Science, art, and technology come together in Bruguière’s abstract photograph.
Cut-paper Abstraction (Film Still from Light Rhythms), c. 1929, Francis Bruguière. Gelatin silver print, 22.4 x 27.8 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum. Speakers: Dr. Jim Ganz, senior curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum and Dr. Steven Zucker, Executive Director, Smarthistory
Have you ever been curious about what it would be like to create art using light? In this film still, Francis Bruguière draws in pure light on cut and folded paper to create a complex image that conveys both space and depth. Originating from Bruguière abstract film produced in England, Light Rhythms demonstrates 1920s avant-garde photographers’ great interest in abstract imagery created through experimental light exposures.
Getty has joined forces with Smarthistory to bring you an in-depth look at select works within our collection, whether you want to learn more at home or make art more accessible in your classroom. This video series illuminates art history concepts through fun, unscripted conversations between art historians, curators, archaeologists, scientists, and artists, committed to a fresh take on the history of visual arts.
“Light Rhythms” is featured in the exhibition “Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography,” part of the larger initiative “PST ART: Art & Science Collide.”
0:00:00.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, in the Department of Photography Study Room, and on this enormous table is a photograph, but it actually is a kind of documentation of a film made in the late 20s in London. It’s a beautiful expression of the interest in abstraction that was so much a part of that moment.
0:00:29.2 Dr. Jim Ganz: The photograph is by Francis Bruguière, who was an American artist, born in San Francisco, [who] worked in New York and then moved to London, where he made a film called “Light Rhythms” that this relates to, and he was quite interested in exploring light abstraction in photography and also in film.
0:00:50.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: Well film and photography is light, it is at its core the fixing of light on form, and this is exactly that in its pure sense.
0:01:02.0 Dr. Jim Ganz: Artists like Bruguière would call a work like this an absolute work, because it’s not mimetic, that is to say it’s not trying to reproduce something in reality or a story, it’s shapes, pieces of paper that have been cut and folded, it’s actually two images superimposed on each other, so it’s quite elaborate.
0:01:23.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: So to understand what we’re seeing, we really need to begin with the artist with a knife or a scissor, constructing these biomorphic forms and then overlaying that with very precise lighting and shadow.
0:01:37.9 Dr. Jim Ganz: Bruguière for a number of years in the 1920s was making still lives out of cut and folded paper; creating these very elaborate three-dimensional constructions purely of white paper, which was a neutral material, and lighting the paper in different ways and photographing the still lives, and was quite known for this particular niche in abstraction in the 1920s; but when he moves to London, he wants to take this further. So he meets a man named Oswald Blakeston, who was a film critic, an art critic, and they hatch a plan for Bruguière to recreate these cut-paper abstractions, but for the purposes of making a film, adding motion and the element of time.
0:02:23.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: Paper is something that we associate with the history of drawing, but here, the artist is drawing not in pencil, but in pure light.
0:02:30.6 Dr. Jim Ganz: So the film “Light Rhythms,” which premiered early in 1930, was hailed as the first abstract or the first absolute film made in England, and what it consists of is a series of segments divided into movements, like a musical score, and each movement consists of six segments. Each segment is a different still life or two still lives superimposed on each other, with lights moving across the surfaces of the paper. And he does this, we think, specifically for reproduction in a magazine called “The Architectural Review,” for an article that comes out two months after the film’s premiere, written by Blakeston.
0:03:28.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: For me, now, in the 21st century, it’s jarring to see these early experimental films because there is no narrative, It’s a rejection of the thing that we so often look to, and I think this was seen very much as oppositional to the commercial film that was being made in Hollywood, for example.
0:03:44.6 Dr. Jim Ganz: It’s turning its back on the conventions that were already established by 1930; the commercial films released, say, in 1930, have all of the formal devices and structures that we see in films made today, but a work like this doesn’t partake in any of those conventions, a work like this is, again, abstract or absolute.
0:04:04.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: My mind looks at this in a sort of analytic way. I try to understand exactly what it is that I’m seeing. And clearly, I see those two large forms and the vertical forms, but the relationship between those is so ambiguous, it’s so fleeting, it’s so impossible to read as forms seem to appear and disappear, not only in shadow, but into each other. And at the same time, they seem to weave in and out of space, creating a sense of depth and a kind of richness that is really compelling.
0:04:35.0 Dr. Jim Ganz: Yes, it’s a very complex image, one doesn’t really understand the scale of it, or which forms are physically connected to each other or which ones are superimposed on each other. There definitely is a sense of space and depth, and it’s not any easier when you watch the actual film, it’s even more complex and hypnotic and fascinating, you really get kind of drawn into the movement of the lights.
0:05:03.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: I noticed that there are little holes in the corners, and so it seems that this was probably tacked up on a wall, that this might have been a working object rather than being intended to be a work of art.
0:05:15.5 Dr. Jim Ganz: We think, based on the inscriptions and the thumbtack holes, that it was a kind of working print of some sort.
0:05:23.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: But we’re so lucky to have this particular print as a vehicle back to this moment, when experimental film was radically new in its rethinking of what film could be. There is this wonderfully optimistic quality here, that film does not need to be a commercial activity, that it can be a fine art activity.
0:05:43.7 Dr. Jim Ganz: That’s true. And there were many different artists who took up filmmaking, people who were painters and photographers got interested and involved in film, there were film clubs, there were theaters that specifically showed art films, it was written about a great deal in various magazines and journals, and had a big impact on the art world overall.
0:06:07.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: The way in which the artist is isolating light and its qualities, and the way that form is defined by light seems so elemental that it almost seems to me like a kind of scientific investigation. Clearly the artist is using photography, a cinema camera, there is technology involved here, but there is this wonderful way in which there’s this coming together of science, of art, and of technology.
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