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Claude Monet An Interior after Dinner, 1868-69, oil on
canvas. Washington, D.C., National
Gallery of Art, Mr. and Mrs. P. Mellon
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Light!
The Industrial Age 1750-1900, Art & Science, Technology & Society
April 7 – July 29, 2001
By
Ellen S. Wilson
Not
long ago, National Public Radio host Scott Simon referred to “the company
that bottled light” in a story on a corporation that manufactures light
bulbs. It’s an interesting thought, that those somewhat bottle-shaped bulbs
can contain such a mystical phenomenon. Light, however, is not so easily
confined. It tends to leak, to spill out of the closet on a dark morning, to
ruin cover-ups, reveal secrets, blind us, or reassure us. It’s a wave, it’s a
particle, it’s actually both. It makes a Turner sunset different from a Van
Gogh sunset, a Degas interior different from a Monet. We can’t live without
it, but we take it for granted until the power goes out. What difference does
it make in our lives, our art, the way we see and think?
Louise Lippincott, curator of fine arts at Carnegie Museum of Art,
and Andreas Blühm, head of exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam,
began to ponder some of these issues in 1997, and the results can be
experienced in Light! The Industrial Age 1750-1900, Art & Science,
Technology & Society, opening in Pittsburgh April 7. The exhibition
is exclusive to the Amsterdam and Pittsburgh museums, and during its
Amsterdam run London's Daily Telegraph critic Richard Dorment called
it “by far the most important exhibition in Europe.”
“We think of light as unchanging, constant, available, and none of
that is true,” says Lippincott in explaining how the exhibition came into
being. “The most difficult thing to understand is how light was perceived
historically. You can compare it to the changes brought about by the digital
age, and its impact was probably just as profound.” The development of
artificial light and the new lighting methods that quickly became available
changed how people saw, and that changed how they lived.
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The exhibition focuses on innovations in lighting during
the Industrial Age in Europe and America, and how artists responded to them.
There are five broad subject areas, beginning, appropriately, with Rays of
Light, and society’s first attempts to understand and control them. This
section recreates Newton’s prism experiment, which demonstrates that a beam
of light passed through a prism is broken into the separate colors of the
spectrum.
In addition to early magic lanterns, microscopes and
cameras, there are rare editions of the scientific texts offering different
theories about the nature of light. A 1704 edition of Newton’s Opticks,
for example, explains that light is made up of particles that behave
predictably, according to mathematical principles. In the previous decade,
Christiaan Huygens had theorized that light was actually a wave and behaved
something like sound waves. Today, we understand that light can behave as
either a wave or a particle, but Newton’s and Huygens’ contributions to the
scientific dialogue were, according to Lippincott, more important that
identifying the makeup of light. “They got people thinking of light as a
material, manipulatable thing, not a gift from God,” she explains. “This was
a completely new concept, and it opened up light as a subject for
investigation, and for art.”
Jean Siméon Chardin takes up the subject in his still life Glass
of Water and Coffeepot, ca. 1760. Despite the simple title, the painting
captures the property of refraction, or the way light bends when it passes through
transparent materials. An understanding of refraction is essential to making
lenses for telescopes and microscopes, and here Chardin demonstrates his own
scientific knowledge. Other elements in the painting – a dark brown
coffeepot, and bright white garlic bulbs – illustrate the behavior of light
as it bounces off some surfaces and is absorbed by others. Chardin may not
have worked out any mathematical formulas in order to paint so accurately,
but he was surely familiar with the current thinking on the behavior of
light.
In the 1780s, when the Argand lamp made artificial light brighter, a
new appreciation for natural light arose, with a sense of the moral authority
linked to a phenomenon beyond human control. Lippincott and Blühm have
assembled in part two of the exhibition, The Light of Nature, a
selection of landscapes in which the real subject is sunlight. What
immediately strikes the viewer is how different light appears in the various
paintings, all of them completed within at least a few decades of each other.
“During the 19th century, physiologists studied the way
the eye and the brain perceived light, and how light influenced emotion,”
Lippincott explains. “They had long known that music, or sound waves,
affected emotion and now painters began attempting to manipulate the viewers’
emotions through the use of light waves, or color.”
