Lot 152: ROBERT DEMACHY (1859-1936)

Struggle Gum-bichromate print. Circa 1904. 6 7/8 x 4 5/8in. (17.5 x 11.6cm.) PROVENANCE From the Collection of a Descendant of Robert Demachy; Sotheby's, London, 4 May 1995, lot 126; to the present owner. LITERATURE See Camera Lucerne, December 1974, No. 12, pp. 3-46 for a series of articles on Robert Demachy. This lot is illustrated on p. 24. NOTES Demachy was a key architect of the photographic aesthetic of his time both as a practitioner as well as a theoretician, writing five books and more than 1,000 articles on aesthetic and technical issues. Some have pointed to the two great strands in photographic aesthetics; both have had distinguished exponents. One, the "naturalistic" style, characterised by straight printing begins with Peter Henry Emerson and continues through the F64 group in America, and the post-war realists. The second strand, of which Demachy is one of the founders, eschews straight printing and everyday subject matter. This popularity of this aesthetic has ebbed and flowed with fashion, but has stubbornly resurfaced at pivotal points in the history of photography, notably with the Pictorialists, the Surrealists and several contemporary masters. Demachy's aesthetic espoused the artifice in the purest sense of the word, from his use of soft focus and deliberately blurred imagery to his pioneering experiments in printmaking. He wrote with disdain of "naturalistic" photography and the straight print: "...its false values, its lack of accents, its equal delineation of things important and useless." This, to Demachy, was not art. He wrote: "A straight print may be beautiful, and it may prove...that its author is an artist; but it cannot be a work of art...A work of art must be a transcription, not a copy, of nature...This special quality...[which makes it a work of art] is given in the artist's way of expressing himself...If a man slavishly copies nature, no matter if it is with hand and pencil or through a photographic lens, he may be a supreme artist all the while, but that particular work of his cannot be called a work of art..." Demachy's audacity in printmaking - using brushwork, complicated pigments and papers could be summarised by the phrase "the end justifies the means." Stieglitz, writing about the gum bichromate process, said that in it "the artist has a medium that permits the production of any effect desired. As a result his photographs, often printed in colour, have the quality of chalk drawings, aquatints or intaglios." Demachy received no less than five one-man shows at the Royal Photographic Society and sixteen illustrations in Camera Work. He was a member of the Linked Ring, the Photo-Secession and the Soci‚t‚ Francaise de Photographie. 'Struggle' is a signature work, chosen for the January 1904 issue of Camera Work by Stieglitz. It brings together his depiction of nudes; of a quasi-mythological subject matter and superb mastery of the gum process with brush-applied coating in a distinctive ochre finish. Instead of a studio or outdoor setting, Demachy has eliminated the visual clich‚s and props of his contemporaries and boldly focused on the nude subject's dynamic pose. His use of brushwork to create the illusion of a whirlwind with the nude at its vortex, is perhaps the boldest of his entire oeuvre and bridges photography and painting. 'Struggle' epitomises Demachy's philosophy, not to use the medium to document a segment of reality, but indeed, to make visible an idea. Jonathan Green, Ed., Camera Work, A Critical Anthology, New York: Aperture, 1973. Nathan Lyons, Ed., Photographers on Photography, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1966. Robert Demachy, Photographs and Essays, London: Academy Editions, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974.