“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be…”
“…One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
A dear friend of mine traveled recently to Amsterdam. Her main motive: the Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum, a show heralded as “The Ultimate Vermeer Collection” (The New Yorker), along with the claim “Vermeer Will Never Look the Same” (The Guardian). More Vermeers—of which there are not a great many—are gathered in this exhibit than have been displayed together anywhere before: twenty-eight of the thirty-four (or thirty-five) known surviving Vermeers are on display, and the display is apparently extraordinary. Do I envy my friend’s seizing this chance to see—to revel in—all these Vermeers in this “miracle” of an exhibit? Yes, of course, even though I was lucky enough years ago to see a number of Vermeers at a Metropolitan Museum show, but I don’t think I was properly attuned.
I expect my friend was fully attuned, so she must have experienced the true Benjaminian aura of these extraordinary paintings, which she has long been attached to. She’d first seen them in reproductions: her love for Vermeer began many years ago when she looked through a book of the artist’s work; she’d felt an immediate connection, a deep resonance in response to both the tension and quietude of the women in the paintings.
So of course she wanted to be transfixed by the Rijksmuseum’s signal, unprecedented offering. But the crowds of visitors, their relentless snapping photos of the paintings with their phones, worked heavily—as so often with large museum shows, as with most exhibitions that are created to be “events”—against the contemplative quality of the work, against her desire to spend as much time as possible with each painting. Against, perhaps, their aura. Still, she says, being able to come close to the paintings despite the waves of people, to see the actual paint on the canvas, was indeed revelatory.
I am suddenly reminded of a movie I saw almost a decade ago. Tim’s Vermeer, directed by Teller of Penn and Teller fame, follows the long process by which the inventor Tim Jenison—not an artist—reproduced Vermeer’s The Music Lesson. Jenison was inspired by the arguments put forward by the artist David Hockney and the architect Philip Steadman that Vermeer must have used a camera obscura to create the near-photographic qualities of his work. Jenison set out to discover whether it would actually be possible to use the technology available to Vermeer to (re)paint a Vermeer. After traveling around the world to study the Dutch master’s work (he does say that seeing the original Vermeers “was a revelation”) and after laying out the exact measurements and proportions of The Music Lesson on a computer, Jenison painstakingly reconstructed north-facing mullioned windows, the viola de gamba, the intricately decorated virginal, the chair, the pitcher, the rug; he used human models in exact replicas of the clothes and hairstyles for the teacher and student. He devised a mirror lens—he dispensed with the dark box of the camera obscura—and after 130 excruciating days of painting using that lens, he had in fact recreated a Vermeer. The point for him and for the film was to prove that such a technique was possible, not that Vermeer did in fact work this way, but that he could have and might have. Jenison, Hockney, and Steadman are all clear: such a way of working takes nothing away from Vermeer’s genius. The film celebrates Vermeer; it celebrates both original work and reproduction—reproduction in a very particular circumstance—as well as an inventive obsession. Jenison’s achievement offers a way in to a painting; it hardly replaces it, and was never meant to.
I want to argue gently for the value of different sorts of reproductions, for reproductions’ having their own kind of presence in time and space. (I am inclined to exclude museum-goers’ phone snaps, yet these may have some value for the picture-takers, even if that value means a boast on social media, proof that they were in the vicinity of great works of art, a way to say, “I was there.”) There are, for instance, artworks I love which I have seen only in reproductions. There are reproductions that inspire a lifelong fascination with visual art, even with one artist in particular—think of my friend and her first experience of Vermeer. I know that paging through art books has nurtured my own ability to look at and respond to paintings, drawings, sculpture. Some reproductions serve to stir my memory of works I have seen, to reanimate the emotions I felt in seeing those originals, to summon their aura. I’ll wager the same must be true for many others. Now we can “visit” museums virtually, with no one around to get in front of us or make pretentious or silly comments, and indeed an online guided tour of the Rijksmuseum Vermeer exhibit has just been released. Granted, the virtual experience is far from the same as the—what to call it?—actual experience? But experience is experience, virtual or otherwise, so let’s say, the virtual experiences does not have the same quality of experience as confronting the original in the canvas or the paper or stone or metal or what have you. As the pandemic set in hard in spring 2020, Peter Schjeldahl claimed in the New Yorker that “[o]nline ‘virtual tours’ add insult to injury, in my view, as strictly spectacular, amorphous disembodiments of aesthetic experience.“ Yet being able to see the works in some form—even if considered adulterated because a screen and not the “real thing” is before us: wasn’t this, or isn’t this, a consolation, if not a substitute? I have seen digital reproductions online that have stirred me, paintings and drawings I have not seen or cannot see or make a possible plan to see—in that last case, a foretaste of aura, perhaps.
