Getty Museum’s ‘Nadar/Warhol’ Focuses on the Nature of Fame

The difference between fame and celebrity, it has been said, is mostly a matter of time. Fame transcends the moment, extending a condition of being well-known back into the past and forward into the future. By contrast, celebrity is of the moment--a state of being seen and talked about now. For the famous, celebrity comes and goes, ebbs and flows, while only some celebrities will ever know the meaning of authentic fame.

If the distinction is correct, then in the modern era, photography paves the superhighway for celebrity, since being talked about is a condition of being seen. When your face is out there, odds are a camera made it happen.

This is “celebrity summer” at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists” is a small show of paintings of the legendary 18th century British actress, which examines the relationships between art and celebrity just prior to the invention of the camera. (Siddons died in 1831, the modern camera dates to 1839.) More to the point, “Nadar/Warhol: Paris/New York” puts the camera in the spotlight.

Nadar (1820-1910) was the pioneering and ambitious French photographer whose portraits of everybody who was anybody in Paris in the second half of the 19th century made his large and busy studio an energetic meeting place for those of liberal politics and thought. Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was the American artist who acknowledged commerce in culture and whose large and busy studio was an energetic meeting place for those of liberal politics and thought in the 1960s and 1970s.

There are many such parallels between the Frenchman and the American, and the show’s curators--Gordon Baldwin, who focused on Nadar, and Judith Keller, who looked at Warhol--have marshaled them as the basis for a comparative exhibition. Some parallels are relatively trivial, such as the simple fact that both men changed their names: Nadar was born Gaspard Felix Tournachon, Warhol was born Andrew Warhola.

Others are more apposite, in terms of the artistic sensibility that drove them: Both were attuned to the rhythms of mass culture--Nadar having worked as a journalist, Warhol having published his own tabloid (Andy Warhol’s Interview). Not insignificantly, in their own day Nadar and Warhol also enjoyed a degree of celebrity that rivaled that of the men and women whose celebrity was enhanced by their work.

Indeed, parallels pile up on parallels. The interesting catalog for the show coaxes forth a variety of relevant facts and probing observations on their respective milieus. Given the curious similarities, it’s something of a puzzlement to discover in the galleries that the exhibition of 44 photographs by Nadar and 43 by Warhol feels rather flat and sluggish.

How could this be? Nadar was an extraordinary portraitist, perhaps the greatest of the 1850s and 1860s, as the exceptional 1995 retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art revealed. And for his part, Warhol was one of those rare, pivotal figures about whom it can be truly said that, after him, nothing in art was ever the same again.

Perhaps the problem is that the piling up of similarities between the artists, their working methods and their milieus does not, in the end, add up to a core similarity in the photographs they made. Indeed, one big difference separates Nadar’s photographs from Warhol’s, and that difference lies between the means and the ends of art.

Nadar’s photographs are finished works of art, complete in themselves. But, are Warhol’s?

With some notable exceptions, most of Warhol’s photographs were critically important intermediate steps on the way to making paintings. Nadar’s photographs of 20-year-old Sarah Bernhardt, shown swathed in light-absorbent velvet, immediately draw you toward the complex theatrical conditions that surround the process of being photographed, which in turn play off the celebrated actress’ dreamy countenance. By stark contrast, Warhol’s photographs of 45-year-old Jane Fonda make you think first of the absent photo-silkscreen paintings and prints of the star, against the memory of which you check the Polaroid studies hanging in front of you.

In the catalog, Judith Keller helpfully italicizes a rarely remarked comment made by Warhol, quoted from his posthumously published diaries: “I told them I didn’t believe in art, that I believed in photography.” The statement underscores the central role of camera-work in Warhol’s oeuvre, and the artist’s savvy understanding of the social hierarchy reflected in different forms of art.

Conflict characterized the relationship between photographs and paintings since Nadar’s day, with arguments raging over whether or not photography was actually art, and if so, how; since Warhol’s day that conflict has disappeared. When he silk-screened camera images onto glamorously painted canvas, Warhol used the camera’s capacity for magnificent deception to make photographs masquerade as paintings.

For a viewer, the experience of Nadar’s photographs is thus qualitatively different from the experience of Warhol’s. In an exhibition built around provocative, sometimes surprising, usually well-considered similarities, the sudden assertion in the galleries of fundamental artistic difference short-circuits the show.

What’s best about the Getty undertaking is the catalog, which reproduces everything in the exhibition and includes full and illuminating entries for all 87 works. The Getty owns a huge collection of Nadar’s images--some 500 in all--and one result of organizing the show has been the addition of 13 Warhols to the single, self-portrait photobooth-strip already in the collection. (Most of the additions are portraits of artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring and two more self-portraits.) The commitment to scholarship concerning the permanent collection is one that often and easily gets obscured in today’s increasingly show-biz-driven museum world, but here it’s the centerpiece.

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* “Nadar/Warhol: Paris/New York,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, (310) 440-7300, through Oct. 10. Closed Mondays.