Chris Knipp
09-10-2010, 09:00 PM
http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/5386/painterspaintingcoverar.jpg
Emile De Antonio: Painters Painting (1972)
(This winds up, for now, my survey of the documentaries of Emile De Antonio, whom my father knew before he ever made a film and who once got drunk at our house and ran over my tent. He went on to become one of the most significant American documentary filmmakers of the Sixties and Seventies. My whole survey can be found here (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1548&p=1566#p1566).)
Painters Painting (1972, 116 min.) fits earlier in this sequence, between Millhouse and Underground, but stands apart from all the rest, because it's not about politics or the filmmaker at all. It's about New York art. De Antonio was active in this scene himself and knew all the important figures he interviews for the film, who include artists, critics, the dealer Leo Castelli, and the collecting couple the Sculls, museum people, the editor of Art News, and the architect Phllip Johnson, himself a significant collector of Rothko, Newman, and others. De Antonio has said that political people never like this film. As Douglas Kellner explains in "American Art 1945-1970: An Introduction ," an essay included as bonus material with the DVD, "Documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio was himself an integral part of the New York art scene, promoting and befriending several of the major artists who continued to be close friends. He helped Andy Warhol get started in painting, was an early promoter of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, was very close to Frank Stella, and knew personally many of the painters involved in Geldzahler's New York Metropolitan Musuem retrospective of 'American Painting and Sculpture --1940-1970,' upon which Painter's Painting is based." Is it based on that? Well, it does discuss several artists not directly heard from but significant, such as Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollack. The critics (whom Barnett Newman calls "aesthetes") come across as arrogant asses here, but Leo Castelli seems simply an urbane pragmatist who found artists whose work he liked and successfully promoted them. Though he may bend the facts a bit in recounting how he got this or that artist started, the collector Robert Scull is sympathetic -- and an essential part of the equation. In the TV interview in which he sums up each of his films, De Antonio argues that art has always been about money, and that critics, dealers, and collectors are essential to the world of art. The buyers may not be admirable, but the artist are doing exciting work are. This film is a bit choppy and some of the sound in the interviews is terrible, but that's worth putting up with for the chance the film provides us to see and here the likes of Willem De Kooning, Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Andy Warhol, and others, as well as critics Clement Greenberg, Hilton Kramer and other important figures in the New York art world of 1970 and the several decades before. This was after all a time when New York was supreme, lines far more clearly drawn than later, between mattered and what didn't, between abstract expressionism, minimalism, pop, and so on. De Antonio records it as an insider, so again he has provided a unique document of a significant moment -- this time not in political, but cultural history. And it rounds out my partial survey of "De's" oeuvre nicely also because it has a personal significance to me: I grew up as an aspiring artist when the New York School was becoming hot, and Willem De Kooning was the first artist whose process as depicted in Art News' series "Paints a Painting" first electrified me with its boldness and surprises. To think that De Antonio was there when this stuff was happening!
Emile De Antonio: Painters Painting (1972)
(This winds up, for now, my survey of the documentaries of Emile De Antonio, whom my father knew before he ever made a film and who once got drunk at our house and ran over my tent. He went on to become one of the most significant American documentary filmmakers of the Sixties and Seventies. My whole survey can be found here (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1548&p=1566#p1566).)
Painters Painting (1972, 116 min.) fits earlier in this sequence, between Millhouse and Underground, but stands apart from all the rest, because it's not about politics or the filmmaker at all. It's about New York art. De Antonio was active in this scene himself and knew all the important figures he interviews for the film, who include artists, critics, the dealer Leo Castelli, and the collecting couple the Sculls, museum people, the editor of Art News, and the architect Phllip Johnson, himself a significant collector of Rothko, Newman, and others. De Antonio has said that political people never like this film. As Douglas Kellner explains in "American Art 1945-1970: An Introduction ," an essay included as bonus material with the DVD, "Documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio was himself an integral part of the New York art scene, promoting and befriending several of the major artists who continued to be close friends. He helped Andy Warhol get started in painting, was an early promoter of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, was very close to Frank Stella, and knew personally many of the painters involved in Geldzahler's New York Metropolitan Musuem retrospective of 'American Painting and Sculpture --1940-1970,' upon which Painter's Painting is based." Is it based on that? Well, it does discuss several artists not directly heard from but significant, such as Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollack. The critics (whom Barnett Newman calls "aesthetes") come across as arrogant asses here, but Leo Castelli seems simply an urbane pragmatist who found artists whose work he liked and successfully promoted them. Though he may bend the facts a bit in recounting how he got this or that artist started, the collector Robert Scull is sympathetic -- and an essential part of the equation. In the TV interview in which he sums up each of his films, De Antonio argues that art has always been about money, and that critics, dealers, and collectors are essential to the world of art. The buyers may not be admirable, but the artist are doing exciting work are. This film is a bit choppy and some of the sound in the interviews is terrible, but that's worth putting up with for the chance the film provides us to see and here the likes of Willem De Kooning, Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Andy Warhol, and others, as well as critics Clement Greenberg, Hilton Kramer and other important figures in the New York art world of 1970 and the several decades before. This was after all a time when New York was supreme, lines far more clearly drawn than later, between mattered and what didn't, between abstract expressionism, minimalism, pop, and so on. De Antonio records it as an insider, so again he has provided a unique document of a significant moment -- this time not in political, but cultural history. And it rounds out my partial survey of "De's" oeuvre nicely also because it has a personal significance to me: I grew up as an aspiring artist when the New York School was becoming hot, and Willem De Kooning was the first artist whose process as depicted in Art News' series "Paints a Painting" first electrified me with its boldness and surprises. To think that De Antonio was there when this stuff was happening!