For my ninth birthday, my godmother sent me The Golden Encyclopedia of Art, a large-format book, perhaps 10 or 12 inches by 14 inches, glossy paged, full color. The title in reddish lettering was set against a marbled white background that took up about two-thirds of the front of the dust cover, and a reproduced painting began on the left third and wrapped around the spine and back: art that displayed art, a reproduction containing reproductions—rather like a set of mirrors— and illustrating a cavernous exhibition space, paintings covering every inch of wall space all the way up to the high vaulted ceiling, which I could see through an enormous columned archway; even the ceiling displayed itself as a painted collection of scenes, and the human visitors far below were dwarfed, with one at the bottom right in what must be a cardinal’s red robe (though I wouldn’t have been able then to identify a cardinal, or any member of the clergy for that matter). I may have seen the gift as an encouragement to take art seriously, or I may have thought my godmother was acknowledging me, a child of nine, as capable of appreciating and understanding art and therefore worthy of consorting with an elite of artists, or I may simply have been entranced by so many pictures. Or all of the above. In any case, the book pleased me.
I’m sure I’d not yet heard of Leonardo da Vinci. But surely the picture, and the whole encyclopedia, gave me a foretaste of good and great art. I was—and still am, as I remember the reproduction of the painting—entranced by the elegant sleekness of the lines of the very long, slender fingers, the long neck, the curving length of the animal, and the seeming textures of the animal’s smooth fur, the echoing tight smoothness of the woman’s pulled-back hair, the silkiness of her skin. These are what moved me when I looked at Lady with an Ermine. The girl’s gaze over her left shoulder, above the pointed snout of the ermine in her arms, as if to say, yes, I’m here, we are here, and we are ourselves only; the careful, gentle way she holds the creature; her subtle but absolute self-possession, self-containment; their containment together: these pulled me in, though I certainly could not then have explained that pull in the terms I use now. I might have said, I love animals, so the picture makes sense to me. But the image has not left me. I could of course look at a reproduction now—but I have not. I somehow prefer to remember that my child-self felt some affinity with the pair, felt some deep pleasure in contemplating them, shared in their bond, wanted their sleekness and their complete elegance.
I’m sure it was in the Golden Encyclopedia that I first saw a painting in which a boy or young man, perhaps an adolescent, blows a large bubble with a long stem. He is leaning over a stone sill, his eyes fixed downward on the almost transparent circle he’s created; he has a major curl hanging in front of his right ear, resembling styled peiyes, and his long hair is tied back with a bow. The palette is browns and beiges, brown-grays and hints of brown-green; the soft flesh tones of the boy’s face and hands, the pale pinkish blush on his cheek, draw us in and center us as well as the painting. What was it about this painting that struck me, that imprinted it more or less accurately on my mind? Perhaps it was the combination of the boy’s concentration, his delicate features, and the relatively trivial, childish, even pointless, but playful act of blowing bubbles, a playfulness emphasized by the shadowy face of a child to his left. Perhaps I understood that the patently, even blatantly ephemeral—the soap bubble—had been fixed in time, rendered more or less permanent by the artist, who happened to be Chardin, but my memory associated no name with the painting, though the reproduction had to be captioned. The boy, so fresh-faced and composed, leaning down, leaning toward me, blowing me a soap bubble: he has remained with me.
