文艺；书评；艺术家和摄影师；瞬间与永恒；

　　A long overdue study of the influence early photography had on painting;

　　早期摄影对绘画的影响，一项迟来的研究；

　　“I have all my subjects to hand”, Pierre Bonnard, a French post-impressionist painter, once wrote. “I go to see them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream.” At the turn of the 19th century, the “notes” Bonnard made included snapshots that he took with his flexible hand-held Kodak camera, which had first been introduced in 1888.

　　“我手头上有全部素材”，法国后印象主义画家皮埃尔·波纳尔曾经写道。“我去采风。做记录。然后回到家。开始作画前我会在脑中回想，让思绪放飞。”在19世纪之交，柯达推出第一台相机（1888年），这里波纳尔所说的“记录”就包括用轻巧便携的柯达相机拍的快照。

　　Unhampered by hefty equipment (the Kodak was held at waist level and had an arrow marked on top to help point the lens) or long exposures, Bonnard and his fellow painters from the Nabi group, Edouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton, were among the first artists to use the camera to observe fine details, perspectives and light effects too fleeting to see with the naked eye. A painstakingly curated new show juxtaposes 220 mostly unpublished vintage snapshots by seven fin-de-siècle artists along with their paintings, prints and drawings in an effort to demonstrate how this new way of seeing inspired and expanded the painters' creative vision.

　　不受笨重机器的束缚（这款柯达相机可以挎在腰部，相机顶端的箭头帮助对准镜头），不用拍长曝光的照片，波纳尔和其他两位纳比派画家——爱德华·维亚尔和菲利克斯·瓦洛通，首开先河利用照相机观察景物的细枝末节、透视图像和光影效果，这些转瞬即逝的景象很难用肉眼观察。最近一个新的作品展展出了由7位“世纪末”艺术家拍摄的220幅老式照片（大部分未曾公开），同时展出的还有他们的油画、印刷品和素描作品。此次展览的举办颇费周折，目的在于向人们展示这种全新的观察方法如何激发和拓宽了画家的创作视角。

　　Henri Rivière, a French printmaker and designer, climbed the soaring Eiffel Tower before it was completed in 1889 to photograph the exhilarating lines and angles of its iron girders set against the Paris sky for a series of 36 lithographs. Vuillard and a gifted, yet little-known, Belgian painter named Henri Evenepoel used the camera as a sketch book and aide-mémoire to capture everyday moments with family and friends. Bonnard in turn photographed his slender, round-faced mistress and muse, Marthe de Méligny, naked in a glade, as inspiration for his illustrations of “Daphnis and Chloé” by a second-century Greek novelist and romancer, Longus.

　　亨利·里维埃，法国版画家和设计师，为了完成由36个石版画组成的一系列作品，曾爬上还未竣工的高耸的艾菲尔铁塔（铁塔于1889年落成），拍摄下了以巴黎的天空为背景，铁塔的钢筋铁架纵横交错构成的振奋人心的画面。维亚尔和另一位才华横溢但名不见经传的比利时画家亨利·埃费内普尔把照相机当作素描本和备忘录，用以扑捉和家人朋友的日常生活瞬间。而波纳尔拍摄的则是他那身材苗条脸盘很圆的情妇，以及他灵感的源泉玛莎·Méligny在树林中一丝不挂的照片。他在给公元2世纪希腊传奇小说家隆古斯的小说《达佛涅斯和克洛伊》做插图时，灵感就来自这些照片。

　　Neither Vuillard nor Bonnard, with whom he shared a studio, actually copied photographs in their resonant, small-scale paintings of domestic interiors. Instead, both tried to replicate the immediacy of snapshots (or instantanés as they were called in France) often catching their subjects mid-gesture. Using his photographs only as an occasional reference point, or to reflect a mood, Vuillard recomposed his subjects at will. “At Table, Lunch” and “In Front of the Tapestry: Misia and Thadée Natanson” both show abbreviated figures, whether absorbed in eating a meal, or with their backs to the viewer. Vuillard's figures, who are almost swallowed up by the vibrant decor, have an apparitional quality that appealed to the 20th-century French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who described Vuillard and Bonnard as among the artists he most admired.

　　波纳尔和维亚尔共用一个画室，两人的小幅装饰画均有一定反响，但实际上这些画并非选自他们拍摄的照片。他们想要尝试的是重现快照（法语为instantanés）中被瞬间定格的运动中的人物。对于维亚尔来说照片仅是一种临时的参考或某种情感的反应，他会随心所欲地对主题进行重塑。《餐桌边的午餐》和《在挂毯前：米西亚和塔德·纳坦松》呈现的都是缩影式的人物，或是在全神贯注的用餐，或是背对着观众。维亚尔画中的人物几乎会被色彩鲜明的画面所淹没，有种若隐若现的效果。20世纪法国摄影师亨利·卡帝尔·布烈松对这种画风极为欣赏，他把维亚尔和波纳尔视为偶像。

　　A Dutch painter, George Hendrik Breitner, also seizes a moment in time in a bustling Amsterdam street scene that is dominated by a veiled figure holding a fur muff up to her face, looking blurred and fugitive, as in real life. Now acknowledged as a gifted photographer in his own right, Breitner used his camera for “Girl in Red Kimono” (pictured right above with its photographic model, left). This precise yet atmospheric re-creation of his snapshot of a girl curled up on a divan, shows her intricately patterned kimono in sharp contrast with the design of the Persian carpet at her feet.

