NEW YORK.- The Grey Art Gallery presents the exhibit Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880-1910. New technologies often inspire artistic innovation. Moving Pictures explores links between the earliest movies and other American visual art forms at the turn of the twentieth century. The first exhibition to integrate cinema into a history of American art, the show reveals how motion pictures impacted perception, visual representation, and definitions of reality. Films— consisting mostly of short, one-to-two minutes of “real life” footage—are installed alongside artworks, providing provocative juxtapositions and stimulating new insights into our understanding of nascent cinema as well as older mediums such as painting, drawing, and printmaking.

Moving Pictures is presented in four parts: suggests parallels between films and time-honored genres such as landscape and marine painting. Examines the influence of motion photography on depictions of the human figure in art and film during the 1890s. Demonstrates the shift in painterly and cinematic depictions of urban life after 1900—from Impressionist visions to gritty realist depictions. Explores the mutual fascination between fine arts practitioners and filmmakers in the early days of the new medium. Highlighting multifaceted interrelationships between movies and other visual art forms, Moving Pictures offers groundbreaking reinterpretations of this crucial period in modern American culture.