Friday, March 31, 2017

Urban Truths of the 19th century

William Edward Kilburn
Chartist meeting in London
1848
daguerreotype
Royal Collection, Great Britain

"A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing.  This colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half million a hundred fold; has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames.  But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, one realizes for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization.  The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive about it  something against which human nature rebels.  The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other  aren't they all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy?  And aren't they obliged, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means?  And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one  that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd  while no man thinks to honor another with so much as a glance.  The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space.  And however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious, as just here in the crowding of the great city."

 from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1848) by Friedrich Engels, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999)

William Edward Kilburn
Chartist meeting in London
1848
daguerreotype
Royal Collection, Great Britain

"This daguerreotype records the immense crowds at one of the Chartist rallies held in South London in 1848.  Calling for political reform, and spurred on by the recent February Revolution in France, the Chartist movement was seen by many as a terrifying threat to the established order.  Fears were so great that on the eve of the meeting, the Duke of Wellington stationed troops across London and the royal family were moved to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.  In the event the rally passed peacefully and Prince Albert later spoke at a Chartist meeting about the sympathy and concern the royal family felt for the working classes.  This is one of a pair of daguerreotypes of the event acquired by Prince Albert."

 curator's notes from the Royal Collection

Anonymous photographer
Rue de Rivoli, Paris
ca. 1865
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Robert Howlett
I.K. Brunel and others observing Great Eastern launch attempt
1857
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"His 'great babe' is how engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel referred to his creation, the Great Eastern.  At nearly twenty-two thousand tons, it was the largest ship built in the nineteenth century.  Robert Howlett was commissioned by The Illustrated Times to document its building and launching.  In this photograph Howlett swung his camera away from the enormous ship to record the human reaction to the anticipated spectacle.  The image has the casual structure of an unposed snapshot.  It was an illustration meant to accompany a newspaper account of the events.  Looking nervously expectant, the men grouped around an imperious Brunel  the short man at the center front, facing right  on the dock were investors from the syndicate that had spent three million dollars for the ship's construction.  Brunel did not want onlookers present, but the owners sold tickets and people came by the thousands.  The Great Eastern stubbornly refused to be moved down the launching ramp, and steam winch handles spun wildly out of control, killing two crewmembers and threatening the spectators.  Several more months of pushing and pulling ensued before Brunel's ship was successfully waterborne."

 curator's notes form the Getty Museum

Robert Howlett
Steamship Great Eastern
under construction at Millwall

1857
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Robert Howlett
I.K. Brunel
with launching chains of the Great Eastern

1857
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

John Thomson
Whitechapel, London
1877
Woodburytype photograph
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Anonymous photographer
Queen Victoria's Jubilee Procession
Thames Embankment, London

1887
albumen print
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Anonymous photographer
Queen Victoria's Jubilee Procession
Thames Embankment, London

1887
albumen print
Royal Collection, Great Britain

"As I study this age which is so close to us and so remote, I compare myself to a surgeon operating with local anesthetic: I work in areas that are numb, dead  yet the patient is alive and can still talk."

 Paul Morand, quoted by Walter Benjamin – from the section On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress in The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Oliver H. Copeland
New Market, New Hampshire
1875
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Anonymous photographer
Street scene with crowd
ca. 1900
gelatin silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Underwood & Underwood
State Street, Chicago
1903
photograph
Library of Congress, Washington DC

Julius M. Wendt
Street Scene - Albany, New York
ca. 1900-1910
gelatin silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Julius M. Wendt
Street Scene - Albany, New York
ca. 1900-1910
gelatin silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Cartoons and Caricatures by Honoré Daumier

Honoré Daumier
"Snow! Real snow! I haven't seen snow in Paris since 1822!
This makes me feel thirty years younger!"

1853
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Honoré Daumier
"O Moon!
Inspire me tonight with just one little thought!"

1844
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Édouard Drumont on Daumier: "Caricature, for him, became a sort of philosophic operation which consisted in separating a man from that which society had made of him, in order to reveal what he was at bottom, what he could have been under different circumstances. He extracted, in a word, the latent self." 

Honoré Daumier
"Come in without fear, Monsieur Potard!
You can see there is no danger, since I'm here!"

1856
hand-colored lithograph
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Honoré Daumier
Nymphs on the shores of the Marne
1855
hand-colored-lithograph
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Baudelaire on Daumier: "By no one more than Daumier has the bourgeois been known and loved (after the fashion of artists) – the bourgeois, this last vestige of the Middle Ages, this Gothic ruin that dies so hard, this type at once so commonplace and so eccentric."

Honoré Daumier
Danger of wearing petticoat-ballons in the season of gales
1857
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Honoré Daumier
Muse of the Brasserie
1864
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Honoré Daumier
"Monsieur, I assure you this cut is very flattering!"
ca. 1845-50
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Baudelaire on Daumier: "His caricature has formidable breadth, but it is quite without bile or rancor. In all his work there is a foundation of decency and bonhomie. We should note that he has often refused to handle certain very fine and violent satirical themes, because, he said, they exceeded the limits of the comic and could wound the feelings of his fellow men."

