Snapshot

This morning I went with a friend to a very good exhibition. Snapshot in Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. First of all, the striking exhibition design. So well done! The colours of the walls, the fonts used for titles, the lay-out of the exhibition; great. We later learned the exhibition design was from InsideOutside, Petra Blaisse's office. The topic is the relation between painting and photography in the late 19th, early 20th century. Breitner, Bonnard, Vuillard, Evenepoel are among the artists. Photography influenced their way of looking at the world around them and by doing so influenced their way of painting. At the start they used their camera as any other person; taking photographs of their family, their environment, their friends. More and more they used photography for research as well as art. We saw children, women in bath, street scenes, beaches, rooms, nudes, family scenes etcetera. For instance the out-of-focus effect, which is common in photography, became an element in Breitner's painted work. A must!