Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

Who Would You Pick To Play Picasso? Plus, Best And Worst Artists’ Films

Most movies about art and artists leave a lot to be desired. We shall see how Picasso is treated in a movie about the making of Guernica, with Antonio Banderas starring as the artist. Banderas, who like Picasso is a Malaga native, said that he “turned down the chance at one point of playing Mr. Pablo, but the time has come in my life where I understand him better, and I am nearly at the age he was when those events happened, in 1937, when he was 55 or 56, and I’m getting close,” according to Fox News Latino. Banderas is 54.

Antonio_BanderasCarlos Saura will direct the movie, to be called “33 dias.” That’s about how long Picasso spent painting Guernica. 

Oh, the movie will also star Gwyneth Paltrow; IMDB says she is “rumored” to be playing Dora Maar.

You can find a few more details are here, but there’s nothing on a production schedule. IMDB puts release as 2015, and lists more cast and crew members.

I couldn’t think of any good artists’ biopics — I haven’t seen that many — but it turns out that Getty curators have been pondering the question, and they made a list. In a February blog post about art in movies, they named these as “the best biopics”:

  • The Moon and Sixpence (1942), about the life of Paul Gauguin
  • Moulin Rouge (1952), about Henri de Toulouse–Lautrec
  • The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), starring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo
  • Caravaggio (1986), about the story late-Renaissance master
  • Camille Claudel (1988), about the tormented sculptor (and Rodin’s muse)
  • Basquiat (1996), about the brilliant American painter
  • Artemisia (1997), about the 16th painter
  • Pollock (2000), which includes the story of one of the artist’s most important commissions, Mural, 1943

That post also lists movies, good and bad, that have “art on the big screen.” Where do you think they put Legal Eagles, about the Rothko case?

 

Friendship Outs: Giant Gift Of Marin Watercolors Goes To…

Not a museum in Maine, where he painted for much of his last 40 years. Not a museum in New York, the center of the U.S. art world, or in Los Angeles, the west coast hub. Or New Jersey, Marin’s birthplace.

Tree, Stonington, Deer IsleNo, Norma B. Marin, the artist’s daughter-in-law, recently donated nearly 300 watercolors, drawings and sketchbooks to the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, according to the Kennebec Journal.

…Norma Marin’s gift to the Arkansas Arts Center was neither random nor the result of a falling out with Maine’s cultural institutions, as some speculated when the gift was announced. Instead, it was the result of a cultivated friendship between Norma Marin and the Little Rock museum and based on the expertise of the center’s staff, past and present.

The curator who will interpret this gift studied Marin as part of her dissertation, and previous museum directors built the museum’s reputation on artworks done on paper. The Marin gift also helps satisfy Norma Marin’s goal of expanding her father-in-law’s artistic impact beyond Maine, where his stature is secure and where hundreds of his oil paintings, watercolors and drawings have permanent homes in museums statewide.

To put this in context: “…Colby College Museum of Art…holds [Maine’s] largest collection of Marin artwork, with more than 60 images.” And, “Combined, museums in Maine have more than 100 Marin paintings, drawings and prints in their collections…the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor has 26, the Portland Museum of Art has 13, Bowdoin has seven, and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art has two. His paintings are also part of many private collections in the state.”

So the gift is a big one.

There’s a lesson here, too, in specialization — something I’ve championed for museums. As the KJ explained:

In the 1970s, [Arkansas Arts Center] director Townsend D. Wolfe recognized that building the museum’s reputation through a strong collection of works on paper was a more affordable strategy than collecting oil paintings. He secured a purchase grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Among the first purchases were works by Andrew Wyeth and Willem de Kooning, vastly different painters but both among the best known in their genres in the last half of the 20th century….

[Now] The Arkansas Arts Center has more than 5,000 drawings in its collection, dating to the Renaissance and including works by 19th century American and European masters. The bulk of the collection is from 20th and 21st century artists…

Strength can attract more strength.

Photo Credit: Tree, Stonington, Deer Isle, Courtesy Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection via the Kennebec Journal

Thelma Golden Adds New Duty To Director’s Role

As if museum directors don’t have enough to do, Thelma Golden — director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem — has generously decided to be a consultant to artists.

thelmagIt is, of course, an attention-getter (and good for her on that score). Golden plans to hang up a consultant’s shingle at the museum at an event on Feb. 9 for artists living or working in Harlem. For three hours, from noon to 3 p.m., Golden will hold 15-minute meetings with artists — a bit like speed-dating — where she will review their work and assess their talent.