The Golden Encyclopedia primed me for my adolescent art-love: Renoir. A reproduction of The Luncheon of the Boating Party, at least in my memory, took up a spread of two pages with the book’s deep valley in the middle. I became attached to the painting’s genial, slightly rambunctious togetherness. A happy gathering! A happy group of friends! These were novel to me. I also sensed a certain frisson between men and women, a delicious flirting which yet seemed straightforward and unthreatening.
In a college acting class, we were asked to base a character on a figure in a work of art. Without hesitation I chose the Boating Party’s young woman holding up a little dog and communing with him, in the midst of the food, the talk, the joking, When my turn came in the class to perform the exercise, I climbed up on the little stage, sat on a chair, and assumed the exact position, posture, and facial expression of the young woman. I believe I was acting happiness, eagerness even, connection.
Like so many young girls, I doted on Renoir for some years—not his nudes, pink-hued, pink-hazed, and plump, which would have embarrassed me, but the clothed young girls at the piano, in a box at the theater, playing with kittens. An adolescent cliche, perhaps; yet the reproductions soothed me, promised me lightness, a place in the world of art.
I do have some originals in my house—works by friends and family, primarily. And I love these pieces. My walls are also hung with numerous reproductions: museum prints, postcards, posters, and I have many art books on my shelf, full of—what else?—reproductions. A friend—a painter—once asked whether I still looked at, or even noticed, the art on my walls or whether my eyes tended to slide over them as all too familiar. The answer is, Both. But I do, since he asked this question, make it a point to attend to the art I’ve surrounded myself with, as well as to the framed photographs I’ve hung. I find stimulation and comfort this way.
(I am not nearly so attentive to the music I love. Over the years, I have accumulated many musical reproductions—i.e., recordings—and I think of pulling this or that CD from the shelf to listen. But I tend not to. Instead, in my head I replay bits of the music I know best, and then I think, I don’t need to play the recording. Which is foolish, because I cannot reproduce a Mozart quartet or one of Bach’s French Suites or anything else anywhere close to precisely or completely. Nevertheless, I often remain content with a mental reproduction of a reproduction of a performance.)
A woman stands in profile against the light from a window at the back of the room—what we see in or through the window blends with the flowered wallpaper to the right. She faces the left of the canvas, arching slightly backward, her left hand placed delicately above her left breast, her right hand spraying what must be cologne onto her body. She may have just emerged from the round tin tub to her left, and in a mirror above a dresser left of the window, we see the reflection of the front of her body. There is something lonely about the figure, but there is also, in her nakedness, in her arcing backward, a sense of opening, to the light, to her physical self, to a small sensuous pleasure, and a kind of delicate welcoming.
This is Bonnard’s Nue à Contre-Jour. A large print of the painting hangs in my bathroom, where I look at it many times every day. And each time, the print—I’ve never seen the original, and I may never see it—greets me and pleases me. A painter friend has said that he generally finds Bonnards “too pretty,” but he’s made an exception for this work—or perhaps he’s just trying to placate me. I don’t care.
In my bedroom hangs another homage to Bonnard, in this case a poster for a delicious exhibit of his late interiors I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. Yes, I am a grownup, and I display a poster, something others may think adults, at least of the middle class (those of the upper classes can afford originals) should no longer be attached to. Again, I don’t care, because the poster reminds me not just of the exhibition itself but of the great pleasure I took in it, and especially of my warm response to the actual painting reproduced on the poster and my need to see it more than once. The painting, with that flattening of perspective Bonnard took to, shows in the foreground a square table standing on a rug of sea blue with a band of white and black and yellow designs. The table is covered with stacked books and papers, and in the background a white cat looks on and a small spotted dog lies curled up. The table, the furniture, the walls veer between deep yellow and orange. The daily sight of the painting-poster stirs me, sometimes inspires me, makes sense to me.
I have several other museum prints that are meaningful to me. Again, I have not seen the originals. One is Gerhard Richter’s Reader. The intentness of the young woman in profile reading a newspaper is matched and reinforced by the intentness—I don’t know what else to call it—of the painting’s near-photographic precision and focus. An unseen source of light illuminates the back of the woman’s neck with its necklace, the shoulder of her dark-brown dress, her light red hair, and the bright page she’s reading; her skin, hair, and the page also seem to give off light, or return the light. The reddish-brown background is blurry, drawing us in to her absorption.
