Role and Relevance of Reproduction in Art

The question of art and reproduction is, for many today, no longer an important one. A key reason for this is that reproduction is a fact of life. All of us have a deeper and more varied relationship to art in reproduction as opposed to art in the flesh, so to speak. The ratio of our experience between virtual and actual is hard to estimate, but few can deny that it is staggeringly high.

The global coronavirus pandemic raised the question yet again, albeit on different terms from twenty, let alone a hundred years ago. Depending on where you lived, online exhibitions were no longer the exception but the norm. Dissipated was the long-held prejudice that the work of art's physical experience was inferior to its reproduction. According to this view, reproductions are a debased second-best.

But that view was no longer tenable. It was forced to recede. We were made to think again about the virtual experience: what it has been for us until it became the norm and what this new norm was, and what all of this would hold for the future.

A Short History of Reproduction

While we associate reproduction with photographs, there is a tradition that stems back to printing and engraving. The principle has always been the same: to make images affordable and easy to distribute. In today’s parlance, reproduction was guided by the urge to democratise images and image-making.

Woodblock printing began in China in the ninth century, after which it spread to the Islamic world. From the thirteenth century in Europe, it was used almost exclusively for textile patterns. Due to the scarcity of paper, pictures came significantly later, at the end of the fourteenth century.

The first paper mills were established in Italy's late 1200s and a century later in Germany, where printing flourished. Gutenberg invented movable type in 1447 (actually as with so many things technological including reading glasses, much earlier in China, between 1041 and 1048, by Bi Sheng) which, as we know, changed the flow of information and culminated, among other things, in the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther in 1517.

Outside of the printed word, the pictures produced by woodblocks were playing cards and crude religious images. The first most significant suite of woodblock works appeared in Nuremberg in 1493. The Weltkronik (Story of the World) was published by Albrecht Dürer’s uncle Anton Koberger with the text by Hartman Schedel illustrated by Michel Wolgemut.

It was the intricacy and sophistication of the works of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) that ushered in printmaking as a significant art form. It is also noteworthy that when Dürer published his celebrated designs of the Apocalypse (1499), the Great Passion (1511), and Life of the Virgin (1511), he accompanied them with a facing text.

And in a sense, this illustrative dimension has never left printmaking. Another lasting aspect is that it has never entirely escaped its relation to the artisanal, something that certain artists themselves passionately enjoy—immersing themselves in technical processes—and which collectors deeply appreciate. For printmaking is often a group, even collaborative activity.

Dürer was a notoriously testing taskmaster of his woodcarvers. Since printmaking has so many different specialist techniques—including woodblock, linocuts, intaglio, screenprinting (serigraphy), monotype, and lithography—is the last surviving artistic practice that accords the guild-like appellation of 'master printer'.

Today artists not versed in printmaking enlist experts to make reproducible, or print-like versions of works in media in which they are known to excel.

Like the dissemination of the book, the dissemination of prints meant that more people could have works of art for less money. With increased literacy in the printed word, the exchange of images increased visual literacy and widened opinion and debate. The critical awareness announced the beginnings of the shift away from religious unilateralism to secular pluralism.

By the sixteenth century, which saw the consolidation of the etching, or intaglio processes, printmaking was adopted a serious arm of the artist's practice, as we see with Rembrandt (1606-69) and in the eighteenth century by Blake in the nineteenth by Whistler, Bresdin (1822-85) and Redon (1840-1916). Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) innovated lithography, introducing both Japanese designs and painterly techniques.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was the master of the monotype, which, as the name suggests, rendered but one print (you could do successive ones, but they were fainter and of inferior quality). This was achieved through oil pastel or paint on glass that was then transferred to a piece of paper that was carefully pressed upon it. His prints are small and often disarmingly intimate.

Printmaking in the eighteenth century served the dual purpose of was responsible for disseminating pornography and popularising paintings shown in the salon. As is the case with photographic reproductions today, the first experience of a work of art could begin with the copy. Curiously, the sympathy with which the original work lent itself to reproduction was a factor in its popularity.