Honoré Daumier
"It feels like we're going to be derailed!"
"You're afraid of a railroad crash? Not me! My life
is insured for a hundred thousand francs!"

1857
hand-colored lithograph
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Honoré Daumier
The gust of wind
1843
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Eduard Fuchs on Daumier: "Not only does caricature greatly accentuate the techniques of drawing, but it has always been the means of introducing new subject matter into art. It was through Monnier, Gavarni, and Daumier that the bourgeois society of this century was opened up to art."

Honoré Daumier
"O, my adored Victor! Such a poetic idea occurs to me!"
1844
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Honoré Daumier
Death of Sappho 
1843
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Siegfried Kracauer on Daumier: "Everyone knew Daumier's mythological caricatures, which, in the words of Baudelaire, made Achilles, Odysseus, and the rest look like a lot of played-out tragic actors, inclined to take pinches of snuff at moments when no one was looking."

Honoré Daumier
The new Cinderella
(Austria running away, abandoning Italy)

1866
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Honoré Daumier
Box at the Théâtre Ventadour
during the performance of an Italian tragedy

1856
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Honoré Daumier
Curtain call for the singer
1857
lithograph, published in Le Charivari
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

 quoted passage are from The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Thursday, March 30, 2017

Blindness and Insanity

Albrecht Dürer
The Insane
before 1528
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"I come now to the facts. The bright light of electricity served, at first, to illuminate the subterranean galleries of mines; after that, public squares and streets; then factories, workshops, stores, theaters, military barracks; finally, the domestic interior. The eyes, initially, put up rather well with this penetrating new enemy; but, by degrees, they were dazzled. Blindness began as something temporary, soon became periodic, and ended as a chronic problem. This, then, was the first result – sufficiently comprehensible, I believe; but what about the insanity lately visited on our leaders? – Our great heads of finance, industry, big business have seen fit to send their thoughts around the world, while they themselves remain at rest. To this end, each of them has nailed up, in a corner of his office, electric wires connecting his executive desk with our colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Comfortably seated before his schedules and account books, he can communicate directly over tremendous distances; at a touch of the finger, he can receive reports from all his far-flung agents on a startling variety of matters. One branch-correspondent tells him, at ten in the morning of a shipwrecked vessel worth over a million; another, at five after ten, of the unexpected sale of the most prosperous house in the two Americas; a third, at ten after ten, of the glorious entrance, into the port of Marseilles, of a freighter carrying the fruits of a Northern California harvest. All this in rapid succession. The poor brains of these men, robust as they were, have simply given way, just as the shoulders of some Hercules of the marketplace would give way if he ventured to load them with ten sacks of wheat instead of one. And this was the second result." 

 from Paris en songe (1863) by Jacques Fabien, published in English as Paris in a Dream (1864), quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Alexander Ver Huell
The Insane in an interior
1856
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Caspar Luyken
Insane man riding horse backwards
1704
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Caspar Luyken
Don Clarazel attacked in Marseilles
by the landlord's insane brother

1697
etching (book illustration)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Gesina ter Borch
The madness of merry companions feasting with Death
1660
watercolor
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"From time immemorial this enigmatic need for sensation has found satisfaction in fashion. But in its ground it will be reached at last only by theological inquiry, for such inquiry bespeaks a deep affective attitude toward historical process on the part of the human being. It is tempting to connect this need for sensation to one of the seven deadly sins, and it is not surprising that a chronicler adds apocalyptic prophecies to this connection and foretells a time when people will have been blinded by the effects of too much electric light and maddened by the tempo of news reporting (Jacques Fabien, Paris en songe, 1863)." 

 Walter Benjamin, from the section on Fashion in The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999) 

Odilon Redon
Madman in somber landscape
1885
lithograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

William Sharp after Benjamin West
King Lear's Madness on the Heath
1793
etching, engraving
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
Self-portrait - "Collapse with Lamp" - Zakopane
ca. 1913
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
Taddeus Langier, Zakopane
ca. 1912-13
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Charles Nègre
Imperial Asylum at Vincennes
Games Room

1858-59
albumen silver print from glass negative
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Charles Nègre
Imperial Asylum at Vincennes
Refectory

1858-59
salted paper print from glass negative
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Hugh Welch Diamond
Patient at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum
ca. 1850-58
albumen silver print from glass negative
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Hugh Welch Diamond
Patient at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum (with dead bird)
ca. 1855
albumen silver print from glass negative
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Anonymous Photographer (France)
"Lottery to Benefit Originals"
ca. 1852
daguerreotypes
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Daguerreotypes of the inmates of a local French insane asylum are used in the early 1850s on a poster promoting a public lottery to raise funds for the asylum, a lottery promoting its intention to "benefit" the authentic "originals" in the photographs.

