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.