Aaron Scharf (22 September 1922 – 21 January 1993) was an American-born British art historian who contributed in particular to the history of photography in which he had developed an interest while studying at the Courtauld Institute.Jay, Bill (1993), 'Aaron Scharf:A verbal snapshot '. Creative Camera, April/May 1993. His investigation uncovered links between painting (and other artforms) and photography, and evidence for artists using photography for reference and other purposes, as well as the way photographers with aspirations as artists referred to painting in their work. He thus pioneered a new field of art history when Pop Art and other movements in the 1960s were reincorporating the medium of photography (which developed separately since the 1930s, and which hitherto art historians in general treated separately from paintingAs Richard Brettell notes: "With the exception of the writings of Aaron Scharf, Peter Galassis, Kirk Varnedoe, and a handful of other scholars, photography is completely omitted from the history of modern art particularly as it was written as a history of movements. In fact, photography played a considerable role in Impressionism, Nabis, Symbolism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, moving hand-in-hand with painting and the graphic arts." (Brettell, Richard R. (1999) Modern Art, 1851-1929: Capitalism and Representation. Oxford University Press, Notes p.220)) and reference to popular photographic images, into mainstream artistic practice. Scharf popularised his study and discoveries with publication of his profusely illustrated hardback Penguin volume 'Art and Photography' (1968) and through his work at the Open University in producing innovative thematic educational videos on the history of photography and its relation to society.
Early life Scharf was born in America on 22 September 1922 to Irving Scharf and his wife, Jeanette Shack (Shackowitz) a Jewish immigrant from Volochysk. He trained at Hancock College of Aeronautics in Los Angeles County in 1944 as a second lieutenant, where he gained his 'silver wings', qualifying to fly heavy aircraft.'Silver wings given to fifty county students,' in Los Angeles Times, Sunday, 27 February 1944, p.13 While at the College Scharf used his artistic talents to draw cartoons for the cadet publications.
During World War II he flew 46 missions as a bomber navigator and was award an Air Medal in November 1944,'More awards for gallantry announced,' in Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, 14 November 1944, p.15 and later promoted to captain. His unit citations were awarded as a result of successful bombing missions over Odertal and Vienna, and it was during his last mission to the latter that flak knocked out three of their B-24 engines and his crew made a forced landing in Russia. Scharf was reported as saying that though “not one of our crew was wounded...many a time we were scared half to death. Some of us came back with graying hair.” From there a jeep convoy took them to Hungary, from where the British flew them out and after the German surrender they flew their B-24 home.'Two decorated fliers return to Hancock where they started,' in Santa Maria Times, Friday, 20 July 1945, p.6
In his memoir of the war Flak (1996) published posthumously by Scharf’s widow, Marina, he recounts how he deliberately botched the targeting of Ravenna, Italy in a bombing raid, to avoid destruction of invaluable monuments.
Post-war After the war he spent some years as a painter and potter in Los Angeles and produced some commercial art illustration. He studied art and anthropology at the University of California where he became engaged to a fellow student Annette Rose in 1946,'Engagements', The Los Angeles Times, Monday, 13 May 1946, p.15 whom he married on 8 September. After receiving a master's degree in painting, he won critical acclaim for three paintings in a veterans' art award exhibition in 1951 in the art gallery of Santa Monica Library, and also showed lithographs at Kistler Studio'Bay display of ex-GI art wins praise,' in Los Angeles Times Sunday, 24 June 1951, p.105'Scharf's oils win critics' praise–but no prizes!,' in Topanga Journal and Malibu Monitor, Friday 6 July 1951, p.1 In 1950 he married Ruth Dunlap Bartlett (born 18 October 1921, Racine, died 16 January 2009, Highgate). An accomplished actress, Ruth owned and ran The Beachcomber, a small theatre on Muscle Beach in Santa Monica. Helena Stevens was her stage name. She was also a committed communist and became the first to play the part of Mother Courage in an English-language production of the play of the same name by the German communist playwright Bertolt Brecht.Proletarian, issue 30 (June 2009) Her husband meantime, was refused work or study in American universities, blacklisted because of his own socialism.
At the Courtauld In 1956, Scharf and wife arrived in the UK as political refugees from McCarthyism, with an invitation, provided by the communist academic (and spy) Anthony Blunt, for Aaron to study at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London providing their ostensible reason for leaving America. He completed his doctoral thesis exploring the relationship between photography and painting there over a period of five years, from 1961 to 1966.
It was eventually published with revisions and additions as Art and Photography (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1968) expanded from his Creative Photography (Studio Vista; New York : Van Nostrand Reinhold, London, 1965).
At the time of writing Creative Photography Scharf had attained his first academic post as head of the department of history of art and complimentary studies at Saint Martin's School of Art.
