Huge, impersonal canvases designed for the walls of billionaires: Tate Modern's Capturing the Moment reviewed

‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. So shouldn’t painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?’ argued Picasso. The inventor of cubism took advantage of his liberty in ‘Buste de Femme’ (1938) to turn Dora Maar into a precursor of Peppa Pig, flaring her nostrils to form a snout. Perhaps he wanted to teach a photographer a lesson about paint by rubbing her nose in it.

Picasso didn’t abandon the subject or the anecdote. He was one of the first modern artists to turn a news event into a painting – Maar compared ‘Guernica’ to ‘an immense photograph’ – and the contemporary artists in Tate Modern’s new show focusing on the relationship between photography and painting have piled in after him. Some have even riffled the same news sources: Marlene Dumas in her painting ‘Stern’ (2004) recycles the same magazine shot of the dead Ulrike Meinhof used by Gerhard Richter in an earlier series of paintings from 1988, like two vultures picking over the same corpse.