Art in the Cinema

i
ii
Art in the Cinema
The Mid-century Art
Documentary
Edited by Steven Jacobs,
Birgit Cleppe and
Dimitrios Latsis

iii
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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iv
 Contents

List of figures vii

Notes on contributors x
Preface and Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction: the mid-century celluloid museum 1

Steven Jacobs and Dimitrios Latsis

1 The institutional breeding grounds of the post-war film

on art 39
Birgit Cleppe

2 American art comes of age: documentaries and the

nation at the dawn of the Cold War 67
Dimitrios Latsis

3 Art history with a camera: Rubens (1948) and Paul Haesaerts’

concept of cinéma critique 85
Steven Jacobs and Joséphine Vandekerckhove

4 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s critofilms and beyond: from

cinema to information technology 105
Emanuele Pellegrini

5 André Bazin’s art documentary in Saintonge 125

Angela Dalle Vacche

6 Projecting cultural diplomacy: Cold War politics, films

on art, and Willard Van Dyke’s The Photographer 145
Natasha C. Ritsma
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vi Contents

7 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape: modernity, the land

and the bomb in two television films by John Read 159
John Wyver

8 Creative process, material inscription and Dudley Shaw

Ashton’s Figures in a Landscape (1953) 181
Lucy Reynolds

9 Neoplasticism and cinema: Ilya Bolotowsky’s experimental

films on art 201
Henning Engelke

Select bibliography 221

Index 225
 List of Figures

0.1 Michelangelo: Das Leben eines Titanen (Curt Oertel, 1938).

Lobby card 4
0.2 Films on Art books published by UNESCO in 1949, 1951 and 1953 7
0.3 Book with texts by Paul Haesaerts and Umbro Apollonio
published on the occasion of the Italian release of
De Renoir à Picasso (Paul Haesaerts, 1950) 13
0.4 Luciano Emmer, technical indications for the filming of a
painting by Fra Angelico (c. 1948) 14
0.5 Carl Theodor Dreyer filming in the Thorvaldsen Museum,
Copenhagen, 1949. Production still. Courtesy of the
Danish Film Institute 20
0.6 Le Mystère Picasso (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956). Digital still 21
0.7 Visite à Picasso (Paul Haesaerts, 1950). Digital still 22
0.8 André Malraux (photograph by Maurice Jarnoux, 1954) 27
1.1 Paul Haesaerts on his film Rubens (1948) in Les Arts Plastiques 57
1.2 Articles on art documentaries in UNESCO Courier (Vol. 11,
n. 12, January 1950), pp. 6–7 58
2.1 Thomas Hart Benton in Art Discovers America (1943). Digital still 69
2.2 Vincent Price as art professor in a production photograph of
one of the intermediate scenes in Pictura (1952). Digital still 74
2.3 One of Grant Wood’s landscape paintings seen through an
outline of a map of the state of Iowa in Pictura (1952). Digital still 75
3.1 Rubens (Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck, 1948). Still by
Paul Bytebier 86
3.2 Rubens (Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck, 1948), Scenario.
Henri Storck Papers, Cinematek, Brussels 89

vii
viii List of Figures

3.3 Rubens (Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck, 1948). Still

by Paul Bytebier 91
3.4 and 3.5 Rubens (Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck, 1948).
Digital Stills. 99
4.1 C.L. Ragghianti. Sketch, Fondazione Centro Studi sull’Arte
Licia e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Lucca. Serie Critofilm 111
4.2 C.L. Ragghianti. Visual and verbal notes on a photograph
showing Piero della Francesca’s Pala di Brera, Fondazione
Centro Studi sull’Arte Licia e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti,
Lucca 112
4.3 C.L. Ragghianti. Draft scenario of the critofilm on Lucca
città comunale, Fondazione Centro Studi sull’Arte Licia e
Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Lucca 113
4.4 Plotter experiments on Piero della Francesca paintings, in
Sound/Sonda, 1, 1978 115
4.5 Angels with musical instruments, (from San Pablo di Casseras),
Museo Diocesano y Comarcal de Solsona 116
4.6 Chronicle reading on the angels with musical instruments
from San Pablo di Casseras (an experiment led by
Silvio Ceccato, Milan) 116
4.7 Plotter experiments on Dürer’s Machina Humana, in
Sound/Sonda, 1978 117
4.8 Ford graphic design on passengers, from Cybernetic Serendipity,
catalogue of the exhibition, London 1968 118
4.9 Plotter experiments on Antonello da Messina’s Saint Sebastian,
in Sound/Sonda, 1978 119
5.1 André Bazin. Photograph taken in the Saintonge region.
Courtesy of Dudley Andrew 131
5.2 André Bazin. Photograph taken in the Saintonge region.
Courtesy of Dudley Andrew 133
7.1 Spinning on a turntable with the sculpture, Alan Lawson’s
camera films through the limbs of Reclining Figure (1951) in
Henry Moore (John Read, 1951). Digital still. BBC Television 165
 List of Figures ix

7.2 Henry Moore sketches in the doorway of a shed in the grounds

of Hoglands in Henry Moore (John Read, 1951). Digital still.
BBC Television 169
7.3 New social housing in Harlow New Town is juxtaposed with
Harlow Family Group (1954–5) in A Sculptor’s Landscape
(John Read, 1958). Digital still. BBC Television 171
7.4 A cast of Falling Warrior (1956–7) is unceremoniously transported
in a wheelbarrow in A Sculptor’s Landscape (John Read, 1951).
Digital still. BBC Television 175
8.1 Figures in a Landscape (Dudley Shaw Ashton, 1953). Digital
still. Courtesy of the British Film Institute 182
8.2 Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture Wave, as featured in Figures in a
Landscape (Dudley Shaw Ashton, 1953). Digital still. Courtesy
of the British Film Institute 193
9.1 Ilya Bolotowsky, The Nautilus Shell (c. 1957–58). Courtesy of
Andrew Bolotowsky 202
9.2 Leo Castelli appearing in Ilya Bolotowsky’s The Nautilus Shell
(c. 1957–58). Courtesy of Andrew Bolotowsky 203
9.3 Ilya Bolotowsky David Smith (1956). Digital still. Courtesy of
Andrew Bolotowsky 207
9.4 and 9.5 Ilya Bolotowsky Fire Escapes (1956). Digital still. Courtesy of
Andrew Bolotowsky 210
9.6 Ilya Bolotowsky Metanoia (1961). Digital still. Courtesy of
Andrew Bolotowsky 213
9.7 Ilya Bolotowsky Metanoia (1961). Digital still. Courtesy
of Andrew Bolotowsky 214
9.8 Ilya Bolotowsky Cinema I Mural (1963). Photo courtesy of
Andrew Bolotowsky 216
 Notes on Contributors

Birgit Cleppe is currently preparing a PhD on European art documentaries of

the 1940s and 1950s at the Department of Art History at Ghent University. She
studied Architecture at Ghent University, Belgium, and the Politecnico di
Milano, Italy. She also works as an art and architecture critic and as a guest
professor, she teaches architecture history and urbanism at KASK School of
Arts in Ghent.

Angela Dalle Vacche is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Georgia Institute

of Technology. She is originally from Venice, Italy, and before coming to
Atlanta, she taught at Vassar College and at Yale University. She is the author of
The Body in The Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (1992), Cinema
and Painting: How Art is Used in Film (1996) and Diva: Defiance and Passion in
Early Italian Cinema (2008). She has edited The Visual Turn: Classical Film
Theory and Art History (2008), The Color Reader (2006) and Film, Art, New
Media: Museum without Walls (2012). Dalle Vacche is currently working on
her fourth book Andre Bazin’s Cinema: Art, Religion, Science.

Henning Engelke teaches art history and film at Goethe-University, Frankfurt.

He has published in journals and anthologies on experimental film,
documentary, production design and film theory. He is the author of
Dokumentarfilm und Fotografie. Bildstrategien in der englischsprachigen
Ethnologie 1936–1986 (2007) and The Art That Never Was: US-amerikanischer
Experimentalfilm, 1940–1960 (2016).

Steven Jacobs is an art historian who has published in Art Journal, History of
Photography, Millennium Film Journal, October, Oxford Art Journal and in
numerous edited volumes. He also wrote or co-authored The Wrong House: The

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 Notes on Contributors xi

Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (2007), Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual
Arts (2011), The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film
Noir (2013), Screening Statues: Cinema and Sculpture (2017) and The City
Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars
(2018). He teaches at Ghent University and University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Dimitrios Latsis is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the School of Image

Arts, Ryerson University in Toronto where he teaches in the Film Studies and
Film and Photography Preservation and Collection Management programs.
He received his PhD in Film Studies from the University of Iowa and completed
a post-doctoral fellowship in Visual Data Curation at the Internet Archive
where he served as film archivist. He recently edited a special issue of the
journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists on Digital Humanities
and/in Film Archives. He is currently writing a monograph on the
historiography of American cinema during the early and silent years.

Emanuele Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Art History and director of the

PhD track in Analysis and Development of Cultural Heritage at IMT School
for Advanced Studies, Lucca (Italy). He has been a researcher at Ca’ Foscari
University of Venice, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and University of
Udine. He has been a Chercheur Invité at INHA Paris, and visiting professor
at Renmin University, Beijing. Pellegrini is a member of the scientific
committee of the Fondazione Ragghianti in Lucca and director of the
international magazine Predella: Journal of Visual Arts. His research interests
are mainly centred on art criticism between the eighteenth and twentieth
centuries. He has published books and articles on Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti,
Roberto Longhi, the protection of cultural heritage in Italy during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Lucy Reynolds has lectured and published extensively, most particularly on

questions of the moving image, feminism, political space and collective
practice. She is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Arts and Design
at Westminster University. Her articles have appeared in a range of journals
such as Afterall, Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Screen and Screendance.
xii Notes on Contributors

She writes for Art Agenda and Millennium Film Journal, and has curated
exhibitions and film programmes for a range of institutions from Tate and
MUHKA, Antwerp to the ICA and the South London Gallery.

Natacha C. Ritsma has obtained her PhD at the Department of Communication

and Culture and American Studies at Indiana University and is currently a
curator at the Loyola University Museum of Art in Chicago. Her research
interests include experimental and documentary film; educational and
non-theatrical film production, distribution and exhibition; and films about
art and artists.

Joséphine Vandekerckhove studied Art History at Ghent University and at

Sapienza Università di Roma and did a postgraduate in Curatorial Studies at
Ghent University/Hogeschool Ghent (KASK). She is currently enrolled as a
PhD student (Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders) at the Department
of Art, Theatre and Music Sciences of Ghent University and Università di
Verona. Her PhD research focuses on a comparative study of mid-twentieth-
century art documentaries of the art historians and filmmakers Paul Haesaerts
and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti in Belgium and Italy, under supervision of
Steven Jacobs.

John Wyver is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Westminster. He is

Principal Investigator on the research project Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on
British Television (2011–15), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council. He is the author of Vision On: Film Television and Arts in Britain
(2007). In 1982 he co-founded the independent production company
Illuminations, and for BBC, Channel 4, Sky Arts and other broadcasters he has
produced numerous arts documentaries and performance films, including
Hamlet (2009), Macbeth (2010) and Julius Caesar (2012). His work as a producer
has been honoured with a BAFTA Award, an International Emmy and a
Peabody Award. He is Media Associate for the Royal Shakespeare Company
and he produces the Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema broadcasts.
 Preface and Acknowledgements

A rt documentaries, which most of us know through television, usually

evoke tiresome didacticism and droll ponderousness. This has not always
been the case, however. Before the breakthrough of television in most European
countries, the art film was applauded as an avant-garde film genre. In the years
immediately following the Second World War, art documentaries played an
important part in an emerging cinephile culture favouring experimental
shorts. The 1940s and 1950s can be considered as the Golden Age of the art
documentary – not only because literally hundreds of art documentaries were
produced but also because of the high quality and highly innovative or
experimental nature of many of these films. With the exception of Alain
Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso (1956)
and a few others, most of the art films of the 1940s and 1950s fell into oblivion
and they have received only meagre scholarly attention. This book aims to
remedy this situation by discussing the most innovative, experimental and
influential post-war art documentaries while also drawing attention to lesser-
known productions.
In an extensive introduction to this volume, the art documentaries of the
1940s and 1950s are situated in the context of the post-war reconstruction and
international cultural exchange, epitomized by international organizations
such as FIFA – the International Federation of Films on Art. Discussing films
by major figures such as Alain Resnais, Luciano Emmer, Henri Storck, Paul
Haesaerts and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, the introduction also chronicles the
debates surrounding the status of films on art as ‘art films’ in their own right. In
addition, the introduction draws attention to the particular formal and
thematic concerns of documentaries on painting and sculpture while also
focusing on the highly important subgenre of films showing artists at work.

