Moving Images, Moving Paintings
Nancy Matthews
When American audiences first went to the movies in 1896, they saw monumental subjects such as Niagara Falls projected onto canvas screens framed with huge gold frames. Within months of the debut of films by the Edison and Lumière companies in New York, the whole country could see the new "moving pictures" not only in big cities, but in small towns coast to coast as the new medium spread like wildfire.
A new exhibition at The Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, investigates the complex relationship between this new medium and painting at the turn of the twentieth century. The focus of this exhibition is American visual culture, and in particular the aesthetics of New York City and modern urban life around 1900. Paintings, posters, kinetoscope parlors and projected movies are shown along with films of art and artists, photographers, and filmmaking as subject. The films are drawn primarily from the Edison, Lumière, and American Mutoscope and Biograph companies, while the paintings come from, among others, Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, George Luks, George Bellows, and Maurice Prendergast.
Although many famous actors, dancers, and athletes were featured in the earliest films, the most popular were the films of places and ordinary people that were already familiar in traditional American art. By the 1890s, rural genre and landscape had dominated American painting for almost a century. It’s not surprising then that the early cameramen for such pioneering film manufacturers as the Edison company turned their movie cameras to the subjects they knew would be most welcome.
Of all American subjects, none was as monumental as Niagara Falls, which had been painted and photographed ceaselessly by American as well as foreign artists. William Morris Hunt’s large oil painting of 1878 is in the tradition of panoramic views of the falls and had been intended for a mural series in the New York State Capitol building in Albany that was never realized. Early films of the falls such as the Lumière Niagara, Horseshoe Falls, 1896, followed in the panoramic tradition, dwarfing the audience by their sheer size and capturing the majestic power of the American landscape.
The idea of animating photographs of bodies in motion arose in the 1870s and was made famous by the San Francisco photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who had devised ways of photographing the movements of race horses. He wanted to find out whether or not a horse ever had all its four legs off the ground when it ran–a long contended issue. Muybridge lectured all over the world about the discoveries revealed by his photographic studies (galloping horses did indeed ‘fly’ between steps) and accompanied his lectures with projected animations of these hitherto unseen poses. By the late 1880s, Muybridge’s encyclopedic series of studies of humans and animals, called Animal Locomotion was heralded by artists and scientists alike, including Thomas Edison. Edison’s phonograph offered a model for the recording of moving images and the inventor found himself immersed in the visual arts for the first time. He handed the project over to William Dickson, an electrical engineer and expert photographer, and, by 1894, the Edison company was producing films for the Edison kinetoscope viewer–both modeled on the technology of the phonograph. By 1896, Edison films were being projected in public settings in the format we are familiar with to this day.
Edison, along with other early pioneers of animated photography, produced a large number of films that record and celebrate the feats of animals (such as race horses), and people–boxers, gymnasts, and dancers. As with the earlier photographs of Muybridge, these films parallel the artistic studies of animal and human motion that preoccupied painters from Rosa Bonheur to Thomas Eakins. One of the most famous performers of the 1890s, the body builder and physical culture advocate, Eugen Sandow, made the connection between film and art crystal clear. His routine of muscular poses, here filmed by Edison, imitated famous classical sculpture and evoked the traditional poses of an artist’s model. The drawing of muscular anatomy was the sine qua non of art students and mature artists as well; and their sheets of drawings, such as John Singer Sargent’s Studies of Male Nudes, c.1910-15, are almost cinematic in the progression of poses captured on the spot.
Artists who came to maturity in the late 1890s benefited from the analysis of movement offered by Muybridge and the early films of Edison. This was especially true of those who studied in Philadelphia–Everett Shinn, John Sloan, William Glackens, and George Luks–but would move to New York around 1900 and produce a gritty view of urban subjects later called the "Ash Can School." Trained to capture the complex movements of modern life, they first worked as journalist-artists for newspapers and magazines covering city life and current events such as accidents, fires, and even the Spanish-American War when it broke out in 1898. Artists and filmmakers found themselves side-by-side, producing similar sensational views of bustling streets and modern industrialized cityscapes.
Although Impressionist paintings of cities like Paris also captured movement, and many early films of city life borrowed the elegant Impressionist style, a new urban aesthetic was developing among artists and filmmakers in New York by 1900. Borrowing from each other, they created tough urban scenes such as Everett Shinn’s Barges on the East River, 1898, and Edwin S. Porter’s Panorama Waterfront and Brooklyn Bridge from East River, 1903. The crowded river with its steaming ships and industrial wharves is monochromatic and shows the unblinking eye of the movie camera, capturing the good with the bad as the river flows before us. In such modern scenes of the city, unexpected heroes arise–immigrants, push cart vendors of the Lower East Side, newspaper boys, dancing girls.
The close-up studies of faces in early films, such as Edison’s May Irwin Kiss of 1896 (a scene from a popular play on Broadway), were presented both as moving images and still pictures. The media circus surrounding the début of the film, a few days after the Edison Vitascope début in New York on April 23, 1896, provided artists with the still version of the kiss. The New York World touted "42 Feet of Kiss in 600 pictures," and illustrated most of them in crude wood engravings of the original frames. In 1896, the future Ash Can artist John Sloan (1871—1951) wrote a scathing review of the May Irwin Kiss for the Chap-Book, a small journal of arts commentary, showing that the images made ripples in the world of serious painters. Poster artists and other commercial artists, cartoonists, and journalists, all grappled with how to represent films–a new subject in their repertoire.
In the Sears & Roebuck poster, A Wonderful Animated Moving Picture Exhibition, c.1900, the May Irwin Kiss is shown projected onto a screen to the delight of a small town audience. The poster was only one part of an entire moving picture kit that could be bought from the Sears catalogue–projector, films, and posters to advertise your "exhibition." Entrepreneurs all over the country bought such equipment and made early film one of the most rapidly-adopted new technologies of its day.
The curiosity that artists and filmmakers showed toward each other’s medium in this period is reflected not only in the many depictions of films such as May Irwin Kiss, but in the equal number of artists and works of art shown in early films. The self-consciousness about the medium itself and the creative act that can be found in both art and film points the way to further explorations of the nature of art in the 20th century.
