Learning artists' secrets from their studios

By S.M.

WORKS of art are often viewed through the eyes of the artist that created them: that van Gogh’s vibrant “Sunflowers” were the product of happy times in Arles, or that Picasso’s “Le Rêve” and “Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust” were clues of his intense affair with Marie-Thèrese Walter, are common generalisations. Yet unless a work of art is a particularly baffling physical feat, viewers rarely stop to consider the acquisition and shaping of materials, the stages that lead to completion.

“In the studio: The Artist Photographed from Ingres to Jeff Koons”, an exhibition at Le Petit Palais in Paris, pulls back the curtain and peeks at artists’ ateliers. It is only through the atelier that the viewer can gain unusual insight into each artist’s process. Yet these photographs are not impartial. There is a second artist involved: the photographer chooses how the studio is framed and, by extension, what is revealed and what left hidden to the viewer.

Studios were once lavish spaces. One set of panoramic images showcases the atelier of Mariano Fortuny y Marsal, a 19th-century painter. His studio in Rome is a trove of exotica: feathers, masks, shotguns, ornamental rugs, pillows and tapestries. It’s a reflection of his production of Orientalist paintings dotted with merchants, sheiks and warriors; in one photograph, Fortuny examines two models in Bedouin-style dress. Parisian studios at the time were similarly extravagant: paintings in gilded frames, Japanese screens and elaborate wooden furniture are ceremoniously displayed by painters such as John Singer Sargent, Albert Aublet and Mihaly Munkacsy. These spaces feed into a mythology of the workspace: the artist is not just a creator, but is surrounded by beauty so that he may create it.

Today's studios are far less opulent: Jeff Koons's studio features numerous Lysol cleaning spray bottles for polishing and fluorescent-hued cartoon paintings of a very different aesthetic era. Mr Koons’s studio was photographed in Gautier Deblonde’s 2004-2013 “Atelier” series, looking at the workspaces of a range of famed artists. Mr Deblonde photographs each studio without its artist, inviting viewers to scrutinise the artist from assorted objects that hint at their favoured approach to scale, subject, palette and art history. Ron Mueck’s studio, for example, is instantly recognisable by the gigantic sculpture of a naked human body sitting on his desk. Other elements of his oeuvre are signified by a mood board of crows, or plastic bins of artistic supplies. These photographs invite viewers to go beyond the sculptural output of this artistic colossus, and revel in the background details and everyday influences.

Those artists who do appear in the frame cannot resist imagining how they appear in it, it seems. Annie Leibovitz’s photograph of Mr Koons for Vanity Fair is highly performative. Mr Koons is in the gym, wearing nothing but gloves and a gaze of intense concentration on his muscled-up reflection in a full-length mirror—a tongue-in-cheek play on the idea of male artist as narcissist. (It's apt, too: “Koons, at 59, has already begun a strict exercise-and-diet regimen so that he will have a shot at working undiminished into his 80s, as Picasso did”.) Whatever power Mr Koons exudes in the art world, Ms Leibovitz has the controlled gaze that makes this image more hers than his.

Indeed, the exhibit invites us to consider the power dynamics of the subject and object, the gazer and the gazed upon. Women, lesser known in the art canon, are key to this subversion. One photograph depicts Lucienne Heuvelmans, a French artist, at her outdoor workspace at the Villa Medicis in Rome in 1911. She sits in front of her easel sketching a nude male model, a rare reversal of the gender dynamic. Usually—as in Maurice-Louis Branger’s image from 1910—the woman is the object to be captured. One striking photograph, taken at the Académie Julian art school, shows an all-male troupe of artists whose eyes bear upon a nude female model; her objectification is made all the more obvious by her pose, which mirrors the inanimate figurines on display behind her. The viewer is, ultimately, the arbiter of influence: either partaking in the objectification, or actively challenging the power dynamic.

This prismatic view, where the artist inspects the model, the photographer observes the artist, and the viewer is oriented by the photographer—reminds the viewer of the layers of perception and creation involved in producing art. We can examine a studio for traces of artistic narrative, but the process remains elusive. As A.O. Scott says, “We may still cling to the myth of the solitary creator, toiling in a garret awaiting a visit from the muse, but the reality of creation has always been much more interactive.”