Gérôme in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Emily Beeny, Columbia University 

      During the second half of the nineteenth century, Jean-Léon Gérôme resurrected the Colosseum and Circus Maximus in a series of pictures that have etched the ancient arena into the modern imagination. Although long neglected by art historical scholarship, Gérôme’s vision of Rome, in all its glory and wickedness, slipped into modernity by the back door of mass culture. Most of these paintings—including the Phoenix Art Museum’s Pollice Verso—passed swiftly into American private collections, but not before their imagery, circulated in the Goupil company’s photographic prints, had reached a vast international audience. Because of their ubiquity in reproduction, Gérôme’s pictures have been used since the 1870s as an authoritative source for the staging of antiquity in an array of media and venues, from circuses, to historical novels, to ballets, to tableaux vivants, to history textbooks, to nickelodeon films, to full-length Hollywood peplums. Each of these stagings has constituted a kind of reproduction, inflected by its own medium and context, of Gérôme’s original vision.

      From an archaeological point of view, of course, the pictures can no longer be considered strictly accurate in their representation of Roman spectacles. So why does Gérôme’s version of the arena remain that of the popular imagination? Many other painters showed pictures on ancient Roman themes at the Salons and other international exhibitions during the second half of the nineteenth century. So why did mass culture chose Gérôme’s? My paper will address these questions by examining the pictures themselves—their complex reality effects, their bodily evocation of violence and sexuality—and by investigating Gérôme’s unique relationship to the phenomenon of photographic reproduction.

      Having reached maturity at the moment when multi-print photographic techniques were coming into their own in France, Gérôme was a member of the first generation of painters who saw their work reproduced photographically. As Adolphe Goupil’s son-in-law, he was uniquely well placed with respect to commercial distribution. Perhaps even more significant for his pictures’ mass-cultural longevity than these accidents of history, though, was Gérôme’s explicit self-identification as a painter for the masses. His remark upon passing a cheap print shop and seeing a photogravure of his Dernières prières des martyres chrétiens (Baltimore Art Museum) in its window, “Oui, je travaille pour ces gens-là” points to a deeper awareness, reflected in the paintings themselves, of his own status as a reproduction artist. 

Jennifer Friess, Case Western Reserve University

    The landscape imagery created by Atget provides an interesting context in which to discuss notions of time, process and nostalgia relative to his life in early 20th century Paris. This essay will seek to establish a psychological justification for the nostalgia found in Atget's park photographs through a contextual survey of the historical circumstances of Atget's time, the placement of his work in the history of landscape photography and an application of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the aura of place found in photographs. Ideas gleaned from this analysis may provide interesting parallels between Atget’s photographs and Atget the photographer. I will argue that Atget's chosen technique and subject matter places him in a unique dialog with the past, present, and future of landscape imagery.

Granet's Choir of the Capuchins:  Cementing an Artist's Reputation through Repetition

Justin W. Jackson, Hunter College

    François-Marius Granet, student of J.-L. David and friendly rival of J.A.D. Ingres, produced 15 copies of “Choir of the Capuchin Church on the Piazza Barberini, Rome,” the work which established Granet’s reputation in the first part of the nineteenth century. The original version, identified as the painting now on display in the newly renovated galleries of 19th-century art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was admired by Napoleon’s sister, Caroline Murat, and Pope Pius VII. 

    The artist’s scene of Capuchin monks was one of the most highly commissioned works of the period, entering the collections of the King of Spain and Alexander I.  Garnering success in Europe, Granet’s Capuchins even participated in the phenomenon of touring exhibitions in the young republic of the United States.  Thomas Sully copied the work, sending his own version on tour. 

    Yet for Granet, adulation had a price.  One observer noted, “[the] picture has excited the admiration of connoisseurs, as well as others, and it is universally proclaimed a masterpiece. M. Granet's house is filled every day with persons coming to see this picture, and many repeat their visits several times in the week.”  Visitors marveled at Granet’s use of light and dark, which created an “optical deception [that] is astonishing.”  Unfortunately, the artist soon wished that some of these connoisseurs would “chuse [sic] some other [scene] themselves, or let him chuse [sic] for them.”  Granet’s primary body of work, views of ruins and the Roman countryside which have garnered increased interest recently, met with much less success during his lifetime. 

    “Choir of the Capuchin Church,” both a boon and bane for Granet, demonstrated how artists could become trapped by their own strengths.  The carrot of acclaim and stick of low sales “forced” artists to specialize and churn out multiple images along the same theme in order to feed an increasingly vocal and demanding art-consuming public.  The example of Granet provided a morality lesson for younger artists, who could sense the limitations of imitation and the need to wrest autonomy from the copy back into the hands of the independent artist. 

Framing the Fleeting:  Photography, Sculpture and Display in the Work of Merdardo Rosso

Marin Sullivan, University of Michigan

    The last twenty years have witnessed a steady resurgence of interest in the work of sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858-1928). Scholars and curators alike have begun to better explore the implications of his artistic output, but as noted Rosso scholar Luciano Caramel states, the “case is, in fact, still open.”¹ Much of the ambiguity in the interpretation of his work, which consists of twenty three original sculptural pieces, can be attributed to the existence of over eight hundred photographic prints and one-hundred-eighty glass-plate negatives that depict his sculptural output. These photographs have been ignored and dismissed for over half a century. This paper examines how the multiplicity and reproducibility of photography infiltrated Rosso’s artistic practice and argues that it was not separate from his sculpture, but interconnected, equal parts of a larger artistic agenda. Rosso’s photographs do not merely document his sculptural production.

    Countless negatives and prints survive depicting Rosso’s sculptures, often printed numerous times with different exposures. In many of these photographs he intervened after printing through cropping, collage, written notation, tearing, hand-coloring, and various modes of framing.  The functions of Rosso’s photographs, though, are multiple, complicated, and layered. They were created as publicity postcards to send to collectors, dealers and friends, and they often served as a source of instruction for a new owner on how to “correctly” display a sculpture after its purchase. Their most important purpose was to provide a means for Rosso to revisit fragmented traces of the long-past “impressions” captured in the original subject material of his sculptures. They do not dematerialize his sculptural practice, as is sometimes suggested. Instead, they extend the boundaries of his practice and reveal it to have been one obsessed with controlling the viewer’s point of view. They allowed Rosso to create new impressions, atmospheres and environments for his work. In their ability to frame a scene, Rosso’s photographs create as much as capture, a fleeting moment.