We’re all in when it comes to bringing art to life through film. Through chaos, creativity and raw emotion, artists have remained captivating enigmas that many can only hope to understand.
Here are 6 of the most iconic art movies you shouldn’t miss:
1. PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE
From French director Céline Sciamma, Portrait Of A Lady On Fire tells a story of forbidden love between the daughter of a wealthy family and the young artist commissioned to paint her portrait promised to a future husband. The deeply intimate film is scored only by the natural sounds of waves, crackling fire, and paint brushing against a coarse canvas. It turns out painting someone you’re falling in love with can be both profoundly charming and tragic at the same time.
2. FRIDA
Frida follows the private and professional life of famed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo in Mexico City. Portrayed by the incredibly talented Salma Hayek, she became one of the most talented and revered surrealist artists of the 20th century. Navigating through her political views and relationships with Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky, viewers are witness to the incredible hardships she suffered during her short life.
3. THE FRENCH DISPATCH
Wes Anderson has purposefully painted visually spectacular and colorful movies in the past. The French Dispatch is Anderson’s anthological love letter to The New Yorker set in the fictitious French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Specifically with ‘The Concrete Masterpiece’– it tells a story about a brilliant but unstable incarcerated painter and his prison guard muse. The first act explores love and the commodification of art.
4. GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING
Girl with a Pearl Earring is a fictionalized account of the painting’s creation. Set in the 1600s, the film follows Vermeer’s relationship with his muse, a housemaid named Griet, played by Scarlett Johansson. Hiding their friendship from Vermeer’s wife, the pair is commissioned to work together to create one of history’s most famous paintings.
5. BIG EYES
This American biographical drama film directed by Tim Burton tells the story about the relationship between American artist Margaret Keane and her second husband, Walter Keane, who, in the 1950s and 1960s, took credit for Margaret’s phenomenally popular paintings of people with big eyes. For years, Walter Keane was known as one of the most commercially successful artists of the 1960s. His paintings of waif-thin girls with eyes four times their normal size were dubbed “the most popular art now being produced in the free world”. But Walter Keane—turns out, couldn’t even paint. It was his wife, Margaret, who was really creating all the “Big Eye” paintings and kept Walter’s secret after he threatened to have her killed.
6. JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child shows never-before-seen footage of the famous artist two years before he passed away in 1988. The influential neo-expressionist painter and Andy Warhol collaborator collided with jazz and Manhattan’s early hip-hop culture of the 70s and 80s. With unprecedented insight, the film revolves around an interview between a 25-year-old Basquiat and director Tamra Davis, exploring the young painter’s relationship with fame and the art world.