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Henry Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec At the Moulin
Rouge, 1892-95, oil on canvas. Art
Institute of Chicago
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Ford Madox Brown’s The Pretty Baa Lambs, 1852, is,
according to the curators, probably the first 19th-century picture
painted for exhibition almost entirely outdoors. Ford said he intended to
represent the effect of sunlight on the scene, and that hanging the painting
in the false light of the gallery led viewers to misinterpret it, to see it,
in effect, the wrong way.
Just 20 years later, when Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro
produced his own study of outdoor light in The Crossroads, Pontoise,
1872, the results were entirely different. Both paintings show bright, sunny
days, but Brown painted the individual blades of grass, and Pissarro’s grass
is made up of broad swatches of various shades of green. Both look equally
grassy, but according to the exhibition catalogue, Pissarro believed that “bright
sunlight flattened detail and diminished color.” Thus his sky is a pale blue,
especially near the horizon, and a white house in the background is merely
sketched in. Brown’s sky is achingly blue, and every fold of drapery is crisp
and distinct. It is difficult to reconcile the two paintings with the
artists’ shared intention: to capture the realistic effect of bright, natural
light on an outdoor scene.
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“Did light behave differently in Britain’s notoriously
humid atmosphere, as compared to France’s drier one?” the curators ask in the
catalogue. “Or did each artist go out into the sunshine expecting to see
things differently from certain artists of the past – and consequently each
found a different version of the truth?” One thing is clear: natural light is
seen in a positive way, healthful, beneficial, and aligned with all the
purity of lambs, motherhood, and visual truth.
In the section Makers of Light, one of the first things
visitors will see is Thomas Edison’s flickering film of the Buffalo
Pan-American Exposition of 1901, the first motion picture shot at night by
artificial light. Marvelous to look at today, understanding its historical
impact requires a powerful imaginative leap. As Dorment points out, “Nothing
– not television, not space travel, not computers – gives us any idea of the
awe our great-grandparents must have felt when they saw the world illuminated
by electricity for the first time.”
Until that first dim candle, light had been entirely in the hands of
God. With the advent of the telescope, it became evident that not only was
light a scientific phenomenon, life on earth might be as well. This change in
thinking is illustrated in the different plates made by Gustave Doré for an
edition of the Bible in 1865 and 1866. In the French edition of 1865,
accompanying the text, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’” God is portrayed
as a magnificent figure raising his arm in a burst of sunlight. In the
English edition of 1866, for a Protestant readership, he is replaced by a
cloud.
Was it hubris to think that God was not responsible for so profound
a gift as light? Was it unnatural and therefore evil to light up our rooms
and factories and go on working, long after the sun had set?
John Martin’s 1841 painting Pandemonium, a vision of the
palace of Satan lit by what appear to be gaslights, suggests that it was. The
gaslights seem to be related to the flames of hell erupting at the feet of
the devil, and the scene itself, some critics say, resembles London’s Pall
Mall, the first street in London to be lit by gas, and a favorite playground
of libertines.
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The last two sections of the exhibition, Personal
Lights and Public Lighting, explore these questions further
because, as Lippincott explains, the moral issue about the human right to
create light flips back and forth. If light enables new sorts of bad
behavior, it also exposes it, as the 19th-century police lantern
with bulls-eye lens demonstrates. Wilhelm Bendz’ The Life Class in the
Academy of Fine Arts, 1826, shows people waiting to begin work while the
lamps are lit, the point being that good work requires good lighting.
Lamp and hearth light, traditionally symbols of female virtue, can
be the peaceful centerpiece of the family, as in Claude Monet’s 1868-69 An
Interior after Dinner. Or it can be a harsh focal point, as in Edgar
Degas’ Interior, also 1868-69, revealing what the exhibition catalogue
calls “two of the unhappiest people ever depicted in art” in a tension-filled
scene of female misery.
In Public Lighting, visitors themselves may observe the
different kinds of lighting that became available during the Industrial Age.
Van Gogh’s famous painting of 1888, Gauguin’s Chair, contains the
first pictorial evidence that Van Gogh had his house connected to the gas network
in Arles, France. The painting shows a gas jet in the background, radiating
light, and on the seat of the chair a candle, whose flame is made
insignificant by the brighter gas light. In the exhibition, the painting may
be viewed by natural light, open gas flame, incandescent gas flame, and
electric arc light, the four kinds of light vying for dominance during Van
Gogh’s career. Each light shows a markedly different painting.
