There’s Nothing Wrong With Artists Using Tricks of the Trade

For a long time after my father got reading glasses, 30 or 40 years ago, he referred to them as his cheaters. “Where did I put my cheaters?” he’d ask. “I want to read the paper.”

The belief that vision aided by lenses somehow constitutes a form of cheating in the act of human perception seemed odd to me then, and it seems odd to me now too. That might be because, unlike my father, I’ve lived my whole life in a world of lens-generated image-glut. For half a century, pictures made with still, movie and television cameras have established society’s visual norm.

Allusions to deception (or cheating) have now emerged in the reception to artist David Hockney’s new book, “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.” The tempest has been brewing for several years. The British-born, Los Angeles-based artist drew fire a while back for suggesting that some portrait drawings by 19th century French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, displayed in a widely admired 1998 museum exhibition, might have been made with the aid of an optical device called a camera lucida. No documentary evidence had ever before suggested as much.

If true, did that mean Ingres, the legendary champion of the preeminent power of line over color in art, couldn’t really draw those lines as well as we thought he could?

Did the use of a visual aid like a camera lucida, which incorporates a prism-like lens through which an image is perceived and outlines can be followed by an artist drawing with a pencil, mean that Ingres had managed to deceive the public? Why had this remained a deep, dark secret for 125 years? Did acceptance of the claim also mean accepting that Ingres had cheated?

With the dark cloud of artistic fraud hovering in the atmosphere, lots of art historians harrumphed. The controversy was greeted in sectors of the academic and museum worlds in a manner not unrelated to the way Modern art has long been received by much of the general public: with suspicion and distrust.

Of course, Hockney doesn’t believe that using a camera lucida as an aid to drawing is cheating at all, any more than wearing glasses to read the paper is. In his book he makes a point of showing how difficult the little contraption is to use, and he marvels at the extraordinary skill involved in using it well. To say that Ingres might have used one is not to line up behind the know-nothings who stand in front of the dripped skeins of paint in a Pollock or a two-faced portrait by Picasso and wail, “My 5-year-old child could do that!” Perhaps so, but probably not well.

The book amplifies Hockney’s earlier suggestion about Ingres, adding other artists and optical devices to the mix, including the room-sized camera obscura, various sorts of curved and flat mirrors and assorted types of ground-glass lenses. The time frame is also enlarged, stretching back from the 19th century to the 15th century.

But whatever the optical device (including a modern camera) and whatever the time period, one thing remains the same: Using an optical device does not make art easier; it makes art look different. That’s a point easily lost.

Art historians, alas, are not known for their uniform skill in looking at pictures. This might come as a surprise to the lay audience, but it’s true.

Leo Steinberg, to my mind the most important art historian at work today, achieved that stature through his rigorous commitment to looking--and looking hard--at works of art. Studio inventories, letters from patrons, literary texts, emblem books, theoretical treatises, bibliographic precedents and all the other significant tools at the disposal of the historian are well and good; but they amount to nothing if what’s claimed doesn’t fit the picture.

The work of art is the primary document that trumps all others. This would seem obvious, a given. But the octogenarian Steinberg knows it’s not. In a brilliant lecture last fall at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--on the subject of Leonardo’s much-looked-at fresco, “The Last Supper”--he took impish glee in jabbing at the laziness with which so many art historians approach the complex task of looking at works of art; they defer first to textual references.

For 500 years “The Last Supper” has been looked at as an illustration of a text--the biblical story in which Christ announces that a disciple will betray him--even though much in the fresco makes no narrative sense. Looking at the painting, Steinberg realized it was more than that, both a Bible story and a visual embodiment of the Catholic mystery of the bread and wine. That dual reality is what makes the complex painting so compelling and sets it apart from the hundreds of other depictions of the Last Supper by lesser artists.

Art historians had missed the magic because they were stuck on reading the fresco as illustration. They kept trying to make the picture fit the text, rather than trying to understand why it looks the way it does.

