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Friday, September 3, 2021

Authenticity ambiguities


I'm posting this for two reasons.  First, it is a decent example of von Marees' style and ability to depict the male body.  Second, it shows an issue I run up against routinely in blogging old art and photographs.  I found these rather different versions of "Three Men in the Landscape" on separate websites.  Which is a more accurate representation of the original?  When we find material on line, we never know what sort of alterations may have been made, at least not without resorting to some serious electronic analysis.  Even they, we sometimes can't tell.  And I have to admit that I may have added to this myself on those occasions I've felt compelled to clean up or brighten an image.

 

13 comments:

  1. The piece on the left more closely matches the extract from the mural, shown below. The brighter colours are similar.

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  2. I like both. High colour and naturalistic flesh tone. A delightful grouping, I wonder if it was done with three models?

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    1. Good question. Von Marees was well funded, so I think it might be three.

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  3. Jerry, don't beat yourself up about brightening an image. The image that you're working with is not the original work; it's somebody's photo of the work, and that photo may be underexposed or otherwise flawed. I've seen several cases of different people's photos of the same artwork where one is brighter than another, and the most obvious explanation is the camera exposure. I see nothing wrong in correcting for that.

    Even when the original work is a photograph, like your collection of physique photos, any image that you found online is a scan or a photo of the original photo, so again there's no guarantee that its brightness is identical to the original. The only exception would be if the original work were a digital photo that the photographer posted online, which of course is not applicable to your vintage material.

    The color painting here is more problematic, because the colors look different, but on examination, it looks like the main difference is the amount of color saturation. I have personally seen cases where I took a photo with my SLR camera, and a friend took a photo of the same thing with her cellphone, and her photo had much more saturated colors than mine did. So, it's possible that neither photo of this artwork was "altered", or to put it another way, it may have been the camera that altered it. In any case, without having seen the original painting, there is no way to know which one is more accurate. –Larry

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    1. Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge, Larry.

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  4. I was perusing a museum website today, looking at art much like your piece pictured here, and I found more than one case where the museum had ownership of more than one version of the same painting, in different lighting and color. All versions were attributed to the same artist, so I assumed that at least in some cases the artist himself put out varying versions of the nearly identical painting. 'm not talking Warhol here, either, who put out hundreds of paintings of the same soup can- these were "classical" works of art in reputable museums. Surely the museum would not have altered the original painting in any way to produce different versions, and they have originals, so I only assume that the artist did this, even centuries ago. I know, though, that the copies we see on the internet are subject to the tampering of the displayer and the temperament of the camera. Is it possible von Maree produced different versions himself?

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    1. I totally see your point, but the example in this particular example was a mural, a type of art unlikely (but not impossible) to have had more than one version made.

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  5. The appearance of a photo depends on the film used. Photographic film is a strip or sheet of transparent film base coated on one side with a gelatin emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of the crystals determine the sensitivity, contrast, and resolution of the film. Unmodified silver halide crystals are sensitive only to the blue part of the visible spectrum, producing unnatural-looking renditions of some colored subjects. This problem was resolved with the discovery that certain dyes, called sensitizing dyes, when adsorbed onto the silver halide crystals made them respond to other colors as well. First orthochromatic (sensitive to blue and green) and finally panchromatic (sensitive to all visible colors) films were developed. Fixing the film to remove silver halide and chemical couplers leaves behind only the formed color dyes, which combine to make up the colored visible image. Later color films, like Kodacolor II, have as many as 12 emulsion layers, with upwards of 20 different chemicals in each layer. So the photographs Jerry finds are reproductions if the original. And how the reproduction was made ie film, exposure, development, type of light ( full spectrum, UV, limited spectrum) and halide crystal size (fine appearance to coarse appearance like pixels).

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    1. What you say about film is spot on, and now things are complicated even more by differences among digital camera output.

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  6. Thankyou Thomas for your amazing knowledge of film. I think we've established that the vast majority of paintings seen in different colors, lighting, etc. is due to manipulation by the film, camera, or photographer of the painting. I am interested in knowing how many of these different versions of the same painting were intentionally produced by the original artist him or herself. Was this very common? I've found multiple such cases. After all, the artist had to sell these paintings, and a popular painting might be worth reproducing by the artist in slightly different mediums.

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  7. You're right, Jerry, that a mural most likely would not be duplicated by the artist. I was writing broadly about all artwork that appears on the internet, and how some of these that appear in different forms may be not due to tinkering, but actual variations of the same artwork done by the artist, and therefore valid as standing on their own. I apologize if I strayed from the discussion that you intended to have on simply the artwork that has likely been changed due to photography and tinkerers later on. My point is that some artwork that appears tinkered with may indeed be separate variances on the same piece, done by the artist-but perhaps those artworks are already well-known to you. I'm no art expert after all. Thanks for hearing my views.

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    1. Please don't apologize! Your addition to the discussion was most welcome and informative. It is a fact that painters have made more than one version of their works on occasion, and you shared personal knowledge of that fact born out by a museum visit. Good stuff.

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