xiii
xiv Preface and Acknowledgements

Finally, the phenomenon of the art documentary is placed in a broader context

of the dissemination and popularization of art enabled by the museum, the art
book and the emerging medium of television.
Following this introductory chapter, nine chapters, each written by
specialists in the field, deal with a specific theme or a key film. The first
two chapters focus on the social, political and institutional context of mid-
twentieth-century art documentaries. Birgit Cleppe demonstrates how the rise
of the post-war art documentary is closely connected to new museological
developments, while Dimitrios Latsis discusses two key American art
documentaries in the light of Euro-American cultural and political
relationships at the start of the Cold War. Subsequently, both Chapter 3 and
Chapter 4 deal with the ways art historians have used the medium of film as
instruments of art historiography enabling new visual research methods. In
their chapters on the films by Paul Haesaerts and Carlo Ragghianti, Steven
Jacobs and Joséphine Vandekerckhove, and Emanuele Pellegrini respectively,
show how these art historians went beyond the traditional role of advisory
experts or authors of a voice-over text, taking full responsibility for the film’s
form and content. The following chapters focus on specific films: Angela Dalle
Vacche discusses André Bazin’s unrealized film project on the Romanesque
churches of the Saintonge region in France, while Natasha Ritsma, John Wyver
and Lucy Reynolds focus on Willard Van Dyke’s The Photographer (1948), John
Read’s A Sculptor’s Landscape (1957) and Dudley Shaw Ashton’s Figures in a
Landscape (1953) respectively. In the final chapter, Henning Engelke discusses
the art documentaries made by visual artists, focusing on Ilya Bolotowsky’s
film experiments.
To a large extent, this book is the result of a research project (2014–18)
sponsored by the FWO Research Fund Flanders that enabled Birgit Cleppe to
complete her PhD thesis on post-war art documentaries under the supervision
of Steven Jacobs at Ghent University. However, the foundations of this book go
back to earlier initiatives such as the symposium and film programme Art &
Cinema: On the Aesthetics, History and Theory of the Art Documentary, which
took place at KASK Cinema in Ghent in December 2013 and included
screenings of films by Charles Dekeukeleire, Paul Haesaerts, Glauco Pellegrini,
Luciano Emmer, Umberto Barbaro and Roberto Longhi, Pierre Alechinsky,
 Preface and Acknowledgements xv

Luc de Heusch, John Read, Bruce Conner and Hans Cürlis, introduced by
Susan Felleman, Steven Jacobs, Brigitte Peucker, Paola Scremin, Angela Dalle
Vacche and John Wyver, among others. This symposium and film programme
was part of a research project on the interactions between film and the visual
arts at the School of Arts (KASK), University College Ghent, which also
resulted in the release of the DVD box and booklet on Art & Cinema: Belgian
Art Documentaries by Cinematek in Brussels in 2013.
A similar film programme and symposium entitled The Cinematic Museum:
The Post-war Art Documentary took place at the same venue in December
2017, including films by Henri Alekan, Dudley Shaw Ashton, René Huyghe,
Mark Lewis, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens,
and lectures by Birgit Cleppe, Steven Jacobs, Dimitrios Latsis, Mark Lewis,
Emanuele Pellegrini and Lucy Reynolds, among others. We would like to thank
all universities, museums, archives and individuals who made possible these
events and offered us the opportunity to watch some amazing films and discuss
these with several experts of the field: KASK Cinema, Cinea Brussels, the
Brussels Cinematek, the BOF Research Fund of Ghent University, Laura
Bonne, Lisa Colpaert, Bert Lesaffer, Elisa De Schepper, Bart Versteirt, Joséphine
Vandekerckhove and Leen Vanderschueren.
Both film programmes brought several contributors to this volume together
and this was also the case with a panel on the post-war art documentary at the
2015 SCMS conference in Atlanta, where Birgit Cleppe, Henning Engelke,
Steven Jacobs and Natasha Ritsma gave papers that were the basis for their
chapters in this volume. We would like to thank all participants, chairs and
audience members for their contributions and valuable comments. We would
additionally like to acknowledge Hilde D’haeyere, Leon Duyck, Joni Kinsey,
Patricia Oman, Sara Kosiba, Roger Hallas, Jennifer Wild and the staffs of the
Archives of American Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,
and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for their advice, research help and
invitations to share this work. Last but not least, we also owe thanks to
Madeleine Hamey-Thomas at I.B. Tauris and Claire Constable, Anna Coatman
and Rebecca Richards at Bloomsbury.
xvi
 Introduction:
the mid-century
celluloid museum
STEVEN JACOBS AND DIMITRIOS LATSIS

In a 1991 survey of art documentaries, its authors state that many of the art
films of the 1940s and 1950s ‘seem dated and too “arty” today’.1 The aim of this
book is to contradict this statement, advocating that mid-twentieth-century art
documentaries are often highly personal, poetic, reflexive and experimental
films that, still today, offer a thrilling cinematic experience in contrast with
many of the didactic art documentaries produced during the following decades.
Furthermore, the 1940s and 1950s can be considered ‘the Golden Age’ of the art
documentary as illustrated by the sheer quantity of such films produced in that
era. Several surveys commissioned and published by international organizations
such as UNESCO include listings of literally hundreds of art documentaries
made in many countries.2 This vast quantity went hand in hand with the
exceptional quality of many innovative landmark documentaries such as Le
Monde de Paul Delvaux (Henri Storck, 1946), La Leggenda di S. Orsola (Luciano
Emmer, 1948), Van Gogh (Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens, 1948), Rubens
(Henri Storck and Paul Haesaerts, 1948), Thorvaldsen (Carl Theodor Dreyer,
1949), Jackson Pollock 51 (Paul Falkenberg and Hans Namuth, 1951), Les
Statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), Le Mystère
Picasso (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956), A Sculptor’s Landscape (John Read,

1
2 Art in the Cinema

1957) and L’Enfer de Rodin (Henri Alekan, 1959). An impressive list of leading
and famous filmmakers contributed to these films, some of which won
Academy Awards and other important film prizes in those years.3 In addition,
art documentaries were discussed extensively at international conferences, in
publications of professional associations, in leading film and art journals and
by prominent critics and film theorists such as André Bazin, Pierre Francastel,
Henri Lemaître, Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim, among others.4
Leading universities started collecting, studying and disseminating these films,
albeit in the context of the overall genre of educational films.5

Pre-war developments

The flourishing of highly innovative art documentaries in the wake of the

Second World War would not have been possible without pre-war experiments.
Films on art go back to the 1910s when scenics and travelogues documented
sights and monuments of historical cities. Architecture and monumental
sculpture were the pre-eminent subjects of early films on art, owing to the fact
that they could be filmed in natural light.6 Moreover, these public sculptures
could be viewed from different or even shifting viewpoints, mobilizing the static
artwork – a goal that many later art documentaries also attempted to reach.
Another way to mobilize or ‘animate’ immobile works of art was to show the
process of their creation. Already in 1915, Sacha Guitry made Ceux de chez
nous (Those of Our Land) on leading French writers and artists including
Degas, Monet, Renoir and Rodin.7 The film basically consists of a series of
vignettes showing celebrities posing for the camera but some footage focuses
on artists working in their studio – in many cases the sole cinematic record of
the artists. Showing an artist at work would become one of the most successful
formulas throughout the history of the art documentary. In the late 1930s,
Elias Katz made the Artists at Work series, consisting of simple 10-minute
glimpses of artists such as Lynd Ward, William Groper and George Grosz at
work.8 Similarly, many American educational films on decorative art of the
1920s and 1930s show us, for instance, how to weave baskets, how to make
pottery, how native Americans made their blankets and so forth.9
 Introduction 3

The most impressive early film project dealing with artists at work, however,
originated in the Berlin Institut für Kulturforschung, which was founded in
1919. Under the direction of art historian Hans Cürlis, this ‘Institute for
Cultural Education’ was one of the first organizations that favoured film as a
mediator for art appreciation and instruction.10 Together with cinematographer
Walter C. Türck, Cürlis started the landmark film cycle Schaffende Hände
(Creating Hands) in 1922 using ‘over the shoulder’ shots showing prominent
artists such as Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Pechstein,
Wassilly Kandinsky, Otto Dix and George Grosz at work.11 Several of these
films document the creation of a work of art in the length of a single take,
dwelling on the artist’s gestures, movements and hesitations. As we will
demonstrate in one of the following paragraphs, the theme of the artist at work
proved highly important for mid-twentieth-century art documentaries,
particularly those on artists using styles marked by gestural brushwork and
physical movements such as Abstract Expressionism and lyrical abstraction.
Apart from Cürlis’s institute, several small studios as well as UFA, Germany’s
major studio, produced films on visual arts during the interwar period. UFA
even included a unit that produced popular educational shorts for both
theatrical and non-theatrical release and listed art subjects in its catalogues as
early as 1922. An often noted UFA Kulturfilm was Die steinernen Wunder von
Naumburg (Stone Wonders of Naumburg, 1935) by Rudolph Bamberger and
Curt Oertel, in which the camera explores the architecture and the sculpted
Gothic figures of Naumburg cathedral. Described by Arthur Knight as the first
film ‘that suggested the possibility of granting an art experience through the
medium of motion picture’, the film has its verbal information restricted
to a minimum and it first and foremost delivers its message visually.12
Oertel went on to make art documentaries, including the landmark
Michelangelo: Das Leben eines Titanen (1940), a feature-length film telling the
story of Michelangelo’s dramatic life, which is evoked not with reliance on
re-enactments, but by the spectacular visualization of his art.
By means of location shots, vivid montages, light- and sound effects,
(subjective) camera movements and point-of-view shots, Oertel carries us
along through intrigues, conspiracies and civil wars in Renaissance Florence
and Rome. Gliding over Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures, Oertel’s
4 Art in the Cinema

Figure 0.1 Michelangelo: Das Leben eines Titanen (Curt Oertel, 1938). Lobby
card.

camera evokes the dramatic tension of Michelangelo’s works, which are

beautifully captured through chiaroscuro lighting. The creation and history of
the statue of David (1501–4), for instance, is evoked through a succession of
striking images. First, we see the statue’s face luring from behind bars, as if it is
still in Michelangelo’s studio, but further shots suggest that the statue is
travelling through Florence. Later, an attack on Florence is evoked as we see a
missile falling and shattering the arm of the statue, followed by dramatic
close-ups of David’s face and shattered marble pieces. Turning the
contemplation of art into a thrilling cinematic experience, Oertel’s film was
re-edited in 1950 by Richard Lyford under the supervision of Robert Flaherty
and Robert Snyder. Distributed as The Titan: The Story of Michelangelo, the
film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Other internationally acclaimed art documentaries released shortly before
the Second World War were produced in Belgium – the magazine Design
Review later noted that ‘Belgium’s contribution to the art film was out of all
proportion to its limited geographical surface area.’13 Thèmes d’inspiration
(Themes of Inspiration, 1938) by Charles Dekeukeleire ‘animates’ static artworks
by showing painted images that are interwoven with footage of the world that
inspired Flemish painters. A highly lyrical film, Thèmes d’inspiration juxtaposes
details of paintings of Old and Modern Masters with footage of real landscapes,
 Introduction 5

faces and objects, evoking the world that inspired the artists. Marked both by
the impressionist avant-garde (to which Dekeukeleire had contributed earlier)
and by the new documentary trends of the 1930s, Thèmes d’inspiration focuses
on the telluric alignment of characters in paintings by Pieter Bruegel, Joachim
Patinir, Jacob Jordaens and Constant Permeke. Dekeukeleire’s film focused not
only on artworks but additionally explored the phenomena that inspired them,
pioneering a format appropriated by many films to come.
The most influential pre-war Belgian art film was André Cauvin’s L’Agneau
mystique (The Mystic Lamb, 1939), which deals with the famous fifteenth-
century altarpiece by Jan and Hubert Van Eyck.14 In an 8-minute film, the voice-
over is confined to a minimum in favour of a visual exploration of the painting.
Scanning the altar’s panels, the camera moves slowly so there is time to
contemplate the many details rendered in close-up. For the first time, an art film
drew attention to the aesthetic coherence of a single (though multi-panelled)
piece of art enabling the viewer to make a formal analysis. Together with
Cauvin’s similar film, Memling (1939), The Mystic Lamb was commissioned by
the Belgian government for its pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair where
it made a lasting impression. Arthur Knight described The Mystic Lamb as
‘probably the first of the new art films on an adult level to be seen by any
considerable audience in America’.15 Writing in 1952, Iris Barry stated that The
Mystic Lamb ‘has not even now, after so many other cinematic studies of
paintings, been surpassed’.16

Post-war reconstruction and cultural

organizations

Films released in the late 1930s such as Dekeuleire’s Themes of Inspiration,

Cauvin’s The Mystic Lamb and Oertel’s The Titan marked the start of a
boom for art films that was only slowed down by the advent of the Second
World War. In the decade following the War, literally hundreds of art
documentaries were released in several countries. This post-war ‘renaissance’
of art documentaries can, no doubt, be linked to the conditions of a society
recovering from the traumas of the War. After the barbarism of Nazism and
6 Art in the Cinema

the devastation of war, film, in its capacity as a mass medium, was called upon
for the accomplishment of a humanist ideal of cultural emancipation through
education. Art came to be seen as a necessary and even a fundamental part of
education for all. These changing attitudes about the place of the visual arts in
education, culture and society were unmistakably beneficial to the production
and exhibition of films on art.17 Considered to be an efficient device for the
proliferation, democratization and popularization of high culture, the art
documentary developed in tandem with an expanding participation of the
middle and lower classes to the sphere of art and culture, as evidenced
by growing museum attendance and cultural tourism. This ideal of social
and cultural emancipation also inspired the foundation of UNESCO, the
United Nations’ scientific and cultural agency, in 1945. International cultural
organizations such as UNESCO and the Fédération internationale des Archives
du Film (FIAF) played an important role in the support of the production,
distribution and critical contextualization of art documentaries, which were
presented as devices for cultural and educational progress. This was also the
aim of more specialized organizations such as IAFF (International Art Film
Federation), CIDALC (Comité Internationale pour la Diffusion des Arts et des
Lettres par le Cinéma) and IIFA (International Institute of Films on Art).
Last but not least, leading artists such as Fernand Légér, filmmakers such as
Luciano Emmer, Henri Storck and Alain Resnais, museum officials such as
René Huyghe (Louvre), James Johnson Sweeney (Guggenheim Museum, New
York) and Paul Fierens (Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels), and film
archivists such as Henri Langlois (Cinémathèque française) and Iris Barry
(MoMA Film Library, New York) were involved in the development of FIFA
(Fédération Internationale du Film sur l’Art).18 Founded in 1948, FIFA
organized three International Art Film Congresses, which took place at the
Louvre in Paris in 1949, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1950 and at
the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1951. Throughout the 1950s, FIFA
would become an important platform for the debates on art films, facilitating
their international distribution.19
Although, in many cases, nationalist agendas, economical protectionism or
just a pride of a local cultural heritage made the production of such films
possible, most if not all of the mid-twentieth-century art documentaries were
 Introduction 7

