Movies about artists... waiting to be made into films

Here, again in no particular order, is a list of artists about whom interesting movies could be made. In one or two cases, it's really surprising that we don't have movies given the colorful details surrounding some of these artists.

Whistler was such a flamboyant character and his famous lawsuit for slander would make for fun cinema as well as his notorious painting of Madame X (in which he portrayed her with the strap of her dress fallen down her shoulder only to repaint it with the strap up after enormous public pressure.) Wouldn't all this have made for a great film? Where are Merchant and Ivory when we need them?

Salvador Dali. I mean, really, the old boy must be squirming in his grave knowing that after all his publicity stunts, his weird behavior, bizarre relationships and influential art, mugging thousands of times for photographers with that ridiculous mustache, nobody has bothered to make a movie out of his life. It's not like there's a shortage of material here.

Joseph Cornell. If you've ever read Deborah Solomon's wonderful and cleverly named 1997 biography, "Utopia Parkway," you'll know that the weird banality of this man who lived with his mother and his sickly brother might make a movie very different from the kind we wish for from Dali's life. Cornell's surreal (some would say creepy) boxes, tacked together in his Queens basement, were part of a very different life punctuated with visits from other, younger adoring artists or chauffeur-driven visits from people like actor and collector Tony Curtis who enjoyed taking Cornell out for rides in the limo. Think Grey Gardens focused on a hapless but successful artist.

Andrew Wyeth and the Helga paintings. The secret paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Was this a great marketing ploy played out to gain enormous publicity? The almost reclusive Wyeth found himself on the covers of Time and Newsweek the summer this body of work was revealed. But if, as Wyeth himself declared, the paintings were about "love" and the whole decade-long depiction of Helga in these images had been a secret kept from Betsy Wyeth, then how is it that Helga was retained as part of Betsy's staff for so long after the revelation of this work? (Betsy Wyeth oversaw the licensing and archiving side of the Wyeth image empire.) Was the secret aspect of these paintings a case of marketing hype or was this a case of one woman who knew that you keep your friends close and your enemies closer?

Robert Henri. An artist with a made-up name he acquired because his father had shot a man out west, fled to the east coast and gave everyone in the family a different alias to protect them from the scandal should he ever be caught. Henri was THE influential teacher of so many beloved American painters and yet his own art was only of moderate commercial success. His little sayings and quips in the art schools were collected by Margery Ryerson, one of his students, and have never been out of print even though Henri died 80 years ago. He loved painting portraits but did not have that many commissions. That left him free to do things like paint portraits of Irish urchins that charm us to no end today. A list of his students and followers reads like a Who's Who of American Art: Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davis, Bellows, Prendergast, Lawson, Davies...

If you've read this far, you're probably the sort of person who has his or her own list of candidates for bio-pics.

Movies about artists

I took a summer course in July, here at Hofstra University where I also teach. The course, was taught by Professor Alexander Naymark and met four days a week for 2 hours ten minutes each afternoon. The curriculum examined how artists' biographies are portrayed in the movies. For 16 days we watched a lot of movies about artists. Most were made for entertainment, not as documentaries.

Some, like The Girl with the Pearl Earring, are largely fiction because in the case of Vermeer, for example, we don't know much about the artist and we know even less about his family and life. So when the film imagines him with a shrewish wife and a controlling mother-in-law, we are left to wonder how likely that really was. We do know that his Catholic family had eleven children. It wasn't easy being an artist, even in Holland's so-called Golden Age.

In other cases we have a great deal of information about the artist portrayed, particularly artists of more recent history. Basquiat is a wonderful film made by another artist (Julian Schnabel) who knew and exhibited with Basquiat in some of the same galleries, at more or less the same time.

Here is a list (in no particular order) of some of my favorite movies about artists:

Rembrandt (1936) Charles Laughton in the title role and Elsa Lancester as Hendrickje Stoffels. Laughton seems to have had a great time with this role and, judging from recent Rembrandt bios and research, his portrayal may not have been far off the mark.

Basquiat (1996) Jeffrey Wright in the title role and a youthful Benicio del Toro as his close friend, David Bowie as Warhol, also Willem Dafoe in a cameo of sorts, Christopher Walken, Courtney Love and Tatum O'Neal

Goya's Ghosts (2006) Milos Forman's movie was around for about ten minutes when it was released in 2006. Like Girl with a Pearl Earring, it is a piece of fiction using some historical figures. Stellan Skarsgard is endearing as Goya. Randy Quaid is a delight as the oafish Spanish King Carlos IV. Natalie Portman is the beautiful young woman tortured by the Inquisition. Javier Bardem is the evil and powerful cleric of the Inquisition.

Moulin Rouge (1952) If you can get past the corny device of having Jose Ferrer simultaneously play both Toulouse-Lautrec and his disapproving father, the count, and if you can get past a lip-syncing Zsa-Zsa Gabor as the chanteuse, Jane Avril, then this is a fun recreation of the time and place. The causes and details of Toulouse-Lautrec's early demise are conveyed in a simplified Reader's Digest style.

Surviving Picasso (1996) This was Merchant-Ivory at their best and although I don't think Anthony Hopkins was the obvious first choice to play Picasso, he does a terrific job. (Who else could credibly portray figures as disparate as Picasso and Nixon in one acting career?) Based on Arianna Huffington's book, the movie focuses on Francoise Gilot's ten years as one in a parade of wives and mistresses who had to live with this monster and creative genius.

Modigliani (2004) I'm not sure this film, which was written and directed by Mick Davis, got much exposure here in the U.S. when it was released but Andy Garcia does a great job of capturing the essence of the tragically creative figure. His no-less-tragic lover, Jeanne Hebuterne is played by Elsa Zylberstein. A beautifully sad story, well told.

Frida (2002) Julie Taymor does a pretty good job of capturing the essence and key points of Kahlo's art, career, personality and struggles, physical and otherwise. Selma Hayek and Alfred Molina as Kahlo and Rivera. After seeing this film again recently I went to an early 1980s edition of Encyclopedia Brittannica to see what it had to say about Kahlo. Nada. The artist did not exist for art historians until the mid 80s. In part, we have collectors like Madonna to thank for that.

Artemesia (1997) That would be Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), daughter of the more famous Orazio Gentileschi. French film with screenplay and direction by Agnes Merlet. With a lithe and tanned Valentina Cervi (photo, above) in the title role. This is a sexed-up version of a story only partly understood by historians. Artemsia studied with her father and then apprenticed with his rival, Tassi, who later finds himself charged with her rape. All the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller. Well done but not without some significant distortions to what facts we do know.

I've left Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy off my list of favorites. It's subjective, I know, but I find those two a little heavy-handed in that mid-20th century Hollywood kind of way.

Tomorrow: Artists whose biographies would make great movies.