As the visually oriented, process-obsessed seekers that we artists are, kicking back and taking in a movie related to our favorite subject is, apart from actually being at the easel, up there with as good as it gets.
Inside Art has previously brought you two wide-ranging round-ups of films about the lives of artists, which you can look back on here and here.
Now we offer our selection of five favorites (and one bonus vid that doesn’t really count because it’s a documentary but is fairly new and very interesting).
FRIDA
This is the true story of Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) and her husband Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), the larger-than-life painters who became the most acclaimed artists in Mexican history, and whose tempestuous love affair, landmark journeys to America, and outrageous personalities made them legendary.
Set in Mexico City, this visually evocative film explores Kahlo’s forward-thinking artistic, political and sexual attitudes as we witness a hard-drinking, passionate woman of the early 1900s, which earned an Oscar nomination for Salma Hayek. Throughout the film, various scenes start as a shot of one of Kahlo’s real-life paintings before slowly dissolving into a live action scene with actors.
LOVING VINCENT
Loving Vincent is an incredible hand-painted animated film about the life of van Gogh and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. Each of the film’s 65,000 frames is an oil painting on canvas, created using the same techniques as Van Gogh by a team of 125 artists drawn from around the globe.
The first fully painted animated feature film, it was conceived as a seven-minute short film in 2008, funded for full length through a Kickstarter campaign, and released in 2017. Loving Vincent was realized by Dorota Kobiela, a painter herself, after studying the techniques and the artist’s story through his letters.
One of the painter-animators on the film, Dena Peterson, has a video in which she demonstrates her mastery of Vincent’s technique so you can master it too. Check out Loving van Gogh
Here too, we must give a shout-out to the excellent At Eternity’s Gate an intense look inside Vincent’s world and his creative life, based on his letters to Theo, directed by Julian Schnabel and starring Willem Defoe. It’s a total love letter to painting and painters. Memorable line: “Sometimes they say I’m mad but … a grain of madness is the best of art.”
POLLOCK
A 10-year labor of love, Pollock is a masterpiece of period cinema, written, directed, and starring Ed Harris. The movie brings alive the time and the energy surrounding Pollock and the abstract expressionists. We get a street-level look at the lives, loves, and literal brawls that played out among the (at first) penniless artists, admirers, critics, curators, magazines, tastemakers, and super-rich patrons in the galleries and lofts in New York City and eastern Long Island during the 1950s. There’s an unforgettable scene in which, as young artists, Lee Krasner understands history is being made before her eyes as she watches Jackson wrest an entirely new synthesis of psycho-mythological dream imagery, Picasso, surrealism and modernist abstraction onto canvas.
MODIGLIANI
Set in Paris in 1919, this biopic centers on the life of late Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, focusing on his last days and his rivalry with Pablo Picasso. The free-spirited, Jewish Modigliani has fallen in love with young, beautiful Catholic Jeanne. They have an illegitimate child, whom Jeanne’s bigoted parents send to a faraway convent to be raised by nuns. The distraught Modigliani needs money to rescue and raise his child.
The answer arrives in the shape of Paris’ annual art competition. Prize money and a guaranteed career await the winner. Neither Modigliani nor his dearest friend and rival Picasso has ever entered the competition, believing that it is beneath true artists like themselves. But push comes to shove with his child’s welfare on the line, and Modigliani signs up for the competition in a drunken and drug-induced tirade. Picasso follows suit, and all of Paris is aflutter with excitement about who will win. With the balance of his relationship with Jeanne on the line, Modigliani tackles this work with the hopes of creating a masterpiece, and knows that all the artists of Paris are doing the same.
Amadeo Modigliani, Woman with Red Hair, 3 ft x 2 ft, oil, 1919
Even if you do not recognize the name, you’ve probably seen Modigliani’s elongated, dream-like portraits of the women he knew from the Bohemian scene of early 20th century Paris. In real life, Modigliani was kind of a maniac, brilliant and unkempt, sleeping on the streets, often raving about art, truth, and beauty while getting night-club friends and fellow artists to buy him drink and after drink in the Montmartre café’s. He died at 35.
GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING
Girl with a Pearl Earring, adapted from a work of fiction by author Tracy Chevalier, tells a story about possible events surrounding the creation of the painting “Girl With a Pearl Earring” by 17th century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. Little is known about the girl in the painting; it’s thought she was a maid who lived in the house of the painter along with his family and other servants, though there is no historical evidence for the idea.
This masterful film attempts to recreate the mysterious girl’s life. Griet, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a maid in the house owned by Vermeer, played by British actor Colin Firth. Vermeer’s wealthy patron and sole means of support, Van Ruijven, commissions him to paint Griet with the intent that he will have her for himself before it is finished. She must somehow secretly pose for the crucial painting without the knowledge of Vermeer’s wife, avoid Van Ruijven’s grasp, and protect herself from the cruel gossip of the world of a 17th century small-town style city.
BONUS FILM: LEONORA CARRINGTON, THE LOST SURREALIST
Leonora Carrington, the “Sorceress of Surrealism” was a British-born surrealist painter and novelist. She lived in Paris, New York, Spain, and Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
Since her death in 2011, her work has steadily been attracting more and more interest from major museums, curators, and art historians, who now realize her work places her among the most important female surrealist artists of the 20th century. There isn’t a biopic for Leonora yet – just several Youtube documentaries like this one – but it’s a sure bet there will be, and soon.
AND…?
Plenty of other films about the lives of the artists could have made this list – Camille Claudel, Edvard Munch – if you have ideas, let me know.