Figure 0.2 Films on Art books published by UNESCO in 1949, 1951 and 1953.

first and foremost inspired by this belief in the possibilities of cultural exchange
and international understanding through culture and education.
This dialectic between internationalism and nationalism also marks the
production and distribution of American art documentaries of the Cold-War
era, such as the landmark film The Photographer (Willard Van Dyke, 1948),
discussed extensively by Natasha Ritsma in Chapter 6. While rivalries between
the US and the Soviet Union in science, including the ‘Space Race’, are widely
known to historians of the period as well as the general public, scholars like
Lisa Davenport and Michael Krenn have shown that dispute in the cultural
and intellectual sphere was at least as intense.20 With abstract expressionism,
jazz and creative writing at the forefront, the United States actively sought to
demonstrate its artistic supremacy over the socialist realism of the Soviet
Union by promoting individualism and the market as the avatars of a ‘national
aesthetic’. The USIA (United States Information Agency) and private
production companies made and distributed films on Jackson Pollock,
Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi, which actively departed from the
regionalist-representational bent of the New Deal sponsored art of the 1930s.
In addition to exhibitions, publishing and the explosion of the art market, it
was films like these that can be credited with the ascendance in public
perception of New York as the new art capital of the world.21
Writing in 1949, critic and curator Arthur Knight found films on art
produced in the United States quite wanting in matters of aesthetics, labelling
8 Art in the Cinema

them ‘invariably pedestrian’, ‘often crude’ and ‘oversimplified classroom

demonstrations’ when compared to the more famous examples of the genre
made in France, Belgium and Italy.22 Despite this qualitative deficit, the
American Federation of Arts’ Guide to Art Films published in 1950 listed no
fewer than 353 such titles, more than a hundred of which had been produced
in the preceding year alone. By 1960, films on art were being nominated for
Academy Awards on a regular basis (e.g. Rembrandt: A Self-Portrait, 1954
and The Living Stone, 1959), artists like Marie Menken and James and
John Whitney made audacious experimental films still being taught today
and specialized companies (like Pictura Films Corporation) and divisions of
educational film producers (e.g. Encyclopaedia Britannica and Films Inc) had
emerged to serve a wide market that included museums, schools and art
appreciation programmes. As we will see in Chapter 2, this (brief) renaissance
of the documentary on art in North America was part and parcel of the rise of
the United States as a leading cultural power in the ‘free’ world of liberal
democracies and was thus imbricated in the cultural rhetoric of the Cold War,
with lines drawn on aesthetic as much as geopolitical grounds.

Major figures in Europe: Emmer, Storck, Resnais

The major figures of the European films on art in the 1940s and 1950s were
Luciano Emmer, Henri Storck, Paul Haesaerts and Alain Resnais, working in
Italy, Belgium and France – countries with a rich artistic (particularly pictorial)
past.23 In Italy, the production of innovative art documentaries started in the
late 1930s and early 1940s when painter Luciano Emmer joined forces with
Enrico Gras to produce a series of innovative and commercially successful
short art documentaries such as Racconto da un affresco (1938), Cantico delle
creature (1943), Fratelli miracolosi (1946), Il Dramma di Cristo (1948),
L’Invenzione della croce (1948) and La Leggenda di S. Orsola (1948).24 Emmer
and Gras attempted to transpose the narrative aspects of paintings into film.
Emmer was convinced that cinema had inherited the narrative functions that
painting once exercised. Not coincidentally, most of Emmer’s films deal with
the rich tradition of trecento and quattrocento painting by artists such as Giotto,
 Introduction 9

Piero della Francesca, Vittore Carpaccio and Fra Angelico among others, who
replaced the iconic stasis of the medieval and Byzantine tradition with a more
dynamic and an openly narrative character.
Rather than documentaries on art, Emmer created narrative films that use
painted images instead of actors, sets, props and locations. Il Dramma di Cristo
(1948) is therefore not so much about Giotto but rather about the life of
Christ, told with the help of Giotto’s frescoes of the story. In so doing, Emmer
isolated details of the paintings in succession, almost evoking classical
continuity. After a shot of a landscape, for instance, Emmer cuts into the picture
with a medium shot on an isolated fragment of the picture, followed by a
close-up reaction shot of a character, in its turn succeeded by close-ups of
bystanders or significant objects. Using camera movements to point out details,
creating rhythm through editing to impart action to the static actors, and
working very closely with the musical score (often composed by Roman
Vlad) and a minimal voice-over commentary, Emmer transformed static
paintings into stories. Most of the shots of an Emmer film focus on narrative
elements in the paintings – elements that painters had themselves used in
order to create a narrative such as gestures or facial expressions of the
characters. As in a feature film, however, Emmer uses inserts of details from
the painting that have no specific narrative function – a bird on a tree, a vase
on a window sill – but that help to create an atmosphere and a setting for the
story. Frequently, Emmer introduces a kind of cinematic suspense, as when he
first shows the feet of a person before showing their character in its entirety,
contradicting the logic of the painting displaying all its details simultaneously.
Although unmistakably based on the narrative organization of the paintings,
Emmer’s films present themselves as creative translations or transpositions
rather than reproductions.
Another major mid-twentieth-century contribution to the development of
the art film was made by Henri Storck, who had already directed Regards sur la
Belgique ancienne in 1936. In the late 1940s he made landmark films on artists
such as Delvaux and Rubens – the latter made in collaboration with Paul
Haesaerts. In contrast with Cauvin’s film on Van Eyck’s Mystic Lamb and most
of Emmer’s films, Storck did not base his films on individual paintings but
rather on a collage of details from various works. While Emmer wanted to tell
10 Art in the Cinema

stories that were also the subject of his filmed paintings, Storck developed
essay films with a thematic and formal analysis of the artworks. As its title
suggests, Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (The World of Paul Delvaux, 1946), which
Storck made in collaboration with poet and essayist René Micha, deals with
surrealist painter Delvaux’s entire oeuvre rather than with his biography or a
specific painting. Delvaux’s famous nudes and uncanny cityscapes merge with
objects and fragments from different paintings crystallizing into an oneiric
and melancholy universe. To achieve this effect, Storck and Delvaux did away
with the frames of the pictures and in some cases lined them up one next to the
other so that Storck’s camera could pass without interruption between them.25
Accompanied by a poem by Paul Eluard and music by André Souris, Le Monde
de Paul Delvaux animates static images: cinema itself almost magically
contributes to the ‘Pygmalionesque’ dimension of Delvaux’s petrified nudes in
nocturnal cityscapes.
Besides Italy and Belgium, the art documentary in the late 1940s flourished
in France, where its production was encouraged by a decree obliging cinema
owners to include short features in their programmes. Moreover, producers
such as Anatole Dauman (Argos Films) and Pierre Braunberger (Les films
de la Pleiade) financed and promoted documentaries by experimental
filmmakers.26 A key figure in the development of the post-war French art
documentary was Alain Resnais, who would become one of the major auteurs
of French post-war cinema. After having made a series of small film portraits
of painters such as Hans Hartung, César Doméla and Max Ernst in 1946–7,
Resnais created Van Gogh (1948, in collaboration with Robert Hessens), which
was commissioned by the Amis de l’Art, a circle founded with the purpose of
stimulating the proliferation of art by means of lectures and films. This society
was presided over by art historian Gaston Diehl, who asked Resnais to make a
film ‘in the style of Luciano Emmer’ who would write the film’s commentary.27
The film tells the tragic story of the life of Vincent Van Gogh, who had already
become the perfect embodiment of the romantic myth of the artist as an
unrecognized, tormented, self-destructive and tragic individual.28 Strikingly,
Resnais tells this myth by means of a cinematic manipulation of Van Gogh’s
paintings. On the whole, the film consists of a masterful succession of 207
shots of details of paintings, evoking the continuity of a feature film. In the first
 Introduction 11

place, Resnais constructs a drama with the help of montage effects, a wide
variety of transitions (from straight cuts to slow lap dissolves), and all kinds of
camera movements. Given this perspective, the film is more in line with Van
Gogh biopics (such as Vincente Minelli’s 1954 Lust for Life) than with most of
the many art documentaries that have since been dedicated to the painter. In
doing so, Resnais masterfully combined the innovations introduced earlier by
Curt Oertel (telling the biography of an artist through the illustration of his
works), Luciano Emmer (creating narrative and drama by means of a continuity
of shots showing details of paintings) and Henri Storck (mixing parts of
different paintings, presenting the artist’s entire oeuvre as a single vast image).
As in Storck’s film on Delvaux, a mobile camera and an eye-catching montage
reveal the essence of the formal language of the artist. The story is told from
within the painter’s mind and the world is seen through the eyes of Van Gogh.
After the success of Van Gogh, Resnais made similar films on Gauguin (1950)
and Picasso’s Guernica (1950).

Education and research

The mid-twentieth-century art documentaries by Emmer, Storck, Resnais,

Haesaerts and many others had unmistakably educational ambitions. They
attempted to take the visual arts outside the museum, bringing them to
wider audiences. Producers of mid-twentieth-century art documentaries often
made these ambitions more explicit. As scholars like Natasha Ritsma and
Suzanne Regan have shown, films on art were among the earliest subgenres
of ‘educational films’ and formed an integral part of the non-theatrical
programmes from the early days of cinema.29 Films like The Art of Timothy
Cole; the Last of the Wood Engravers (made for the Boston’s Museum of Fine
Arts in 1930) and The Art City of Munich (1912) were among many listed in
early catalogues published by pioneers of educational cinema George Kleine
and Charles Urban. Indeed, before its emergence as a separate niche in the
1930s, short (single reel or split-reel) films on art were often subsumed under
the category of travelogues or ‘scenics’, films that aimed to replicate something
of the experience of the Grand Tourists of the Age of the Enlightenment by
12 Art in the Cinema

combining travel, sightseeing and art appreciation in an easily digestible

package. Such films were screened in cinemas as part of what came to be known
as ‘the complete program’ (combining a feature with non-fiction, comedic and
animation shorts) during the 1920s, but they were also disseminated by a robust
distribution network that catered to church groups, primary and secondary
schools, art academies and even prisons and the military.30
Furthermore, art documentaries were frequently presented as instruments
of learning and even as new models of art historical scholarship in their own
right. Strikingly, leading art historians such as Gaston Diehl in France, Roberto
Longhi and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti in Italy, or Paul Haesaerts in Belgium,
participated in the production and, occasionally, direction of these films. Their
involvement thus surpassed their traditional role of adviser or author of the
commentary. As demonstrated in Chapter 3, Belgian art historian and critic
Paul Haesaerts collaborated with Henri Storck on the landmark film Rubens
(1948), which provided a formal analysis of the works of the baroque painter.
To do so, Haesaerts and Storck employed the entire repertory of the film
medium: irises, close-ups, camera movements, and even rapidly rotating
images reveal Pieter Paul Rubens’ predilection for spiral-shaped structures;
animated lines point out the characteristics of Rubens’ compositions, while
dissolves to footage of water, clouds and flames evoke Rubens’ idea of a fertile
universe in motion. By means of split screens, Haesaerts and Storck compare
Rubens with other artists. Two years later, Haesaerts used similar diagrams,
split screens and animations in De Renoir à Picasso (1950) as a commentary
about modern art in general, tracing three inspirational sources: the so-called
sensual or carnal (Renoir), the cerebral (Seurat) and the instinctual or
passionate (Picasso).
For Haesaerts, conventional art criticism and art history were outdated and
unadjusted to their objects. ‘Let the image now replace the word, let discourse
become an eloquent succession of images.’31 Calling cinema a ‘new instrument
of investigation and thinking’ that enables us to comprehend the artworks,
Haesaerts developed a concept of ‘cinéma-critique’.32
Likewise, in Italy, art historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti developed the
concept of the critofilm, which he saw as a form of art criticism ‘made through
cinematographic means instead of words’.33 As demonstrated in Chapter 4, his
 Introduction 13

Figure 0.3 Book with texts by Paul Haesaerts and Umbro Apollonio published on
the occasion of the Italian release of De Renoir à Picasso (Paul Haesaerts, 1950).

series of about twenty critofilms started in 1948 with a now lost film, Lorenzo
Il Magnifico and concluded in 1964 with a film essay, Michelangelo, the longest
of the series. As an author of writings on cinema as a visual art form since the
1930s, Ragghianti believed strongly that our understanding of visual language
could be improved if we use images instead of words in order to ‘decode’
artworks. Unlike many of their colleagues, Haesaerts and Ragghianti went
beyond the traditional role of expert or author of the text, taking full
responsibility of a film’s construction.

The art documentary as art

Despite these educational purposes, many art documentaries of the era also
displayed self-consciously artistic and cinematic ambitions. According to
Siegfried Kracauer, Rubens by Haesaerts and Storck ‘is neither pure cinema
nor merely a teaching instrument. It is a glamorous hybrid’.34 Although some
14 Art in the Cinema

stated that the medium of film remained ‘predominantly a machine for seeing
better, a remote cousin of the magnifying lens, a periscope, a pair of opera
glasses’,35 filmmakers such as Alain Resnais, Henri Storck and Luciano Emmer
presented their ‘documentaries’ not as mere registrations or reproductions of
artworks. A film on art had to be an interesting art film, exploring the essential
characteristics of the film medium and investigating the tensions between
movement and stasis, the two- and three-dimensional, narrative and iconic
images, and the real and the artificial. This autonomization of the film vis-à-vis
the original artwork was an important subject for debate in those years. FIFA
itself embodied this ambiguity as the two last letters of the abbreviation were
defined as films sur l’art on some occasions and films d’art on others. Many
of these films were screened as part of film programmes combining art
documentaries with experimental films by artists such as Norman McLaren,
Hans Richter or Fernand Léger.

