This article appeared in the New Times on December 4, 2001 (my birthday
). I thought members here might find this interesting. Please note that I am not taking any position on this, but simply presenting information:
December 4, 2001
Paintings Too Perfect? The Great Optics Debate
By SARAH BOXER
It started personal and it stayed personal. Three years ago the artist David Hockney realized that he could not draw like Ingres. Worse yet, he thought that Andy Warhol could. Warhol's drawings were confident, quick and correct. They had the cool assurance of a photograph. The reason was clear: Warhol made his drawings by tracing photographs.
Starting with that jangling observation, Mr. Hockney derived a new theory of art and optics: around 1430, centuries before anyone suspected it, artists began secretly using cameralike devices, including the lens, the concave mirror and the camera obscura, to help them make realistic-looking paintings. Mr. Hockney's list of suspects includes van Eyck, Caravaggio, Lotto, Vermeer and of course the maddeningly competent draftsman Ingres. All of them, Mr. Hockney suggests, knew the magic of photographic projection. They saw how good these devices were at projecting a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. And they just could not resist.
That was the case that Mr. Hockney and his scientific sidekick, Charles Falco, a professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona, presented before a jury of art historians, artists and scientists on Saturday and Sunday at a symposium arranged by the New York Institute for the Humanities called "Art and Optics: Toward an Evaluation of David Hockney's New Theories Regarding Opticality in Western Painting of the Past 600 Years." The auditorium at New York University was packed. A line of people waited outside to come in. Lawrence Weschler, the writer who first publicized Mr. Hockey's theory in The New Yorker, presided. He used his crutch not for his pulled leg muscle, but to gavel the audience to order.
Mr. Hockney and Mr. Falco first presented their case in a 75-minute documentary film. In it they gave no documentary evidence of optical instruments. Instead they showed how the paintings gave themselves away.
The suspect paintings, they showed, are too correct and too natural to have been "eyeballed" or drawn freehand. The armor, eyes, lutes and clothes in them look too real; the expressions appear too fleeting.
But these paintings are also too incorrect. They have parts that are out of focus, like photographs. Or they have multiple vanishing points and parts that do not quite fit together, telltale signs that the artist focused and refocused his lens to capture different parts of his picture. Or they have a preponderance of left-handed drinkers, suggesting that a reversing lens was used. Some actually contain depictions of optical devices. Van Eyck's "Arnolfini Wedding," for example, shows a convex mirror whose concave side might have acted as a lens that projected an image onto a flat surface.
Mr. Hockney is not accusing any artist of cheating. "I am not even saying that people traced," he added. "Optics don't make art." The lens, the mirror and the camera obscura are all just tools. The point is that artists encountered them much earlier than anyone thought.
"To see them is to use them," Mr. Hockney said. He suggested that a direct line led from van Eyck's obsession with projected images to television's conquest of the world.
If art historians had bothered to learn optics, Mr. Falco added, they would have known it all decades ago.
Art historians did not take this lying down. Keith Christiansen, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, read an open letter to Mr. Hockney testifying that he had gone out and bought a concave mirror at Duane Reade. His verdict? The projection the mirror threw onto his paper wasn't clear enough for him to make a decent drawing. Besides, he added, there is plenty of evidence that artists like Michelangelo, Raphael and Caravaggio had "no need for fuzzy, upside-down images." They made freehand preparatory sketches instead.
Susan Sontag went after Mr. Hockney's ideology of picture making. To say that there were no great painters before optical devices, she said, is like saying there were no great lovers before Viagra. It is a "very American" kind of argument. Although Mr. Hockney was born British, she said, in his thinking "he is one of us." To argue that there is a "direct line from van Eyck to television," she said, is to use present-day mass visual culture as the lens through which the past is examined. It represents the "Warholization of art."
Linda Nochlin, the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, was as dramatic as Mr. Hockney. At her signal an audience member brought Ms. Nochlin's wedding dress onstage, a white shift with blue doughnut shapes on it. As evidence that artists can draw patterned cloth without the aid of optics, she compared the dress to a wedding portrait that Philip Pearlstein, "an eyeballer par excellence," had made of her sitting in that dress while her husband slouched next to her in white pants. "This is what I call scientific evidence," she said.
