The Hollywood History of Art is an imposing volume, well designed and lavishly illustrated. It is a substantial and fresh investigation of a largely uncharted domain – the intersection of art and cinema. Christopher Frayling, writer and broadcaster, rector of London’s Royal College of Art for 15 years and chair of the Arts Council of England until 2009, is a cultural historian known for several books, including about Sergio Leone and the spaghetti western.
At a time when the Government has announced that the Basic Income for the Arts will be made permanent, Frayling’s elegant exploration of the history of Hollywood’s depiction of painters and painting is relevant, not least in that it questions how our society values art and artists, and the media image of art and artists.
Mapping the terrain from biopics of the 1930s to several more recent low-budget depictions made in England, Frayling proceeds with an outline of the abiding mythologies that have configured the image of the artist, revealing both the allure and the ambivalence with which the Hollywood industry regards creative genius.
Contention around new biopics often centres on their relative accuracy – directors will defensively argue that they are “truthful rather than representing the truth”. This book offers many examples of how narrative needs and commercial pressures distort that relationship. There is a wealth of visual references and attention to detail occasionally strays into the cinephile’s fascination with the extraneous – noting that Irving Stone’s original novel (on which Vincente Minnelli’s film Lust for Life was based) wrongly had Van Gogh severing his right ear and not his left.
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Works of art are interpreted within the terms of the artist’s psychology – Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows becomes his suicide note in Lust for Life. This is a convenient myth – in fact, the artist believed it showed what was “healthy and fortifying about the countryside” and it was painted some time before he died.
The film depicts the poignancy of a life story of confusion and self-torment, with the implicit irony of Van Gogh’s belated and posthumous recognition, which led to record-breaking recent auction prices for his pictures; Orchard with Cypresses, for example, sold for $117 million in 2022. “Everyone wants to get on the Van Gogh boat,” as a character in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 movie about the New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat puts it.
The context of experiment, the process of trial and error that characterises most creative practice, is always absent. Mainstream cinema’s focus is on psychology and the demands of shaping a compelling narrative. Motives can fall prey to what Orson Welles criticised as a distorting emphasis on artists rather than their art. Audiences are invited to empathise with the suffering of creators, rather than engage critically with the meaning of their creations.
Frayling’s main focus is on large-budget productions from the American studios, but includes a few English independent features: Caravaggio (Derek Jarman, 1986) and Love is the Devil, about Francis Bacon (John Maybury, 1998) – two films made independently on minuscule budgets in Hollywood terms. Jarman’s movie went some way in challenging the genre – questioning the etiquette of a biopic of a Renaissance painter with playful anachronisms such as introducing a typewriter and motorbike into the mise-en-scène of 16th-century Rome.
Interestingly, Frayling includes autobiographical insights into the animated debates that took place within the Arts Council of England before the council agreed to contribute to the funding of Maybury’s film on Bacon. There were those who said it was “far too soon to be making a film about Bacon’s life and work”, he writes, and those who were apparently concerned about turning Bacon into an icon of gay culture.
The book confines itself almost entirely to the anglophone sphere, which is a limitation – it might have been interesting to extend the discussion to other world cinemas. Frida, with Salma Hayek (produced in 2002 by American Zoetrope and Miramax at the height of what Peter Wollen called “Fridamania”), is carefully discussed in the book, but it could have been compared to Paul Leduc’s Frida, naturaleza viva, made in Mexico five years earlier, which differed by utilising minimal dialogue and adopting a fluid movement through time, revealing a contrasting cultural approach and directorial style.
Andrei Tarkovsky was able to produce his visually ravishing Andrei Rublev, a significant example of Soviet cinema, loosely based on a 15th-century Russian icon painter, free from historical constraints, as so little is known of his actual life.
Frayling mentions the growth of identity politics in the late 1960s, forming a new critical context as gender, sexuality and the continuing process of decolonialisation enter the picture. However, the political context of economics may also be one of the determinants of cinema’s repeated image of the angry, tormented artist. The apocryphal response of a Japanese potter to the question “How long did it take you to make that?” was “Thirty minutes and thirty years,” and indicates the unique basis of much artistic production – a defiant deviation from the controlled wage economy most people work within.
In collecting these histories and presenting the diversity of films at this time, Frayling’s book opens a welcome debate about the cinematic portraits that shape and reinforce popular assumptions. The imaginary of art practice is shaped not only by cinematic conventions and narrative demands, but also by the broader socio-economic forces that influence which stories are told and how.
[ From the archive: Artist biopics: like watching paint dry?Opens in new window ]
By repeatedly foregrounding the suffering and isolation of the artist, mainstream films reinforce romanticised struggles of tortured artists (portrayed as “free, but lonely”, in the composer Robert Schumann’s phrase,) sidelining the collaborative realities and everyday labour of artistic creation, thus reducing art-making to a series of psychodramatic episodes rather than a sustained, communal process. As a result, the diversity of artistic experience is flattened, and the nuances of creative practice risk being lost in favour of a more commercially viable, emotionally charged depiction.
