‘I often wonder what artists are for nowadays, what with photography and a thousand and one processes by which you can get representation,’ L.S. Lowry muses in Robert Tyrrell’s 1971 documentary. ‘They’re totally unuseful. Can’t see any use in one. Can you?’
I can: as fodder for biopics. Cinemato-graphers have always been inspired by painting, but the appeal of the artist’s biopic lies less in the representation than the lifestyle: mainly the sex. Kirk Douglas’s Vincent van Gogh demonstrates his ‘lust for life’ in the trailer for Vincente Minelli’s 1956 film with what would now be considered a sexual assault on Jeanette Sterke as his cousin Kay; Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo seals his assumed heterosexuality in Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) with a Hollywood kiss with Diane Cilento’s Contessina de’ Medici.
The artist’s biopic is a man’s world, but it ain’t nothing without a woman or a girl. The women pose, put out and put the kettle on.
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