Figure 0.4 Luciano Emmer, technical indications for the filming of a painting by Fra
Angelico (c. 1948).
 Introduction 15

This ‘arty’ and experimental dimension of mid-twentieth-century art

documentaries contributes to their poetic dimension, intellectual depth,
astounding visuals and their exceptional quality, which surpasses those of
most later art documentaries complying with the standardized ‘illustrated
lecture’ format. Not coincidentally, the experimental art documentaries of the
1940s and early 1950s developed in tandem with the so-called essay film,
which combined the look of a documentary with a personal perspective and a
highly reflexive dimension.
The essay film at least partly derived from the art documentary and its
productive tension inherent in the translation of painting, sculpture or
architecture into film. Resnais’ early art documentaries on Van Gogh (1948)
and Guernica (1950) paved the way for his essay films of the 1950s. His Les
Statues meurent aussi (with Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, 1953) about
African art and the effect of colonialism on its reception is a perfect example
of an essay film characterized by a self-reflexivity that can be found in the
works by Dziga Vertov and Jean Rouch. Les Statues meurent aussi prefigures
several later art documentaries such as Ways of Seeing (John Berger, 1972) or
Cézanne: Dialogue avec Joachim Gasquet (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle
Huillet, 1989), which, akin to the new deconstructivist methods of art history,
subverted voices of authority and, inspired by a Brechtian aesthetics, questioned
the illusionistic possibilities of film.36
This autonomization of the art documentary vis-à-vis the original artwork
was an important subject for debate among the critical reflections on the genre
by Resnais, Emmer, Storck and Haesaerts. These debates also reveal that these
filmmakers refused to make a clear-cut distinction between the film on art on
the one hand and the art film on the other. Writing in a 1950 issue of Sight &
Sound, Jean Queval explicitly denied the need for rigid delineations of type,
arguing that at ‘present, there is little to be gained from introducing rigid
categories into a genre that is still searching for principles’.37 Paradoxically,
Siegfried Kracauer situated the autonomy of the new experimental art
documentaries in an art historical tradition. Referring to the use of pieces of
antique architecture in Piranesi’s engravings, or the presence of French and
Italian fountain sculptures in Watteau’s fêtes champêtres, Kracauer stated that
objections against these art films usually fail ‘to take into account the fact that
16 Art in the Cinema

within the traditional arts themselves, transfers of works of art from their own
medium to another are fairly frequent and are considered quite legitimate’.38
According to Beatrice Farwell, however, art documentaries are confronted
by a dilemma by definition. ‘The more a film on art succeeds as a film, the less
likely it is to increase one’s understanding of painting.’39 Alluding to the film by
Storck and Haesaerts, Farwell deals with the example of the art of Rubens,
which, at first sight, seems like a natural for film treatment because his art is full
of movement. The point, however, is that Rubens was capable of creating this
movement in a static medium. When a painting is set into motion by means of
cinematic devices, the illusion Rubens skilfully created is lost. A new filmic
illusion is constructed, which, according to Farwell, falsifies Rubens’ art and
which can even lead to a misinterpretation of the art of painting in general.
Furthermore, the medium of film was often denounced by art historians
because films did not show the entire work in a single shot or at a single glance.
At the third FIFA conference in Amsterdam in 1950, an art critic even argued
for the obligation of filmmakers to show the artwork entirely and in colour at
the beginning of their films.40 Such considerations ignore the basic qualities
and possibilities of art documentaries, which not only ‘represent’ artworks but
also reproduce, duplicate, reconfigure, re-imagine or remediate them with the
help of the cinematic or audio-visual devices such as close-ups, montage,
camera movements, etc. In the process, art documentaries transform or translate
the original artworks from one medium to another, creating a new hybrid.

Camera and canvas: documentaries on painting

The demand to ‘show the artwork entirely and in colour at the beginning of a
film’ and the rather naïve assumptions on the transparency of film also ignore
the essence of the film medium, which exceeds or at least questions the
dichotomy based on Lessing’s division between spatial and temporal arts. Art
documentaries can even be said to exemplify the complexity of film as both a
spatial and temporal discipline. This is already clear from Emmer’s films where
various stages of a narrative painting (such as The Legend of Saint Ursula by
Carpaccio) are seen simultaneously by the beholder of the original artwork as
 Introduction 17

forming part of a single pictorial composition unfolding in time by means of

camera movements and editing techniques.
However, on a more fundamental level, the maker of an art film faces
additional problems. Even when a shot attempts to record a painting entirely,
the artwork as a Gestalt is lost by definition because, almost always, the
proportion of the painting does not completely coincide with the aspect ratio
of the film camera and film screen. The filmmaker, consequently, has to crop
the image or the frame will also include a part of the world that falls outside
the painting. Strikingly, in the most interesting art films, filmmakers deal with
their framings in a highly conscious way and create new visual balances and
tensions within them. In the films by Emmer, Storck and Resnais, this even
becomes a conditio sine qua non.
Given this perspective, one should also point out that not only the vast
majority of art documentaries and the most interesting and innovating ones
among them have painting as their subject, whereas the film medium seems
more appropriate for the registration of sculpture and architecture, both of
which imply a mobilized beholder. This pronounced focus on painting cannot
entirely be explained by referring to the prominent position the medium of
painting has occupied since the Renaissance. The preference for painting as a
subject might be related to the visual primacy of film whereas architecture and
sculpture have traditionally been thought of as more tactile – an aspect that
will be dealt with in the following paragraph. First and foremost, however, it is
precisely the confrontation between the frame of the painting and that of the
camera as well as the interference of two kinds of two-dimensionality that turn
the film of a painting into an interesting artistic challenge. At the precise
moment when the avant-garde emphasizes the integrity of the pictorial surface
(for example, the insistence on flatness throughout Clement Greenberg’s
writings of the 1940s and 1950s), filmmakers played on the ambivalence of the
film image which, according to Arnheim, presents each object ‘in two entirely
different frames of reference, namely the two-dimensional and three-
dimensional’.41 By focusing on painting, Emmer, Storck and Resnais presented
the genre of the art documentary as a means to investigate the limits of film as
a medium by juxtaposing movement versus stasis, narrative versus iconic
images, and cinematic space versus pictorial surface.
18 Art in the Cinema

The juxtaposition between two frames was also the subject of one of the
major essays André Bazin dedicated to the relation between painting and
cinema.42 According to Bazin, the fixed frame of painting enclosed a world
that exists entirely by and for itself; it draws the attention of the spectator
in a centripetal way to a static composition. The frame of the film camera,
by contrast, is mobile and implies a centrifugal space extending beyond the
frame into the smallest and most remote corners of everyday life. When we
show a part of a painting on a film screen, the space of the painting loses its
orientation and it is presented as something borderless and hence as something
that extends beyond the frame. Apart from the (educational or democratizing)
fact that cinema is capable of bringing a painting closer to a wider audience,
film presents a painting as part of the world. According to Bazin, Resnais
precisely succeeded in introducing this centrifugal space of film into the
centripetal space of painting. By switching between paintings and by letting
the camera glide over surfaces the limits of which remain invisible, Resnais
breaks through the spatial restraints of painting. According to Bazin, Resnais’
art documentaries are therefore hybrid or symbiotic works. On the one hand,
they cannot simply be considered as documentary recordings of another art
form because the material provided by the other medium is transformed. On
the other hand, they are not autonomous films since they remain dependent
on other arts.

Key documentaries on sculpture

‘An object in space is a better proposition for a film on art than a two-dimensional
work like a painting, an illuminated manuscript, or a goblin,’43 wrote Josef Paul
Hodin in his review of Looking at Sculpture (Alexander Shaw, 1949), a film
focusing on statues in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Indeed, cinema has
consistently been presented as the perfect instrument to document sculpture.
‘Short of a field trip, the best way to teach sculpture is with cinematic visual
aids,’ Sally Chappell wrote in 1973. ‘The flow of images and the inherent motion
of changing camera distance and angle simulate the live three-dimensional
experience of sculpture better than a series of front, side, and back view slide
 Introduction 19

reproductions. The cinema can also reproduce the movement of light, so

important in rendering the material of sculpture – the shifting reflections in
Brancusi’s metals, for example, or the glowing transparencies in Pevsner’s
plastics.’44
Apart from the aforementioned The Titan, the most interesting examples of
documentaries on sculpture include Aristide Maillol, sculpteur (Jean Lods,
1943), Alexander Calder: Sculpture and Constructions (Hartley Productions for
MoMA, 1944), Visual Variations on Noguchi (Marie Menken, 1945), Looking at
Sculpture (Alexander Shaw, 1949), Forms in Space: The Art of Sculpture (Sidney
Lubow and Arthur Swerdloff, 1949), Thorvaldsen (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1949),
Henry Moore (John Read, 1951), Les Pierres vives (Fernand Marzelle, 1951),
Jacques Lipchitz (Frank Stauffacher, 1951), Works of Calder (Herbert Matter,
1951), Les Statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953),
Figures in a Landscape (Dudley Shaw Ashton, 1953), The Gates of Hell (Albert
Elsen, 1954), L’Enfer de Rodin (Henri Alekan, 1957), Gyromorphosis (Hy
Hirsch, 1958) and A Sculptor’s Landscape (John Read, 1958).45 None of these
films, with the exception of Les Statues meurent aussi, have received major
critical or scholarly attention. This list comprises a wide variety of titles, ranging
from didactic documentaries (Shaw, Lubow and Swerdloff ) that attempt to
explain the quintessence of sculpture, to artists’ films (Menken, Hirsch) that
use sculptures to create abstract visual studies, to poetic film essays by major
filmmakers (Dreyer, Alekan, Resnais and Marker). Arguably coming closest to
the format of the essay film is Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die) by
Resnais and Marker. Dealing with African art and voicing a vehement criticism
of colonial politics, this famous film is marked by the self-reflexivity
characteristic of essay films. As Resnais and Marker focus on the sculptures’
eyes, on beholders looking, and on practices of museum display, the film is a
meditation on the cinematic gaze and how it visualizes or represents sculptures.
In so doing, the film definitely reflects on the encounter between film and
sculpture.
This dimension also marks other key documentaries on sculpture of the
1940s and 1950s, which additionally juxtapose an optic visuality to a haptic
one. On the one hand, films such as Thorvaldsen and L’Enfer de Rodin enable us
20 Art in the Cinema

Figure 0.5 Carl Theodor Dreyer filming in the Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen,
1949. Production still. Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

to ‘feel’ the three-dimensionality, weight, and even texture of sculptural

volumes through the use of light, a scanning camera or revealing close-ups.
Here, film also makes manifest the fact that sculptures are situated in the
same physical space as their beholders, emphasizing the bodily interactions
between statue and onlooker. This ‘reality effect’ of sculpture is emphasized
by the filming of sculptures against natural backgrounds such as shifting clouds
or moving foliage in documentaries such as Figures in a Landscape and A
Sculptor’s Landscape. On the other hand, the moving image inevitably
transforms sculptures into pure optical phenomena. In films like L’Enfer de
Rodin and Visual Variations on Noguchi, even the most heavy and solid volumes
are turned into floating, airy shapes on the screen. Movement within the shots,
shifting viewpoints, camera movements, light and fragmenting and alienating
close-ups transpose the sculpture from its real and physical space to an
imaginative realm. These films demonstrate that the medium of film is able to
transform sculptures into a pure optical experience reminiscent of Ein
Lichtspiel: Schwarz Weiss Grau (1930), László Moholy-Nagy’s landmark film
 Introduction 21

that is more of an extension of his kinetic light sculpture rather than a mere
document of it.

Contemporary artists and acts of creation

Showing a static artwork in the dynamic medium of film has often been
considered an uninteresting or unchallenging task by filmmakers. That’s why so
many art documentaries have shifted their focus from the finished artwork to its
process of creation, i.e. the development of the artwork through time. Long after
Cürlis’ 1920s series of Schaffende Hände (creating hands), the motif of the artist
at work remained important throughout the art documentary’s entire history. In
the 1940s and 1950s, the act of creation became the subject of key films such as
Visite à Picasso (Paul Haesaerts, 1950), Jackson Pollock 51 (Paul Falkenberg and
Hans Namuth, 1951) and Le Mystère Picasso (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956). The
first of these films, Haesaerts’ Visite à Picasso, contains a remarkable sequence

Figure 0.6 Le Mystère Picasso (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956). Digital still.

