Nadar: The Tesla of Art

(Don’t skip the image captions!)

Revolving Self-portrait of/by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1865 (giffed by me)

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known simply as “Nadar”, was a French photographer, cartoonist, journalist, novelist, pornographer, essayist, event planner, socialite, and hot-air balloonist. (He built what was then world's biggest balloon, “Le Géant / The Giant”, which had six bedrooms and crash-landed on its second voyage.)

He took the first ever aerial photographs:

Paris from the sky. This is also the earliest photo collage I’ve been able to find (aside from trick photography) but the issue seems unremarked upon by art historians, possibly as it’s 40 years before Picasso would coin the word.

He did the first ever photo interview:

Nadar interviewing Michel Eugène Chevreul, the celebrated chemist who figured out how soap works, pioneered the discovery of relative color contrast, and was a noted skeptic and debunker of charlatans through his discovery of primed involuntary motion (he figured out how Ouija Boards work). It’s worth remembering that photography, now considered an art, before the advent of digital, required expertise in chemistry.

He founded The Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Machines with the help of his close friend Jules Verne. He’s the inspiration for Verne’s first hit book, “Five Weeks In A Balloon”; and later follow-ups “Around The World in 80 Days”; and “From The Earth to the Moon”, where men travel to the moon using an explosive blast.

Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne’s hit “Around The World in 80 Days”, is based on Nadar.

The first spaceship to land on the moon was named after the spaceship they rode in that book. Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, said this during the first Apollo moon mission:

“A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the Moon in spaceship Columbiad. Our modern-day spaceship Columbia completes its rendezvous with Earth tomorrow.”

One of the book’s three space travelers, a smooth-talking french poet named Ardan, is obviously based on Nadar (even their names are anagrams).

Illustrations of “Michel Ardan” (Nadar) entering space rocket Columbiad in illustrations of Jules Verne’s “From The Earth To The Moon” in 1865, and photos of Apollo 11 Spaceship Columbia landing on the moon in 1969.

Nadar photographed portraits of Liszt, Balzac, Delacroix, Emile Zola, Rossini, Sarah Bernhardt, Verne, Rossini, Baudelaire, Gustav Eiffel, Offenbach, Manet, Monet, Verdi, Rodin, Berlioz, Louis Pasteur, Rousseau, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, The Czar of Russia, etc… (!)

As photography came to dominate “realistic image-making”, and painting came into its own as being more about sharing one’s impression, the first ever exhibition of Impressionist Paintings was hosted in Nadar’s studio (with paintings by Cezanne, Degas, Monet, Renoir…).

Nadar’s Studio in Paris

Paintings from the first ever Impressionist art show, at Nadar’s Studio: “A Modern Olympia” by Cezanne, “At the Races in the Country” by Degas, “Boulevard des Capucines” & “Impression, Sunrise” by Monet, and “The Theater Box” by Renoir.

(The “Impressionist” painters were given their name sarcastically by a hater trying to discredit their art movement, in a nasty review of this art show at Nadar’s. Fittingly ironic that the word that critic used to mock a new art meme ended up being his greatest contribution to the world.)

Ok, back to Nadar. He said:

“Photography is a marvelous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds — and one that can be practiced by any idiot.

The theory of photography can be taught in an hour; the technical notions. But what is not taught is the psychological side of photography. I don't think that's too ambitious a term.

It's the immediate empathy with your subject; this contact which helps you to sum up their habits, attitudes, and ideas, according to each person's character. This enables you to make not just an accidental, ordinary cardboard copy typical of the humblest darkroom hack, but to achieve a likeness of the most intimate and positive kind: A speaking likeness.

The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.”

Here are some of Nadar's surviving portraits:

Victor Hugo at his desk, and on his deathbed.

Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, and Emile Zola In His Study

Hermaphrodite, and Naked Woman

Author Jules Verne, Louis Pasteur, and Sarah Bernhardt

Alexander Tsar of Russia, Baudelaire, Sketch of Baudelaire

Rodin, Monet, Selfie in The Catacombs

He was one of the big proponents of photography being a valid art-form (a controversial issue at the time). Here are two cartoons he made on the matter:

“The Ingratitude of Painting, Refusing the Smallest Place in its Exhibition, to Photography to whom it Owes so Much”, 1857. And “Painting Offering Photography A Place in the Exhibition of Fine Arts”, 1859.

And let's end with another quote and self-portrait:

“Do not all these modern miracles — the steam engine, the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, the radio, bacteriology, anesthesiology, psychology — pale when compared to the most astonishing and disturbing one of all, that one which seems finally to endow man himself with the divine power of creation: the power to give physical form to the insubstantial image that vanishes as soon as it is perceived, leaving no shadow in the mirror, no ripple on the surface of the water?

People were stunned when they heard that two inventors had perfected a process that could capture an image on a silver plate. It is impossible for us to imagine today the universal confusion that greeted this invention, so accustomed have we become to the fact of photography.”

Nadar’s Selfie in a hot air balloon carriage

“There is no such a thing as art; There are people who can see, and others who cannot even look.

Ok, thanks for reading. I was very excited to learn about Nadar, because he felt like a kind of kindred spirit.