Genre subjects have always enjoyed more popularity with the general public than any other branch of the art of painting. The wielders of the brush however have always looked upon story telling in painting as something unworthy of the highest ideals of their profession. By this they do not altogether mean that minute study of details and exact presentation of facts make their productions conspicuously uninteresting as works of art, but rather that they lack those qualities which are associated with the most advanced phase of modern art.
This hatred for genre subjects has always seemed a rather futile agitation to me. Nobody with any pretense to taste will deny that those painters who devote the utmost care to the most insignificant objects (and who are still considered by the large majority the pillars of art, because their shortsightedness is relative to the ordinary seeing capacity of the crowd), are artistically inferior to those who master touch and technique, the problems of tone and color, and the decorative side of painting.
But how about the little Dutch Masters, who were genre painters in the strictest sense of the word, and who nevertheless understood to invest the true likeness of their subjects with a charm and fascination far beyond ordinary graphic powers and force of drafstmanship? And cannot also the paintings of a Fortuny and Knaus, for instance, be defended on the same grounds?
You may say that such men are exceptions, that the harmonious concentration of vision, peculiar to them, lifts them above minor talents -- painters like Defregger, Vauthier, and Mosler, whose pictures are like pages torn from a popular novel. But if there are exceptions, the fault can hardly lie in the choice of subjects, and the question whether a genre painter paints artistically or not is reduced to a large extent to personal opinion.
Let us investigate this matter a little more closely. First of all, it will be necessary to ascertain of what material a genre picture is constituted, an extremely difficult problem, as it is well nigh impossible to draw the boundary lines with indisputable precision. The standards which guide the painters in their judgement have assumed no definite shape, they are mostly a matter of personal feeling and the traditional "ism" of some special school, and consequently not to be relied upon. Moreover they are full of paradoxes.
Take for instance a painter like Defregger. No matter how this painter might treat a group of peasants, we would classify his picture at once as genre. On the other hand if we are confronted with a peasant by the hand of Israels or Lieberman we would hesitate and prefer to call the production "a study". And yet there is in both the same careful study, the same striving to get at the secrets of certain types of humanity, the same desire to record completely and definitely their special traits.
The whole difference seems to lie in the conception, for it cannot be denied that both pictures tell a story. The one is told ˆ la Dickens in a popular way, the other in the style of a writer of the modern realistic school, which may be some day just as popular as the other one.
But the problem is still more difficult. For how shall we classify a single finished figure of Meissonier or Zamaois! We might be inclined to call it a study, as long as the figure is merely placed against a background without any special occupation, while we would designate it as genre as soon as the figure is represented as playing chess, looking at a piece of statuary, etc., or in other words approaching the anecdotal style of paining. On the other hand who would deny that the women of Stevens, who are generally depicted in interiors and employed in one or another phase of domestic or social life, do not show the same subtle refinement and psychological insight as the ladies of Aman-Jean or Dewing, who sit in attitudes of pensive grace against backgrounds that are nothing else but color arrangements
True enough, but Stevens is an exception, he is a psychologist and a colorist of the first order, somebody will argue. He is infatuated with anything feminine which suggests to him harmonies of tone, in which the richer color chords shine like the faint lustre of ancient gems in a twilight atmosphere.
If this argument holds good, then the subject is not the point at all, but the treatment alone. Although story telling is, in my opinion, rather unaesthetic in the pictorial representation of human figures, as long as these are seen separately and individually, and not en masse, as by the impressionist painter, I see no reason why genre subjects should be tabooed altogether, as it depends entirely on the way they are treated. In ideas Fortuny has hardly more to tell than GŽr™me for instance, but how differently he tells it! To him life is a masquerade, ebullient and capricious, where every detail glitters like a piece of jewel-clustered brocade. All that should be avoided in pedantic realism, which busies itself with every little thread stealing out of a buttonhole, and which can see only things detached in detail and not as a harmonious whole.
In artistic photography the situation is a similar one, the same fight is on and almost the same arguments could be used in regard to the works of Dumont, Eickemeyer, Stirling, White, KŠsebier, and Steichen. However there is one difference. A painting, no matter how trivial or prosaic its subject may be, can still charm by technical qualities, in which certain characteristics or the artist may be reflected, while a photographic genre picture ˆ la Defregger or Vauthier, no matter how cleverly composed is always hopelessly inartistic. It depends too largely on the models and their ability to pose, and to remain natural looking while a long studio exposure is taking place. It is almost a physical impossibility.
Eickemeyer's "The Dance" was a most ambitious attempt to overcome these difficulties; he had the proper models and studio outfits on hand, he thought out the composition night and day, altered it frequently, made study after study until he finally succeeded in getting a faultless picture from the photographic point of view. Artistically it is of no more interest than a reproduction of a painting by Diehlman. The same might be said of White's "Ring Toss." The means of modification do not seem to be sufficient to generalize the facts which the camera tells with such unrelenting bluntness. The more artistic a photographer is, the more he will see in an object what he looks for, but the camera will never fail to remind him that there are forms in nature which the mind at the time did not perceive. A study of these two prints will give a fair estimate of the limitations of the photographer's craft. Elaborate genre scenes in which several figures are introduced are practically impossible, and to strain after effects like these means to invite failure and to join hands with mediocrity. One and two figure subjects lend themselves more easily to photographic treatment as Dumont and White have successfully proven, but their efforts are hardly more than finger posts in the right direction. They lack virility and esprit, and excite as pictures hardly more than a passing interest.
Steichen and Eugene are as far as I know the only ones who might possibly succeed in discovering and expressing in photographic genre some of that "painter" element which we admire in the works of Liebermann or IsrŠels. For those who are not initiated into the painter's technique it very much resembles the pursuit of the impossible, an occupation which they should leave to people of less discretion than they are supposed to possess.
