Veszprémi Nóra - Jávor Anna - Advisory - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2005-2007. 25/10 (MNG Budapest 2008)

STUDIES - Zsuzsa FARKAS: Reproductions in a Sculptor's Estate from the 1870s: Anna Christ's Photographs of Ferenc Kugler's Statues

ZSUZSA FARKAS Reproductions in a Sculptor's Estate from the 1870s: Anna Christ's Photographs of Ferenc Kugler

's Statues In the middle of the 19

th century, reproductions of artworks sold at museums and shops were still graphically made prints: their prototypes being either drawings made on the spot or, increasingly, photographs. It is common knowledge that, hardly had daguerreotypes been invented, fixing images of objects on plates immediately began to spread, and, owing to specialization, the field of reproduction of artworks developed from daguerreotypes showing still lifes of objects. As a result of the new technology, first of all, the stock of objects in museums changed: all collections were redoubled due to reproductions. Artworks came to new life in photographic images as they became moveable, uniform and easy to handle. Costly photograph series made in museums were on sale in albums and by the piece in Paris and the art-dealer shops throughout the capital cities of Europe. People encountered a new type of sight in (art) objects reappearing on plates; and the knowledge of reproductions came deemed a measure of education. Around 1860, the small (9x12 cm), albumin "visit card" became the most prevalent format. The technological innovation of photography brought about rapid development in the various scholarly disciplines, too. Large-scale and expert recording of historical monuments and objects began to evolve, which resulted in a radical turning point in the history of scholarship. Photographs producing precise likenesses led to the advance of efficient comparative analyses, opened up new perspectives in research, and helped art history develop into a science. In the 19

th century, reproduction also ushered a genuine revolution in the public accessibility of works of art. On the one hand, it helped the study of the relationship between art objects; on the other, it fostered the scholarly processing and cataloguing of objects acquired by museums. Earlier drawings of art objects did not provide a unified view, because certain elements: inscriptions, patterns, diagrams were depicted in a more focussed, more "precise" way than in reality. In contrast, however, the photograph faithfully reproduced whatever could be fixed on a negative in evenly distributed light without magnification or distortion. A new type of document came into being due to photographic reproduction: it recorded not a certain object, not what was significant about it, but its sight itself, primarily its form, not its details. Photographic reproductions were immensely successful: they were easy to send, replace, handle, buy, etc., and soon pushed other techniques of reproduction into the background. We only have scattered archival sources, association and academy reports, on the beginnings of reproduction in Hungary from 1840. Photographic reproduction took the lead until the develop1. Unknown painter: Portrait of Ferenc Kugler, mid-1860s. HNG Archive ment of photomechanical technologies in the 1880s. It is between these two dates that research can focus primarily on object photography.

1 This field meant a most important source of income for photographers, publicity and means of advertising for artists, as well as a way of promoting permanent or temporary exhibitions for museums. In this period, all art objects were reduplicated: plaster replicas were made of museum objects, oil copies of paintings, then graphically made prints followed, and last came photographic albums. A cheap, though, in the want of colour, virtual museum came into being. The study of the fine-arts material of the period has revealed that statues in public spaces were often as not left out of such albums, for they were far from the traditional category of art-object