Capturing the Moment? It’s more painting by numbers in this so-so Tate show

Painting and photography square off in this new show full of big hitters but with no clear message or purpose

Alice Neel’s 1955 piece, ‘Dominican Boys on 108th Street’, gets ‘kicked right out of the gallery’ (The Estate of Alice Neel/Tate)

Painting is supposedly undergoing a renaissance, but there’s barely an artist working today who doesn’t employ photography in one form or another. Indeed, in our photo-tweaking, Instagram-posting, image-manipulating times, painting has become, it could be argued, a mere by-product of photography.

This potentially hugely vexed field provides fertile ground for a major Tate exhibition, exploring the “dynamic relationship between contemporary painting and photography”. Capturing the Moment draws substantially on the collection of the Yageo Foundation, created by the Taiwanese electronics giant, which famously bought David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) for $89m – then the most expensive painting by a living artist – in 2018. The show puts modern master paintings by the likes of Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter and Peter Doig into “dialogue” with recent acquisitions by younger artists from the Tate’s own collection.

With the stage set for a really prickly and entertainingly rivalrous encounter between the two mediums, it’s surprising to find ourselves looking at paintings by Lucian Freud – an artist who prided himself on only painting directly from life – as we enter the show. The title of the room, however, gives the thinking behind the display and, indeed, the entire show, away: Painting in the Time of Photography. Since all painting has been somehow touched by an awareness of the possibilities of photography since the mid-19th century advent of the medium, the exhibition seems to regard just about any painting created since 1830 as within its remit. Freud’s poignant The Painter’s Mother IV (1973) is justified on the grounds of its downward-pointing – and arguably photographically inspired – angle over her crumpled features.