22 Art in the Cinema

Figure 0.7 Visite à Picasso (Paul Haesaerts, 1950). Digital still.

showing Picasso painting various forms (a bird, a vase with flowers, various
zoomorphic figures) on a sheet of Plexiglass mounted between himself and the
camera. The effect is striking – shown against a dark background, it looks as if
Picasso draws white lines into the space in front of him. The use of a glass pane
in order to show the creation process itself was adopted by Falkenberg and
Namuth’s highly influential Jackson Pollock 51. Pollock’s large-format drippings
can be understood as an almost seismographic registration of his bodily
movements and their effect on film is very powerful. Similarly, The Reality of
Karel Appel (Jan Vrijman, 1962) features artist Karel Appel, who was a member
of the CoBrA movement (1948–51), flicking paint at the camera, peeping
through a hole in the canvas.46 The most famous variation of the artist painting
on a glass pane can be found in Clouzot’s feature-length Le Mystère Picasso.47
Noirish black-and-white shots of Picasso at work alternate with long takes
in colour of a porous white screen on which Picasso paints or draws. Clouzot’s
long takes reproduce the duration of the painting process. The screen is filmed
frontally from behind so that the artist remains invisible. As a result, the screen
 Introduction 23

becomes a kind of ‘automatic painting’ transforming or morphing, for instance,

the initial image of a flower into a fish, then a hen, a human face, and finally the
head of a faun.
In these landmark films by Haesaerts, Namuth and Falkenberg, and Clouzot,
we are witnessing the creation and development of a painting through its
succeeding stages. According to André Bazin, who famously labelled the Clouzot
documentary a ‘Bergsonian film’, time and duration have become the instruments
and even the subject of the film, which consists for the most part of uninterrupted
long takes that reproduce the duration of the painting process.48 For Bazin,
Clouzot’s film on Picasso shifts the emphasis from the simultaneous presence of
all the elements of a finished work to the progressive duration of the creative act.
Both the Picasso films by Haesaerts and Clouzot and Jackson Pollock 51 by Namuth
and Falkenberg largely consist of scenes in which we see the artist at work filmed
through a plate of glass or translucent material. In the films by Haesaerts and
Namuth and Falkenberg, the artists themselves seem to be immersed in their
paintings, emphasizing the physical dimension of the pictorial act.
The fascination for the artist at work tallies perfectly with the stylistic
preoccupations of the artists being filmed. After all, artistic currents such as
Action Painting, Tachisme and CoBrA (often grouped under labels such as
abstract expressionism, lyrical abstraction or gestural abstraction), favoured
experiment, irrational spontaneity, improvisation and a highly physical way of
painting. Referring to Action Painting, Harold Rosenberg famously noted in
1952 that ‘the canvas began to appear [. . .] as an arena in which to act – rather
than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or “express” an object,
actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an
event’.49 In addition, emphasizing on process over product, Rosenberg concluded
that ‘a painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.
The painting itself is a “moment” in the adulterated mixture of his life. [. . .] The
act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The
new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.’50
Likewise, CoBrA artist Jorn noted that the psychic automatism favoured by the
pre-war Surrealists, had been exchanged for a more physical activity.51
This entanglement of physical and biographical aspects made gestural
abstraction highly attractive for filmmakers as the artworks themselves enticed
24 Art in the Cinema

the spectator to see them in an organic relationship with the artists who made
them. Post-war lyrical abstraction provided filmmakers with images that are
static (and hence un-cinematic) but the paintings evoke the painter’s
movements and his physical actions – hence notions such as ‘Action Painting’,
‘Gesture Painting’ or ‘Gestural Abstraction’. In the context of these artistic
currents, a painting can be read as an almost seismographic registration of the
movement of the artist’s hand or entire body. As a result, movements of the
hand or bodily manipulations of canvasses, stretchers, pencils, and paint are
emphasized in the films by Haesaerts, Clouzot, and Falkenberg and Namuth as
well in other films such as Calligraphie japonaise (1955) by CoBrA member
Pierre Alechinsky. In the context of Gestural Abstraction, painting becomes a
performance. In so doing, the films on Picasso and Pollock at work paved the
way for the increasing importance of the bodily presence and the performative
self of the artist. These films construct a narrative around the body of the artist
and track his fluid and gestural creative process in a way at once more
sophisticated and critical than portrayals of artists in older films like Works of
Calder of Art Discovers America. These films resonate, for instance, with the
work of Georges Mathieu, who occasionally introduced a performative
dimension to his painting in the 1950s, executing large canvases before
audiences.52 Likewise, several artists of a later generation experimenting with
performance and happenings (Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, Fluxus artists) have
mentioned the importance of the ubiquitous photographic and cinematic
representations of Jackson Pollock at work.53
Gestural Abstraction not only appeals to cinematic representation because
of the importance of physical actions and gestures, but also because of the
temporality that is inscribed in the paintings. Gottfried Boehm not only sees
‘movement, physically manifested in and through the artist’s body’ as a
common denominator in most of these artworks but also notices ‘a heightened
temporality that communicates itself to the works’.54 This notion of painting as
a process of constant metamorphosis is also a crucial issue in Picasso’s work of
that era as demonstrated in the films by Haesaerts and Clouzot. Moreover,
changing, transforming, metamorphosing an image also implies destruction
– ‘to paint is to destroy what preceded’, Karel Appel stated.55 As the act of
creation, destruction implies the subjection of the artwork to a physical act,
 Introduction 25

which makes it attractive for filmmakers – it is not a coincidence that the

filmed biographies or so-called biopics of famous or fictitious artists often
contain scenes in which the artist destroys his creations.56
Films showing or evoking the acts of creation are ambivalent. On the one
hand, they contribute to a demystification of romantic notions about the artist
genius, inspiration, and creation. They unveil the act of creation, showing that
the production of artworks involves lots of preparations, numerous mistakes
and recapitulations, mundane labour and even boredom. On the other hand,
however, such films seem to be unable to deconstruct the mythic image of the
artist as demiurge. On the contrary, they almost inevitably present the artist as
a ‘heroic individual’ tallying with the post-war cult of major artists as celebrities.
According to Lotte Eisner, in showing the immediacy of the act of creation, ‘an
astounding presence is revealed, stripped naked in all its complexity’.57 Thanks
to the film medium, the artists acquire an almost shamanistic power. Focusing
on the act of creation, these films, in the words of Philip Hayward, contribute
to an ‘extreme fetishization of the actual moment of creation’.58 In films showing
artists at work, Patrick Hayman notes, the magic of painting ‘comes across in a
splendidly satisfying way, as the painting itself grows and changes under the
joyful brush of the artist’.59 Many of these films are so powerful because they
hint at an essential feature of many art currents of the beginning and middle
of the twentieth century. As indicated by authors such as Konrad Fiedler and
Paul Valéry, the act of creation acquired a new meaning in the development of
modern art since the late nineteenth century.60 Instead of presenting the hand
as a mere servant of the artist genius, merely giving form to an idea or disegno,
modern art saw the struggle against the materials or against earlier stages of
the artwork as an essential element of its aesthetic power. Combining seeing
and doing in all kinds of bodily relations, the act of creation became a staple
image of the art documentary.
Finally, the motif of the artist at work was also used in contexts in which the
process of artistic creation does not involve the physical action or virtuoso
drawings emphasized in the films on Picasso or Pollock. In Magritte, ou la
leçon de choses (Luc de Heusch, 1960), the stereotypical image of the artist
struggling with paint and brushes in an untidy studio is replaced by footage of
the famous Surrealist dressed in suit and tie, who works in the homely living
26 Art in the Cinema

room of his house – his ‘work’ seems only to consist of moving and manipulating
frames and canvasses as well as giving (sometimes ironic) titles to already
finished paintings.61

Art book and museum

In their attempts to convey works of art, art documentaries should be situated

in a long tradition reaching back to ekphrastic writing in Antiquity and the
development of all kind of practices and devices of display and means of
mediating art works, such as prints, photography, illustrated books and
museums. Moreover, the Golden Age of the art documentary coincides with a
period of major changes in the fields of publishing and museums, following on
the heels of the popularization of the fine arts in the decades following the
Second World War. The cultural participation of the middle and lower classes
was expanding – a phenomenon resulting in increasing number of visitors to
museums as well as in the breakthrough of the illustrated art book, epitomized
by the success of publishers specializing in high-quality art books such as Skira
and Phaidon.
The art book had already undergone some major changes shortly before the
war. Kenneth Clark, for instance, who would much later write and present the
milestone BBC television art documentary Civilisation (1969), published One
Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery in 1938. The book
became an instant success and was followed by the publication of More Details
from Pictures in the National Gallery in 1941. Inspired by the improvement of
photographic reproduction techniques, both books were made for the pleasure
of the eye. Although a few details had been selected ‘for historical or
iconographical reasons’, most details ‘have been chosen chiefly for their beauty’,
Clark emphasized in the introduction. Clark further remarked that the book
contained many details that viewers had never noticed. This means that ‘we do
not look at pictures carefully’ and that ‘the great value of these photographic
details is that they encourage us to look at pictures more attentively, and show
us some of the rewards of patient scrutiny’.62
 Introduction 27

Figure 0.8 André Malraux (photograph by Maurice Jarnoux, 1954).

First and foremost, the late 1940s and early 1950s was also the era in which
André Malraux developed his Musée imaginaire.63 According to Malraux, the
traditional physical museum could be exchanged for a kind of virtual
all-encompassing photographic archive, embodied in the phenomenon of the
illustrated art book. In contrast to the traditional museum, which stimulated
the contemplation of unique and isolated masterpieces, the Musée imaginaire
was rather based on the juxtaposition of artworks of divergent styles, periods
and cultures. Whereas, according to Walter Benjamin, photography and film
had destroyed the aura of the traditional work of art, for Malraux, modern
techniques of mechanical reproduction had a rather ambivalent role.64
Photography was unmistakably capable of disconnecting the work of art from
28 Art in the Cinema

its original context but could also reinforce its aura by emphasizing its affinity
with other artworks or with human creativity as such. Strikingly, for Malraux,
the medium of photography supplies the materials for the art book but it is
cinema that provides its organizational model.
According to Malraux, the art book was, just like a film, a succession of
images arranged on the basis of a technique of montage.65 Like many art books,
many art documentaries can be considered as virtual museums; they are
cinematic equivalents of a curatorial endeavour: creating successions of
artworks and isolating masterpieces through montage, camera movements,
light, etc.
What is more, the production of numerous high-quality art documentaries
and Malraux’s project of the Musée imaginaire also coincided with important
museological innovations. The late 1940s saw the establishment of the
International Council of Museums (ICOM), which had ambitions to
pioneer new curatorial practices. As Birgit Cleppe has demonstrated in her
chapter in this volume, right from its inception, ICOM showed great interest
in the art documentaries and museums were often involved in their
production.
Museum collections and major exhibitions have also been the subject of
early newsreels and seminal art documentaries. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, for instance, figured prominently in the self-produced films
having already adopted film by 1925 and showing its own movies at the
museum.66 The Metropolitan also produced Behind the Scenes: The Working
Side of the Museum (1928), an early example of the popular subgenre of
behind-the-scenes tours of museums. With Kurgäste hinter Museumsmauern
(1934) and Heilbehandlung von Kunstwerken (1939), which deal with the
conservation laboratories of Berlin museums, Hans Cürlis contributed to this
subgenre as well. In the 1930s, Cürlis also made films focusing on collection
highlights of a single museum or several museums in films such as Aus Berliner
Museen (1937) and Schatzkammer Deutschland (1939).67 After the war, leading
museums continued to produce films or were the subject of art documentaries.
The Louvre, for instance, features in numerous documentary films with various
approaches and perspectives. Some of these films, such as Images de l’ancienne
Egypte (Maurice Cloche, 1951), show artworks isolated from their context
 Introduction 29

without the disturbing details that might thwart an intimate encounter with
the artworks during a real museum visit. Others, such as Les Pierres vives
(Fernand Marzelle, 1951), bring together works from different galleries to
evoke an actual museum visit as the camera goes from one room into the other,
approaching the exhibits from an oblique angle. In so doing, rather than merely
documenting the museum, the film aims to extend the museum experience,
translating it into a thrilling cinematic adventure while constructing a new
virtual collection.68

Television: standardization and deconstruction

The landmark art documentaries by Oertel, Emmer, Storck, Haesaerts and

Resnais of the late 1930s and 1940s preceded the spread of the medium of
television in their countries of origin. In the decade following the Second
World War, the mid-twentieth-century documentary on the visual arts found
its most fertile non-theatrical base in the culture of ciné clubs, art societies,
museums and schools. From the 1950s onwards, however, television became
the most important medium for the production and distribution for art
documentaries. It should be noted that television’s relationship with the
visual arts goes well beyond the format of the feature-length art documentary
as the arts also became occasionally the topic of newsreels, talk shows, TV
revues and other types of programmes. Moreover, this relationship has been
largely determined by the process of transmission as many programmes were
live or recorded broadcasts of events from a television studio or an outside
location. In the United States, the rapid rise of network television and its
incessant demand for programming played a major role in the coverage of
art for a mass audience. Lynn Spiegel has amply demonstrated that such
programmes were used by broadcasters to bolster ‘their reputations as public
servants’ and ‘to convince sponsors, audiences and government regulators at
the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that their companies were
not just economically sound, but also socially valuable’.69
Apart from featuring artworks and artists in all kinds of programmes,
television became a major (co-)producer of art documentaries, which could
30 Art in the Cinema

now reach a far greater audience than ever before. The first major advances in
the 1950s were made in Great-Britain where John Read (see Chapter 7) made
seminal films on such contemporaneous British artists as Henry Moore,
Graham Sutherland and Stanley Spencer. Impressed by Emmer’s films and
convinced that ‘the educational is implicit in the artistic’, Read focused on
direct encounters with the artists. His films, in the words of John Wyver, ‘can
feel strikingly “open” for the viewer to bring his or her own responses’.70 Some
interesting films on art were also produced within the context of Monitor
(1958–65), arguably television’s first arts magazine. Noteworthy among them
are Ken Russell’s portraits of composers such as Elgar and Debussy and Pop
Goes the Easel (1962), his account of the development of Pop Art in Britain
using a kind of collage-aesthetic echoing the works of the artists being
discussed in the film.
Directed at a mass audience without a specialist knowledge, for better or
worse television contributed to the standardization of the art documentary
taking the format of a didactic historical tour with an on-camera host whose
words are often juxtaposed with footage of artworks. This format was
pioneered by Kenneth Clark, who created art programmes from the late
1950s onwards and who became famous with the highly successful thirteen-
part series Civilisation: A Personal View (1969).71 In Civilisation, Clark delivers
his lectures in magnificent settings all over western Europe thanks to a budget
that enabled extensive location shooting. Combining the art history lecture
with a Grand-Tour-travelogue format, Civilisation harmoniously pairs
spectacular images with music and a narration marked by ‘the effortless
confidence’ and patrician erudition of Clark’s judgements.72 This on-camera
presence of an expert would subsequently mark many similar series for
decades, from John Berger’s riposte to Clark’s Civilisation in Ways of Seeing
(1972), and Robert Hughes’ Shock of the New (1979) to Simon Schama’s Power
of Art (2006), and the recently broadcast ‘sequel’ to Civilisation, entitled
Civilisations (BBC/PBS, 2018) which Schama co-hosted with Mary Beard and
David Olusoga.
Despite the didacticism of this dominant format, television has occasionally
also offered possibilities to question or deconstruct the voice of authority
speaking on- or off-camera and giving an art history lecture supported by the
 Introduction 31