As light became easier to use, the science behind it became more
removed from our daily experience. When we stopped having to trim wicks and
fill oil reservoirs, we may have lost sight of light itself. “I would like
visitors to the exhibition to understand, when they leave, the extent to
which the quality of light affects them,” Lippincott says.
We may think we understand how light works, but the art and the
technology included in this exhibition show us a more profound truth. It may
be that only an artist can really capture how light makes us see, feel, and
live.
The last two sections of the exhibition, Personal Lights and Public
Lighting, explore these questions further because, as Lippincott
explains, the moral issue about the human right to create light flips back
and forth. If light enables new sorts of bad behavior, it also exposes it, as
the 19th-century police lantern with bulls-eye lens demonstrates.
Wilhelm Bendz’ The Life Class in the Academy of Fine Arts, 1826, shows
people waiting to begin work while the lamps are lit, the point being that
good work requires good lighting.
Lamp and hearth light, traditionally symbols of female virtue, can
be the peaceful centerpiece of the family, as in Claude Monet’s 1868-69 An
Interior after Dinner. Or it can be a harsh focal point, as in Edgar
Degas’ Interior, also 1868-69, revealing what the exhibition catalogue
calls “two of the unhappiest people ever depicted in art” in a tension-filled
scene of female misery.
In Public Lighting, visitors themselves may observe the
different kinds of lighting that became available during the Industrial Age.
Van Gogh’s famous painting of 1888, Gauguin’s Chair, contains the
first pictorial evidence that Van Gogh had his house connected to the gas
network in Arles, France. The painting shows a gas jet in the background,
radiating light, and on the seat of the chair a candle, whose flame is made
insignificant by the brighter gas light. In the exhibition, the painting may
be viewed by natural light, open gas flame, incandescent gas flame, and
electric arc light, the four kinds of light vying for dominance during Van
Gogh’s career. Each light shows a markedly different painting.
As light became easier to use, the science behind it became more
removed from our daily experience. When we stopped having to trim wicks and
fill oil reservoirs, we may have lost sight of light itself. “I would like
visitors to the exhibition to understand, when they leave, the extent to
which the quality of light affects them,” Lippincott says.
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Lapierre, Magic Lantern, ca. 1880 Haags Documentatie.
Centrum Nieuwe Media, the
Hague
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We may think we understand how light works, but the art
and the technology included in this exhibition show us a more profound truth.
It may be that only an artist can really capture how light makes us see, feel,
and live.
The last two sections of the exhibition, Personal
Lights and Public Lighting, explore these questions further
because, as Lippincott explains, the moral issue about the human right to
create light flips back and forth. If light enables new sorts of bad
behavior, it also exposes it, as the 19th-century police lantern
with bulls-eye lens demonstrates. Wilhelm Bendz’ The Life Class in the
Academy of Fine Arts, 1826, shows people waiting to begin work while the
lamps are lit, the point being that good work requires good lighting.
Lamp and hearth light, traditionally symbols of female virtue, can
be the peaceful centerpiece of the family, as in Claude Monet’s 1868-69 An
Interior after Dinner. Or it can be a harsh focal point, as in Edgar
Degas’ Interior, also 1868-69, revealing what the exhibition catalogue
calls “two of the unhappiest people ever depicted in art” in a tension-filled
scene of female misery.
In Public Lighting, visitors themselves may observe the
different kinds of lighting that became available during the Industrial Age.
Van Gogh’s famous painting of 1888, Gauguin’s Chair, contains the
first pictorial evidence that Van Gogh had his house connected to the gas
network in Arles, France. The painting shows a gas jet in the background, radiating
light, and on the seat of the chair a candle, whose flame is made
insignificant by the brighter gas light. In the exhibition, the painting may
be viewed by natural light, open gas flame, incandescent gas flame, and
electric arc light, the four kinds of light vying for dominance during Van
Gogh’s career. Each light shows a markedly different painting.
As light became easier to use, the science behind it
became more removed from our daily experience. When we stopped having to trim
wicks and fill oil reservoirs, we may have lost sight of light itself. “I
would like visitors to the exhibition to understand, when they leave, the
extent to which the quality of light affects them,” Lippincott says.
We may think we understand how light works, but the art and the
technology included in this exhibition show us a more profound truth. It may
be that only an artist can really capture how light makes us see, feel, and
live.
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