Hockney’s basic proposition is a simple one: Over the last 600 years, scientific developments in optics have had an effect on artists. Optical technology has contributed to the way painters’ pictures look.

The proposition is incontrovertible. Specific examples can be argued and debunked, but the general premise can’t.

Hockney may not be correct that Raphael used projections made with optical lenses to help compose his celebrated portrait of Pope Leo X, circa 1518-1519, shown clutching a small magnifying lens in his fist. Or that convex and concave mirrors, a new technology in Europe in the first half of the 15th century, could have aided Jan van Eyck in his breathtaking depiction of Canon van der Paele. Or that Caravaggio, who left no known drawings for any of his magnificently staged tableaux, might have employed something like a camera obscura to achieve his dramatic effects in the creation of painterly space.

But to presume that artists would be immune from curiosity about optics, a science that deals with the effects of light in the propagation of imagery, is just plain foolish. To presume that they would run from optical devices is naive. It would be like artists today ignoring the digital look of the computer screen.

In fact, Hockney almost never makes definitive declarations in his book about which artist used what device to make which painting. His observations are presented as speculative. He’s more interested in the forest than the trees.

The book is not a sustained historical argument. Rather, it’s a picture book with extended captions--an accumulation of snapshots, as it were, not unlike Hockney’s own pictures made by accumulating Polaroid images of a scene. (There’s not a footnote in sight, either, which is enough to give the vapors to most art historians.)

It’s significant, though, that the first and longest of the book’s three sections is devoted to “The Visual Evidence,” in which the artist looks first at what paintings have to show. Hockney begins with the primary documents because, as an artist, that’s what he makes. Art historians make texts, and texts are often what they look to first.

Indeed, that’s one of the best parts of “Secret Knowledge.” Hockney looks at artists without the romantic glow of their being isolated and immortal geniuses. He knows that artists are workers who have jobs and that getting ahead in the job requires savvy. If using a lens or mirror would assist in making a painting look the way the artist wants it to look, of course he or she would use it.

Cheating? No. Exactly the opposite.

The tempest is a bit like being shocked, shocked to discover that most painters no longer grind their pigments. The industrial manufacture of chemical paint in tubes changed the look of art in the 19th century, just as plastic-based acrylics did in the 1960s.

That’s not to say artists wouldn’t be squeamish--or even secretive--about revealing their optical techniques. Like plumbers or florists, they’ve got competitors to worry about, not to mention the biases and prejudices of clients. Technical advantages are worth protecting. Call them trade secrets, like the recipe for Classic Coke.

Thomas Eakins is a good example. Hockney sticks to European art history in his book, so he makes no mention of America’s greatest painter before the Modern era. Eakins, who worked in Philadelphia in the second half of the 19th century, when the commercial trade in art was leaving town and consolidating in New York, had a rough go of it career-wise.

The wonderful retrospective of his work currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art shows definitively that Eakins sometimes projected his own photographs onto canvas to aid in the process of composing paintings. It didn’t mean he couldn’t draw; it meant he could get the look he was after.

Eakins kept this optical technique a secret, as did his widow long after his death. Only now is the method being pieced together. (Notably, the proof has been provided by a curator working with a paintings conservator, historians for whom the art object is a primary document in the most fundamental way.) Neither the painter’s use of projected images nor the familial secretiveness diminishes the magnitude of Eakins’ achievement. He was making extraordinary art, just as his immediate predecessor, J.-A.-D. Ingres, did in France.

Reading Hockney’s book, I began to think of painters since the Renaissance as workers in the extraordinary optical economy that arose in 15th century Europe and flourished, until it came to define our image-saturated world. Now that a new, contrasting digital economy has entered the scene full-tilt, the ever-shifting contours of the old optical economy are becoming more distinct. We’re beginning to see a bit of forest take shape from all those trees. Hockney, among others, has pitched in to help us see it.