Aaron Scharf

Scharf’s own art production consisted of montages made from old photographs and/or 19th-century wood engravings, a selection of which were published by Bill Jay in his last issue as editor of Creative Camera. Jay had seen and was intrigued by the artworks each time he picked up Scharf’s copy for Album from his residence near the editorial offices and he published them accompanied by the art historian’s request that they be printed without a text; “No text this time! Give them no titles. Let them open up those little doors to mystery which Redon talks about”

During this period, Scharf contributed the entry on Henri Cartier-Bresson in the Encyclopædia Britannica. He had divorced Ruth, who went on to act for television and films, including Highlander (1986), The Lords of Discipline (1983) and The Ted Kennedy Jr. Story (1986). She died on 25 February 2009. He married Marina (née Betts).

He died on 21 January 1993, survived by his wife Marina and son Caleb, an astrophysicist.

Aaron had become ill and he and Marina moved to a farm at Briston, Melton Constable, Norfolk. In 1983 and semi-retired Scharf taught as a Visiting Lecturer in Photography in the Design Department at Norwich, even when ill and tired.

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; this is significant in indicating the connection between the Scharf’s discoveries and the later Hockney-Falco thesis.

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.” 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,” and hailed by Marie Czach as “the definitive work on the subject of Art and Photography”, while Ken Marantz declared it “carefully documented, appropriately illustrated, and readable…important, but the conclusion is particularly insightful…” 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.” 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.”

In 1969 Aaron Scharf joined The Open University, Milton Keynes, England, moving to Deanshanger 10 miles away. He stayed there, as Professor of Art History writing art history courses and pursuing personal research, until pressured out by other staff in 1982. Also in 1969, he visited the United States to deliver units on Photography in Modern Art and Seminar in Problems in the History of Photography for Stanford University’s 1969 Summer School. From August 1972 he was a member of the photography committee of the Arts Council chaired by Barry Lane with Tristram Powell, a BBC producer; Marina Vaizey, Sunday Times art critic; Bill Gaskins, head of the Audio-Visual Department at Sheffield Polytechnic; David Hurn of Magnum, Ron McCormick and Peter Turner, assistant editor of Creative Camera. The BBC’s landmark eight-part series Pioneers of Photography (1975) was fronted by Aaron Scharf and looked at the history and development of photography.

Scharf’s doctoral thesis at the Courtauld was eventually published with revisions and additions as Art and Photography (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1968), the expanded version of his Creative Photography (Studio Vista; New York : Van Nostrand Reinhold, London, 1965).

Scharf’s articles on photo history were published in the 1968 issues of Creative Camera magazine in his column, and in Album They reflected his eclectic interests in photography’s history, including spirit photography and Darwin’s use of photography, to discussion of the engravings on the backs of cartes-de-visite. Under the pressure of other work, he asked to be relieved of writing the Creative Camera column and ask that Van Deren Coke continue it, which he did until December 1969.

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, 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.

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.

During World War II he flew 46 missions as a bomber navigator and was award an Air Medal in November 1944, 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. 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.

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. 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 painting) 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.

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. While at the College Scharf used his artistic talents to draw cartoons for the cadet publications.

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, 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 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. Her husband meantime, was refused work or study in American universities, blacklisted because of his own socialism.