HOUSTON, TEXAS.- In art, the first International Style began around 1400 in Western Europe, when the world was not yet a globe. The second International Style did not come along until the 1920’s, but that is just a matter of labels. Once the railroad, the steamship and the modern press expanded travel and communication, it would be hard to think of a major artistic style that did not travel everywhere. But styles do change as they move about the globe, and sometimes their subjects and meanings change, too. ’Russian Pictorialism,’ a show at Fotofest, the biennial Houston photography festival, made clear that this late-19th- and early-
20th-century photographic style had certain goals and achievements quite unlike those of Pictorialism in other countries. With more than 130 pictures by 16 photographers from the 1880’s to the 1930’s, this was the largest show of Russian Pictorialism seen abroad since a 1928 exhibition in Italy. After his death in 1979, the work of Pictorialist Aleksandr Grinberg has been exhibited in more than 50 shows in Europe, Asia and the United States and won many gold medals in the 1920’s before being silenced. The exhibition’s curators, Yevgeny Berezner and Irina Chmyreva from the State Center for Museums and Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, say in a brief but illuminating essay in the Fotofest catalog that the history of Russian Pictorialism has yet to be written. The Russian Pictorialists clearly shared their international contemporaries’ fervent desire to make photography an art as well as their predilection for Impressionism and Symbolism. Like other Pictorialists, they favored landscapes, portraits and nudes, mastered such ’artistic’ techniques as bromoil and gum bichromate, made photographs that could be mistaken for the products of other graphic techniques and courted blur, color and texture.

Pictorialism has also been said to represent a reaction against the cold materialism of science and applied technology and an attempt, as in Symbolism, to plumb the imagination. It was nostalgic and essentially elitist. In Europe, its placid vision momentarily reassured a bourgeoisie threatened by the unrest of the lower classes. From the early 19th century on artists considered it their duty to deal with pervasive ethical problems and to improve public morality. The situation of the peasants was a primary concern.

The core of the collection shown at Fotofest was assembled by Mikhail Golosovsky, a photographer and optical engineer who patiently ferreted out work wherever it lay hiding. The show enlarged the history of Pictorialism, not only by adding photographers and images, but also by pointing out how ethical and spiritual meanings could inhere in photographs that would have been considered secular elsewhere. Negotiations are under way to mount this show in Russia, taking the exiled work home again.