"I've got all the subjects to the hand", Pierre Bonnard, French painter, who once wrote. "I went to see them. I took notes. Then I went home. And before I start painting I pondered, I had a dream. At the turn of the 19th century, the "notes" Bonnard made including photos that he took with flexible handheld Kodak cameras, which was first introduced in 1888.
Blocked heavy equipment (Kodak held at waist level and has an arrow marked on top to help point the lens) or a long exposure, Bonnard and his fellow painters from the Prophet, Edouard Vuillard group and Félix Vallotton, was among the first artists to use the camera to observe fine details, light and perspective effects are too short to see with the naked eye. New show painstakingly curated vintage photos that juxtaposes 220 mostly unpublished by seven fin de siècle artists along with paintings, prints and drawings in an attempt to show how this new way of looking at expanded vision inspired and creative painter.
Henri Rivière, French printmaker and designer of the Eiffel Tower, rises to soar before it was completed in 1889 for the exhilarating lines and angles of iron girders against the sky of Paris for a series of lithographs 36. Vuillard and a talented, yet little-known, Belgium painter Henri Evenepoel uses the camera as a sketchbook and an aide-mémoire capture the everyday moments with family and friends. Bonnard was photographed in turn ramping up, round-faced and muse, Marthe de Méligny, naked in the swamp, as inspiration for his illustrations of "Daphnis and Chloé" by a novelist second century Greece and romancer Longus.,
Vuillard and Bonnard, with whom he shared a studio, actually copying the photos in their domestic interior painting resonant, a small scale. Instead, they try to imitate the proximity of a snapshot (or instantanés as they are called in France) are often caught mid-gesture of their subjects. Using the photos just as a point of reference, or sometimes to reflect mood, its people will be recomposed on Vuillard. "In the table of day" and "In Front of the Tapestry: the artist Thadée Natanson" famous and the second shows the abbreviated figures, are absorbed in eating food, or with their backs to the audience. The numbers Vuillard's, which is almost swallowed the vibrant decor, have an interesting quality of apparitional for 20th century French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who describes Vuillard and Bonnard as among the artists he most admired.
The painter George Hendrik Breitner, Netherlands, also captured the moment in time in a scene of Amsterdam thoroughfare which was dominated by the figure holding a muff feathers to veiled her face, looking Dim, the fugitive, as in real life. Now recognized as a talented photographer in his own right, Breitner used the cameras for a "girl Red Kimono" (pictured above with proper model photography, left). This right but his snapshot of the atmospheric visits a girl curled up on the divan, showing his elaborate kimono patterned in sharp contrast with the design of the Persian carpet in the feet.
