Inspirations and Speculations
The inspiration for this website was Susan Seidelman’s 1994 short film The Dutch Master (1994) where the dental hygienist Teresa becomes fascinated by a Dutch painting in MoMa. The painting’s characters suddenly take on a life of their own and Teresa enters an erotic fantasy world of luxurious colours and sensual costumes. As a result […]
Other Painter Biopics
Vincent Van Gogh has had the most films made about him followed by Rembrandt van Rijin and Pablo Picasso. The other painters come from Ireland, Argentina, Hungary, Estonia and Russia among many other countries. The order of the list down to Jackson Pollock has been determined by the number of films made about the painter. […]
East Asian Painting and Cinema
Biopics about Japanese, South Korean and Chinese painters among other films. The groundbreaking, seminal study edited by Ehrlich and Desser on Sino-Japanese paintings and film must be mentioned at the start (see bibliography). Donald Richie’s article from it on “Film and the Visual Arts in Japan” can serve as a brief introduction here where he […]
Queer Biopics
Films about Andy Warhol and David Hockney in particular, but also about Caravaggio, Salvador Dalí, Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarowicz. Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio can also be found in the Individual Directors sections and in the following article about “the emergence of the queer artist biopic” by David Bovey. Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio (1571-1610) […]
Biopics of Twenty-Two Women Painters
There are uncanny parallels between the difficulties budding women painters and film directors have encountered breaking into their respective fields. And while progress has been made, it has been an unacceptably long haul. Twenty-two women painters have been the subject of one or more film biopic. Eleven of the films now to come were directed […]