camera’s exploration of artworks or buildings. Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972)

not only dealt with art but also addressed the very process of its dissemination
and commercialization by the mass media. Inspired by Marxist art theorists
such as Frederick Antal and Walter Benjamin (to whom Berger explicitly refers
in the first programme) as well as by the ‘new art history’, Berger demystified
traditional notions of art, revealing its hidden ideologies. Dealing with themes
likes reproduction, the female nude, the role of the art market, and the
seduction of advertising, Ways of Seeing relates both art and popular visual
culture to social and economic reality.
The diversity in approaches, formats and content suggested by these few
examples of the art documentary’s afterlife on the small screen could well be
thought of as a second Golden Age of the genre, one that brought it to a much
larger public while retaining stylistic traits pioneered by earlier filmmakers
(camera movement over artworks, chronological or geographic succession
in editing, etc). Furthermore, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, state
television in many European countries facilitated the production of
experimental and highly self-reflexive art documentaries such as productions
by Jean-Christophe Averty in France, Gerry Schum in Germany, Mike Dibb
and John Wyver in the United Kingdom, and Jean-Paul Tréfois, Jef Cornelis
and Stefaan Decostere in Belgium.73 Their new televisual formats were closely
connected to changes in the arts themselves. Unmistakably, the medium of
television was at its best when dealing with contemporary practices and issues.
Rather than visualizing or reproducing artworks that already existed, new
artworks were created through the interaction with television, in line with new
artistic currents such as happening, performance, process art, land art,
conceptual art and video art. Coinciding with the development of these new
ideas and practices, television became an important channel of production for
many vanguard artists. Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgallery or ‘TV Gallery’ contains
an episode entitled Identifications (1970) showing performances or
interventions by Joseph Beuys, Gilbert & George, and Richard Serra among
others. Likewise, artists such as Peter Weibel, Valie Export, Maria Lassnig and
Arnulf Rainer were able to create works for/on Austrian art programmes such
as Kontakt or Impulse in the early 1970s. Although they ‘documented’ artworks
in a certain sense, these programmes presented themselves as artworks in line
32 Art in the Cinema

with new conceptions and definitions of ‘art objects’ among the vanguard art
currents of the late 1960s and 1970s.
In a world in which television programming has increasingly migrated to
streaming and online platforms and the self-contained, feature-length
documentary is increasingly superseded by seriality, interactivity, virtual and
augmented reality, we would do well to remember that despite its nearly
century-long evolution, the art documentary is deeply rooted in the cinematic
tradition of non-fiction, the populism of the Visual Instruction movement and
the vision of filmmakers like Emmer, Storck and Resnais that sought to bring
their passions for visual art and the motion picture together. It is to their work
that the contributors to this volume pay tribute.

Notes
1 Henriette Montgomery and Nadine Covert, ‘Art on Screen: Films and Television on Art
– An Overview’, in Nadine Covert (ed.), Art on Screen: A Directory on Film and Videos
about the Visual Arts (New York/Los Angeles: Metropolitan Museum of Art/J. Paul
Getty Trust, 1991), 1.

2 See, for instance, William Mck. Chapman, Films on Art (New York: American
Federation of the Arts, 1952), Le film sur l’art (Paris: UNESCO, 1953) and
Carlo Ludovico Raghianti, Répertoire général international des films sur l’art
(Roma: Edizone dell’ Ateneo, 1951), containing 453, 729 and 1,109 titles
respectively.

3 In 1950, Alain Resnais received an Oscar in the Best Short Subject category for Van
Gogh, whereas Robert Flaherty and Robert Snyder won the Academy Award for Best
Documentary Feature with The Titan. 1848 (Marguerite de la Mure and Victoria
Mercanton) and Rembrandt: A Self-Portrait (Morrie Roizman) were nominated in 1949
and 1954, respectively, for best documentary shorts. For the importance of art
documentaries at the Venice Film Festival, see Luisella D’Alessandro, La Mostra del
cinema di Venezia e la fortuna del documentario d’arte in Italia (Università di Teramo,
MA diss., 2007).

4 The two most important texts by Bazin on this topic are ‘Peinture et cinéma’ (written
between 1943 and 1951) and ‘Un film Bergsonien: Le Mystère Picasso’ (1956), which
are both included in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2007), 187–92,
193–202. See also Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Painting and Film’, in Film Essays and Criticism
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 86–92; Siegried Kracauer, Theory
of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1960), 195–201; Pierre Francastel, ‘A Teacher’s Point of View’, in Films on Art (Paris
 Introduction 33

and Brussels: UNESCO and Les Arts plastiques, 1951); and Henri Lemaître, Beaux-arts
et cinéma (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1956).

5 For a prominent case study see Natasha Ritsma, The Postwar ‘Arts Explosion’ in an
Age of Mechanical Reproduction: the Production, Distribution and Exhibition of
Non-Theatrical Films on Art (PhD diss: Indiana University, 2014).

6 See Jens Thiele, Das Kunstwerk im Film: Zur Problematik filmisher Präsentationsformen
von Malerei und Grafik (Bern: Herbert Lang/Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1976), 14.

7 See Alain Carou, ‘Ceux de chez nous: galerie de portraits, théâtre de la mémoire’, in
Noëlle Giret and Noël Herpe (eds), Sacha Guitry, Une vie d’artiste (Paris: Gallimard,
2007), 55–61.

8 Katz was a student at the American Artists School. See ‘PM Shorts’, PM Magazine
(1 December 1937): 84.

9 See Arthur Knight, ‘A Short History of Art Films’, in Chapman (ed.), Films on Art 1952,
8–9.

10 See Thiele, Das Kunstwerk im Film, 15–18; Reiner Ziegler, Kunst und Architektur im
Kulturfilm 1919–1945 (Konstanz: UVK Verlaggesellschaft, 2003), 35–40, 45–54 and
302–9; Ulrich Döge, Kulturfilm als Aufgabe: Hans Cürlis (1889–1992) (Berlin:
CineGraph Babelsberg, 2005); and Rainer Ziegler: ‘Schaffende Hände: Die Kulturfilme
von Hans Cürlis über bildende Kunst und Künstler’, in Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann,
Jeanpaul Goergen (eds), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland. Band
2: Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 219–27.

11 Cürlis was not known for his use of animation and other special effects – his films were
billed as ‘Trick- und Animationsfilme’. See Peer Moritz, ‘Berthold Bartosch’, in
CineGraph Lexikon zum deutschsprachigen Film (Munich: edition text + kritik,
1984).

12 Knight, ‘A Short History of Art Films’, 10. See also Ziegler, Kunst und Architektur im
Kulturfilm, 290–1 and 315–17.

13 Gordon Mirams, ‘Art and the Cinema’, Design Review 3, 2 (September–October 1950):
39–41. See also Steven Jacobs, Art & Cinema: Belgian Art Documentaries (Brussels:
Cinematek, 2013).

14 See Steven Jacobs, ‘The Silence of the Mystic Lambs: Jan van Eyck and André Cauvin’s
film about The Mystic Lamb (1939)’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of
Art 39, 1–2 (2017): 102–10.

15 Knight, ‘A Short History of Art Films’, 11.

16 Iris Barry, ‘Pioneering in Films on Art’, in Chapman (ed.), Films on Art 1952, 2.

17 Katerina Loukopoulou, ‘Museum at Large: Aesthetic Education through Film’, in

Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron and Dan Streible (eds), Learning with the Lights
Off: Educational film in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012), 357.
34 Art in the Cinema

18 See Leon Duyck, FIFA: Fédération Internationale du Film d’Art Onderzoek naar de
samenstelling, doelstellingen, werking en activiteiten van de FIFA en de ondersteuning
van de kunstdocumentaire na WOII tot en met de jaren ’60 (Ghent University, MA diss.,
2014).

19 See the volumes published by UNESCO such as Films on Art (Paris: Unesco, 1949);
Films on Art (Paris: UNESCO/Brussels: Les Arts plastiques, 1951); and Francis Bolen
(ed.), Films on Art: Panorama 1953 (Paris: UNESCO, 1953).

20 Lisa E. Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2009) and Michael L. Krenn, ‘The Golden Age of
Cultural Diplomacy’, in The History of United States Cultural Diplomacy: 1770 to the
Present Day (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 95–126.

21 Serge Guibault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1983).

22 Arthur Knight, ‘Art Films in America’, in Films on Art: A Specialized Study and
International Catalogue (Brussels: Editions de la Connaissance, 1949), 44.

23 Steven Jacobs, ‘Camera and Canvas: Emmer, Storck, Resnais and the Post-war Art Film’,
in Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2011), 1–37.

24 On Emmer, see Lorenzo Codelli, ‘Un Sandwich par jour: Entretien avec Luciano
Emmer’, Positif 543 (May 2006): 100–5; Luciano Emmer and Enrico Gras, ‘The Film
Renaissance in Italy’, Hollywood Quarterly 2, 4 (July 1947): 353–8; Francis Koval,
‘Interview with Emmer’, Sight & Sound 19, 9 (January 1951): 354–6; Herbert F.
Margolis, ‘Luciano Emmer and the Art Film’, Sight & Sound 16, 61 (Spring 1947): 1–3;
Paola Scremin, ‘Luciano Emmer: Récits sur l’art’, Zeuxis (Autumn 2005): 55–62; Lauro
Venturi, ‘Italian Films on Art’, in Films on Art (Paris: UNESCO/Brussels: Editions de la
connaissance, 1949), 32–41.

25 Paul Davay, ‘Compelled to See’, in Films on Art (Paris: UNESCO/Brussels: Editions de la

connaissance, 1949), 16–17. See also Steven Jacobs, ‘Henri Storck’s Le Monde de Paul
Delvaux (1946) and Pygmalionist Cinema’, in Roger Hallas (ed.), Documenting the
Visual Arts (London: Routledge, 2019), 23–33.

26 See Roger Odin, L’Age d’or du documentaire, Vol. II (Europe, années cinquante),
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 9–15; and Dominique Bluher and François Thomas (eds),
Le Court métrage français de 1948 à 1968 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes,
2005).

27 See Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues and Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: Liaisons

secrètes, accords vagabonds (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006), 212. In the interview
included in this volume, Resnais mentions that he started Van Gogh before
having seen a film by Emmer. He nevertheless recognizes the latter’s influence on
Guernica.
 Introduction 35

28 See Griselda Pollock, ‘Artists Mythologies and Media Genius: Madness and Art
History’, Screen XXI, 3 (1980): 57–96; and Griselda Pollock, ‘Crows, Blossoms, and Lust
for Death: Cinema and the Myth of Van Gogh the Modern Artist’, in Looking Back to
the Future: Essays on Art, Life and Death (London: Routledge, 2000), 277–310.

29 Natasha Ritsma, The Postwar ‘Arts Explosion’ in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

The Production, Circulation, and Exhibition of Nontheatrical Films on Art
(PhD diss., Indiana University, 2015) and Suzanne Regan, The Utilization of the
Film Medium by American Art Museums (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, 1981).

30 For more on the distribution practices of educational cinema see Katerina

Loukopoulou, ‘Museum at Large: Aesthetic Education Through Film’, in Dan Streible,
Devin Orgeron and Marsha Orgeron (eds), Learning with the Lights Off: Educational
Film in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 356–76 and Zöe
Druick, ‘UNESCO, Film and Education’, in Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson (eds),
Useful Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 81–102. University
extensions catering to adult (further) education became increasingly important
distributors of educational films (including art documentaries) as evidenced by the
prominent example of Indiana University’s Audio-Visual Center discussed by Natasha
Ritsma in The Postwar ‘Arts Explosion’ in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction and in her
chapter in this volume.

31 Paul Haesaerts, ‘Sur la critique par le cinéma’, in Le Film sur l’art 1950 (Paris: UNESCO,
1950), 26. See also Céline Maes, ‘Paul Haesaerts et le film sur l’art: pour un cinéma-
critique’, in Valentine Robert, Laurent Le Forestier and François Albera (eds), Le film
sur l’art: Entre histoire de l’art et documentaire de création (Rennes: Presses
universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 153–64.

32 Paul Haesaerts, ‘Arts plastiques et caméra’, Festival (Cahier 4) (Brussels, 21 June 1947).
Also published in Arts de France 23–4 (1948): 25–31.

33 On Ragghianti, see Marco Scotini (ed.), Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and the Cinematic
Nature of Vision (Milan: Charta, 2000).

34 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1960), 198.

35 Barry, ‘Pioneering in Films on Art’, 1.

36 Judith Wechsler, ‘Art History and Films on Art’, in Nadine Covert (ed.), Art on Screen: A
Directory of Films and Videos About the Visual Arts (New York: The Metropolitan
Museum, 1991), 10–11.

