Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the Popularizing of American Art

Description

Biopics on artists influence the popular perception of artists' lives and work. Projected Art History highlights the narrative structure and images created in the film genre of biopics, in which an artist's life is being dramatized and embodied by an actor. Concentrating on the two case studies, Basquiat (1996) and Pollock (2000), the book also discusses larger issues at play, such as how postwar American art history is being mediated for mass consumption. This book bridges a gap between art history, film studies and popular culture by investigating how the film genre of biopics adapts written biographies. It identifies the functionality of the biopic genre and explores its implication for a popular art history that is projected on the big screen for a mass audience.

Doris Berger is a curator at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, USA. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the director of the Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany. Her practice includes writing, teaching, curatorial and audiovisual work focusing on intersections of art and film in modern and contemporary American and European art.

There is a wide divide between the lives of artists and movies about those artist that can seem impossible to span. Ms. Berger lifts up all the rocks and shows us what's underneath - it's not always predictable or pretty but it's certainly revealing. * Ed Ruscha, Artist * With Projected Art History, Doris Berger brings critical attention to a film genre that powerfully shapes cultural attitudes about artistic production but has been largely unacknowledged in the disciplines of art history and film studies. Artist biopics reinforce myths about artistic creativity, elevating the typically male painter's struggle and genius. Berger skillfully analyses two paradigmatic examples, Pollock (2000, dir. Ed Harris) and Basquiat (1996, dir. Julian Schnabel), enriching her account with research-based insights about their production and reception. Projected Art History makes a strong contribution to the still-limited literature on an important form of popular art history, adding nuance to our understanding of celebrity as constructed in both film and art. * Britt Salvesen, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and Prints and Drawings Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art * At a time when the "high" and "low' of culture seems reoriented to "digital" and "analogue", Berger's Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the Popularizing of American Art points directly to the center of why, and how, the history of art matters to our culture. With a popular lens onto big-budget films, like Pollock, she grounds the intersection of real art and artists with film; the medium through which many are brought into the discipline. Exhaustively researched and engagingly written, Berger thoughtfully reminds the academy (art and film historians alike) to pay attention to its viewing public. * Courtney J. Martin, Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture, Brown University, USA *