Then the gloves really came off. David Stork, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, considered the little convex mirror in van Eyck's Arnolfini wedding picture, the mirror that, Mr. Hockney suggests, van Eyck could have flipped over and used as an optical device. First off, Mr. Stork said, a mirror of that size would never have worked. To get a lens that would "hold Arnolfini, his wife and dog," he would have needed a huge mirror, sliced from a sphere seven feet in diameter.
And that is just the beginning of the trouble. If van Eyck had used the lens in a camera obscura, he would have had to paint upside-down, Mr. Stork said. Then there is the lighting problem: the projected image in a camera obscura would have been too dim. "To mimic the conditions indoors on a gray day in Bruges," he said, would require hundreds of candles, and then, even if the artist were to survive the fire hazard, "the color looks wrong."
Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, kept Mr. Hockney on the ropes by showing some excellent, optically exact drawings of rearing horses. They were made by a 5-year-old autistic child named Nadia, who had seen only pictures of horses standing still. If an autistic 5-year- old can do this, Ms. Winner said, then "I would argue that a Renaissance artist could do it, too."
Eventually things started looking up for Mr. Hockney's theory. Gary Tinterow, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, suggested that Ingres might have done some tracing. John Spike, a Caravaggio scholar, noted that in 1672 a critic described something in Caravaggio's studio that sounded a lot like a camera obscura. And, Mr. Spike said, an additional bit of confirmation came when he was looking at a Caravaggio in London with Mr. Hockney. An old Frenchman came by cursing at the work. He shook his cane at the painting and denounced it for being too much like a photograph. It turned out that nut was Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Next came the battle of the Vermeer scholars. Philip Steadman, an architect and the author of "Vermeer's Camera," which argues that Vermeer had photographic aims, said that Vermeer's paintings contain perfect renditions of things found in Dutch houses: chairs with lion backs, globes, paintings, Delft tiles, virginals, even the ceiling beams. What's more, six Vermeer paintings are different viewpoints of the same room, and all have been done on the same size canvas. Why? "Because he has traced them" from "images created in a camera obscura," Mr. Steadman said.
Walter Liedtke, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum who was one of the organizers of "Vermeer and the Delft School," fought back. Although he did not oppose the idea that Vermeer was interested in the effects of the camera obscura, he said, he had evidence that Vermeer's rooms were "pure invention." Vermeer's attitude, he said, was, "To **** with physics."
Mr. Steadman accused Mr. Liedtke of "mimesophobia, the morbid fear of slavish imitation."
But what is to fear? Plenty, said Nica Gutman, a conservator of paintings who worked on the current Eakins show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Many artists find it shameful to be caught using photographs. Take Eakins and his painting "Mending the Net." All the figures and the tree, she said, are "precisely the same as those in the photographs." That is, Eakins projected them from a photograph onto the canvas and traced them. Eakins did his best to hide the evidence. And after he died his widow lied about it, too, Ms. Gutman said.
Do artists still conceal their optical tricks? Some do, but others simply cannot. Chuck Close is one. He makes paintings that are undeniably based on photographs. When a class of third graders came to visit him recently, one of them asked, "Can you really draw or do you just copy photographs?" He said he finally drew a freehand Mickey Mouse, "and the kids were, like, Ooh!"
Mr. Pearlstein, the painter who made Ms. Nochlin's wedding portrait, said, "I paint people and landscapes from direct observation," but added that he had sometimes been mistaken for a photo-realist. It does not sting. "There is no moral issue" with
using optical tools, he said, "only stylistic issues."
Moral issue or not, Svetlana Alpers, a professor emerita at the University of
California at Berkeley, suggested that Mr. Hockney, who has often used
photographs in his work, secretly wanted to "kick free of the lens habit."
"Why not just go for it, David?" she said. "The old masters did."
Rosalind Krauss, the Meyer Shapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at
Columbia University, questioned the epiphany that started it all for Mr. Hockney. To
say there is no difference between the lines of Ingres and Warhol, she suggested, is
wrong. Ingres's drawn line "swells and narrows." Warhol's traced line is "flaccid,
inert and everywhere equally broad," the essence of technology.
In the end Mr. Close, who joked that the symposium should have been called
"Look Back in Ingres," said he had learned that "some scientists are just as annoying
as some art historians."
Mr. Weschler tossed away his crutch, crying, "I'm cured!"
And Mr. Hockney said: "I enjoyed it. I learned some things." Then he added, "I will
now go back to my studio."