News

World’s Oldest Operating Photo Studio Closes in India

• by Claire Voon on June 28, 2016

Bourne & Shepherd studio in 2011 (photo by Sudipta Mallick/Flickr)

After more than 150 years of documenting the faces and landscapes of India, a photo studio that many considered the world’s oldest in operation has shuttered. Bourne & Shepherd, named for its founding British photographers, Samuel Bourne and Charles Shepherd, officially closed earlier this month, following its last owners’ loss of a 14-year legal battle over the company’s sole space, a building in Kolkata’s busy Esplanade area. The studio — which, starting in the 1860s, produced cabinet cards and cartes de visite that propelled it to prominence — has since 1910 occupied an old, four-story structure owned by Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). What happens to its remaining archives and equipment, including a massive camera originally used by Bourne, a prolific travel photographer, is now uncertain.

Bourne & Shepherd studio in 2011 (photo by Biswarup Ganguly/Wikipedia) (click to enlarge)

“We only had the building on lease and due to a space issue, and a discrepancy on the rent, [LIC] wanted it back,” co-owner Jayant Gandhi told the India-based Writing Through Light. “We filed a case in 2002 and finally lost the battle to the court order.”
Now in his 70s, Gandhi also cited the difficulty of running the business at his age and the impact of digital technology as reasons for the closure. He and co-owner K.J. Ajmer had expanded operations to include work on commercial shoots and processing services for 16 and 35mm motion-picture film, but reaping strong profits still proved challenging. Gandhi told The Hindu that he now intends to try and preserve the studio’s archives and equipment, although he has not shared any specific plans. A petition asking LIC to convert the space into a museum has emerged on Change.org, but it has so far amassed fewer than a dozen signatures. Listed by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation as a Grade IIB Heritage Property for its “architectural style,” the building itself should at least continue to receive protection and proper maintenance from LIC; according to the corporation’s guidelines, only “horizontal and vertical addition and alteration … compatible with the heritage building” are allowed.
LIC, however, has long neglected the structure. It still sports a massive hole in the roof that dates to 1991, when a large fire broke out. The main studio and library, then on the top floor, contained around 2,000 glass negatives — used to reprint images for sale — that were lost to the blaze: Gandhi told Times of India he had stored some of the archive’s most cherished ones in a large iron safe, but the flames damaged the metal and he was never able to open it again. Since the disaster, business has been on the decline.

Bourne & Shepherd’s studio (photo by Pramanick/Wikipedia)

At its peak, Bourne & Shepherd had numerous outlets not only across India but also in London and Paris. It began in the northern India city of Shimla, where Bourne founded a studio in 1863 with another photographer, William Howard. Initially a bank clerk in Nottingham, Bourne had acquired his first camera just a decade prior, according to photographic historian Hugh Ashley Rayner in his catalogue essay for the exhibition Bourne & Shepherd: Figures in Time (curated by Tasveer gallery, the traveling show just finished its run in India, only days before the studio closed). Bourne first approached photography as a hobby, snapping pictures of the marketplace from his window at work, but after exhibiting some of his images, he decided to move to India to pursue it as a profession.

Bourne & Shepherd’s photographic postcard portrait of Rudyard Kipling (c. 1892) (photo courtesy the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, via Wikipedia) (click to enlarge)

