If Steichen had used the camera as a painter would (once he even photographed himself with brush and palette), Strand treated it like a knife.
It has been a while since sculpture could be dismissed as "something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting," as Ad Reinhardt, the Abstract Expressionist painter, once said.
He presents himself not as just a painter but as an artist-painter.
(He once declared, "As a painter, I have to have a mountain").
Once marginalized as a "painter of dancers," Degas is now counted among the most complex and innovative figures of his generation, credited with influencing Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and many of the leading figurative artists of the 20th century.
Though his name rings few bells today, Alexander Helwig Wyant once achieved fame as a painter of naturalistic landscapes -- a bit on the somber, elegiac side, to be sure -- inspired mainly by views in the Adirondacks and later in the Catskills.
Where once Sisley's definition of himself as a painter seemed open to national debate, now, aged 57, he was a French Impressionist.
"I started out as a painter and some of that has survived in me," Wenders once said in an interview.
He once said that he thought of himself purely as a painter; and it is instructive to see the canvases alongside the sculptures.
He once told a German protégée, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607 78), who was known as a painter and a poet, that she was wasting her intellect studying Hebrew and theology.
