Art History Question - Essay Example

Before industrialization, artists used to paint observable landscapes, representations of the common activities among the people such as farming and many other representations from imagination. When technology began getting integrated in art and industrialization became widespread, artists responded by changing their manner of painting. By the 1880’s, artists and photographers were reacting to the current industrial conditions in their works of art. People were divided in to two, with some preferring the original painting by artists while some changed their preference to the new developments whereby cameras were used to produce a perfect portrait of people and objects.

Many of the artists in America turned to publishing periodicals such as ‘Harper’s Weekly’ where they could represent their artistic work (Halliwell 1998 p. 97)The artists changed from the original portraits of people in farms to pictures of people operating machines. They had to develop a new way of representing their messages to the people who had changed their lifestyles. They had to match their art with the changing social and political environment. People preferred art work developed through the techniques that were more recent, assuming them to be superior and state of the art.

They felt such art matched with the modern lifestyle. These changes had to be considered, with some artists concentrating on the development of images through photography as a form of art. Artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and Brady Mathews were amongst the artists who used cameras as a form of art for developing portraits to represent facts (Bohan 2006 pp 67-71). Bibliography1. Halliwell S. The 19th Century: Artists, Writers, and Composers, Steck-Vaughn, 1998.2. Bohan R. American Art, 1850-1920.

University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.