Some images of the landscape and the spaces that house them. "Every single entity contains an adumbration or landskip of the whole Universe" (Jan Baptist van Helmont, 1650). Images becoming life—life becoming images.
Seven images, each staging their own disappearance.
This documentary features a kinetic artist who creates vibrant mixed media works that push the boundary between 2D and 3D.
The Flemish painter, humanist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was fortunate to be recognized during his lifetime as an artist of genius and one of the most prolific among his peers, making him a key figure of the Baroque.
The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky claimed, or has been credited with, the 'creation' of abstract art. At the core of this film is a dramatic recreation of Kandinsky's account of returning to his studio one dark evening, and being astonished by an unknown masterpiece of abstract art leaning against the easel - a picture which turned out to be one of his own landscapes fallen on its side. 'Now I knew for certain that the object spoiled my pictures.' While this film's narration does indeed emphasize the notion of an inspired breakthrough to Abstraction, the picture it conveys in more purely filmic ways is a rich and complex one.
A montage, using documentary material filmed during the war, shows the beginnings of an air attack and Londoners entering shelters. From the silent deserted streets, the film moves underground into the world of Henry Moore's shelter drawings. People sit along subway platforms, looking after their children, settling down for the night, sleeping in bunks and on the floor. Above ground London burns. Henry Moore used the eye of a sculptor in portraying the stolidity and enduring patience of a besieged people. This film brings together a unique series of drawings which are some of the most remarkable achievements of an artist during wartime. Eliminating all narration, it explores, on several metaphoric levels, the very nature of human consciousness and creativity.
For the whole of his long life Emil Nolde, the leading German Expressionist, luxuriated in colour. Before the First World War in Berlin he made many paintings of the theater, music-hall and opera; he loved flowers and even coaxed a garden out of the salty soil of the Baltic coast, where he had built himself an isolated house. His parents were Frisian peasants and he loved the landscape of North Friesland: it was the theme of many of his pictures. But the Nazis disapproved of his work and finally forbade him to paint at all. Although Nolde was already in his seventies when this happened, no political regime could stifle his vision. At great danger to himself he continued to work, making watercolour sketches the size of postcards, which he called 'unpainted pictures,' meaning them to serve as sketches for the large oils he would paint when he was free. And he did outlive the Nazi regime, marrying a twenty-eight-year-old woman in 1948 and painting up until the year before he died.
This movement marks the beginning of modern art in Germany. It is the German equivalent of French Fauvism, from which it draws its main inspiration, but it carries an Expressionist and social emphasis that is characteristic of Nordic 'angst.' The artists of Die Brucke were restless creatures, over-sensitive, haunted by religious, sexual, political or moral obsessions. Dramatic landscapes and nudes, mystical and visionary compositions, scenes of the countryside, the streets, the circus, the cafe-dansants and the demi-monde were their principal subjects. Their pure colours blaze in acid stridency, encompassed by rough, dry contours which show the influence of African art and primitive woodcuts. The work of the following is shown: Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Muller, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein.
About the history of the Dominican Republic's visual arts from the perspective of color given by the incidence of light in the island, alongside the historical events that defined its master artists.
Fajar Suharno was a theater maestro from the 80's to the 90's. He was imprisoned because his theater activities were considered against the New Order government. At its peak, he made a show entitled "Geger Uwong Ngoyak Macan" about the events of crushing people who were considered thugs/criminals (Petrus). The show was held exactly the day before the massacre took place
A documentary about Tintoretto.
Nicholas Baum goes on a journey to Den Bosch, Hieronymus Bosch's town, and gives his explanation about what he thinks the painter's works originally meant.
An account of the life and work of the multidisciplinary Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny Madrazo (1871-1949), textile and fashion designer, set designer, photographer, painter and engraver, known as the Leonardo Da Vinci of the 20th century.
A documentary about the French photographer Nadar aka Gaspard-Félix Tournachon
To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.
The multi-talented outsider artist Richard McMahan is on a quest to painstakingly re-create thousands of famous and not-so-famous paintings and artifacts–in miniature.