Artist Daniela Roughsedge maintains a marvelous online list of films about artist’s lives over at the artist’s website and forum-hosting platform ArtFinder.com.
You need to create an account to view the list, but sign up is free and apparently pretty harmless. And you can opt to receive an email whenever Daniela’s list is updated or someone posts a new film idea in the comments, which is every so often.
Now, these are not necessarily easy-to-find films that you can watch for free on YouTube (though some of them definitely are). And you may or may not find them on Amazon, Hulu or Netflix at any given moment. Let’s face it, “Vincent and Theo” just isn’t going to have quite the blockbuster mass appeal of “Titanic” or “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Which is fine!
Yet, some of these are really obscure. You’ll have to sift through on your own to find the ones you like. But if you’re ready to get your art geek on, you can create an account and view the list here. Or you can check out a few highlights and trailers below.
Classics:
*Rembrandt (1936) film directed by Alexander Korda
*Lust for Life (1956) – Director: Vincente Minnelli
*The Rebel (Call Me Genius) (1961)
The Rebel is a comedy, a British satire from the stylish’ ’60s. This is one you can watch for free on YouTube.
*The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965). Director: Carol Reed
*Biography: Andrew Wyeth (1980)
*Egon Schiele – Exzesse (1981) Director: Herbert Vesely
*The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) –Director: Peter Greenway
*Caravaggio (1986) – Director: Derek Jarman
*My Left Foot (1989)
*Vincent & Theo (1990) – Director: Robert Altman
*Charles Rennie Mackintosh – A Modern Man (1996) directed by Richard Downes
*Incognito (1997). Director: John Badham
*Paul Henry – Into the West (1997) BBC documentary YouTube
*Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998). Director: John Maybury
*Man Ray: Prophet of the Avant-Garde (1999)
*Pollock (2000) Director: Ed Harris
IMDB page with trailer for Pollock, written, directed, and starring Ed Harris.
After 2000, films about artists proliferate. Between Frida (2002) – Trailer and Hilma (2022 – Director: Lasse Hallström – Trailer) there are dozens – too many to list here.
(Still, we can’t resist mentioning Willem Defoe as van Gogh in Eternity’s Gate (2018 –Trailer)
We’d love to hear from you about your ideas and favorite films about artists. Send em in!
If films about ART and how to make it are more to your taste, check out Streamline’s PaintTube line of teaching DVDs and search by genre, medium, subject, and many other particulars right here.
Princeton Acquires Abstract Masterworks
Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (613-3), 1986. Promised gift of Preston H. Haskell, Class of 1960. © Gerhard Richter / Photo: Douglas J. Eng
Princeton University Art Museum has been gifted a trove of abstract works by Gerhard Richter, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem De Kooning and others in the largest donation in the institution’s long history.
The donated works, from Princeton alumnus Preston Haskell, were accompanied by an unspecified sum – the latest donation to enable the construction of a new Princeton University Art Museum being constructed on the site of the old.
The Princeton University Art Museum’s collections date to the 1750s, when the first works of art entered the collection of what was then the College of New Jersey, making it one of the oldest art collections in North America. In 2018, the University announced that Adjaye had been selected to design the new building, in collaboration with Cooper Robertson. The new building is rising on the site of the previous museum, and its design also will shape a new home for the University’s Department of Art and Archaeology, while retaining Marquand Library. Together, the three units will continue to function as a dynamic center for research and teaching all but unique in higher education.