Charles Shepherd, who had his own photo studio with a man named Arthur Robertson in the northern city of Agra, joined Bourne and Howard in Shimla in November 1863, as Rayner explains. Howard left about two years later, leaving the business with the two-partner name it’s kept for the past 150-plus years.
The company’s first studio in Shimla was known as “Talbot House,” named for photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, Rayner writes on his website. By 1865 it also had a branch in then-Calcutta that moved locations a number of times before settling, in 1910, into its Esplanade premises. Bourne & Shepherd’s other studios closed over the years, but the Kolkata one endured, with the business prospering through the 20th century. Besides making portraits of people from Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna to English writer Rudyard Kipling, the photographers also documented important events including the Delhi Durbars of 1877, 1903, and 1911.
“The company became the de-facto official photographers to the British Raj in India; and produced portraits of successive Viceroys and Governors, as well as most high officials and major political events,” Rayner writes. “Everyone who was anyone in British India, had their portrait ‘done’ by Bourne & Shepherd, at some point in their career!”
While Shepherd primarily worked as a printer, took portraits in the studio, and managed the commercial side of the business, Bourne traveled extensively, capturing the architecture, scenery, and people of India. He was an expert in the wet-plate collodion process, which required setting up a fully equipped darkroom tent near the capture site to quickly process the plates — and he apparently succeeded even while “perched on a mountainside in the remote Himalayas, with the thermometer approaching a hundred degrees and a dusty gale blowing,” as Rayner describes.
“Although not the first serious photographer to document the landscape and architecture of India, he was perhaps the first to produce such a large and coherent body of work of such consistently high technical quality and artistic merit,” Rayner continues. “His images recorded an India that was rapidly changing, and that has now largely disappeared.” Many of these images now reside in the collections of museums around the world, from London’s National Portrait Gallery to the Smithsonian Institution.

Left: Bourne & Shepherd, “Jaipur, His Highness, Maharaja Ram Singh, G.C.S.I.” (1877); right: Bourne & Shepherd, “Udaipur, His Highness, Maharana Sajjan Singh” (1877) (photos courtesy MAP / Tasveer)

Samuel Bourne, “Agra, The Taj Mahal from the corner of the quadrangle” (1865) (photo courtesy MAP / Tasveer)

Bourne and Shepherd eventually moved back to Europe in, respectively, 1870 and 1879, with Bourne later developing an interest in watercolor painting. Ownership of the business passed to a number of people: It remained in European-only hands until 1955, when then proprietor Arthur Musselwhite sold it at auction; Ajmer and Gandhi then took control of the Kolkata studio in 1964 — almost exactly one century after Bourne and Shepherd began working together. Over the years, the building has welcomed such regulars as 1913 Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore as well as filmmaker and writer Satyajit Ray, who memorialized the business in stories featuring his fictional character Feluda.
Despite this rich history, LIC is not interested in preserving the old Bourne & Shepherd studio, Gandhi told Times of India. He does not intend to sell any of the old photographs or equipment for fear that people may misuse them, but also doesn’t know where to find the space to hold all the artifacts he’s amassed over time.
“I am sad that it is gone,” he told Writing through Light. “But in the end, there are some things that are out of one’s control.”

Bourne & Shepherd’s c. 1875 photograph of the rifle-toting Prince of Wales, posing with a tiger he killed and members of his hunting party during his tour of India (via Library of Congress)

Bourne & Shepherd, “A Floating Oak Bungalow in Difficulties” (c. 1903) (via the Emma A. Koch photograph collection of India, South Asia, and Australia, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)

Bourne & Shepherd’s photo of four Bengal men carrying a man in a palki or palanquin (c. 1862–85) (via Emma A. Koch photograph collection of India, South Asia, and Australia, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)

Samuel Bourne, “Varanasi (formerly Benares), Vishnu temples on the Ganges” (1866) (photo courtesy MAP / Tasveer)

Bourne & Shepherd, “Delhi, His Eminence, The Viceroy’s Elephant, Delhi Durbar” (1877) (photo courtesy MAP / Tasveer)

Bourne & Shepherd, “Darjeeling, The loop on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway” (c. 1880) (photo courtesy MAP / Tasveer)

Samuel Bourne, “Agra, The interiors of the Moti Masjid” (c. 1860) (photo courtesy MAP / Tasveer)

Samuel Bourne, “Delhi, Safdarjung’s Mausoleum” (1865) (photo courtesy MAP / Tasveer)

Samuel Bourne, “Delhi, The Great Arch and the Iron Pillar at the Qutub Minar” (c.1860) (photo courtesy MAP / Tasveer)

