Pierre Bonnard's photograph of his wife, Marthe, entering a bathtub is as lovely as his many paintings of the same subject. His straightforward full-length photograph of Hortense Howland is included as is a rather marvelous 1895 self-portrait of the master reclining in majestic profile in front of a painting of a woman's vast rump.
Henri Rivière, who was one of the first engravers in Europe to make woodcuts in the Japanese style, cropped pastry chefs interestingly at the waist and Alphonse Mucha presumably used his photograph of a model in his atelier as a study for the program he was designing for the 1900 World's Fair.Įdgar Degas was a fine photographer whose prints have been widely exhibited. An earlier outdoors study of Cézanne, in 1890, would be even less interesting except for the suggestion, which is perhaps only in the eye of the beholder, that the mass in the upper right corner is Montagne Sainte-Victoire.īernard was a painter, one of many who used the camera. Sometimes an otherwise ordinary snap is deeply moving because of its subject: There is Emile Bernard's 1904 portrait of a white-bearded man, thrilling only because the man is Paul Cézanne seated in front of Les Grandes Baigneuses. The pictures are engaging chiefly for the delight that taking them clearly aroused. It was the age of new small cameras and film that was much faster and relatively easy to handle: The shutterbug was born.Įnthusiastically, as the exhibition shows, they pointed their small Kodaks at life around them, a crowd near the Paris opera, or Mardi Gras or the brand new (and since replaced) palace at the Trocadero, providing simple mementos of bygone days to stick in albums or to pile in attics for descendents decades later finally to profitably unload. What photography was for had long been a subject of debate: Was it the enemy of painting or its poor relation? By the 1880's the sterile and often self-contradicting debate had been enriched, and further complicated, by a new category of photographers who were heedless of the implications of their snaps. As a footnote to its major exhibition of daguerreotypes, the Musée d'Orsay has opened a small show on photography at the turn of the last century, subtitled "From Pictorialism to Eugène Atget" and dealing with the change from a painterly to a naturalistic approach.
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