In Utah, for example, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints organized cultural missions sending American artists as ambassadors to study in Paris. It was not not long before Americans — Mary Cassatt, who was born in Pennsylvania — took to Impressionism. Her work impressed Edgar Degas so much that she became the only American artist associated with her French Impressionist peers. 

Regarding the 17 paintings organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)  Blue Grass, Green Skies highlights the rapidly expanding group of American painters who like Cassatt, studied in France, who became the strongest proponents of Impressionism outside the place of the movement’s birth, which continued for more than three decades. However, a new generation of artists also carved a new path as Realists, shying away from the color palettes that defined Impressionism, to render scenes of American life that showed the hard impacts of a nation with unprecedented urban growth and industrialization.

One of the artisfs most prominently represented in the exhibitions Childe Hassam. Although, in 1889, he rented and worked in a Parisian studio once occupied by Renoir, he did not study formally with his French counterparts as Cassatt had done. Nevertheless, the Massachusetts-born became the paradigmatic American Impressionist, who eschewed painting scenes from the past. A Smithsonian magazine feature published in 2004 recalled that Hassan, in an 1892 interview, said ““A true historical painter, it seems to me, is one who paints the life he sees about him, and so makes a record of his own epoch.” But, in that same interview, he rejected the Impressionist label, proclaiming “The true impressionism is realism.” The four Hassam paintings in this show  that critics consistently praised amplify his point: Point Lobos, Carmel, 1914, Strawberry Tea Set, 1912, Ponte Vecchio, 1897 and Boston Street Scene, 1900 — a master class in color saturation.

At the time of its creation, Cassatt’s Woman and Child was considered unlike many other painterly expressions of the intimate bond of mother and child. Cassatt, who never married but was an aunt to her brother’s children, apparently used her housekeeper and companion as a model, and the figures are outlined in cobalt blue while they are fleshed out with quick brushstrokes but while the work appears to be unfinished, its sketch-like appearance nevertheless conveys the ephemerality of intimacy and innocence. Adam Gopnik, in a New Yorker magazine feature published in 1999, called her work radical. He explained that “Cassatt’s mothers, like Degas’s dancers, are being asked to produce poses, in the advancement of grace, that involve a lot of dull repetition. Her children are as taking and as indifferent to their mothers as gods are to nymphs, or men to opera girls. Cassatt is, on a smaller scale of achievement, to mothering what Jane Austen is to courtship: the outside viewer who grasps clearly, as the women involved grasp only vaguely, the essential disequilibrium of the activity, the fact that the woman always gives more love than she can hope to take.”

Blue Grass, Green Skies is a compact exhibition but the paintings cumulatively show how American Impressionism had spread coast to coast. In Los Angeles, Hollywood stars from the peak of the silent movie era owned a good number of paintings of the period. An exceptional example is  Granville Redmond’s California Poppy Field, from the 1920s, a large painting, painted on rough fabric, that epitomizes depth and texture, immortalizing the landscape of poppy fields that were found in Southern California. 

One of the Givernites, Evelyn McCormick returned to Northern California to capture Carmel Valley and Monterey Peninsula in her paintings. Her Carmel Valley Pumpkins (circa 1907) signifies an unfettered gestural painting technique, mesmerizing in capturing a nearly unsurpassably ideal pictorial of autumn.

Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography 

The visual counterpoint of Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography is the elucidating complement to Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism. In fact, when the viewer who has been drawn to the “jewel box” of American painting, a well-chosen phrase by UMFA curator Alisa McCusker, can confidently draw parallels with the photographers who comprised the vanguard of Pictorialism. In sum, the two exhibitions are like planets in symphonic orbit moving similarly in the creative system of American visual arts, defined in a period spanning the last two decades of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century  

Photo-Secession is like a grand encyclopedic chapter in explaining the bridge between photography as documentation, journalism and historical chronicle and as art that eventually would put photography permanently on a level of aesthetic merit as painting. Among the 26 artists are names synonymous with photography’s greatest figures: Alfred Stieglitz (including photos of Georgia O’Keeffe, a titan in American 20th Century who recalled that  “I was photographed with a kind of heat and excitement and in a way wondered what it was all about.”), Heinrich Kühn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand and Clarence Hudson White. The exhibition also highlights the two trade periodicals Stieglitz edited: Camera Notes (1897–1903) and Camera Work (1903–1917). All works of art in this exhibition are from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. This exhibition is organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.

The most fascinating realization in the UMFA exhibition is the fast-moving evolution in aesthetic beliefs that unfolded in a brief period. By 1917, the core of Photo-Secession artists fragmented, especially as  Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand stepped back to straightforward photographic representation while Käsebier and White, notably, continued to finesse their painterly styles. 

In particular, the exhibition is a must-see for photographers experimenting with technique and printing, as the photographs represent  platinum, gum-bichromate, carbon, cyanotype, and bromoil. During this period, portrait studios and mass-produced images for the tourist trade became viable means of economic livelihood, an impact spurred in part by the fact that European photographers who espoused Pictorialism exhibited their image prints next to paintings and drawings. As the exhibition title cards note, the Kodak camera, first issued in 1888, further popularized photography with its roll film, simple controls, and reasonable cost of one dollar (about $33 today). 