Bourne & ShepherdCharles ShepherdFeatureKolkataSamuel Bourne

Video

Picasso and Matisse Trade Blows in a Cubism vs. Fauvism Bar Brawl

• by Carey Dunne on June 30, 2016

Gobelins L’École de L’Image, clip from “Au Lapin Agile” (2016) (All GIFs by the author)

Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were the 20th century’s greatest artistic frenemies. When Gertrude Stein introduced them in 1906, Matisse said he and Picasso were “as different as the north pole is from the south pole.”
An intense, competitive partnership followed, a kind of aesthetic war between Cubism and Fauvism. Picasso parodied and, some say, ripped off Matisse; Matisse condescended to the younger painter. But they also met regularly, traded paintings, and considered each other invaluable critics. As Picasso told Pierre Daix, one of his biographers: “You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.”
Their rivalry was never consummated with a fistfight — unlike many artistic rivalries. If it had been, though, it might have looked a little like Au Lapin Agile, a new animated short by the renowned animation department of Paris’s Gobelins L’École de L’Image (or Gobelins School of the Image). Debuted at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, it depicts Picasso and Matisse in an epic bar brawl rendered in vibrant Cubist- and Fauvist-inspired forms and hues. 

The fight goes down at the Lapin Agile, the Montmartre cabaret that was beloved of many generations of the Parisian avant-garde and that Picasso famously painted in 1905. In the painting, Picasso plays the part of a harlequin seated at the bar, next to his lover, Germaine Pinchot. In 1907, Picasso would paint his then-controversial masterpiece “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” for which Pinchot modeled. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” largely overshadowed Matisse’s “Le bonheur de vivre” (or “The Joy of Life”), painted a year earlier, and which some critics say had a direct influence on Picasso’s painting.
The pressure to take sides in the Picasso-versus-Matisse rivalry persists today, in exhibitions like Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry at the Kimbell Art Museum in 1999. Those who were close to the painters had differing opinions about which one ultimately came out on top. “In their meetings, the active side was Pablo; the passive, Matisse,” said Françoise Gilot, one of Picasso’s partners. “Pablo always sought to charm Matisse, like a dancer, but in the end it was Matisse who conquered Pablo.” Watch the short film to see who prevails in the cartoon rendition of their rivalry.

Gobelins L’École de L’Image, clip from “Au Lapin Agile” (2016)

Gobelins L’École de L’Image, clip from “Au Lapin Agile” (2016)

h/t The Verge 

AnimationfightsHenri MatissePablo Picassoshort films

Museums

In the Jungle of Henri Rousseau’s Imagination

• by Joseph Nechvatal on June 30, 2016

Henri Rousseau, “The Snake Charmer” (1907), oil on canvas (Paris, musée d’Orsay © RMN-Grand Palais [musée d’Orsay] / Hervé Lewandowski) (click to enlarge)

PARIS — Henri Rousseau is art history’s best-known naïf painter. The Cubists, Dadaists, and Surrealists were among the first to appreciate his zoomed-in, hyperreal aesthetic strengths. It all started when, in 1900, Pablo Picasso stumbled upon an unknown naïve painting by Rousseau; lacking conventional trompe l’œil representational skill, it was being sold as a toss-away canvas to be painted over. Picasso bought it for peanuts, loved its anti-classical aspect, and sought out the unsuccessful artist who had painted it. (Organizers of the official Salon exhibitions had regularly rejected Rousseau’s submissions.) In 1908, after purchasing Rousseau’s simple but massive “Portrait of a Woman” (1895), Picasso — who eventually bought two more Rousseaus — held a half-serious, half-burlesque banquet at his Le Bateau-Lavoir studio in Rousseau’s honor. He was dubbed Le Douanier (or customs officer, though his day job was technically as a toll collector) and enshrined as a father of Picasso and Georges Braque’s Cubist art. It was there that Rousseau famously and ridiculously remarked to Picasso: “We are the two greatest painters. You in the Egyptian manner; and I in the modern.”

