Shitfit

By Crispin sartwell

Rarely has there been a bigger snitstorm in the history of art history than that recently given impetus by the painter David Hockney. Hockney and Charles Falco, a professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona, have argued that many painters - including van Eyck, Caravaggio, Vermeer, and Ingres - traced or at least made use of images generated by optical devices in making their paintings.

The primary suspect is the "camera obscura" a pre-photographic device that projected an image into a box, where it could be traced or from which a drawing or painting could be copied. But there were automatic image-makers that preceded the camera obscura, and of course ones that followed, such as what we call the "camera" (the word simply means "chamber").

It's been obvious from the outraged response of various art historians that they regard Hockney's view as an attack in the painters they love. And it is obvious that they think that using optical devices is a kind of cheating, that if Vermeer used a camera obscura, then he is not as great a painter as we thought.

In fact, though, the point is not new, especially with regard to Vermeer. Many art historians have long suspected that his paintings were traced from camera obscura images. They have a variety of reasons, such as the little "bubbles" of light that appear in many of Vermeer's paintings, which are typical of camera obscura images.

Now I am not a "professor of optical sciences." But allow me to suggest that Vermeer's achievement is just as significant whether he made use of optical images or not.

Through much of the twentieth century, realist painting - painting that tries to show how the world really looks - has been spectacularly out of fashion. The great painters of the century - Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, and so on - were extreme anti-realists. And many philosophers and art historians have argued that there is no such thing as how the world really looks and so that realist painting is impossible.

Picasso's painting is a celebration of the human imagination, of the amazing world inside his colossal Skull. But the painting of Caravaggio and Vermeer is a celebration of the world, an attempt to show the way things are. Vermeer is an unusual 17^th century painter in that very little of his output is religious. But maybe there is a religious vision there, a vision that takes an almost a worshipful stance to the real, in which the world is God or God the world.

We should think of realism as the craft of pantheism, as a way to find the profound truths in the most everyday reality. In that sense realist painting is profound: it might be the most profound sort of painting.

Realism's decline coincides with the introduction of photography. When you can reproduce the look of the world mechanically, it is said, there is no point any longer in painting portraits or landscapes. You could do the same thing cheaply and instantly with a camera.

But in fact, the introduction and development of photography only made realist painting more urgent. For in the case where reality could be reproduced at will, the idea of taking months to paint it was perversely beautiful: it showed as clearly as anything could a devotion to the world that was being painted.

Realist painters from Vermeer or well before to the present day have made use of optical devices. They have the belief that such devices display something true about the world and so can help them craft its celebration.

When you get down to it, we all think photography shows us something real. If we want to know how our children looked ten years ago, we got to a photograph.

So I say unto you art historians: relax. It's cool. Vermeer used every tool at his disposal for generating realist images, as well he should have. That he was not Picasso is, um, a very good thing.

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