37 Jean Queval, ‘Film and Fine Arts’, Sight & Sound (February 1950): 35.

38 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 197

39 Beatrice Farwell, ‘Films on Art in Education’, Art Journal 23, 1 (Fall):

39–40.
36 Art in the Cinema

40 Bolen, ‘Le Film à la rencontre des arts plastiques’, 7.

41 Rudolf Arnheim, Film As Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957), 59.

42 Bazin, ‘Peinture et cinéma’, 187–92.

43 J.P. Hodin, ‘Two English Films’, Films on Art (Brussels/Paris: Les Arts Plastiques/
UNESCO, 1951), 22.
44 Sally A. Chappell, ‘Films on Sculpture’, Art Journal 33, 2 (Winter 1973–4): 127–8.

45 See Steven Jacobs, ‘Carving Cameras on Thorvaldsen and Rodin: Mid-Twentieth-

Century Documentaries on Sculpture’, in Steven Jacobs, Susan Felleman, Vito
Adriaensens and Lisa Colpaert, Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 65–84.

46 The Danish-Belgian-Dutch CoBrA movement (an acronym for the capitals of these
countries) produced several interesting art documentaries showing artists at work
although all of these films were made after the dissolution of the movement in 1951.
Apart from De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel (Jan Vrijman, 1962), documentaries on
CoBrA artists include three versions of a film on painter and poet Lucebert by Johan
Van der Keuken: Een film voor Lucebert/Lucebert, tijd en afscheid (A Film for Lucebert/
Lucebert, Time and Farewell, 1962/1967/1994); and two films by Luc de Heusch on two
of CoBrA’s founding members: Alechinsky d’apres nature (Alechinsky from Life, 1970)
and Dotremont: Les logogrammes (Dotremont: The Logograms, 1972). In 1955, painter
Pierre Alechinsky made an interesting film on Japanese Calligraphy. See Steven Jacobs,
‘CoBrA, Canvas, and Camera: Luc de Heusch Filming Alechinsky and Dotremont at
Work’, in Rachel Esner and Sandra Kisters (eds), The Mediatization of the Artist
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 115–29.

47 See Bazin, ‘Un Film Bergsonien’; Smith, ‘Moving Pictures’, 163–73; and Philippe Fauvel,
‘Le Mystère Picasso: De la Tyrannie de la réalité, en peinture, à la litanie de la peinture,
en réalité’, Positif (May 2009): 96–9.

48 Bazin, ‘Un Film Bergsonien’, 193–202.

49 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952), included in Charles

Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing
Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 581.

50 Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900–1990, 582.

51 Richard Miller, ‘De CoBrA-geste’, in Anne Adriaens-Pannier and Michel Draguet (eds),
COBRA (Tielt: Lannoo, 2008), 241.

52 See Georges Mathieu, Georges Mathieu: 50 ans de création (Paris: Hervas, 2003); Lydia
Harambourg, Georges Mathieu (Lausannes: Ides et Calendes, 2013); and Georges
Mathieu, L’Abstraction prophétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

53 See, for instance, Allan Kaprow, ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’ (1958), in Allan
Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1993), 1–9.
 Introduction 37

54 Gottfried Boehm, ‘The Form of the Formless: Abstract Expressionism and Art
Informel’, quoted in Action Painting: Jackson Pollock and Gesture in Painting
(Ostfeldern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 39.

55 Karel Appel, quoted in Hugo Claus, Karel Appel Painter (New York: Abrams, 1962), 152.

56 On artists biopics, see Steven Jacobs, ‘Vasari in Hollywood: Artists and Biopics’, in
Jacobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2011), 38–64. It should be remembered that the ephemeral aspect of art in these
films is reinforced by the fact that works produced during their making was always
meant to be destroyed afterwards.

57 Lotte Eisner, quoted in Philip Hayward, ‘Introduction’, in Philip Hayward (ed.), Picture
This: Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists (London: John Libbey, 1988), 7.

58 Philip Hayward, ‘Introduction’, in Hayward (ed.), Picture This, 7.

59 Patrick Hayman, quoted in Philip Hayward, ‘Introduction’, in Hayward (ed.), Picture

This, 7.

60 Dominique Chateau, ‘L’acte de création comme problème esthétique’, in Pierre-Henry

Frangne, Gilles Mouëllic and Christophe Viart (eds), Filmer l’acte de création (Rennes:
Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 81–7.

61 Steven Jacobs, ‘Cinema, Surrealism, and Object Lessons: On Luc De Heusch’s 1960
Magritte ou la leçon de choses’, Art Journal 77, 1 (2018): 54–70.
62 Kenneth Clark, ‘Introduction’, in One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National
Gallery (London: Printed for the Trustees of the National Gallery, 1938), v–vi.

63 Le Musée imaginaire was originally published in 1947 as the first volume of Psychologie
de l’art (Genève: Skira) and was later adapted to become a part of Les Voix du silence
(Paris: Gallimard, 1951). In 1965, the text was republished as Le Musée imaginaire
(Paris: Gallimard). The three volumes of Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale
(Paris: Gallimard) were published in 1952–4.

64 For a fresh look at Malraux’s project and a comparison with the work of Benjamin and
Aby Warburg, see Walter Grasskamp, The Book on the Floor: André Malraux and the
Imaginary Museum (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2016).

65 See Douglas Smith, ‘Moving Pictures: The Art Documentaries of Alain Resnais and
Henri-Georges Clouzot in Theoretical Context (Benjamin, Malraux and Bazin)’,
Studies in European Cinema 1, 3 (2004), 163–73. See also Grasskamp, The Book on the
Floor.

66 Haidee Wasson, ‘Big, Fast Museums/Small, Slow Movies’, in Charles R. Acland and
Haidee Wasson (eds), Useful Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011),
178–204. Another example from this period is Franklin Watkins (1950) produced
by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for their exhibition of the artist’s work that
year.
38 Art in the Cinema

67 See Bénédicte Savoy, Vom Faustkeil zur Handgranate: Filmpropaganda für die Berliner
Museen 1934–1939 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2014).

68 See Steven Jacobs and Birgit Cleppe, ‘A Museum of Moving Images: Mid-Twentieth-
Century Art Documentaries on the Louvre,’ Oxford Art Journal 42, 3 (2019): 373–93.

69 Lynn Spiegel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 4. See also Maurice Berger, Revolution of the
Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television (New York: The Jewish Museum,
2015).

70 John Wyver, Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (London: Wallflower
Press, 2007), 22.

71 Clark had made some experimental forays into art programmes for BBC Television
even before the Second World War, with his Artists at Work series (1937–8). See
Wyver, Vision On, 16. His Civilisations (1969) would even get a limited release in
cinemas, including at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, testifying to the
fact that distinctions between television and cinema were often blurred in the
production and circulation of art documentaries.

72 John Wyver, ‘Television’, in Chris Stephens and John-Paul Stonard (eds), Kenneth
Clark: Looking for Civilisation (London: Tate Britain, 2014), 124.

73 See Dorine Mignot (ed.), Revision: Art Programmes of European Television Stations
(Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1987).
 1
The institutional breeding
grounds of the post-war
film on art: key figures and
networks behind the first
International Conference
on Art Films
BIRGIT CLEPPE

From 26 June to 2 July 1948, the French art circle Les Amis de l’Art (Friends of
the Arts) organized the first International Conference on Art Films.1 For the
organization of the conference, Les Amis de l’Art managed to gather an
impressive list of co-organizing partners: UNESCO, the International Council
of Museums (ICOM), the Cinémathèque française and the French Ministries
of Education and Foreign Affairs. Held at the Louvre and the Musée de
l’Homme, the conference was also supported by two leading French museums.
Moreover, the conference coincided with two other major events within the art
world. From 21 to 27 June, the first International Conference of Art Critics was
held in Maison de l’UNESCO in Paris, while from 28 June to 3 July, ICOM
organized its first general conference in the Louvre.2 The conference on art

39
40 Art in the Cinema

films was attended by a variety of filmmakers, artists, museum officials, film

archivists and art historians, who had already shown interest in the genre of
the film on art. The event, with film screenings and lectures, was presented to
all the attendants of the other two conferences. At the end of the conference,
the organizers provided a long-term institutional endorsement of the film on
art by establishing the Fédération International du Film sur l’Art (FIFA, or the
International Federation of the Film on Art).
This chapter aims to uncover the roots of this outspoken interest by
prominent cultural and political authorities in the fairly new film genre of the
art documentary. By mapping who was involved in the organization of this
first conference, it unravels a heavily intertwined network of institutions and
individuals that supported the foundation of FIFA. By tracking down how the
film on art fits alongside their other activities, it will not only bring to light the
divergent ambitions behind the institutional infrastructure of the film on art,
but also investigates whether there are common interests and concerns to be
found within this chaotic amalgam of personal opinions and ambitions, and
institutional agendas. More particularly, this chapter will demonstrate the
dominance of the museum world in the development of the post-war art
documentary and FIFA. In addition, the ambitions of the attendants of FIFA’s
first conference in 1948 will be discussed in the light of FIFA’s 1966 report
entitled ‘Problems of the Film on Art’, included in FIFA’s final publication, the
film catalogue Dix ans du film sur l’art (Ten Years of the Film on Art).3 In so
doing, I will question if and how the origins of this institutionalization
enhanced, delimited or to some extent even predetermined the future
production, diffusion and promotion of films on art. After all, the interest in
film was far from an unconditional love for a new art form, as most museums
reduced art documentaries to functional tools, serving their own agendas.

Joining forces: who founded FIFA?

In a brief report on the conference, Henry de Morant, director of the Fine Arts
Museum in Angers, stated that ‘until now, the film on art was the result of
isolated directors working with limited resources and without any link between
them’.4 These isolated initiatives, Morant added, ‘were highly unfavorable for
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 41

the proliferation and even the creation of films on art’. According to Morant,
the principal result of the conference was ‘to make those interested aware of
their common strength and group them into a Fédération internationale du
film d’art et du film expérimental.5
‘The organizers of the first FIFA conference, and first and foremost
Mr Diehl’, Morant added, had modelled themselves on ‘the scientific film, that
started to become well-known and appreciated thanks to the initiatives of Jean
Painlevé, D. Commandon and others’.6 In 1947, Painlevé had established the
International Scientific Film Association (ISFA) under UNESCO’s patronage
and as part of the Fondation de l’Union Mondiale du Documentaire with,
among others, Joris Ivens, Henri Langlois, Iris Barry and Henri Storck. Its goal
was ‘to join scientific, technical and film circles’.7 Painlevé had attributed a
central role to UNESCO, because ‘this organization could allow to regulate
efficiently the participation of all member states and particularly facilitate the
circulation of educational films’.8 The association strengthened its ability to
distribute films worldwide by also inviting organizations such as the Fédération
Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF) and the Fédération Internationale
des Ciné Clubs (the latter directed by Painlevé since its creation in 1947) to
participate at its first conference in October 1947.9 Similarly, with the
foundation of FIFA, ‘the objective of the federation is to group the persons and
institutions interested in art and cinema. It tries to encourage the realization
and diffusion of the film on art [. . .] through the rapprochement among its
members’.10 It will, therefore, consciously use their institutional structures and
networks. As a result, Morant concludes, ‘it is not said that the films will always
remain unknown to the big masses’, while admitting in a footnote of his report
that ‘currently they are definitely! And if I say that I have never seen a single
one of them, it is not to distinguish myself of my brother historians.’ For the
international dissemination of art documentaries, the patrongage of UNESCO
was fundamental.

Les Amis de l’Art

One of the speakers at the conference was French art historian and critic Gaston
Diehl, who explicitly referred to ‘the systematic experiments which had been
42 Art in the Cinema

carried out in the past four years by Les Amis de l’Art (Friends of Art) in various
circles of Paris and the Provinces’.11 Founded immediately after the liberation in
October 1944 by Diehl, the Parisian Mouvement des Amis de l’Art, often
shortened to Les Amis de l’Art, aimed to spread knowledge of contemporary art
all over France. It did so by setting up local branches, organizing conferences,
film screenings, and establishing the Prix de la jeune peinture.12 The organization
also published a journal whose subtitle reveals its true ambition: Mouvement de
propagande et de culture artistiques.13 The film on art fitted perfectly within this
mission. In his book La peinture en France dans les années noires (1935–1945),
which can be regarded as his memoirs, Diehl summarizes the humanist
emancipatory mission of the organization in a chapter entitled ‘Le regard
devant l’oeuvre’ as ‘apprendre à voir’ or ‘learn to look’.14 Apart from being ‘an end
in itself for artists (painters, sculptors, architects and engravers) who might use
it as a new visual medium’, Diehl pointed at the possibilities of the art film ‘for
the artistic education of the public’.
As part of the activities of Les Amis de l’Art, Diehl frequently screened
films.15 It was at one of Les Amis’ events that young filmmaker Alain Resnais
would meet painter Robert Hessens as well as Gaston Diehl, who invited
Resnais to direct a 16mm film on the the Van Gogh exhibition held at the
Musée de l’Orangerie, from January to March 1947, ‘in the style of Luciano
Emmer’.16 By the time of the 1948 conference, Les Amis de l’Art had already
produced several influential art documentaries. Van Gogh (Alain Resnais and
Robert Hessens, 1948) would eventually win the Academy Award for Best
Short Subject in 1950.17 In the same period, Diehl, Hessens and Resnais
collaborated on Malfray (1948).18 In 1949–50, Hessens and Resnais produced
Guernica, and in 1950, Diehl would write the scenario for Gauguin, directed by
Resnais.19
Having founded the Salon de Mai during the Occupation, where artists
who had been disregarded as degenerate by Nazi ideology were invited to
exhibit their works, and having written Les problèmes de la peinture (The
Problems of Painting) in 1945, Diehl’s interest primarily focused on
contemporary, often abstract, art and painting. Les Amis de l’Art would also
publish the booklet Pour et contre l’art abstrait (In Favour and Against Abstract
Art), as an issue of Les Carnets, written by Diehl and Denys Chevalier.20
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 43