"Art and Photography" While Australian State Gallery curator of the 1920s Heinrich Schwartz is reported to have pioneered in, and lectured in America (in 1949) on, research into "pre-photographic" paintings of the 1820s and 1830s, made without lensed devices, in which Schwarz discerned "photographic features," Scharf's book revealed hitherto uncredited direct influences of photography on the creation of artistic images in painting."This kind of archaeology, in a relatively new field of study, is very necessary before the relevant philosophical, sociological and, certainly, aesthetic questions can adequately be answered". (Scharf in his review of The Painter and the Photograph by Van Deren Coke in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 107, No. 753 (December 1965), p. 635) The emphasis is on the photograph as used in the service of painting, or imitating painted images.There were a number of subsequent books on this topic including Volker Kahmen, Art History of Photography, trans. Brian Tubb (New York: Viking Press, 1974), Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (Museum of Modern Art, 1984), Andy Grundberg and Kathleen McCarthy Gauss, Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), Heinrich Schwarz & William Parker Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences (University of Chicago Press, 1987), Elizabeth W. Easton (ed.) Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard (Yale University Press, 2011), Barbara Buhler Lynes and Jonathan Weinberg (eds) Shared Intelligence: American Paintings and the Photograph (University of California Press, 2011). A useful article is Mark Prince, “Painting & Photography,” Art Monthly 260 (October 2002). Scharf does not here give the same emphasis on photography as an artistic medium in itself as much as he did in Creative Photography, though he does recognise the greater acceptance of photography as art in chapters on the mid Twentieth Century.
Art and Photography was widely and favourably reviewed. As early as 1969 Los Angeles Times art critic William Wilson was certain that it would "join standard texts on the subject" and in summary concluded that “Scharf, insists, in scholarly fashion, that photography has created a new situation we cannot call better or worse, only different, challenging. If the book proves anything, it is that art and photography are both art, interdependent, and yet so fundamentally different you can't really mistake one for the other.”William Wilson, 'The photographic eye and the artist's inner vision,' in Los Angeles Times, Sunday, 30 November 1969, p.647 It was welcomed in its most extended contemporary review in the Art Journal by Carl Chiarenza; "At long last a scholarly sourcebook has been published which attempts to organize the bewildering mass of documents relating to the interaction of photography and other media since 1839. Dr. Scharf's new book is absolutely indispensable to any research in the field; it will be the standard reference for a long time to come."Art and Photography by Aaron Scharf; Mirror Image, the Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society by Richard Rudisill review by Carl Chiarenza. Art Journal, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring, 1972), pp. 338+340+342+344+346+348+350 Marie Czach hailed it as "the definitive work on the subject of Art and Photography",Marie Czach review of Art History of Photography by Volker Kahmen, ARLIS/NA Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 4/5 (SUMMER 1975), p. S13.The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of North America while Ken Marantz declared it "carefully documented, appropriately illustrated, and readable...important, but the conclusion is particularly insightful..."Art and Photography by Aaron Scharf review by Ken Marantz. Studies in Art Education, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Spring, 1971), p. 71.National Art Education Association Robert A. Sobieszek considered it "one of the most appealing books in the field to be published in a long while...the sheer ambition of the work's scope covers the subject with a density lacking until now."Art and Photography by Aaron Scharf review by Robert A. Sobieszek, Aperture, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer 1970). Aperture Foundation, Inc. Earlier, Michael Webb likened the book to "an archaeological dig, laying bare a lost city on the evidence of an incoherent scatter of shards. Patiently the strata are revealed, the evidence accumulated, the fragments re-assembled."Art and Photography by Aaron Scharf review by Michael Webb, in Leonardo, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct. 1969), p. 438. The MIT Press In 1981, Peter Galassi, in his own book on the subject wrote that "the most important and influential work on painting and photography is Aaron Scharf's [book]".
Art and Photography appears in David Hockney's painting My Parents, 1977 (Tate, London) in which the painter's father is engrossed in reading the book;Jonathon Jones, 'Portrait of the week, No.91, David Hockney's My Parents (1977),' in The Guardian, Saturday, 19 January 2002, p.54 this is significant in indicating the connection between the Scharf's discoveries and the later Hockney-Falco thesis.
At the time of publication, Scharf had become head of the History of Art and Complementary Studies Department at St. Martin’s School of Art, London. The couple settled in Hampstead.
Scharf’s peer, and also friend and frequent correspondent, was Van Deren Coke, whose own studies into the links between art and photography were published as The Painter and the Photograph a year earlier than Creative Photography, but without the same circulation and international reception,Thirty-four editions of 'Art and Photography' were published between 1963 and 1994 in 3 languages revised and enlarged from the 1964 catalogue issued under the same title for the exhibition curated by Van Deren Coke which toured the US in 1964 and 1965.The Painter and the Photograph was reviewed, prior to his own publication, by Aaron Scharf who wrote: "Coke's admirable little book (which was produced also as a catalogue for a travelling exhibition in the United States) makes a large contribution.". The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 107, No. 753 (December 1965), p. 635