Image via Complex Original
Why read lengthy biographies or spend hours at museums attempting to decipher what the artist was really thinking when you can kick back on your sofa and spend two hours watching a movie instead?
We’ve chosen 10 artist biopics that will give you an insight into what the artist was thinking, what his or her environment was like, and what he or she was like as a person. Spoiler alert: most were bohemians fond of alcohol, drugs, or sex or sometimes all three. And the women were definitely just as bad as the men.
To use Lady Caroline Lamb’s description of English poet Lord Bryon, this lot were “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” No wonder artists are such fun subjects for filmmakers and the actors who get to play them. Scroll down for 10 Must-Watch Artist Biopics.
Mr. Turner
Year: 2014
Director: Mike Leigh
Famed for his gritty portrayals of British life, Mike Leigh casts Timothy Spall, an actor he regularly uses, to play the role of Joseph Mallord William Turner. The film looks at the British landscape painter (1775-1851), famed for his sunsets and seascapes, and focuses on his painting techniques, his relationships with critics and other artists, his love of ladies, and his rather disgustingly frequent grunts and coughs throughout its two and a half hour running time.
Frida
Year: 2002
Director: Julie Taymor
Salma Hayek is captivating in this film, which tells the story of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and her turbulent relationship with fellow artist Diego Rivera (played by Alfred Molina). It’s hard to re-imagine the film with Madonna playing the lead, but apparently she fought hard to get the role (and thankfully didn’t). The film highlights many of Kahlo’s key works and animates them in a surprisingly non-tacky way to illustrate Kahlo’s thought-process behind the paintings.
Klimt
Year: 2006
Director: Raúl Ruiz
John Malkovich plays Austrian painter Gustav Klimt in this movie that primarily focuses on Klimt’s love life, including his pursuit of Lea de Castro and his subsequent death from syphilis. Unfortunately, this makes the entire film’s plot rather questionable given that Klimt died from flu and that we’re not entirely sure if he ever had the sexually transmitted disease either. Nevertheless, it’s an enjoyable portrayal of Vienna and Paris at the turn of the 20th century and Nikolai Kinski provides a star turn as Egon Schiele.
Carrington
Year: 1995
Director: Christopher Hampton
Dora Carrington was a British artist whose personal life was significantly more interesting that her artwork, which was probably what convinced Emma Thompson to play her. Loosely associated with the Bloomsbury Group, she lived with the gay writer Lytton Strachey, but married Ralph Partidge, forming a bohemian love triangle. Strachey (played by Jonathan Pryce) remained her one true love, and Carrington committed suicide aged 38, two months after Strachey’s death from cancer.
Factory Girl
Year: 2006
Director: George Hickenlooper
According to IMBD, Andy Warhol has been portrayed in 40 productions, from an episode of Futurama to Men in Black III. There hasn’t really been a film that solely focuses on him, but Factory Girl, which looks at his relationship with supermuse Edie Sedgwick, probably comes closest to the lot. Guy Pearce plays Warhol to Sienna Miller’s Sedgwick and beautifully captures Warhol’s ticks, cadences, and general aloofness.
Basquiat
Year: 1996
Director: Julian Schnabel
Who better to make a film about an artist than another artist? Especially since the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat refused to allow his works to be used in the film, so Schnabel painted the copies himself. Jeffrey Wright plays Basquiat, David Bowie plays Andy Warhol (we told you Warhol is in a lot of films), and Benicio del Toro, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, and Willem Dafoe are among the rest of the star-studded cast. The film tells the story of the Brooklyn-born artist’s rise to fame and his death from a heroin overdose aged 27.
Fur
Year: 2006
Director: Steven Shainberg
Although subtitled An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, director Steven Shainberg, best known for his film Secretary, worked again with screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, using Patricia Bosworth's biography of American photographer Arbus for source material, but with additional fictional flourishes. Nicole Kidman plays a mesmerizing Arbus, and we are introduced to her various photographic subjects, including Lionel Sweeney (played by Robert Downey Jr.) who suffers from hypertrichosis—a condition informally known as “werewolf syndrome” due to the resulting excessive body hair.
Surviving Picasso
Year: 1996
Director: James Ivory
This lavish Merchant Ivory production tells the story of Picasso (played by Anthony Hopkins) and one of his many lovers—Françoise Gilot (played by Natascha McElhone), who is the mother of Claude and Paloma Picasso. We are also introduced to his previous lovers, including Dora Maar (played by Julianne Moore). The film primarily concentrates on the stormy relationship between Picasso and Gilot, no doubt partially due to the fact that they couldn’t get permission to show any of Picasso’s art works in the film.
Pollock
Year: 2000
Director: Ed Harris
Playing abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock as well as directing the film about him was a labour of love for Ed Harris. He was inspired to make the film after his father gave him a biography of the artist (because Pollock and Harris bear a strong resemblance to each other). The film charts Pollock’s rise to fame in the 1940s, in between his womanising, alcoholism, and marriage to fellow artist Lee Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harden, who won an Oscar for the role). Harris himself gained 30lbs for playing Pollock near the end of his life and did all the on-screen painting himself.
Big Eyes
Year: 2014
Director: Tim Burton
Tim Burton’s latest film looks at the extraordinary story of 1950s American artist Margaret Keane and her husband Walter, who took the credit for all of her portraits of people with manga-like big eyes. The case only came to light when the couple got divorced and Margaret fought for ownership of her work. Kate Hudson and Thomas Haden Church were initially cast in the roles back in 2008, but the film was then pushed back and in 2012, and Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Reynolds were scheduled to take the roles. But by the time that Burton was given the directing reins, Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz had nabbed the roles.