Early photo-prints from the Rijksmuseum

Henri Béchard
Climbing the Great Pyramid
ca. 1860-80
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Willem Witsen
Portrait of Lise Jordan with veil
ca. 1890-95
gelatin silver print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anonymous photographer
Magnolia blossoms
ca. 1910-25
gelatin silver print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Giacomo Caneva
Piazza Navona, Rome
1850
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

A prophecy from the year 1855:  "Only a few years ago, there was born to us a machine that has since become the glory of our age, and that day after day amazes the mind and startles the eye. This machine, a century hence, will be the brush, the palette, the colors, the craft, the practice, the patience, the glance, the touch, the paste, the glaze, the trick, the relief, the finish, the rendering. A century hence, there will be no more bricklayers of painting: there will be only architects  painters in the full sense of the word. And are we really to imagine that the daguerreotype has murdered art? No, it kills the work of patience, but it does homage to the world of thought. When the daguerreotype, this titan child, will have attained the age of maturity, when all its power and potential will have been unfolded, then the genius of art will suddenly seize it by the collar and exclaim:  Mine! You are mine now! We are going to work together."

 from a journal article of 1855 by A.J. Wiertz, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin for Harvard University Press, 1999

Roger Fenton
Portrait of a young woman with a letter
ca. 1856
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jacques de Lalaing
Standing model, draped
before 1914
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Eadweard Muybridge
Woman walking with basket on head
1887
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Henneh & Kent
Portrait of Mabel Boscowen
1860s
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Leonel Ricci
La Danseuse de Corde
ca. 1880-88
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Herman Stafhell & Co.
Portrait of a young woman
ca. 1870-80
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Godfried de Jong
Portrait of a young man
after 1874
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Frederik Gräfe
Collection of Musical Instruments
assembled by Johan Coenradus Boers

ca. 1899
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

William, Earl of Craven
View of Ashdown
ca. 1855
photograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"'Wouldn't you like to see a picture or two that you might care to buy?' . . . Titorelli dragged a pile of unframed canvases from under the bed: they were so thickly covered with dust that when he blew some of it from the topmost, K. was almost blinded and choked by the cloud that flew up.  'Wild Nature, a heathscape,' said the painter, handing K. the picture.  It showed two stunted trees standing far apart from each other in darkish grass.  In the background was a many-hued sunset.  'Fine,' said K., 'I'll buy it.'  K.'s curtness had been unthinking and so he was glad when the painter, instead of being offended, lifted another canvas from the floor.  'Here's the companion picture,' he said.  It might have been intended as a companion picture, but there was not the slightest difference that one could see between it and the other; here were the two trees, here the grass, and there the sunset.  But K. did not bother about that.  'They're fine prospects,' he said.  'I'll buy both of them and hang them in my office.'  'You seem to like the subject,' said the painter, fishing out a third canvas.  'By a lucky chance I have another of these studies here!'  But it was not merely a similar study, it was simply the same wild heathscape again.  The painter was apparently exploiting to the full this opportunity to sell off his old pictures.  'I'll take that one as well,' said K.  'How much for the three pictures?'  'We'll settle that next time,' said the painter . . . 'I must say I'm very glad you like these pictures, and I'll throw in all the others under the bed as well.  They're heathscapes every one of them  I've painted dozens of them in my time.  Some people won't have anything to do with these subjects because they're too somber, but there are always people like yourself who prefer somber pictures.'"     

– from The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (1935)


Charlotte M. Endicott
Thorn Mountain
Jackson, New Hampshire
1899
cyanotype
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

 '"'Wouldn't you like to see a painting that I could sell you?' . . . From beneath the bed the painter dragged a pile of unframed paintings so deeply covered in dust that when the painter tried to blow it away from the one on top, the dust whirled up before K.'s eyes, and for some time he could scarcely breathe.  'A landscape of the heath,' said the painter, and handed K. the painting.  It showed two frail trees, standing at a great distance from one another in the dark grass.  In the background was a multicolored sunset. 'Nice,' said K., 'I'll buy it.'  K. had spoken curtly without thinking, so he was glad when, instead of taking it badly, the painter picked up another painting from the floor.  'Here's a companion piece to that picture,' said the painter.  It may have been intended as a companion piece, but not the slightest difference could be seen between it and the first one: here were the trees, here was the grass, and there the sunset.  But that made little difference to K. They're nice landscapes,' he said, 'I'll take both of them and hang them in my office.'  'You seem to like the subject,' said the painter, and pulled out a third painting, 'luckily enough, I have a similar one right here.'  It was not merely similar, however, it was exactly the same landscape.  The painter was taking full advantage of the chance to sell his old pictures.  'I'll take that one too,' said K.  'What do I owe you for the three of them?'  'We'll talk about that next time,' said the painter, 'you're in a hurry now and we'll be keeping in touch, after all.  By the way, I'm glad you like the paintings; I'll throw in all the pictures I have under here. They're all heath landscapes, I've painted a lot of heath landscapes.  Some people are put off by paintings like these because they're too somber, but others, and you're among them, have a particular love for the somber.'"

 from The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka, translated by Breon Mitchell (1998)