Only ten artists will merit this treatment, and to be one of them, you have to apply, with winners chosen in a lottery. (If you qualify, send your name, home or studio address in Harlem and phone number to holdingcourt@studiomuseum.org by 6pm on Friday, January 31.) “Winners” will be notified by Feb. 4 and asked to bring a resume, 10 images (not originals) and an artist statement.

The event “celebrates the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance and Contemporary Art and the Museum’s ongoing commitment to the Harlem arts community,” per the release — the latter I get, and am therefore happy to spread the word.

Would this work at other museums? Some. Will it spread? Somehow, I don’t think so.

 

Don’t Regret Missing “Civilisation” — Not Anymore

KClarke'sCivilisationI never saw Civilisation. But I — and you — can easily access it now on a free website, along with 492 other documentaries about art, and hundreds more about science, history, war, Britain, America and so on.

The site is called DocuWatch, and I have no idea how new or old it is. It was called to my attention today by a Facebook friend, and — considering the snow that is paralyzing much of the Northeast corridor and some other parts of the country, it seemed like to perfect time to share it with RCA readers. Maybe you’ll have Wednesday off.

The landmark BBC series, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, which was aired in Britain in 1969  (I don’t know when it ran in the U.S.), is there in 13 episodes (It was remastered in HD in 2011). So is an 18-part art history series, a 36-part series on Italian Renaissance artists, 24 episodes on Impressionism, plus a different series on eight Impressionist artists, two on Hitler’s museum, 10 Sister Wendy’s, Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New, Who the *$&% Is Jackson Pollock? and much more.

Hundreds of hours of free programming about art! 

Waugh Fans: Head to California

Waugh-HuntingtonIf you like Evelyn Waugh — and I do — you may be pleased to learn that about 250 rare books and reference books and 135 letters and manuscripts by the great English prose satirist have been given to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Ca.  (Unless, like me, you happen to live in New York, and wish they had gone to the Morgan Library,* which has some Waugh material, but has you will see below, not much by comparison with other institutions).

But really, that wouldn’t have happened: the Waugh trove was given by Loren and Frances Rothschild, and “Loren is a longtime book collector and current member of The Huntington’s five-person board of trustees,” the Huntington said. Says the press release:

According to John Wilson, associate professor of English at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania and founder of the Waugh Society, the Rothschilds’ gift establishes The Huntington as the second leading center of Waugh studies in the world, second only to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which acquired Waugh’s library in several batches from 1961 to 1991. Other institutions with Waugh holdings include the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the New York Public Library, Georgetown University, Leeds University, Leicester University, and Notre Dame University.

For the Huntington, the Waugh materials are another notch on its belt in 20th-century literature holdings. It already owns what it calls “significant archives” of writers like Conrad Aiken, Kingsley Amis, Charles Bukowksi, Octavia Butler, Kent Haruf, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Christopher Isherwood, Hilary Mantel, and Wallace Stevens. Some of them knew or worked with or admired Waugh, so the Huntington already owns Waugh materials.

I think I’ve read all of Waugh’s early novels – Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and Scoop (1938), plus, of course, Brideshead Revisited. I recommend them.

waugh_lettermcintyre_440But what’s in this trove? Some examples:

  • the handwritten manuscript of Waugh’s early travel book, Ninety-Two Days
  • Waugh’s hand-corrected typescript of his first novel, Decline and Fall, with the title page showing the alternate titles Picaresque, The Making of an Englishman, and A Study in Discouragement. Waugh crossed out each before settling on Decline and Fall, the first of many satires of British society
  •  the 17-page annotated original typed manuscript of The Hopeful Pontiff, Waugh’s essay on Pope John XXIII
  • more than 100 letters between Waugh and his English publisher, Chapman & Hall
  • a series of unpublished letters relating to the risk of a libel lawsuit resulting from the publication in the United States of The Loved One, Waugh’s satire on Forest Lawn, the Los Angeles–based funeral business
  • a copy of The Cynic, a rare 1916 subversive alternative to the official school journal, co-edited by Waugh, then a 13-year-old student at Heath Mount School.
  • a copy of the Broom, a short-lived 1923 publication with a story written by Waugh while at Oxford.
  • scores of Waugh’s articles, essays, and fiction published in periodicals, in some cases as the only or the true first editions of the work.
  • “critical, biographical, and bibliographic secondary research materials”

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Huntington (at right is a handwritten letter by Waugh about his novel, The Loved One)