Once photography took over, artists continued to make prints, either as a way of creating works more affordable (the Op artist Victor Vasarely (1906-97) made an express point of doing this, producing smaller prints of larger paintings) or by using photographic technology within printmaking (photolithography), and in the famous case of Warhol, when he worked on canvas, opting for slight deregistrations and inconsistencies in the screen-printing process to meld the tactile uniqueness of painting with the sturdy precision of the mass-reproducible print.

Photography and the Threat to Painting

Like the near-simultaneous invention of calculus by Leibniz and Newton in the 1670s, photography too enjoyed something of a parallel birth. The first known photograph arrived in 1826, a heliograph of over eight hours exposure of the view from the window of Joseph Niépce.

A little later, in 1833, the English scientist William Fox Talbot (1800-77) began experimenting with photography while using a later variant of the camera obscura, the camera lucida. The next year, using silver nitrates on paper, he began working on a process he named 'photogenic drawing’.

Meanwhile, Niépce had teamed up with Louis Daguerre (1787-1851), who had also become interested in fixing the images seized by the camera lucida. Six years after Niépce’s death in 1833 and, to understandable excitement, Daguerre published the finding of the daguerreotype, a significant improvement on Niépce’s find.

The Gazette de France stated that the invention 'upsets all scientific theories on light and optics, and it will revolutionize the art of drawing'. Spurred by Daguerre's announcement, Talbot made his hitherto secret findings public and, in 1840 to the Royal Academy, announced his 'calotype', which literally means 'beautiful picture'.

In the same year, Voigtländer constructed the Petval lens, which reduced the time for exposure by ninety percent. Glass negatives persisted until 1884 with the introduction of flexible film; in 1888 came the Kodak camera, making photography comparatively cheap and easy.

By the 1850s, photographs and photographers were everywhere. It had effectively put two whole demographics, the painters of portrait miniatures and all but the most exceptional engravers, out of business.

Understandably, photography caused widespread consternation amongst painters who excelled in skill over ingenuity. It prompted Paul Delaroche, an academic painter of popular historical scenes, to make the memorable exclamation, ‘From today, painting is dead’.

In one way, it was, but the watershed of photography proved painting to be the most adaptable of all media. It has died several deaths (its death was proclaimed most recently in the 1980s), but it has a feline resilience.

As the eminent art historian Meyer Shapiro notes, photography caused painting to emphasize its material, textural, abstract elements with which mechanically reproducible media were at a loss to compete.

The fundamental role that photography plays in our everyday lives causes one to forget that photography was first discussed in light of painting and drawing.

Daguerre's first pictures were still-lives, and in 1844, Talbot published his treatise on his discovery, entitled The Pencil of Nature, which defined the medium almost exclusively in terms of painting.

Numerous painters of repute responded positively to the invention: at advanced stages in their career, both Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Jean-Auguste Ingres (1780-1867) made use of photographs, as did the Impressionists—whose first exhibition in 1874 was housed in the studio of the renowned photographer Félix Nadar—whose snap-shot portraits, sweeping panoramas and abrupt cut framing are all indebted in some way to photography.

Such auspicious associations between artists and photography and photographers did not stop a chorus of antagonism to it, among them the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who frothed at the mouth when confronted with photography’s encroachment upon art, opining that it was uninventive, unsurprising, unimaginative and that it gave the talentless painters a new wind.

Critical Confrontation: Walter Benjamin and the ‘Aura’ of the Work of Art

But, Baudelaire's most admiring twentieth-century critic, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), wrote the provocative and easily most influential essay on photography and film, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (1934), or ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’. Here Benjamin mourns the demise of the aura surrounding the unique work of art due to photographic reproduction.

Robbing the artwork of aura, Benjamin feared, threatened to have the negative effect of depriving it of what made it special, its genuine presentness, and allowing it to join the dreamworld of commodities, displacing the object from its station within its physical place and its historical moment. He acknowledged, however, that the positive repercussion of this upheaval was to demystify the art object, divest it of its cultish status, and to open it to greater scrutiny.

