The Museum Barberini in Potsdam is showing an exhibition entitled “Photography and Impressionism” until the beginning of May.
The close relationship between these two is evident from the fact that the first major exhibition of Impressionist painting took place in 1874 in the photographer Nadar's former Parisian studio on the Boulevard des Capucines.
This circumstance, which is also mentioned several times in the exhibition catalogue, bears witness to an artistic elective affinity that had great consequences for modernism.
The photograph was the older of the two.
Almost fifty years had passed since Niépce first fixed a view from the roof window of his estate in Burgundy, in which the new medium had made a brilliant career despite all hostilities.
She not only became the patron saint, but also the teacher of impressionist painting.
While the official salon art stuck to effectively depicting “histories” that one knows from reading books, impressionism – nomen est omen – relied solely on impressions from the real world.
Such a connection to factual, physical reality is also a characteristic of photography.
It is called "light writing" because the rays of light falling on the sensitive plate inside the "camera"
produce a distribution of gray or brown tones in which you can see a projection of the real things that were in front of the lens when the picture was taken.
Similarly, an impressionistic painting is said to result solely from the visual impressions left by the light on the painter's retina.
Both methods of image production are based on the desire to produce the image in direct dependence on what is depicted.
Their differences are then explained by the way in which the optical impressions are processed.
In photography this happens through chemical reactions, in painting a hand controlled by the brain has to make markings on the picture surface.
This is well known and easy to see.
But there is another difference that is not often considered.
While the camera only ever opens for the limited duration of a specific exposure time, the eye is constantly receptive to new impressions.
As a result, in the process of painting, meaningful patterns have to be filtered out of the overabundance of visual sensory data that a camera doesn't even notice.
What this means becomes clearer when one compares Monet's grainstack (on the second floor, in the snow room) with Alphonse Taubin's photograph of a haystack, on display one floor below.
When taking the picture, you will get as close as possible to see all the myriad details.
A painter usually does not reproduce such details, either because he cannot perceive them at all or because it would be too much effort to paint every single blade of grass.
Therefore, when approaching Monet's painting, one does not discover any details of the depicted object.
On the contrary, one only sees brushstrokes, in which it becomes increasingly difficult to see what they actually represent.
This is because Monet, from the raw material of the sense impressions,
which poured into him over a long period of time while painting the rick, had to pick out significant patterns.
At the end, a few vertical brushstrokes are enough to make it clear that one is looking at a pile of dry straw, and a single orange line is enough to indicate the position of the sun and condense its rays into a shimmering outline.