Developing art: Exhibit is first major collection of European pictorialist works

ST. LOUIS -- A rare exhibit of European works that elevated pictorial photography to a fine art is having its only U.S. showing at the Saint Louis Art Museum, a fitting homecoming for some pictures last seen here during the 1904 World's Fair.

"Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888-1918," which opens Sunday, features more than 140 exquisite photographs that look like paintings, watercolors and drawings, an effect achieved through blurry soft-focus lenses, unconventional developing and printing techniques, vivid pigments and rough-textured paper or super-thin tissue that gave them a rich, handcrafted quality.

The pictorial (or "picture-ism") movement, which got momentum in 1890 and faded after the end of World War I, produced some of the most "spectacular pictures in the genre's history," exhibition curator Phillip Prodger wrote in an introduction to the show's catalog.

In photography's first 50 years, only the skilled and wealthy dabbled in the craft and exchanged techniques in photo club meetings and journals. But George Eastman's portable Kodak snapshot camera in the late 1880s meant anyone could take a picture.

When masses of amateur "button pressers" with no studio training began joining the elite's clubs, and when avant-garde photographers found the clubs too conservative, photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz started new clubs in the United States and Europe. The break of these highly skilled, artistic amateurs created the international pictorialist movement whose photographers used the camera for creative expression rather than as a documentary tool.

"They didn't want to just record, but express an emotion," said Eric Lutz, assistant curator of prints, drawings and photographs for the Saint Louis Art Museum.

The result was "images drawn from the imagination," featuring nudes, portraits, landscapes and domiciles, Prodger said.

The pictorialists strung gauze or silk stockings in front of the lens to achieve a soft focus, and used platinum rather than silver on paper for a more luminous, evocative look. British photographer Peter Henry Emerson, who was not a pictorialist, led the way with his "The Snow Garden," which played with depth of field and differential focus to create a beautiful effect.

Colorful pigments were used instead of black or sepia tones to convey hues. Photographers eventually created the illusion of full color by making separate negatives filtered for red, blue and green.

They printed their images on hand-coated, rather than commercial paper, to accommodate different pigments and textures. They built depth and texture by layering emulsions and painting them with rough brushstrokes.

Pictorialists in Vienna in the late 1890s -- including giants Hugo Henneberg, Heinrich Kuehn and Hans Watzek -- were among the first to be recognized as artists and have their work shown alongside paintings.

In a scene from the Austrian Alps, Kuehn built two pictures by laying images over the same negative, adding trees, a hill and flowers as though using photo editing software.

Influenced by varied art styles including Renaissance, impressionism, romantic and contemporary, the Pictorialists experimented with film, paper, context, color and size of negative, even where to exhibit their works and how to frame them.

Many of the works are dated and signed as in a painting. Some are presented in elaborate frames with multicolor matting.

Among the exhibit's most fragile pieces are rare colored transparencies on glass known as autochromes, the first true color process achieved in 1903 in France, and loaned by the SociZtZ Fran?aise de Photographie. The autochrome's color particles are made up of photosensitive grains of potato starch stained with different pigments and coated on the slide.

"This show is going to be fascinating, an eye-opener, and will present material American audiences have never seen," said photography historian Keith Davis, curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

Pictorial photography faded after 1918 as just-ended World War I made idealized, sentimental images seem out of sync with the trauma the world had just suffered.

The exhibit, which traveled from the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Rennes in France to St. Louis, was assembled from 25 individual and institutional lenders, mostly from Europe, but including the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

It marks the first time that such a broad array of European pictorialist works have been exhibited together, Prodger said. The fragile works will not travel further after the show closes May 14.

The choice of St. Louis is in part due to history. Organizers of the 1904 World's Fair had invited avant-garde artists from around the world to exhibit here, and renowned French pictorialists from the Photo Club de Paris accepted. But because so many painters also accepted, the pictorialists' works were exhibited separately.

"So this homecoming will put them back in the art museum where they were promised they'd be shown," Prodger said.

---

On the Net:

Saint Louis Art Museum: http://www.slam.org