After Stieglitz had stepped back from his original stance, he expressed in 1919 that “Gum, diffused lenses, (ultra) glycerining, were of experimental interest once. … Most of these are of more value historically than artistically. The prints are neither painting (or its equivalents) nor photographs. Let the photographer make a perfect photograph. It will be straight and beautiful—a true photograph.” However, McCusker puts the fine point on the discussion, drawing upon the history of the camera obscura to solidify the argument of photography as a new artistic field, by citing Arthur Wesley Dow, painter, printmaker, photographer, educator, curator and writer. Describing it as “painting with light,” Dow explained, “He can control the quality of his lines, the spacing of his masses, the depth of his tones and the harmony of his gradations. He can eliminate detail, keeping only the significant. More than this, he can reveal the secrets of personality. What is this but Art?”

The birth of the Pictorialism movement was facilitated in part by Peter Henry Emerson’s 1889 book, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, which opened the door for landscape photographers to experiment with soft-focus lenses and manipulatable printing methods. It spread quickly throughout Europe and eventually in the US, where Stieglitz organized juried photographic salons in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The movement’s first major exhibition was in 1903 at the National Arts Club in New York, which comprised 162 works by 32 artists. 

It became the democratizing pivot to put photography on par with painting. But, within the span of barely more than a decade, the movement also lost steam in some quarters, as Stieglitz had no patience for those photographers who seemed to value their economic survival far more than a grander pursuit of art for art’s sake. Part of this may have been a result of Stieglitz’s strong personality. A prominent quote in the exhibition comes from O’Keeffe, who knew Stieglitz better than anyone else: “He was either loved or hated—there wasn’t much in between.” 

It was White who eventually inherited the mantle of Pictorialism and brought a new generation of artists who are featured in Photo-Secession: Karl Struss, Anne Brigman, Laura Gilpin and Doris Ulmann, all of whom are referenced in this exhibition. Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lang, who established eminent careers, also studied with White.

Not to be outdone, the exhibition also presents exceptional examples of Straight Photography, especially in the works of Steichen and Strand, whom Stieglitz mentored. One of the most striking photographs by Strand is New Orleans, from 1915, capturing a moment in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, who otherwise would be forever forgotten. The individuals shown are anonymous and the point of obscurity is represented by dark shadows of buildings at the top of the image. One of the earliest examples of fashion magazine advertising is a 1929  Advertising Study for Coty Lipstick, by Steichen. He had practiced his facility with magazine production techniques in generating the logo, typeface, and page layouts for Camera Works, in which he collaborated with Stieglitz.

One of the most prescient examples that would become plainer and more evident decades later in the 20th century for photography’s artistic possibilities was Vortograph, a 1917 image by Alvin Langdon Coburn. In rejecting Pictorialism, he wrote an essay that championed abstraction, which as the exhibition highlights in the documentation, “it is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts, and with her infinite possibilities, do things stranger and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams.”

Photographers such as Arnold Genthe and Doris Ulmann reflected the dynamics of choosing between Pictorialism and documentary. Genthe, who was based in San Francisco and was best known for his photographic documentation of that city’s Chinatown, is seen here in a 1920 landscape image of New Mexico’s Acoma Pueblo, which incorporates the soft focus characteristic of Pictorialism. Meanwhile, Ulmann’s 1918 Man Employed in Fish Processing Plant, Near Gloucester, Massachusetts evidences the influence of Pictorialism with an oil-on-print image of a photograph that nevertheless is documentary in nature, She eventually abandoned oil printing to return to direct gelatin silver prints for documentary purposes in her work. Among the works from Karl Struss, who eventually broke from Stieglitz and joined White in the Pictorialist movement, is Cables, a 1912 gelatin silver print, that emphasized his view of his New York City urban scales. There also is his 1919 print of the Grand Canyon in winter, captured when he was en route to Hollywood. He began working with legendary film director Cecil B. DeMille and became of the film industry’s greatest Studio Era cinematographers. 

Among the more than half dozen prints by Clarence Hudson White, from approximately a 20-year period surrounding the turn of the previous century is The Kiss from 1904, featuring sisters Jean and Marion Reynolds. Despite the break in their aesthetic philosophy. Stieglitz admired White’s work and critics often praised White for his master skills in composition and placement of subjects. However, earlier when they were in the same aesthetics orbit, the two produced the 1907 palladium print The Torso, among the most iconic image of the Photo-Secession movement. The image was printed two years later in an issue of Camera Works. But, given the contentious nature of their relationship, Stieglitz later instructed White to remove his name from everything associated with their collaboration but retained a couple, including one he co-signed with White.

