... have seen a fair number of famous paintings in person. They looked much different than reproductions I've viewed in books and whatnot and were much more impressive and awesome. (Particularly a dozen or so by Van Gogh which blew me away. I had to turn to a stranger and express my amazement, bashfulness notwithstanding.)
Have you experienced this as well? If so, how much do you think is lost when viewing a reproduction as compared to an original? Is it a totally different experience? And what accounts for the loss? You're still viewing the same painting in essence after all.
If there is a difference it would seem important to view originals. Should artists make a point of doing that, despite the hassle of making trips to museums and shelling out loot for admission?
Sorry to be so inquisitive.
This is a very good question, and brings up some profound differences in the experience of art.
In some very deep ways viewing a reproduction is nothing like viewing a painting.
One of the things that most artists know these days is that reproductions, no matter how good, are always at least a little off, and sometimes nearly unrecognizable. The flat image on paper, no matter how carefully photographed and printed, is nothing like the painting in person.
This as far as I can tell is due to optics, the nature of the materials used, and the three-dimensional nature of our universe.
A painting is not an image. It is a three-dimensional construction of optically sophisticated materials.
Paint is not simply color, but ground particles of one or more colored materials (pigments) suspended in a medium (the binder). It has a three-dimensional physicality. Even painters who paint as flatly and smoothly and thinly as they can deal with the nature of layers of paint and the mix of physical pigments.
Paint as a physical object also has optical properties. Different pigments have varying levels of opacity, of reflectivity, of brilliance. Some have sheens of different colors that only show up in certain lightings or at certain angles. There are dozens of commonly used pigments, hundreds all told, each of which has its own unique wavelengths of light which may not always be approximated by the limited range of colors available as printers' inks.
A painting in front of you is a complex object made of many layers. Some paintings have dozens or hundreds of layers, microscopically thin. And that's not even getting into artists who used the physicality of paint as a three-dimensional substance itself, such as
Turner or
Rembrandt.
A printed reproduction is a completely flat object, made optically by blending four or more colors of transparent ink on paper. No matter how well photographed or color matched, it will always miss some of the nuances of the original.
One difference between digital art and painting (and sculpture for that matter) is that digital art really is completely flat, whereas even the thinnest of watercolors on paper has genuine three-dimensional depth. Digital art looks better in reproduction than paintings because it shares the flatness of the reproduction (although the nature of colors in digital art means that they can never be truly matched in reproduction).
Some of this effect may be because of size and presence. Most paintings are far larger than their reproductions. Seurat's
"Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte" is lovely and well-known, but how many people are aware that the figures in the foreground are nearly life-sized? Standing in front of it, it fills one's awareness.
Not even the best reproduction duplicates that experience.