At the end of the essay, Benjamin welcomes the introduction of film, by then over three decades old, as a form that could deliver messages in a less ambiguous form than art. Benjamin was a liberal Marxist, and his agenda for art was perceptual and spiritual freedom.

Film could portray things in a way that the everyday man could digest and possibly conduct him to a more enlightened state. Benjamin was exceptionally responsive to the new visual language that film introduced. 

The camera opened up a form of perception, the sharpness of which was unprecedented, arresting the flow of perception and breaking it down into its own mechanics. Benjamin speaks about experiencing the 'optical unconscious' at work. Technical reproduction returns to perception what other more dulling effects of technology have removed.

For Benjamin, technological production sped up life, leading people into a perpetual state of distraction. Film provided a salutary antidote: the newly disassembled and reassembled nature of filmic montage allows the viewer to see experience as slowed down and 'according to a new law'.

Unfortunately, as Benjamin was seeing as he wrote the essay, film's ability to alter and freshen mental states were being proven in a negative way by the Nazi propaganda machine's aestheticization of politics, manipulating its audiences to an ulterior purpose. Benjamin foresaw the relation between media and politics that, with television, has become the norm.   

Benjamin’s contemporary, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), was also concerned about manipulating technology to the detriment of the human spirit.

(Both thinkers fell afoul of historical events. Benjamin, believing himself to be in the clutches of the Nazis, killed himself. Heidegger, for a time, joined them, something he regretted and never lived down, tainting some of the most searching philosophy of the last century.)

Back to the Virtual vs. Actual Artwork Experience Debate

By the end of the twentieth century, the view that the physical experience of the work of art was superior was still widespread, upheld by art historians, critics, curators, artists, collectors—that is, most who had some stake in the art world.

Seen on face value, there is something irrefutable about this. As with our relations with people, our experience of a work of art is at its most authentic and compelling when it is physically present. After all, most artists make the work on a physical level—we may even say that digital artists have a tactile relationship to the computer keys and the screen—so it is only fair to assume that the experience of the work follows in the same measure.

There is another, more cynical side to the virtual vs. real debate, which relates to art collections and the value of the work of art. To insist on the physical experience of the actual work of art is also to emphasise art's uniqueness and irreplaceability.

This is why we visit art galleries. It is also in the consciousness of the difference between the physical and the virtual that we may seek out qualities that are imperceptible or diluted in reproductions in the presence of the actual work. This may include looking at the work up close and from a distance, scrutinizing details, and so on.

It may be that the sheer profusion of reproductions has made gallery-goers yet more conscious of the physical experience. On the artist's level, it is often observed that with photography, artists began to concentrate on the physicality of the medium more and more, given that they were less shouldered with the burden of the need to represent the world around them. On a literal level, at least, photography did that better.

The Fate of Art and Reproduction Now

With all of these considerations in mind, we still have to acknowledge that it would be hard to single out any person for whom the experience of art has not predominately been through reproductions. As the old saying goes, you’d have to be living under a rock.

While some may pooh-pooh popular culture, it is undeniable that the average person's artistic visual literacy is immeasurably higher than someone a hundred years ago, let alone in the centuries before.

Just think: for the average Joe in a Medieval village, the extent of exposure to art was through the altarpiece that he would worship on his weekly visit to Mass. That is, if there was an altarpiece and if that was painted by anyone of any competence. Maybe a statue or two. You get the point.

Artists like Picasso and Leonardo are part of most people’s vocabulary. From Mexico to China, artists from the past and present comprise a rich visual texture that inhabits all levels of life, from cheap reproductions to textile designs.

It is irrefutable then: our experience of art in reproductions dramatically outstrips that of art in physical actuality.

Could it be then that there are, in fact, multiple experiences of art, each of which has its respective validity? In recent years, Instagram has shown us that with extraordinary force.

For maybe, as adaptive animals, we have grown so accustomed to reproduction that we have an experience of it that has its own kind of authenticity. For we now inhabit multiple virtual worlds, and these virtual words constitute dimensions of our lived reality.

This is not to say that the physical experience is not to be denigrated. It is just that we may need to acknowledge that there is a plurality of valid experiences. If you accept this, it is a conclusion that may lend some relief.