　　与此同时，荷兰画家乔治·亨德里克·布赖特纳也抓住时机记录下来阿姆斯特丹川流不息的街景，画面突显了一位头戴面纱的女子，身上包裹着毛皮披肩，只露出脸，神情隐约难辨，整幅画作看起来非常逼真。布赖特纳凭借自己的努力被公认为天才摄影师，他利用相机绘制出《穿红色和服的女子》（右上图为画作，左图为模特照片）。照片中的女孩蜷曲在沙发上，身上的和服花纹精致复杂，与脚下的波斯地毯的图案对比鲜明，布赖特纳根据这张照片进行的再创作描绘精确，完美的再现了原照的氛围。

　　Unlike their official work, none of this exhibition's seven artists ever intended their photographs to go on public display. Photography, for them, was a mechanical process rather than an art form. Some of the images come from the attics and albums of the artists' families; Rivière's photographs, now at the Musée d'Orsay, were catalogued only in 1988. Vallotton, who left just 20 images, compared with 2,000 left by Vuillard, may even have destroyed the evidence following accusations that he copied a central figure from a photograph published in a French magazine in 1908. Snapshot studies for two of his paintings, “Beach at Etretat” and a portrait of his wife entitled “Red Room, Etretat”, show how he worked from photographs, eliminating extraneous details and grey shadows. He used this pared-down style to create powerful groups of figures or psychological portraits.

　　此次展览涉及的7位艺术家从未打算把这些照片作为正式作品公布于众。对于他们来说摄影只是一个机械加工过程，并非艺术。许多图片是他们的家人从阁楼上或是影集里找到的。里维尔拍摄的照片现在展览于奥赛博物馆，但也只是在1988年才被收入博物馆。而瓦洛东仅留下20幅图片，相比维亚尔的2000幅照片，他的数量就少多了。他曾被指责抄袭了1908年出版的一本法国杂志里的照片——照片中的一个主要人物，但如今从这些少量留存的照片中已找不到任何证据。瓦洛东有两幅画作，《埃特尔塔的沙滩》以及他为妻子画的题为《红色房间，埃特尔塔》的肖像画，对照相片进行研究，可以发现他如何利用照片学习去除冗余的细节和不必要的阴影。采用这种简洁的风格瓦洛东创作出很多场面宏大的画作以及心理肖像描写。

　　Vallotton and Vuillard liked to exchange photographs. Evenepoel, a pupil of Gustave Moreau who took almost 900 photographs, including a series of searching self-portraits, in the two years before he died of typhoid aged 27, described his camera as a “real gem”. A photograph of his hesitant family about to cross the Place de la Concorde recalls Edgar Degas's famous portrait of Vicomte Lepic and his daughters, while images of his cousin Louise de Mey and their son Charles embody the emotion he invested in his portraits.

　　瓦洛东和维亚尔喜欢交换照片。另一位艺术家埃费内普尔，师从古斯塔夫·莫罗，在短短2年间拍摄了近900幅照片，包括一系列探索式的自画像，但他随后不幸死于伤寒，年仅27岁。他曾描述他的相机是“真正的宝物”。埃费内普尔有一张照片记录了他的家人踯躅着准备穿过协和广场，这张照片让人想起埃德加德加著名的肖像画《会计师和女儿们》。另一张画像描绘了他的表姐路易丝·梅伊和儿子查尔斯，画面体现出他作画时的情感投入。

　　“I savour them all [my snapshots] with the slightly sad joy of reflecting that all this good time is past”, Evenepoel wrote to his father in 1897. These images, like most in the exhibition, are startlingly small. But close inspection reveals a finely detailed portrait of how this group of artists lived and worked, and it conveys the real sense of the excitement they felt as they experimented with their seemingly miraculous new gadget.

　　“我细细地品味它们（我的照片），但一想到照片中美好的时光都已逝去，喜悦中不免略带感伤”，1897年埃费内普尔在写给父亲的信中说到。这些图片和其他展出的作品一样画幅都非常小。但经过细细观察，这些艺术家生活和工作的细节便详尽地呈现在眼前，同时艺术家们在用这个看似不可思议的新型小玩意儿做尝试时的喜悦和兴奋也流露无余。

　　“Snapshot: Painters and Photography 1888-1915” is at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, until January 8th 2012. It will be displayed at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, from February 4th until May 6th and at the Indianapolis Museum of Art from June 3rd until September 2nd.

　　“照片：画家与摄影师 1888-1915”在阿姆斯特丹梵高博物馆展出，结束日期2012年1月8日。该展览还将于2月4日至5月6日在华盛顿菲利普斯陈列馆展出，6月3日至9月2日在印第安纳波利斯艺术博物馆展出。