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Who played these real artists in the movies?
Rembrandt in Rembrandt (1936)
Paul Gauguin in Lust for Life (1956)
Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956)
Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)
Andrej Rublev in Andrej Rublev (1966)
Camille Claudel in Camille Claudel (1988)
Dora Carrington in Carrington (1995)
Jean-Michel Basquiat in Basquiat (1996)
Andy Warhol in Basquiat (1996)
Pablo Picasso in Surviving Picasso (1996)
Francis Bacon in Love Is the Devil (1998)
Willem de Kooning in Pollock (2000)
Lee Krasner in Pollock (2000)
Jackson Pollock in Pollock (2000)
Frida Kahlo in Frida (2002)
Johannes Vermeer in The Girl in the Pearl Earring (2003)
Amedeo Modigliani in Modigliani (2004)
Diane Arbus in Fur (2006)
Margaret Keane in Big Eyes (2014)
J.M.W. Turner in Mr Turner (2014)
Alberto Giacometti in Final Portrait (2017)
Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate (2018)
J.S. Lowry in Mrs Lowry and Son (2019)
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Answers here.
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[IMAGE: dir. Tim Burton Big Eyes 2014]
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Gabriel von Max was an oddball nineteenth-century Czech-born German painter. He was rated for his religious paintings, but he spent much of his time painting monkeys—considered an inferior pursuit at the time. He even earned the title ‘Affenmaler’—monkey painter. In this 1889 painting, he presents his furry friends as a cohort of art critics. They strike poses: grandiose, quizzical, and imbecilic. They are us, yet not us. Perhaps it was a trap for anyone who dared to judge his own work, with Von Max holding up a mirror to his critics. As a curator—straddling the realms of art production and reception—I don’t know whether to take it personally. Which side of the fence am I on? Am I among the critics (judging the art) or at their mercy (making exhibitions alongside the artists)? No offence to monkeys.
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[IMAGE: Gabriel von Max Monkeys as Judges of Art 1889]
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If I won Lotto, I would endow a writing prize for premature obituaries. I’d invite writers to pen obituaries for living persons of note, assuming they will die five years from now. The writers will have to be true to what has already occurred, but can invent the future as fancifully as they wish, perhaps granting their subjects the last chapters and deaths they deserve—flattering or otherwise. Get creative. We publish the best.