I’ve recently purchased and framed two prints of works by Vanessa Bell, whose work I have long admired—admittedly, I first became acquainted with it because of my unabashed devotion to and immersion in the work of her sister, Virginia Woolf. I may never get to Charleston, Bell’s home in Sussex where her paintings, ceramics, screens, and designs reside, along with works by Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and other Bloomsbury notables. But seeing these two prints from Charleston seems to put me in some relation to Bell and through her to her sister, even if that relation is highly indirect or just imaginary.
A very dear friend of mine is a collagist. It is largely through the scanning of her own photographs and of found material that she creates her collages, which she can then scan to produce her handmade books. There might be any number of levels of reproduction involved, with the results that, oh yes, have an aura all their own.
I am going to reverse myself now, possibly, because I’m remembering a few instances in which seeing original works has proved stunningly vital. In these cases, the aura is reproducible—in posters, prints, books—in the sense of that vitality’s being brought back to me with some force.
When I was fourteen and on holiday in France with my mother—a holiday that was a reprieve from and a compensation for a difficult previous year—we traveled to the South of France. In Nice, we went to the Matisse Museum, where it was the delicious, sensual cutouts that struck me most. But it was our visit to he Matisse Chapel in Vence that made the most significant impression. That I had no religious affiliation, tendency, or background did not matter in the least. My response was visceral, direct, unfiltered by any belief or expectation, and I hold onto it still, more than fifty years later.
The stark and vibrant simplicity of the small structure and of the artist’s designs, which played with and against the pure white of the interior, overpowered me. Matisse’s vivid blue, light blue-green, and yellow panes stirred me as no stained glass windows have ever since; few line drawings have lent a shiver of transcendence like Matisse’s very spare evocations, black on white tile, of a religious figure (I didn’t know it was a saint, or which saint), of Mary and child, and of the stations of the cross (which, again, I would not have recognized without guidance—and again, that mattered not at all). Starkness and richness were somehow indistinguishable, and the chapel felt not like a structure studded with individual bits of art but like a single, and singular, work in itself, a place of wholeness, both contained and open. If I had ever thought, at that young age, that art could engender such feelings, the chapel assured me that I was not mistaken. I was idealistic and impressionable, and what I saw seemed to validate my longing to be an artist of some kind. But it was not just my youth that provoked my potent reaction, for I find that others at no matter what age have had similar experiences when they stepped into the chapel.
The Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of Matisse’s cutouts in 2014–2015, and I was happy to greet those ardent shapes of color again. But coming across designs for and photos of the chapel included in the show, I could only turn to my husband and say, “Oh, I wish you could see the real thing.”
Would I have been content to study the designs and photos had I never seen the Real Thing? I’m not at all sure. Oddly, I have no reproduced photographs, no postcards or prints, from the chapel or the MOMA show.
I was so emotionally and intellectually overwhelmed by another exhibit that I still find it difficult to adequately describe either the work or my reaction. In 2001, the Jewish Museum in New York mounted the entirety of Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre? I had never heard of Salomon. Initially, I was simply intrigued by the title, rendered more potent by not one question mark but two. Salomon’s question(s) had been mine and had hounded me for years: Was I living a life, or was I acting?
Life? or Theatre? echoed and absorbed my own confusions. But it also took me far beyond, or beneath, or around my relentless self-questioning. Salomon’s 700-some gouaches are intimately intertwined with text. The text for the first 200 or so paintings appears on semitransparent overlays, then for the rest of the work is integrated into the paintings themselves, with some panels composed of text only. The whole work, which also includes instructions to hear certain pieces of music as you look and read, throws light upon that strange and hazy borderland between private retrospection and public recollection, between personal memoir and narrated history, between individual consciousness and collective awareness. To experience the actual Life? or Theatre?—to see all of it, room after room—is to be drawn into a young woman’s dialogue with a possible and a real past. A Berlin native, Salomon created this remarkable mixed-genre work (the eliding of genres is just one of its affecting and effective purposes and features) in the South of France, hiding from the Nazis—who found her. She died at Auschwitz.