Henri Rousseau, “The Hungry Lion Attacking an Antelope” (1898/1905), oil on canvas (photo by Robert Bayer, Basel) (click to enlarge)

Attendees at the fête included Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, art critic André Salmon, art dealer and historian Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler and the collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Many of them were also fascinated by so-called “primitive” art, discovering in it a powerful form of emotional expression that felt modern. For them, Rousseau became a sort of home-grown primitive whose paintings captured something of the abstract verve they admired in African art. For example, Wassily Kandinsky, who in 1912 included African artifacts in the Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, acquired two of Rousseau’s paintings, commenting that Le Douanier opened the way to the possibilities of simplicity in art. These zippy avant-gardists praised Rousseau’s style of innocence based, they presumed, on his inner conviction of the rightness of his private vision.
In The Douanier Rousseau: Archaic Candour at the Musée d’Orsay, curators Beatrice Avanzi and Claire Bernardi pick up on this relationship with modernism and go deeper into art history, comparing and contrasting Rousseau’s paintings with earlier academic ones, like Adolphe William Bouguereau’s “Equality before Death” (1848). Of the show’s 78 paintings, 45 are by Rousseau. His more mysterious works, like “The Snake Charmer” (1907), stand up well to the comparison. For me, they produced an obscure empathy that evoked the profound mysteries of natural Transcendentalism. In a sense, this show became a tale of two Rousseaus: Henri and Jean-Jacques.

Adolphe William Bouguereau, “Equality before Death” (1848), oil on canvas (Paris, musée d’Orsay, dation, RF 2010 7 © Musée d’Orsay, dist RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt) (click to enlarge)

The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau doubted the validity of previously socially constructed form, and, like Henri Rousseau did more than a century later, looked for answers within. Discovering and remaining true to one’s own nature was the primary aspiration for both Rousseaus. That said, Henri’s true nature is a bit of a caprice. Though he very often painted the foliage of the jungle, he never visited one. Rather, he went to the botanical garden in Paris and studied the plants and zoo animals there. And instead of painting the plants to scale, he would make them bigger than in reality, so that they came to resemble a drug-fueled fantasy world.
Rousseau had a very real and hard personal life. He had nine children with his first wife, Clemence, but she died young, as did his second wife after they had been married for only four years. Rousseau wanted to be known as a great artist, but was unappreciated for most of his life and died a rather lonely man in 1910, at the age of 66, from a leg infection. Reportedly, only seven people attended his funeral at the Cimetière Parisien de Bagneux (one of them was Paul Signac). But a year later, a tombstone was set up by Apollinaire, the painter Robert Delaunay, and a Monsieur Queval (Rousseau’s landlord). Also shortly after Rousseau’s passing, New York City saw the first one-man exhibition of the artist’s work ever held, arranged at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291 by Rousseau’s friend, the US artist Max Weber. In 1913, Constantin Brâncuși and the painter Manuel Ortiz de Zárate engraved on Rousseau’s tombstone this epitaph, which Apollinaire had penned:

Hear us, kindly Rousseau.
We greet you,
Delaunay, his wife, Mondieur Queval and I.
Let our baggage through the Customs to the sky,
We bring you canvas, brush and paint of ours,
During eternal leisure, radiant
As you once drew my portrait
You shall paint
The face of stars

At the Musée d’Orsay, Rousseau’s masterpieces from the museum’s collection, the Musée de l’Orangerie, and elsewhere are displayed alongside paintings by Georges Seurat, Carlo Carrà, Diego Rivera, Max Ernst, Delaunay, Kandinsky, Picasso, and other lesser-known artists, such as the Nabis painter Félix Vallotton. Paul Gauguin’s “Schuffenecker’s Studio” (1889) is a particularly beautiful companion to Rousseau’s paintings for its flattened picture plane. Being together in the depths of an imaginary jungle is a central motif of the show, especially in the encounter between contemporary works and Le Douanier’s paintings. That is where a collective elaboration of meaning is to be found, in the symbolic and material versions of naiveté.

