Reproduction & original in art: why the former can never replace the latter

Bords d'une rivière (Riverbanks) 1904-05

It is a fair question to ask, “How far is it possible to write meaningfully about works of art that you have only seen in reproduction?” To which my reply would be, that it is possible to write a great deal – with the provision that the colours are well reproduced (in paintings, or as applied to ‘constructivist’ sculpture). How though is it possible to judge that the colours of paintings you have not seen are reproduced accurately? There are, I think, two methods of coming to a reasonable conclusion about this: 1 If you are already thoroughly familiar with the ‘colour language’ of a particular painter – as, say, Cézanne: Yellow ochre, green, and blue; and 2 If there is coherency of colour across the picture plane. However, some paintings seem to resist – for whatever reason – qualitative reproduction. And one such is Van Gogh’s Prisoners Exercising [after a print by Dore]. The reproduction to the right is one that I scanned from

Van Gogh, Prisoners Exercising

Pierre Cabanne’s Van Gogh, Thames and Hudson World of Art series, 1963. I read this in 1980, and do not remember seeing any other reproductions of Prisoners Exercising – such as might have made me think what a great painting it was. The painting is in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow and, sometime in the mid 1980s, they lent a selection of their paintings to the National Gallery for a special exhibition. Among these was Prisoners Exercising, and I remember being utterly amazed and delighted by the richness, depth, and subtlety of the colours. I would go so far as to describe it as a hymn to yellow ochre and blue. I have never since seen – nor ever expect to see – a reproduction that could elicit such a reaction. Only by being in the presence a great work of art is it possible to experience the kind of transcendence that I felt that day in the National Gallery.   

But what does it mean to talk of transcendence in this context? To me there is nothing spiritual involved, nothing religious. Quite the contrary. It has to do with the effect of being in the presence of something, the sheer materiality of which floods the imagination. To give a deeper idea of what I am discussing, here are some passages from James Elkins tour de force, What Painting Is:

Less interesting painters [than Elkins’ example, Rembrandt] do not know what to do with the choice between substance and illusion. Poor painting does not push the equivocation as far as it can go, until the paint teeters on the edge of transcendence. (p187)

When painting is compelling, it is uncanny: it hovers on the brink of impossibility, as if nothing that close to incorporeality could exist . . . paint can reach a pitch of unnaturalness where it seems that it might lose every connection with the tubes and palettes where it began. That is the state that counts, and not the choice between fictive space and canvas, or between illusion and paint. It’s not the choice, but the narrowness of the gap: the incredible tension generated by something so infinitely close to perfection. (p188)

So it is that the argument between abstract and figurative painting is irrelevant. A hundred or a million brushstrokes are neither here nor there: how they are placed and the manner of their placing, whether with painstaking care or with some kind of near–attack on the canvas, is all that matters (provided that the artist knows what she is doing). Between paint and the painter there is an intimate relationship; and if the tussle between these – a human being and the potentially transcendent stuff squeezed from tubes – is pushed to the limits, then may a work of genius come into being. All sense of the smell of oil paint and turpentine will

have dissipated in the finished work on the gallery wall. But the process involves hours, days, and even weeks, of mixing colours, washing brushes, and scraping the palette clean (of that smeared mess of strange compounds colours, the like of which you could never reproduce, and so may fold into kitchen foil for possible use the next day). And then: “Who has not experienced the gray feeling of the ‘morning after’ when having to face the work done on the day before? Suddenly the ignored gaps and fragmentation and the apparent chaos of undifferentiation push into consciousness. Part of the creative capacity is the strength to resist an almost anal disgust that would make us sweep the whole mess into the waste–paper basket.” (1)  Not that this is the whole story: “. . .  the painter has all the joys of immediate creation, his picture, like Adam, coming to life under his hand.” (2) And what do we see in the galleries? That some people give a painting about three minutes attention, while others might as well be a troop of monkeys!

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(1) The Hidden Order of Art, Anton Ehreenzweig. University of California Press, 1967 (p103)

(2) The Painter’s Eye, Maurice Grosser. Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1951. Paperback edition, Mentor (p167)

James Elkins’ What Painting Is, was first published by Routledge in 2001