Two of my current favourite pictures: the top one a photograph by Thomas Hoepker, taken in Brooklyn on 11 September 2001, the other is Seurat’s La Grande Jatte on a Sunday afternoon, painted in 1884.
They are 117 years apart, but it just struck me how similar they are in both composition and subject: urban middle class groups enjoying the sunshine, albeit a little passively in the Brooklyn picture.
A Bad Guide 
I would have said that the Brooklyn people are more relaxed. What do you mean by “passively” ? Not standing bolt upright and stiff as their whalebone fannies, as in the Seurat ? The only things moving there are the three animals – the little dog rushing at the big one, and the monkey tensed to spring out of the way when the fur flies.
Is it certain that the top one isn’t photo-shopped?
Yes, it’s certain. Here are responses from two of the people in the photo to accusations that they look like they didn’t care about the WTC collapse.
Stu, they aren’t doing anything about the explosion. That’s what makes the photo unsettling. Seurat’s got all sorts of activities going on, though no big explosion, of course.
Most of the Jatte people are are looking impassively in one direction, towards the water. You can’t imagine that they are watching someone not waving, but drowning ?
Could be. I always think the woman on the left must have wheels instead of legs. Right, I mean. Woman on the right.
Or else she is a sort of half-centaur, with the hind end of a quadruped under there.
In fact, she could play both the front and back ends of the pantomime horse.
La Grande Jatte is one of the many small islands in the Seine as it leaves Paris and meanders West towards the sea. In the 19th century these islands were very popular places to reach by boat on a Sunday sfternoon. Renoir also did several paintings showing people in cafés and dancehalls near the river. The people here are relaxing (even if rather stiffly) and watching the boating activity on the river. The meandering Seine is very slow and calm, an ideal place for rowing a small boat. It is very unlikely that anyone is bathing, let alone drowning.
I am merely pointing out that it is all too easy to interpret what you see in a painting or photograph as “people behaving improperly”. One role of the imagination is to provide speculation to fill the gaps in your knowledge. Another is to find fault.
Yet another use for the imagination is to paint and photograph in such a way as to stir up speculation, fault-finding and controversy. That is apparently what the photographer in this case was trying to do.
I ought to have mentioned that if you click on the Seurat you can see a lot of interesting detail: the man walking along blowing a what? French horn? for example. You can’t do that with the Hoepker photo; though you can get it up in Google’s “large images” category, the size magically diminishes when you reproduce it. Presumably that’s because an “original” print costs $38, 000, I think it is. Hoepker is a well-known and well-regarded Magnum photographer who is, presumably, not averse to his work stirring up the speculation, fault-finding and controversy that Stu mentions.
A bit like Schubert, who also died at the age of 31, the very great Georges Seurat, inventor of Pointillism, had one of those 19C. what-if-they’d-lived careers. He made several smaller paintings of La Grande Jatte as well as other pictures of similar scenes by the Seine. His circus paintings are marvelously atmospheric and they provide an introduction to some subsequent 20th C. themes (Futurism & artificial lighting and Photorealism, for example), as well as being great works in their own right.
On Arte last year there were several long documentaries on painters in the 19C – not something I would usually watch. What grabbed me were the sections on (to me unknown) women, sometimes mistresses then wives of certain painters, who themselves created fabulous paintings. I can’t remember any names, unfortunately. They are known to art historians of the period, but not to the general intelligent public (me), I think.
Another startling bit of news was that it was the women who could be seen to have “invented” or introduced certain techniques in their paintings – in many cases portraits of women including self-portraits. I think Pointillism may have been one of those techniques, but don’t bet on my memory being right.
Although, as is well-known, I have often been a dismissive misogynic bastard when it comes to Femininity As Such, I have to admit that over the years I have encountered more than enough instances in which dead white males, before and after dying, have tried to keep unusual women locked up in the cupboards of history. The article on Pointillism does not mention a single woman, although I know from the Arte documentaries that there were some who played substantial roles.
The feminist tracts I have read over the years have influenced me only in a superficial, emotional way. Acquiring concrete knowledge has convinced me more than bra-brandishing ever did. I guess that’s a typically male experience…
In this week’s TLS there is a fascinating article on Victoria Welby (who she !?) and her “significs”. She helped Pierce get his ideas worked out and influenced Richards and Ogden (The Meaning of Meaning). From passages by her quoted in the article, you can see that she would not have liked their “Basic English” initiative. Orwell agreed with her – his Newspeak was a satire on that Basic English business, something I did not know.
That’s all very interesting, Stu. Thanks. I suppose I ought to get the TLS & NY Review. I don’t think we can get Arte even though we are very arty.
Crown, would you please correct “you can see that see” to “you can see that she” ? This is only my first correction request this year, I know that your fee kicks in at some point.
Let me just put in a plug for Alan Bennett’s “Smut: Two Unseemly Stories” that I bought yesterday and am now reading – when not laughing myself silly over it. What a cunningly entertaining writer Bennett is.
Yes, I’ve read it. I think I’ve read everything by Alan Bennett, including his plays. My favorite thing in the London Review of Books is Alan Bennett’s excepts from his diary of the past year that comes out every January.
Seurat’s got all sorts of activities going on, though no big explosion, of course.
Do we know that? Maybe there was a mad bomber carrying on his activities in Neuilly at that very moment. I’ll bet there was, and both the painter and his subjects were ignoring it. Bastards.
My favorite thing in the London Review of Books is Alan Bennett’s excepts from his diary of the past year that comes out every January.
Yes, they’re wonderful; I just read the latest the other day. (I tend to fall behind.)
I am riveted by that photo. How much walking around do you have to do to come across a scene so well posed?
As for the second, why has the girl got her parasol up in the shade? Is it meant to signify something?
Dearie, I think photographers spend all their waking hours looking for scenes like that. And then when something shows up they have to remember not to panic and let their hands shake. It’s a hard life: very little money and lots of stress, probably, like most fun jobs. As for the parasol, weren’t they terrified of getting a touch of sun on their white skin and ending up being mistaken for farmers?
Language, I like to think of you reading Alan Bennett in the LRB.
Parasols in the shade: I think the couple standing have just been walking in and out of sun and shade and are just pausing, so it is not worth folding up the parasol if they are going to continue into the sun. The girl sitting with her parasol open seems to be at the limit of sun and shade, so perhaps she has just opened it or is about to close it, as the sun “turns”.
Somebody with really good eyes (or a better computer? Or a different reproduction?) – at the centre top, is there a chap diving off a small boat, or standing on his hands in the bows? Or is it something completely different? A bizarre wind-sock? A strangely placed furled sail? Help!
marie-lucie: The girl sitting with her parasol open seems to be at the limit of sun and shade, so perhaps she has just opened it [the parasol] or is about to close it, as the sun “turns”
Every parasol becomes a tournesol.when handled properly.
catannea, I think you mean just right of centre, close to the top. Using two pairs of reading glasses on an enlarged picture (by clicking), what I see is a French flag standing in the bow of this small boat, which carries sitting passengers. The flag is rather large for the size of the boat, and you can recognize the blue half-furled along the flagpole, next the white and then the red, most visible as it is at the free end. This means there is a little wind, enough to move the end of the flag, but not enough to extend it..
Oh, thank-you. Yes. That makes more sense. It certainly IS a “little large” for the size of the boat, if it looks as big as a passenger to me! Very patriotic. Perhaps the day in question is not far off the quinze juillet…
catorze. Brain fog.