I was shaken when I emerged from the exhibit halls. I don’t want to exaggerate or misremember—I had just been immersed in realms of memory—but I was in tears. I felt astoundingly close to Salomon’s project, to her story, and to the horrifying history that she records and was finally felled by. Yet Salomon, in the very structure and approach of the work, also generates at times an ironic distance from her own narrative, which only makes the overall piece all the more piercing. And Life? or Theatre? ends with the narrator seeming to begin this very project: the last gouache shows her kneeling by the sea and painting, with the title, Leben oder Theater, written across her back.
I bought the volume reproducing Life? or Theatre?—773 pages of the work plus introductory essays. And I have studied it. Written about Salomon. I need to see this enormously thick book on my bookshelf. My response to the exhibit—which very much feels like a response to Salomon herself—returns to me every time my eyes glance over that shelf. And of course, whenever I look through the book again, gaze at the reproductions. My memory is stirred by her investigation of memory, her willingness to remember and imagine and reinhabit and encompass.
These days, reproduction of artworks is not exactly the kind of reproduction that Benjamin was writing about. Digital reproduction of all kinds pervades the Internet, of course, and this I suppose is a form of “mechanical authenticity”—the reproduction is authentically copied. Many, many articles are titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” a number of them arguing for the significant accessibility provided by high-resolution, data-driven copies (an argument I find hard to oppose), some claiming that art and our view of its value are ever-changing, and digitization and proliferation online happen to embrace such change. I am rather allergic to pronouncements, and anyway, I’m not equipped or credentialed enough to do more than stick a mental toe into this sea of perceptions (which I’m aware of, by the way, thanks to the Internet). I’m more interested in personal responses to art—to the Real Thing, if we could agree on what that is, and to its possibly infinite iterations. It seems to me that what’s at stake is the degree of value or aura we each assign to a work, no matter how we experience it.
I could easily say that forgeries are reproductions, especially those at least initially authenticated as Real. The aura in this case usually comes from the name of the artist whose work the forgery was thought to be, whether Vermeer or Rembrandt or Hockney. But as often occurs, the proverbial rug is pulled from under us, or from under the forger, and the forgery loses its once-perceived value. Some might make the point that a forgery might be “artistic,” aesthetically well produced, in itself. And what of imitations? Can we distinguish between imitation and influence, acknowledged or unacknowledged? Plagiarism would seem to be opposite of forgery; in the latter case, a work is claimed as another’s; in the former, the work of another is claimed as one’s own. Now there are computer programs that will create works “in the style of” whatever artist you offer it. Shall we call that authentic mechanical imitation?
What I know is this; If you can see an original artwork, you are very lucky. If you cannot, or if you cannot afford an original (that narrows the field considerably), a reproduction may not just suffice but may offer at least a way in to the evocations and associations and perhaps the sheer beauty or weightedness of what the artist’s pencil, pen, brush, chisel, or welder has brought into the world. Ultimately, each of us must decide for ourselves whether a response is authentic or projected or faked.
Soon, I expect to be able to compare my online viewing of a piece of art with my perception of the Real Thing. Through various leads, I’ve come upon a British artist whose work I find beautiful. I sensed an aura about her paintings, particularly those of books. I’ve been in contact with Jess Allen, and she’s let me know that a small gallery in New York will be showing her work and that I can come to the opening (the “invitation” went out to everyone on her newsletter list, I believe—not a personal invite). I am planning to travel to New York to see her paintings. There is one in particular I’m anxious to buy, though I don’t know if I will be able to afford it. And yes, I want the painting itself, the Real Thing. But I’m grateful for the almost omnipotent Internet for introducing Ms. Allen to me. Will the actual work devalue the reproduction of her work online? Not at all. They exist on a different level of seeing, a different level of experience. I’m grateful for all of it.