Perhaps the greatest representation of the period came in Stieglitz’s 1907 hand-pulled photogravure print The Steerage, one which he would explain its provenance in great detail 35 years later in an essay. The photo was taken when he and his family left for Paris on May 14, 1907, aboard the first-class quarters of the Kaiser Wilhelm II ship. “Stieglitz argues with the benefit of more than three decades of hindsight that The Steerage suggests that photographs have more than just a “documentary” voice that speaks to the truth-to-appearance of subjects in a field of space within narrowly defined slice of time,” Kris Belfen-Adams reflects.”Rather, The Steerage calls for a more complex, layered view of photography’s essence that can accommodate and convey abstraction.”

As one of the earliest and most potent expressions of Modernism, Belden-Adams takes the analysis yet further, noting that Stieglitz’s accounting of that day in 1907 “calls attention to one of the contradictions of photography: its ability to provide more than just an abstract interpretation, too. The Steerage is not only about the ‘significant form” of shapes, forms and textures, but it also conveys a message about its subjects, immigrants who were rejected at Ellis Island, or who were returning to their old country to see relatives and perhaps to encourage others to return to the United States with them.”

The Photo-Secession split certainly did not settle the debate. In 1965, Pierre Bourdieu’s book of essays Photography: A Middle-Brow Art brought strong objections to conventions about photography about art. But its publication date also came during a period when the art world steadily elevated photography to an artistic medium on par with painting. To illustrate the tension in the discourse, consider an essay in Bourdieu’s book by Jean Claude Chamboredon (Mechanical Art, Natural Art: Photographic Artist), which examined the work of great French photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson. According to Chamboredon, as Christoph Behnke explained in a 2007 essay, “legitimacy is constructed by futilely borrowing concepts from the high arts. In this sense, in the early 1960s photography found itself in a situation similar to that of jazz, for example, or film criticism, but with the additional difficulty of having to formulate a different appropriation of the medium contrary to the tremendous spread of photographic practice as an art moyen.” 

Behnke added, “Nevertheless, Chamboredon assumes that the virtuoso photographers prepared the way for a legitimate variant of photography, for example through their ‘unanimous call for the establishment of a museum of photography.’” To wit, as Behnke cites: Steichen’s successor as head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, John Szarkowski, who legitimized the formalist vocabulary to showcase and validate photography’s place in the museum setting. 

Spaced throughout the Photo-Secession  exhibition are highlighted quotes that mirror the debate about photography as either a middle-brow or high art form. Dow, as mentioned earlier, is one of the them. From 1902, a line attributed to Luigi Palma de Cesnola, then director of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, reads, “Why, Mr. Stieglitz, you won’t insist that a photograph can possibly be a work of art—you are a fanatic!” Elevating the photographer’s work as more than “mechanical imitation,” others foretold the dynamics of not only Bourdieu’s writings a half century later but alsothe paradigm shift that photographers embraced with greater frequency especially from the Sixties and going forward. 

In 1917, strand concluded, “The photographer’s problem, therefore, is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium…without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods. … Photography is only a new road from a different direction but moving toward the common goal, which is Life.” On the other hand, in 1907 , Robert Demachy, a French contemporary, telescoped Chamboredon’s contentions that would be published more than 55 years later in Bourdieu’s essay collection: “Pictorial photography owes its birth to the universal dissatisfaction of artist photographers in front of the photographic errors of the straight print. Its false values, its lack of accents, its equal delineation of things important and useless, were universally recognized and deplored by a host of malcontents…I consider that, from an art point of view, the straight print of today is not a whit better than the straight print of fifteen years ago. If it was faulty then it is still faulty now.”

Tying both shows together

Then how did the paradigm shift finally took hold? Behnke wrote that, in the decades following the Sixties, there was “a kind of implosion of aesthetic difference in the world of painting and sculptural art due to the questioning of originality, subjective expressiveness and formal singularity because of the influence of photography.” He cited a 1984 essay by Rosalind Krauss, which entails a precise reading of Bourdieu’s theoretical underpinnings that were published two decades earlier:

“It shows that Bourdieu’s sociological analysis of photography played an important role in a certain phase of determining what legitimate art can even be, when it is exposed using the tool of photography. It is an irony of history that Krauss takes Bourdieu’s precise and demystifying analysis of photography to make use of it as an instrument of deconstruction against legitimate art, whereas Bourdieu, in the early 1960s, took it completely for granted that there was an intact, highly legitimate aesthetic field that excluded photography, because it was not able to develop originality, authenticity or a formal vocabulary. It was specifically this lack that made photography interesting for a certain advanced field of art in the 1960s and 70s.”

The parallels in Blue Grass, Green Skies and Photo-Secession shows are striking. One is found in the subject matter of their respective work (landscapes, portraiture, figure studies and still life). Another is the embrace of experimentation. A third is the sense of social egalitarianism, where the gates were opened to women, in particular: Mary Cassatt in painting and Gertrude Käsebier in photography, for example. 

A fourth is acutely relevant to the omnipresent challenge for contemporary artists who must contend with those questioning the merit of their work. “Many artists are exposing their hearts and souls in their work. So if you find someone or even yourself questioning the validity of art or finding something ugly or unskilled, then try to consider why you might feel that way before dismissing the work,” McCusker said, concluding her talk from last summer.  “The beauty of art is its ability to encourage constant reflection, including self-reflection.”