“But my lecture has to do with the Greene case. And really you shouldn’t miss it.”
Markham paused and turned.
“Merely one of your wordy prologues, eh?” He sat down again. “Well, if you have any helpful suggestions to make, I’ll listen.”
Vance smoked a moment.
“Y’ know, Markham,” he began, assuming a lazy, unemotional air, “there’s a fundamental difference between a good painting and a photograph. I’ll admit many painters appear unaware of this fact; and when color photography is perfected—my word! what a horde of academicians will be thrown out of employment! But none the less there’s a vast chasm between the two; and it’s this technical distinction that’s to be the burden of my lay. How, for instance, does Michelangelo’s ‘Moses’ differ from a camera study of a patriarchal old man with whiskers and a stone tablet? Wherein lie the points of divergence between Rubens’s ‘Landscape with Château de Stein’ and a tourist’s snap-shot of a Rhine castle? Why is a Cézanne still-life an improvement on a photograph of a dish of apples? Why have the Renaissance paintings of Madonnas endured for hundreds of years whereas a mere photograph of a mother and child passes into artistic oblivion at the very click of the lens shutter? . . .”
He held up a silencing hand as Markham was about to speak.
“I’m not being futile. Bear with me a moment.—The difference between a good painting and a photograph is this: the one is arranged, composed, organized; the other is merely the haphazard impression of a scene, or a segment of realism, just as it exists in nature. In short, the one has form; the other is chaotic. When a true artist paints a picture, d’ ye see, he arranges all the masses and lines to accord with his preconceived idea of composition—that is, he bends everything in the picture to a basic design; and he also eliminates any objects or details that go contr’ry to, or detract from, that design. Thus he achieves a homogeneity of form, so to speak. Every object in the picture is put there for a definite purpose, and is set in a certain position to accord with the underlying structural pattern. There are no irrelevancies, no unrelated details, no detached objects, no arbitr’ry arrangement of values. All the forms and lines are interdependent; every object—indeed, every brush stroke—takes its exact place in the pattern and fulfils a given function. The picture, in fine, is a unity.”
“Very instructive,” commented Markham, glancing ostentatiously at his watch. “And the Greene case?”
“Now, a photograph, on the other hand,” pursued Vance, ignoring the interruption, “is devoid of design or even of arrangement in the æsthetic sense. To be sure, a photographer may pose and drape a figure—he may even saw off the limb of a tree that he intends to record on his negative; but it’s quite impossible for him to compose the subject-matter of his picture to accord with a preconceived design, the way a painter does. In a photograph there are always details that have no meaning, variations of light and shade that are harmonically false, textures that create false notes, lines that are discords, masses that are out of place. The camera, d’ ye see, is deucedly forthright—it records whatever is before it, irrespective of art values. The inevitable result is that a photograph lacks organization and unity; its composition is, at best, primitive and obvious. And it is full of irrelevant factors—of objects which have neither meaning nor purpose. There is no uniformity of conception in it. It is haphazard, heterogeneous, aimless, and amorphous—just as is nature.”
“You needn’t belabor the point.” Markham spoke impatiently. “I have a rudimentary intelligence.—Where is this elaborate truism leading you?”