@ Pherdinand:
The final selection of works is by Picasso. The collection showcases Boy With a Pipe, 1905, from the artist’s "Blue Period". Study of the artist’s collection of photographs indicates that his Blue and Rose periods may have been inspired by blue-tinted cyanotype prints of the time.
Picasso also took a great many documentary and ethnic photographs which he later used in developing his cubist style. In looking at his work and the earlier work of Gaugin,
you can easily see that the foreign influences on European art would never have been as strong had it not been for access to photography.
Rarely does an exhibition convey as clear a vision of artists' thought processes as this one. Not only does the exhibit juxtapose source materials, studies and completed works, it also compares different artists from this dynamic period and effectively shows how each used photography to a different end.
What becomes immediately apparent is that the camera has profoundly influenced the very concept of "modern art." The use of the camera forever changed the way artists perceive the world and their role as artists.
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This quote:
The use of the camera forever changed the way artists perceive the world and their role as artists.
Is the key to the argument. Prior to the invention of photography, the artists role was to do the camera's job. The degree of accuracy between subject and object painting was the measure of the artist. This was not "art" per se, but "skill".
This photography caused these technicians that we incorrectly call "astists" - they were "painters", to react to new technology by moving toward abstraction, modern art, which
is art. Prior to this, if we were moved emotionally at a painting, we were moved by the scene itself (Christians weeping at scenes of the crucifixion... etc.) and/or the skill at which whatever object was represented (though this is more admiration than it is an emotional response).
The painters weren't using the medium to try to communicate
anything. Therefore, prior to the advent of modern art - a reaction to the emergence of photography which ate their lunch (literally), there were no "artists" only "painters". They were documentarians, not artists, skilled as though they may be.
For this reason, photography is not art. Photographers are not artists, they are photographers. Painters are painters, not artists in the same way "illustrators" are not artists - a distinction no one ever questions. No artist existed prior to the advent of Modern Art, which is art, and which was a reaction to the introduction of new (at the time) technology. Picasso and his contemporaries were the first artists, and had it not been for he and his contemporaries, "painters" might well have been rendered obsolete by photography. They went from "painters" to "artists". Today, no one wants to be a "painter", they my take jobs as "illustrators" but show their "art" in art galleries, which is certain to be abstract, which would not have been the case had it not been for Picasso and other abstract paintings, who made art in reaction to the advent of the camera that rendered their skills at painting - not making art, obsolete.
