Afternoon at the Museum

My sister Stacey and I went to the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati today. There is no admission fee on Sundays this summer so it was great to enjoy the exhibits and not have to pay for it.
It's been a while since I've taken the time to visit a museum and I realized how much I really like to do it. I enjoy wandering the galleries and seeing art that inspires and challenges me. I even like to see art that I don't like because it makes me stop and think why I don't like it. Cincinnati has other museums that I am definitely going to try to take in.
The Taft Museum www.taftmuseum.org is mainly made up of paintings and decorative porcelain. The Taft family (President Taft's half-brother) really liked to collect Chinese porcelain and seventeenth century European portraits. The Tafts also donated their home which is now part of the museum.
The museum also included a special exhibition gallery. The current exhibition is entitled: TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845–1945.
I really didn't know much about Pictorialism so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Here's what I learned:

Pictorialism is the name given to a photographic movement in vogue from around 1885 following the widespread introduction of the dry-plate process. It reached its height in the early years of the 20th century, and declined rapidly after 1914 after the widespread emergence of Modernism. The terms "Pictorialism" and "Pictorialist" entered common use only after 1900.

Pictorialism largely subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Most of these pictures were black & white or sepia-toned. Among the methods used were soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, heavy manipulation in the darkroom, and exotic printing processes. From 1898 rough-surface printing papers were added to the repertoire, to further break up a picture's sharpness. Some artists "etched" the surface of their prints using fine needles. The aim of such techniques was to achieve what the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica termed, in discussing Pictorialism, "personal artistic expression".
Despite the aim of artistic expression, the best of such photographs paralleled the impressionist style then current in painting. Looking back from the present day, we can also see close parallel between the composition and picturesque subject of genre paintings and the bulk of pictorialist photography.

The Pictorialist photos I saw at the Taft Museum were beautiful. They were beautiful works of art that included all sorts of subjects. Many of them had the look of charcoal drawings or paintings rather than photographs. I've included an example of Pictorialism with this post entitled Speed by photographer Robert Demachy . You can see it doesn't really look like a photo. It's very much like an Impressionist painting or a charcoal drawing. It was wonderful to learn about this period in art photography and to spend the afternoon at the museum with Stacey.
I hope you have had a great weekend. Thanks for being a part of my journey!