“Paintings and early and contemporary photographs are presented together according to traditional genres such as portraiture, still life, nudes and landscape, highlighting the universality of the themes and influences across all the works, both past and present.
Drawing attention to one particular and rich strand of photography’s history – that of the influence and inspiration of historical painting – the exhibition features pictures by the greatest British and French photographers alongside work by an international array of contemporary artists. It includes new photography and video specially commissioned for the exhibition and on public display for the first time, plus works rarely seen in the UK.” (from the National Gallery website)
“Seduced by Art is the first major exhibition of photography at the National Gallery. Its curator, Hope Kingsley, describes it as a three-way project linking contemporary photography with two sets of Old Masters, those of the past four centuries of fine art and those of the first three decades of photography. Its thesis is that the first photographers were indeed seduced by art, mining the old to make the new, and that contemporary photographers continue to draw deep inspiration from that tradition.” (Alex Danchev in The Times Literary Supplement, 14 December 2012)
“… the curators don’t bother to rehearse the succession of arguments that point out the already obvious relationships between painting and photography as they have been drawn over some 180 years. Rather, arranging the show in a series of thematic galleries – portraits, the figure, tableaux, still life and landscape – they focus on works from the first and the last 30 years of the medium. They juxtapose the historical and the contemporary and leave out everything between.” (Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times, 30 October 2012)
