hotography, which was invented in 1825 and became a constant by the 1850s, had the ability to capture the moment and freeze time rendered portrait painting almost unnecessary as a way to capture the subject for eternity. Vanity and narcissism had a hay-day with photography. Oriental prints used genre themes and incorporated composition techniques that attracted the attention of the impressionistic artists. With the quality and quantity of photographic images and printing the common person could own and display images at a reasonable cost. During the 20th century artists began to look for way to be more expressive, sometimes to the point of reaction. For the artist emotion is everything and the interpretation is left to the viewer, many times with different reactions from different people. Art became a colorless topic with numerous questions and the leading inquiry was "Is it Art?" The Piazza San Marco, an oil on linen painting by Renoir is a series of blurred images and the human form is lost in the smudges. Even clearer images such, as La Lecture by Morisot where the human form of a young girl can be distinguished is still blurred and unclear. It is as if the movement wanted to wipe out humanity or blend it into the universal surroundings.Expressionism, the artistic style that the artist seeks to display not reality, but emotions and responses. Typically, the art uses distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy to evoke a response from the viewer. In 1911, a new group of German Expressionists opens the way towards abstraction with it experimentation and originality. It is Wassily Kandinsky, who is most often credited with painting the first Abstract picture, in 1910. Abstraction distorts the human form and makes it almost unascertainable. Cubism as can be seen in the George Braque painting of Picasso, to the left, the cubistic style demands that the pictorial elements be influenced by the intersecting of transparent cub...
