Abstract

Art
Alloway, Lawrence | December 29, 1969 issue

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Photography has been credited with the destruction, or at least the outdating of, realist painting, the argument was usually the utilitarian one. When that came to seem not quite true, it was reckoned that the camera must, at least, have wiped out narrative painting. Thus television commercials took the place of genre painting. These crudely evolutionary views usually originated with the supporters of non-figurative art, among them Malevich, and despite their pleasant simplicity are fallacious. Photographic references both intensify illusion and affirm artificiality. This interplay of accurate reference and syntactic curiosity occurs because the camera provides both a direct record and a distorting one.

See Also:

PHOTOGRAPHY; GENRE painting; PAINTING; TELEVISION; NARRATIVE painting; CAMERAS
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