Henri Rousseau, “Child with Doll” (1904–05), oil on canvas (Paris, musée de l’Orangerie © RMN-Grand Palais [musée d’Orsay] / Franck Raux) (click to enlarge)

Over and above their naïve nature as semantic value, some of Rousseau’s paintings — like “Child with Doll” (1904–05) — display a strange form of folk art amateurishness. Granted, these terms have deep pitfalls. On closer look, “Child with Doll” gets weirder and weirder. It is not just the crippled-like legs of the child with a five o’clock shadow, but the way s/he is holding the doll by its crotch. Zoom in on the face of the apparently male doll in a dress, and the heavily blushing, worried look appears ominous. This painting might just as well remind you of a Henry Darger as a Gauguin. Regardless, Rousseau was the first naïve painter to receive serious critical recognition, and he remains regarded as a great master. At first, his fresh and direct vision appealed mainly to artists, but a number of major group exhibitions in the 1920s and ‘30s helped to develop the public taste for his work — most notably Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. That show included perhaps the best know of his paintings, the Symbolist composition “War” (or “The Ride of Discord,” circa 1894). The painting depicts a woman-at-arms sitting sidesaddle on a pin-headed horse (or perhaps running next to it). Horse and rider are both floating — suspended in time and gravity — over a pile of corpses being picked over by a flock of black birds. As with “Child with Doll,” “War” rewards slow looking with uncanny creepiness. There are bent and twisted arms and legs to be relished, along with the beautiful, dark, twisted fantasies found in the left eye of a doomed man staring out at us. That despondent eye is matched with another left eye, closed and enclosed in a triangle at the figure’s crotch, with a small but lethal bullet hole above it. The pink sunset colors of the clouds and warm yellow backdrop give this flat painting an attractive, if ghastly, splendor. It is surprisingly placed next to Paolo Uccello’s Goth “Saint George and Dragon” (c. 1470), for no apparent reason that I could grasp, other than they looked cool together.

Henri Rousseau, “War” (or “The Ride of Discord”) (ca 1894), oil on canvas (Paris, musée d’Orsay © Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt) (click to enlarge)

At the end of 19th century, Europe had developed a fascination for the exotic due to the expansion of and spoils from colonialism, but with Rousseau’s “The Hungry Lion Attacking an Antelope” (1898/1905) we are far from the trouble-free jungle that Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered the natural state of happiness. Even people like Le Douanier, who never left France, couldn’t buy into that delusion for long. Rousseau transmuted to canvas all sorts of hairy, gruesome activities in his fake jungle, which eventually spanned 25 paintings, including “Tiger in a Tropical Storm” (1891) and the unlikely masterpiece “The Dream” (1910). This and other late works received short shrift from critics at the time, no doubt partly because Rousseau was seen as a toll collector who dreamed of being a painter.
This exhibition fulfills Rousseau’s dream handsomely by placing him within a wide art historical context that connects his paintings to as far back as the 15th century, as demonstrated by the inclusion of the wonderful tempera painting “Portrait of an Unknown Man with a Red Beret” (1493) by Vittore Carpaccio from the Museo Correr in Venice. This work would, in turn, influence several generations of artists, including Fernand Léger, who took inspiration for his “The Mechanic” (1920, also included in the exhibition) from Le Douanier’s “Portrait de Pierre Loti” (1891), which was based on the Carpaccio. Here, Le Douanier’s paintings merge into an archaic stylistic jungle that can be described as anti-classical, standing in contrast to the “official” painting style — of his time, or any time. The show closes, fittingly, with a series of his invented jungle scenes inspired by the flora of Parisian public gardens, places where dawdlers go to daydream and escape banal daily realities. Rousseau’s awkward pipe dream paintings remind us that art is one manifestation of the broader human capacity to consciously reshape our image through deliberate whimsy — if only in order to explore our own capacity to do so.

Henri Rousseau, “The Dream” (1910), oil on canvas (© 2016 the Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence) (click to enlarge)

The Douanier Rousseau: Archaic Candour continues at the Musée d’Orsay (1 Rue de la Légion d’Honneur, 7th arrondissement, Paris) through July 17.

Henri RousseauJean-Jacques RousseauMusée d'OrsayPablo PicassoParis