Top Five: Paintings into movies?

A couple weeks ago we learned that a fetid Thomas Kinkade painting has a future as a movie. In a similar, er, spirit, here are five paintings that really should be movies:

1.) Pierre Bonnard, The Terrace at Vernonnet (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Bonnard painted film stills before there were film stills. (Cinema was born in France in 1895. Here's where that fits on Bonnard's timeline.) His compositions crackle with tension between people, movement at the edges of the picture, and as a colorist Matisse is his only peer. I could have picked any one of 50 Bonnards to list here, but this one is particularly mysterious.

2.) James Rosenquist, F-111 (Museum of Modern Art). Is Rosenquist generally considered to be a narrative painter, a contemporary history painter? He should be. I know it's difficult for MoMA to have a painting this massive on view more often, but it's one of those contemporary masterpieces that should I always feel like I need more time with. (Of course when a painting is bigger than my apartment...)

3.) Henri Matisse, The Music Lesson (Barnes Foundation). This painting isn't as well-known as is its abstracted brother, MoMA's Piano Lesson. In many ways that's a bolder painting, but the Barnes' version is tenser, crueler, quicker. (It was painted just days before Matisse's son was to leave to fight in WWI.) How cruel is this painting? Matisse's wife Amelie has been banished to the out of doors. Matisse's Reclining Nude sculpture of her, made 10 years prior, hovers menacingly above her. And if that's not enough, the painting in the upper-right corner of the painting appears to be a conflation of two Matisse portraits of two famed beauties: one of Matisse's pupil Olga Merson and one of Greta Prozor. Matisse did not sleep with Prozor -- but he may have slept with Merson. (Biographer Hilary Spurling emphatically says no, but there's no question that Matisse was more captivated by Merson than by his wife. Interestingly, Matisse seems to have attempted to soften the psychological impact of Merson's inclusion in a sensitive family moment by mixing two portraits.)

4.) Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (Hirshhorn). Ruscha's masterpiece. Why is the museum on fire? And how will the fire end -- or will it? Sure, there are art historical answers to these questions, but the movie version wouldn't have to follow reality, would it? I see Johnny Depp as the art critic and Angelina Jolie as, well, anything.

5.) Eric Fischl, The Funeral: A Band of Men (2 Women) Abandonment! (Hirshhorn). I wrote about this painting five years ago and a Hirshhornian emailed me to tell me the painting's origin. I'll tell you what I told him: I know, but I wish I didn't. The painting tells a sad enough story without knowing, well, the story.

Bloggers: List your top five and I'll link to them on Friday. (Make sure you link back here so I see it via Technorati.)