ART REVIEW : Pioneering Photographers and Their ‘Palette of Light’

Historically it’s not uncommon for new technologies to echo the old mechanisms they replace. When automobiles were invented they retained running boards like a vestigial bone from the carriage era. Today computers imitate the typewriters they made virtually obsolete. A thought-provoking small exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum shows that something very similar happened in the early days of photography.

“Palette of Light: Handcrafted Photographs, 1898-1914” was organized by curator Weston J. Naef and consists of 32 vintage prints by camera artists who wanted to make their brand-new art look like old art. In mood, the show might be called “In the Gloaming.” It’s thoughtful and a little nostalgic as if, unconsciously, these pioneers sensed the eventual impact of mechanical picture-making with considerable regret.

American Edward Steichen is the best known of the five represented. Significantly, he was also a practicing painter. The first of his works on view is a 1901 self-portrait depicting him as an old master holding his palette.

It isn’t just the trappings that are painterly. Photographers dissatisfied with the glossy albumen paper that was the standard for early printing came up with a gum bichromate process that allowed for more variety of texture and coloration. Steichen and the rest used it to achieve a soft-focus effect that has the atmospheric quality of a painting. This “pictorialist” mode was institutionalized as the Photo-Secession movement back in New York.

One of its votaries was Gertrude Kasebier, a kind of photographic Mary Cassatt. Along with Steichen and like-minded others she attached herself to Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291. Her portrait of him resembles an early Expressionist print. Maybe she was thinking about Edvard Munch with his air of devil-dandy.

As it turned out, Stieglitz was the pictorialists’ great Satan. He came to champion the crisper, more graphic “straight” photographic style that was more in line with the reductive trends of modernist thinking. It wasn’t long before the pictorialists were forced to go straight or be cast as dodos.

Meantime, they made some touching and finely nuanced work. Austrian Heinrich Kuehn left images like “Miss Mary (Warner) at Her Night Table.” It reflects a characteristic pictorialist attraction to figures silhouetted against the light, Rembrandt-style.

American Alvin Langdon Coburn clearly had Whistler on the brain in his “Grand Canal, Venice.” There’s something considerably more original about a 1911 view of Ocean Park. Locals will like it for its revelation of what our beach town looked like back then. Artniks may pick up a sense of surreal power in the way Coburn managed to capture the roiling surf as if it had frozen.

Speaking of local matters, there is a surprisingly significant image by George Seeley. It shows a landscape near Stockbridge, Mass., but its smoky silhouette style resembles nothing so much as the recent paintings of Ed Ruscha.

It’s as if our contemporary hero, poet of Pop and intuitive pioneer of Conceptual art, had looked back at this supposedly outmoded work and found something that speaks to the ominous Postmodern present.

* “Palette of Light: Handcrafted Photographs, 1898-1914,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu; to June 19, closed Monday. Admission free, advance parking reservations required: (310) 485-2003.