When artists were first moved by pictures

The names of the new devices said it all: Vitascope, Kinetoscope. These were tools for capturing and viewing life -- in motion, ever changing.

When early forms of presenting motion pictures made their public debut in the 1890s, they appealed as marvels of science and art. A Sears, Roebuck & Co. poster advertising a program of films about the new U.S. territories of Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines promised “A great combination of instructive entertainment and amusement!” Presaging the dominance of screen culture, it added: “More information in two hours’ entertainment than in many days’ reading.”

A sense of wonder at the technological and artistic possibilities of the new medium permeates the exhibition “Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880-1910,” at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery through Dec. 9. Organized by the Williams College Museum of Art, where it first appeared, the show tells a tale of intertwining motives, subjects and styles.

The show and accompanying catalog (with contributions by 14 essayists) are scholarly productions, but “Moving Pictures” makes its points vividly through a collage-like installation joining paintings, prints, photographs and flat-screen monitors continuously running early films, most less than a minute long. The display is a fleshed-out version of the classic art history slide lecture, two images projected side by side, each to be understood in a new way through comparison with the other.

Although the visual correspondences among early films and turn-of-the-20th-century art are clear, the nature of the relationships is less explicit. “It all had to be pieced together,” says the show’s organizer, Nancy Mowll Mathews, senior curator of 19th and 20th century art at the Williams College Museum.

Mathews says she started with the visual rhymes but didn’t know how to explain them at first while following up on information about painter Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924) owning stock in a film company. “It was immediately obvious looking at these films -- that was what Prendergast’s art and the art of his generation was about too. Sifting through the documents we have, you don’t see really good documentary information, letters that say, ‘Oh I saw this film and I want to make a painting just like it.’ It really had to be re-created from a generational point of view.”

The juxtapositions in the show resonate because of the creators’ shared interest in capturing everyday life. William Glackens’ drawing of a street dense with vendors, carriages and children at play hangs next to a screen showing two short films by the Edison Manufacturing Co. surveying similar market scenes. Mary Cassatt’s print of a mother with child on her lap appears adjacent to a Lumiere film of a family at lunch outdoors, the baby being fed by the father while the mother pours herself a cup of tea.

Similar groupings bring together artworks and motion pictures of grand waterfalls, turbulent seas, skirt dancers in the style of Loie Fuller, men at work, beachgoers and boxers.

Striking as they might be, such juxtapositions are prone to force an equivalence more apparent than real.

Bruce Goldstein, who as director of repertory programming at New York’s nonprofit Film Forum investigates unexamined areas of film history, is more enthusiastic about the look of the show than its thesis: “It was a lovely exhibition, and a beautiful installation, but I don’t really buy the premise of it .... I think the early filmmakers were really just capturing life as it happens. Expressive lighting and imitating art came much later.”

Charles Musser, professor of American studies and film studies at Yale University, became advisor and essayist for “Moving Pictures” with some skepticism as well. “Anytime you do something like this you push connections further than other people are willing to accept, or possibly further than they are there,” he says. Many early filmmakers were artists, including some who worked with Thomas Edison in his New Jersey laboratory, a place, Mathews notes, “of great ideas, not dinky inventions.” Edison was driven to create a device that, he said, would do for the eye what the phonograph did for the ear. From his studio came the Kinetoscope -- a standing box-like device that animated a small filmstrip for individual viewing. Shortly thereafter came the more impressive Vitascope, which had its debut in 1896 and projected those same strips of film onto screens framed, like paintings, in elaborately carved gilded wood.

Edison’s inventions expanded upon the pioneering stop-action photography of Eadweard Muybridge. First with the support of Leland Stanford, then the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge produced photographs in the 1870s and 1880s that documented human and animal locomotion. Those images, many of which are in the exhibition, splintered continuous movement into split-second parts, unfamiliar fragments that startled the eye and challenged the mind.

If realism was the connective tissue between the arts at the time, instantaneous photography made it clear that reality could be defined -- and represented -- in multiple ways.

“The issue was, from an artistic point of view, what do you draw from?” Mathews explains. “What makes art?”

Muybridge and others, such as painter and photographer Thomas Eakins, who had a scientific bent, were astounded by what photographs could reveal that the human eye couldn’t see. “This new invention suddenly pulled back the curtains and allowed us, the artist in particular, to see a part of the world that was not visible before,” Mathews says. But other artists felt differently: “If the human eye can’t see it, why should I put it in my art? My art is about the human experience, not the scientific experience.”

The evolution of abstract art, Mathews asserts, can be traced back to both arguments.

“Moving Pictures,” which travels to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., Feb. 17 through May 20, the final stop on its tour, traces the earliest years of art responding to film, film responding to art, and both media reflecting the cultural and technological moment. That story extends to the present, broadening as it goes.

“In every decade,” says Mathews, “there are artists interested in film and filmmakers interested in art. You can’t have Hitchcock films without Hopper’s art. You can’t have some of the abstract Dada films without the Dada art inspiring them. Every generation there’s an overlap, but it’s not the one-to-one relationship we have prior to 1903.”

Once “The Great Train Robbery” was made in 1903, she adds, “the story took over and propelled the medium to where it is today, and art and film diverged. But at the start, the two were joined.

“You can’t look at those posters of the films in those great gold frames and not see the ambitions of the filmmakers to make great art with a capital A.”