Art and cinema, a perfect match

The seventh art has always been very interested in art and in artists. In this article we're going to take a look at some of the films centred on the lives of universal masters, such as Lust for Life (1956), Mr. Turner (2014), Pollock (2000) or Shirley: Visions of Reality, about the work of Edward Hopper. Also interesting are those in which art plays a leading role in the plot, like The Best Offer (2013), Woman in Gold (2015), Big Eyes (2014) or Midnight in Paris (2011).

One of the most famous is Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn, which tells the life of the famous Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh. A film that enjoyed enormous success and that portrayed the painter's tormented life through his work. A 1956 picture directed by Vicent Minelli, with an excellent screenplay by Norman Corwin based on the 1934 novel of the same name written by Irving Stone.

A film that recounts, through his life and his work, the anxiety, the sense of failure and the loneliness that finally drove him to madness. A complex life that begins with his early years as a preacher in the mining regions of Belgium and runs up to his contact with the Impressionist painters based in Paris. It also focuses on his unstable love affairs and the complicated bond with his brother Theo, who helped him all his life both as emotional support and as the financial means for Vincent to survive as a painter. The most interesting thing is that he managed to surround himself with other artists like Seurat, Monet, Pissarro or his best friend Paul Gauguin, played by Anthony Quinn, who would win the Oscar for best supporting actor.

Another interesting film is Mr. Turner, a British-French-German co-production from 2014, written and directed by Mike Leigh and starring Timothy Spall, Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson. It is a biography of the eccentric British painter J.M.W Turner (1775-1851), an illustrious member of the Royal Academy of Arts. A curious painter who lives with his father and his loyal housekeeper and who, although he leads a comfortable life surrounded by aristocrats, visits brothels and travels frequently in search of inspiration. An artist who suffered the mockery of the public and the sarcasm of society. After his father's death, his life changes when he meets Mrs. Booth, the owner of a family guesthouse by the sea.

The film premiered in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where Timothy Spall won the award for Best Actor and the cinematographer Dick Pope received a special jury prize for the photography.

Another of the most interesting films about artists is Pollock (2000), a picture about the American abstract painter produced, directed by and starring Ed Harris. The film features Marcia Gay Harden, Val Kilmer and Amy Madigan in the main roles.

The film tells of the meeting, in the New York of the 1940s, between Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, painters and lovers, at the centre of the New York art world. The couple decide to marry and move to the countryside, for which Krasner gives up her own work to devote herself body and soul to Pollock's art. The artist will create an extraordinarily original body of work that turns him into the first modern painter of the United States. A hard film, because it also tells us about his existential doubts and his violent episodes.

The film features important figures of post-war American culture such as the Dutch-born painter Willem de Kooning, his patron Peggy Guggenheim… It explains how Pollock goes, in a very short time, from being a complete unknown to becoming the most important American artist of his day.

Another of the best films about an artist may well be Shirley: Visions of Reality by director Gustav Deutsch, about the most outstanding paintings of the American painter Edward Hopper. As if it were a stage play, Deutsch, who is also a painter, photographer, architect, video artist, musician and filmmaker, stages thirteen of the American artist's best-known artworks. Among them such well-known paintings as New York Movie (1939), Hotel Lobby (1943) or Western Motel (1957). The director builds his sequences through the exact reproduction of the scenes shown in the chosen Hopper paintings. Starting from them, with minimal action and dialogue over which Shirley's voice-over predominates, he constructs a narrative based on this woman's concerns, inspired by the poses in each of the paintings.

Now, if we talk about films connected with the art world, one of the most notable is The Best Offer, an Italian film directed by Giuseppe Tornatore and released in 2013. A picture with music by Ennio Morricone and performances by actors such as Geoffrey Rush, Jim Sturgess, Sylvia Hoeks and Donald Sutherland. The film tells the life of Virgil Oldman, a solitary and eccentric man but also an art expert and a highly regarded auctioneer. His dull life changes when he meets a beautiful, mysterious young woman who commissions him to appraise and sell the artworks she inherited from her parents. This young woman, who suffers from a strange psychological illness that keeps her isolated from the world, will change his life forever.

In 2013 this film was the big winner at the David di Donatello Awards, handed out every year by the Italian Film Academy. It cites numerous artworks, such as the portrait that Oldman finds and has restored, which is a copy of the Retrato de muchacha by Petrus Christus, and among the artworks he analyses is El nacimiento de Venus by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

Also very original is Woman in Gold, directed by Simon Curtis and starring Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, Tatiana Maslany and Katie Holmes. The film tells the story of Maria Altmann, a Jewish woman who had to flee Vienna because of the Nazi siege during the Second World War. After all those years away from her country, she decides to set out to claim the property the Nazis stole from her family, among which is an important artwork by Gustav Klim, the Retrato de Adele Bloch-Baauer I. To help her along this long and complicated road, the young lawyer Randy Schoenberg fights alongside her all the way to the Austrian government and the United States Supreme Court. A difficult road on which Maria has to face all the secrets and truths hidden in her past and that now come to light.

Another of the films that has most surprised us in recent years is the recent Big Eyes (2015), directed by Tim Burton and centred on the life of the painter Margaret Keane and her great success in the 1960s painting her characteristic big-eyed figures. The film tells of the painter's legal battles with her husband Walter Keane, who claimed her artworks as his own.

Lastly, Midnight in Paris written and directed by Woody Allen, a story set in Paris that tells of the troubles of a family on a business trip as well as of the leading couple, Owen Wilson, a successful but disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter, and his fiancée Rachel McAdams, who are on holiday. While the screenwriter wanders the streets dreaming of the roaring twenties, he falls under a kind of spell that means that, at midnight, somewhere in the Latin Quarter, he finds himself transported to another universe where he will meet people he'd never have imagined exchanging a word with. The film features figures from the cultural world of the time such as the writer Gertrude Stein, the painter Salvador Dalí, Adriana of Bordeaux, lover of Modigliani, Braque, Picasso and Hemingway, the American pianist and composer Cole Porter, the novelists Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the pedantic intellectual Paul Bates, the black dancer Joséphine Baker, Pablo Picasso, Djuna Barnes, the American Surrealist artist Man Ray or the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

Have you seen a film you'd like to recommend to us? Go ahead, we love it when art and cinema give us wonderful films like these.

And if that's not enough for you, in this other article we talk about Art in documentaries, don't miss it!