Pablo Picasso Jean Dubuffet Mark Rothko Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Michelangelo Buonarroti Joan Miro Jean-Michel Basquiat James Rosenquist

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Fifties

Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) is really an Abstract Expressionist movie. Like Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), it is about male rage finding an outlet in beautiful art. I personally doubt that the Abstract Expressionists were so one-dimensional, but certainly these films tell stories — about van Gogh and Michelangelo, respectively — that are full of the heroic meanings of 1950s U.S. art. Authenticity reigns. Bohemia (a state of mind, not a place) is the logical response to a corrupt world: Otherworldliness, or being a social dropout, is the only way you can stay in touch with unusual and powerful artistic gifts that the world cannot understand. The beneficiary can’t really understand them either, but he knows he’s got to remain true to them. If as a result he seems a bit mumbling and primitive to the rest of his natural class, the educated, well, what’s so great about being articulate?

The Pope calls up to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, "When will it be finished?" "Soon, soon!" comes the distracted reply. Michelangelo’s up in the air in more ways than one: He’s getting inspiration from heaven. Whenever the Pope meets him on ground level, there’s a row. How can a mere English-accented, physically soft power guy (Rex Harrison) get common sense from a physically hardy, explosive art guy who’s got soul (Charlton Heston)? Kirk Douglas’s fiery van Gogh eats paint and froths at the mouth; he loves women, but they’re afraid of him. Only a crazy prostitute will shack up with him. And even she gets fed up with his craziness. Hang on, who was the crazy one? All of them! It’s the crazy world of art!

An earlier rehearsal of the rage-filled authentic painter-genius myth, Moulin Rouge (1952), John Huston’s biopic of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, has a variation: The hero is an aristocrat and is never at a loss for clever words. But he is also an outcast from his class, and his bons mots, delivered in José Ferrer’s delicious silky baritone, are tinged with bitterness and pain. The fictional Henri despises poshness and verbal confidence because he knows they mean nothing. What means everything is the rare quality of fiery genius, which is noble down to the bone, not just superficially or through a mere accident of birth. The meaning of all these ’50s movies is that Ab Ex feeling runs deep, and the rage of artists is explosive.

The films have all the limitations of melodrama, but they’re rather fascinating today because they’re about something society doesn’t have anymore: the automatic expectation that art should be sincere. It’s like the attraction of the TV series Mad Men (created by Matthew Weiner), which shows us a lost sense of moral restraint, impossible for anyone to escape 50 years ago but impossible now for anyone to take seriously.

Seventies

Seventies art didn’t mean anything to a popular audience, so Hollywood mostly avoided it. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) perfectly combines the two main moods of art of that era, the intuitive and the coldly intellectual, in the figure of Diane Keaton’s Annie, who is ditsy but brainy.

The one art moment in Annie Hall is pretty satisfying: Keaton enacts a hilarious imitation outside the Museum of Modern Art of the hateful knowingness of intellectual chitchat. We see personal hostility, arrogance, and social fear masquerading as educated judgment.

In the following year, elfin whimsy was captured all too painfully in the movie An Unmarried Woman. Jill Clayburgh plays a dumped middle-aged wife looking for love who finds a color-field painter played by Alan Bates. Bates’s paintings were done by Paul Jenkins, whose stuff is aesthetically a bit on the dodgy side, which was inadvertently appropriate for the tone-deaf portrayal of a sensitive artistic type that Bates (usually a good actor) was directed to perform by Paul Mazursky. To create the impression of original intelligence unsullied by conventional thought processes, the director subjected the audience to a monotonous stream of lopsided, bright-eyed man-boy grins and conversational non sequiturs. (Bred from the same gene pool of artist-impersonation DNA, but with the intelligence element sucked right out, was Greta Scacchi’s white-linen-draped ninny masquerading as an artist in Robert Altman’s The Player, 1992.)