NEW YORK — Consider a pair of words that begin with “a”: art and advertising. You might say that they’re oranges and apples (speaking of words that begin with “a”). Well, yes and no. The two are wildly different, to be sure. But they can also overlap. When they do, the results are always interesting — and often memorable.
Observing instances of overlap, as well as their absence, is one of the pleasures afforded by “The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography.” It runs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Aug. 4. Under the thematic circumstances, “The Real Thing” is a nicely provocative title. The show, which includes some 60 items, focuses on the first century of photography, from the 1840s to 1940s, with one ringer from the ‘50s.
Art, photographic and otherwise, is about means: the elaboration of style. What makes something art is how that something is done, not its what or who or why. Advertising is about ends, or, rather, a single end: pushing a product. As the Hungarian photographic team Révész-Biró once put it, advertising “creates great people, dictates the fashions, brings renown and success, boom or depression, and, last but not least, sells the goods.”
If art provides an advertiser with a useful means toward achieving that end, then so be it. A style such as Surrealism or Constructivism or a technique such as photo-montage, each very much avant-garde in the years between the two world wars, was quickly, and happily, adopted by advertising. Might “co-opted” or “subverted” be more accurate? That would be a pretty hifalutin view to take, since the results could be so striking, even, yes, artistic. It would be hard to dispute that during those years advertising did more to introduce more people to Modernism than, say, the Museum of Modern Art did.
Curated by the Met’s Virginia McBride, “The Real Thing” is arranged thematically even as it follows a largely chronological course. Some product photography shows its subject in solitary splendor (“The Isolated Object”), some shows it en masse (“The Array”), some implies narrative (”The Tableau”). These categories are illuminating. That description applies to the wall text, too. One learns, for example, that it wasn’t until the 1920s, that it became less expensive to use photographs rather an illustrations in an advertisement. Thus was created “an expanded vocabulary of visual persuasion.” Or there’s this description of Penn’s celebrated spilled still life, “Theatre Accident, New York,” “Part autopsy, part ‘I Spy.’” That’s writing as stylish as it is insightful.
There are familiar names in “The Real Thing” you might expect: famous photographers known for their advertising work, such as Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, and Paul Outerbridge. There are familiar names you likely wouldn’t: famous photographers not known for their advertising work, such as James Van Der Zee, August Sander, and André Kertész.
The Kertész in the show belongs to a category of one. Call it product photography ex post facto. The photo is Kertész’s almost-preposterously elegant image of a fork, a plate, and the shadows cast by each. Seeing it, a German silverware company had the canny idea to use it in an ad.
Finally, there are photographs from unfamiliar names: Ralph Bartholomew Jr., Adolph Lazi, Murray Duitz, and Grancel Fitz. Bartholomew’s packages of soap, Lazi’s industrial equipment, Duitz’s men’s shoe (which rivals that Kertész cutlery in elegance), and Fitz’s tooth paste tube and brush are beneficiaries of the artistic impulse Outerbridge articulated in 1922, just as product photography was getting into high gear: “I have attempted to interpret the beauty of the simplest and humblest of objects.”
Among other products included here, some humble, some not, are candy, cigarettes, disinfectant powder, perfume, tombstones, Panama hats, drill bits, textiles, whiskey, margarine, rolling papers, a pocket comb, toilet paper, coffee, light bulbs, wigs, switch plates, and, inevitably, automobiles. (What is it about cars and cameras?) Implicit in the pictured products being so varied is an important point: So long as there’s a profit to be made, selling ignores hierarchy. Maybe this is where art and advertising most fundamentally differ. One is inherently aristocratic, the other is as democratic as a dollar bill.
Of course dollar bills crumple and tear and, thanks to inflation, lose their value. Art is sturdier than one might think. That’s another unexpected lesson “The Real Thing” has to offer. Who remembers such once-famous brands as Ipana toothpaste, Packard automobiles, the A&P supermarket chain, or AT&T’s Bell System? All of them figure in the show. They’re all gone, but the images promoting them endure. An ancient adage comes to mind, a usefully updated caution for a neoliberal age: ars longa, commerce brevis.
THE REAL THING: Unpackaging Product Photography
At Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York, through Aug. 4. 212-535-7710, www.metmuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.
