Still stuck for a Christmas present for your artists friend, or looking to convince your partner/friend that all that time you spend in your studio is worth the effort?
You might think about giving them a movie rather than a book. Art History tutor, Stewart Roberts has a few suggestions ranging from documentaries to biopics. To kick off his list he suggests three contrasting movies about the same artist, Vincent van Gogh.
The first is, appropriately enough, an old classic in its own right:
Lust For Life (1956)
Based on the novel of the same name by Irving Stone, Kirk Douglas stars as the brilliant artist Vincent van Gogh. showing how he became a painter, his life during the height of his career, and, ultimately, his death.
Art consumed this Dutch painter, and this movie portrays this fact beautifully with Kirk Douglas’s vaguely New York-sounding Vincent van Gogh as the maladjusted Dutchman who slowly finds and then loses himself in his art. 75 years on, Vincente Minnelli’s opus is still probably the artist biopic.
It’s hammy and paints with a broad brush, but it’s also colourful and devotional in a heart-on-its-sleeve way that you can’t get away with anymore, which cuts against the dreariness of all that creative anguish. Van Gogh’s drinking buddy Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn) holding court about how he “likes ‘em fat and mean and not too smart” may not appeal to today’s sensibilities but the film does make some charming effort to illustrate the artists’ creative as well as personal disagreements, including a dramatic shouting match over the merits of Barbizon School painter Jean-François Millet.
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