New book looks at how movies shape the way we think about artists

"Christopher Frayling, a professor emeritus of cultural history at the Royal College of Art (RCA) and the former chair of Arts Council England, is referring to his book The Hollywood History of Art, which takes a long, detailed look at how mainstream cinema has portrayed artists. He may well be right; along with his distinguished career as an art history academic, Frayling has also produced a string of impressive books about film, writing about subjects as varied as westerns, vampire cinema, the set designer"

"Frayling's approach in the new book is to break the subject down by artist in the rough order of their adoption by the cinematic mainstream, starting in the 1930s with Fredric March as Benvenuto Cellini and Charles Laughton's Rembrandt, sweeping all the way up to Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner. Along the way he covers the likes of Kirk Douglas's Vincent van Gogh, Charlton Heston's Michelangelo, Ed Harris's Jackson Pollock and Salma Hayek's Frida Kahlo."

""These films are important biographical fictions that feed into generally accepted common knowledge about artists in a big way," Frayling says. "They offer a narrative where the art is a Rorschach test of the life. You read the life through the paintings. A lot of curators encourage you nowadays to make connections between the life and the art. Well, that's what Hollywood is doing, only on a grand scale.""

Mainstream cinema has portrayed artists in recurring, dramatized biographical narratives that shape public understanding. Depictions begin in the 1930s with figures such as Benvenuto Cellini and Rembrandt and continue through portrayals of van Gogh, Michelangelo, Jackson Pollock and Frida Kahlo to J.M.W. Turner. Anglo-American cinema, including non-mainstream films, presents art as a Rorschach test of life, encouraging viewers to read personal biography through artworks. These biographical fictions create simplified connections between life and art and reinforce cultural myths about artistic genius, creativity, and the tortured or heroic artist archetype.

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