As Marianne Le Galliard has observed – partly quoting the voice-over

commentary of Alain Resnais’ film on Henri Goetz (1947) – this fitted well in
the post-war Parisian context. In a world turned upside down by the Second
World War, there was a predominant spirit of humanism based on subjectivity
and the defence of individuality. Abstract art, at the time of the Liberation,
responded for some to this dynamism, to this

new world that arises. Thus, in Paris, new galleries are opened (Conti
Gallery, Allendy or Denise René) and new associations are formed, such as
Les Amis de l’Art, founded by Gaston Diehl in 1944 whose goal is to
disseminate this new art through projections, publications, ‘educational’
conferences.21

Another reason that may explain Diehl’s interest in all varieties of artistic
education was his dissatisfaction with conventional museum displays. Diehl
had graduated from the École du Louvre in 1936, where he may well have been
in touch with Louvre curators René Huyghe and Jacques Jaujard who were
then in the midst of realizing their art documentary Rubens et son temps on the
eponymous exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie.22 In 1943, René Huyghe
would become one of the members of the honorary committee of Diehl’s Salon
de Mai, together with his colleague at the Louvre’s painting department,
Germain Bazin, who would later collaborate on the Louvre documentary A
Golden Prison: The Louvre (John Sughrue, 1964). In his book on French
painting between 1935 and 1945, Diehl dismisses his classical education at the
École as it ‘had not prepared him at all to sift the wheat from the chaff and
rather tended to mislead him in the name of the so-called tradition’.23 Instead
of an academic or art historical understanding of the artwork, Diehl propagated
a more direct and visual approach to the canvas, in which ‘its sensitive strength
to communicate’ could be revealed.24 At the 1948 conference, he took this
stance when he stated that the film on art’s ‘purpose was not so much to
describe a work of art accurately and in detail but rather to evoke its inward
essence’.25 Instead of giving solid art historical background, the films should
stimulate ‘the curiosity and appetite of the observer, finally encouraging him to
visit the museum in order to see and study the original work, with the spirit
and detail of which he would be already familiar’.
44 Art in the Cinema

The conference’s honorary committee

A quick glance at the honorary committee of the conference reveals the interest
in the art documentary among national and international institutions,
government officials and leading figures in the fields of cinema and the visual
arts. All of them shared the interest of Les Amis de l’Art in the film on art as a
new medium for artists, but also as a tool for artistic education as well as a
revolutionary reproduction method that enhanced national and international
distribution of artworks. Strikingly, most of the organizations involved were
fairly young. The French Cinémathèque, which had been founded in 1936, was
represented by its founding director Henri Langlois. Langlois was bewildered
by Luciano Emmer’s Racconto da un affresco (1938), and appreciated his films
on Italian Renaissance painting first and foremost as independent works of art.
Emmer himself would state that ‘shooting a short film was no longer about
rigging up a series of photographed paintings’.26 Langlois would be the first to
screen Emmer’s work in France.27 Subsequently, Emmer’s films were applauded
by prominent film critics such as André Bazin, Jean George Auriol and Jean
Cocteau.
Likewise, the French Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), which
had just been established in 1946, was represented by its director Michel
Fourré-Cormeray as well as Claude Jaeger and Jacques Chausserie-Laprée,
who were responsible for the production of films and documentary shorts
respectively. As a non-commercial documentary film genre, the film on art
was well within the scope of the CNC that had the task of ‘ensuring the
dissemination of documentary films and the development of a non-commercial
cinema sector’.28
Whereas CNC and the French Cinémathèque could furnish the necessary
contacts and technical knowledge from a cinematic point of view, the French
Ministry of Foreign Affairs could provide the necessary support on the political
level. Its Cultural Relations Department and its Cultural Interchange
Department were represented by Louis Joxe and Roger Seydoux respectively.
Philippe Erlanger attended the conference as director of the Association
française d’Action Artistique, its core business also being the development of
international cultural exchanges.29 Jacques Jaujard, former Director of National
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 45

Museums, represented the French Ministry of Education. The composition of

the honorary committee of the conference thus mainly revealed the interest in
the art documentary on an institutional, often political level, centred around
France’s national interests and the international ambitions of its ministries and
some of its organizations.

UNESCO: a fresh impulse to the

dissemination of culture

Non-French members of the honorary committee of the 1948 Conference on

Art Film included Grace McCann Morley and Ernest Borneman who
represented UNESCO’s Museum Division and Film Unit. UNESCO’s interest
in the art documentary comes as no surprise. UNESCO was founded during
the last months of the Second World War with a strong belief in the value of
cultural interchange between people for the establishment of world peace. Its
mission was

to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among

the nations through education, science, and culture in order to further
universal respect for justice, for the rule of law, and for human rights and
fundamental freedoms, which are affirmed for the peoples of the world
without distinction of race, sex, language, or religion, by the charter of the
United Nations.30

In his appraisal of UNESCO’s activities in the early years of its existence,

Walter Sharp, distinguishes three ways it had to achieve its main purpose.

First among the means proposed for realizing this noble goal is the
advancement of mutual knowledge and understanding through all means
of mass communication; that is to say, ‘the free flow of ideas by word and
image.’ [. . .] The second suggested method is to ‘give fresh impulse to
popular education and to the spread of culture,’ by promoting equality of
educational opportunity. [. . .] The third is to ‘maintain, increase and diffuse
knowledge,’ for its own sake, by conserving the world’s cultural inheritance,
46 Art in the Cinema

by encouraging international exchange of persons and publications, and by

assuring world-wide access to the products of the world’s scholars, scientists
and creative artists.31

It is clear that the art documentary could play an important role in all three.
As filmic reproductions of art, art documentaries exhibit artworks in a
cinematic way, bringing the museum to the cinema theatre. By adding
movement, comparing details, or showing artists at work, art documentaries
could show even more than the real museum, and it could reach wider
audiences. The very first issue of the UNESCO Courier stated that the
visual reproduction of art was ‘to be encouraged [. . .] as a means of assisting
art education and stimulating cultural exchange’.32 As part of UNESCO’s
Arts and Letters programme, a detailed catalogue of paintings reproduced in
colour

will be discussed with experts in colour reproduction, art education and the
history of art who are to meet in Paris this summer at the same time as the
Conference of the International Council of Museums. To complement these
lists, to bring them alive as it were, an exhibition will be held consisting of
the best colour prints available to illustrate the techniques of colour printing
and their role in art appreciation and education.33

In many of its early issues, the UNESCO Courier expressed its interest in
reproductions of artworks and, consequently, also in the medium of film as a
means of popular communication about the arts. The fourth issue announced
the production of a ‘Film Catalogue on International Understanding’, referring
to a ‘draft catalogue of filmstrips and films on the crafts and arts’.34 Another
article in the same issue emphasized the importance of improving colour
reproductions of paintings, adding that ‘attention is also urged towards
improving the colour fidelity in films of works of art’.35
Though both are part of UNESCO, an interesting antagonism can be found
between the progressive approach of UNESCO’s film unit and a more
conservative stance towards the film on art by its Museum division. In his talk
at the International Art Film Festival at the Metropolitan Museum in New
York, held on 26 April 1957, Belgian film archivist Francis Bolen, who
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 47

represented UNESCO’s Film Unit, described the organization’s supportive

role.36 While never directly financing the production of films on art, with the
exception of Paul Haesaert’s L’Humanisme: Victoire de l’esprit (1955), it tended
to support existing initiatives.37 From 1953 onwards, FIFA was granted a
yearly sum of $2,000 and it published several catalogues listing the existing
films on art (one of them edited by Bolen himself). The film on art also
benefitted from several more general UNESCO policies, such as its Film
Coupons, which had been introduced in order to overcome the different
currencies of its member states.
UNESCO’s film unit regarded the film on art as a means of mass
communication, being able to distribute art on a massive scale, maybe even
with a possibility of realizing André Malraux’s contemporaneous ideas on the
imaginary museum. UNESCO’s museum division, on the other hand, saw
things from a different angle, as we can conclude from both Grace McCann
Morley’s writings in the Burlington Magazine in 1947 and the Museum
guide it published in 1960.38 The Museum Division regarded the film on art
merely as an educational tool, as a technical aid that should never distract
the visitor from ‘the real contact with the objects’ because ‘real objects seen in
their best setting can accomplish this far more effectively than can a second-
hand experience’.39 By no means, could film be a replacement of the actual
museum.

ICOM: a new method for revealing art

The UNESCO Courier published a short report on the 1948 ICOM conference
that expressed the shared views of UNESCO and ICOM on the importance
of museums: ‘With UNESCO, ICOM believes that museums can have great
value in furthering understanding among peoples and can have strong
influence in the educational training of both youth and adults.’40 Founded with
the support of UNESCO in 1946, ICOM intended to introduce new
museological practices. In his introduction to the very first issue of ICOM’s
periodical Museum, Georges Salles, Directeur des Musées Nationaux in charge
of the Louvre, succinctly summarized the then prevailing ideas on museum
48 Art in the Cinema

innovation, aimed at transforming the museum from an elitist storehouse of

art treasures into a medium of mass communication.

Like books and the radio, the museum is on the way to becoming one of
the principle media of knowledge: it must therefore adapt itself to all
subjects and all public to be at the same time a means of study and
stimulating entertainment, a storehouse and an organ of widespread
diffusion.41

Right from its inception, ICOM showed great interest in the art documentary.
In the second (double) issue of Museum dedicated to ‘Museums and Education’,
the fourth and final chapter dealt with films on art, with articles such as ‘The
Film and the Art Museum’, ‘The Function of the Art Film’, ‘Art and the Camera
Eye in Italy’ and ‘The Use of Motion Pictures in Museums of the Present Day’.42
The editorial stated that ‘art museums should take note of the outstanding
developments in this new method of revealing art’.43
The honorary committee of the first Conference on Art Films may not have
included any ICOM members, but the organizing committee contained
several museum officials, often very active within ICOM and within FIFA. As
‘representatives of national commissions’, René Huyghe and Charles Sterling
represented France. Both were working at the painting department of the
Louvre. Having produced an art documentary himself, Huyghe lectured at the
conference on his colour film Rubens et son temps (René Huyghe and Jacques
Jaujard, 1938) emphasizing ‘the extraordinary mobility and supersensitivity of
the camera’s eye and its ability to magnify an isolated detail’. Huyghe
furthermore emphasized the added value of film over the museum because the
observer’s eye could

be guided on a real tour of the picture, so that, by revealing the balance of

the composition, the secrets of technique and the intrinsic vigour of the
forms, the camera can impart a more profound understanding of the
intentions of the artist.44

Huyghe was very interested in developing new museological paradigms. In the

first issue of Museum, he wrote about the rearrangement of the Louvre’s
painting collection that ‘a museum is not a fixed frame into which exhibits can
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 49

be fitted like soldiers enrolled in a unit; the setting must be an expression and
a natural extension of the work of art’.45 For ICOM’s second biennial conference
in London in 1950, Huyghe wrote an influential report on ‘the Coordination of
international art exhibitions’, tackling the conflicting ambitions of a museum
that wants to attract as much people as possible on the one hand, and aims to
conserve its artworks in the best conditions on the other.46 With the possibilities
of art documentaries in mind, Huyghe’s central question in this report almost
sounds rhetorical: ‘How can we satisfy the growing appetite of the public and
avoid disappointing the highly desirable curiosity they are showing in works of
art, while at the same time reducing the movement of works to the minimum?’47
Together with Italian art historian Lionello Venturi, Huyghe would act as a vice
president of FIFA from its establishment. Working for the Louvre where FIFA
had its headquarters, and being an active member of ICOM, Huyghe would be
one of the strongest links between the art documentary phenomenon and the
museum world in the early days of FIFA.
Coinciding with both the first FIFA Congress and the first ‘Congress of Art
Critics’, UNESCO’s report on ICOM’s first ‘Biennial International Museum
Conference’ also mentions ‘a special evening of the members of ICOM held on
the evening of 29 June’.48 This event was clearly aimed at convincing leading
museum officials and art critics of the importance of the art documentary, as
indicated by this quote from Louvre curator René Huyghe’s speech:

At the present time, the film is one of the most valuable instruments we
have for the proliferation and appreciation of art. With the help of the
camera, the material structure and the essential content or character of
works of art can now be analysed in detail. People do not generally know
how to look at pictures. The film enables us to hold the spectator’s eye and
guide it step by step through the descriptive and visual detail of a work of
art.49

In general, approbation for the film on art often went hand in hand with a
dismissal of traditional ‘dull’ museum displays. For instance, UNESCO’s report
on the first conference is introduced with the essay ‘The Art Film in the
Museum’ by Gordon Mirams that would later appear in ICOM’s periodical
Museum. Associating museums with ‘dreadful paintings’ in ‘dim corridors’,
50 Art in the Cinema

Mirams evokes a ‘nightmare’ in which he would be ‘locked up in the local

museum at closing time and forced to spend the night among the mummies,
the skeletons, the devil-masks, and the stuffed lions and tigers’. But ‘if I had
access to the museum’s movie projector and a supply of its art films’, Mirams
writes, ‘I would even welcome the opportunity’.50
Another leading museum official involved in the institutional network of art
documentaries was Willem Sandberg. Serving as director of the Stedelijk
Museum in Amsterdam since 1945, Sandberg attended the conference as a
representative of the Dutch National Commission. Under the direction of D.C.
Roëll, he had been responsible for the contested reorganization of the Stedelijk
in May 1938, executed within the context of the exhibition A Hundred Years of
French Painting. The entrance hall and staircase, the walls of which had
previously been of red and yellow brick and had been decorated with green
tiles, was painted white. In addition, the lilac wainscoting was removed, the
yellow glass was replaced by plain glass and light was tempered by awnings.
Organizing over 300 exhibitions in a period of seventeen years, Sandberg was
more interested in the museum as an active player within the field of visual arts
than in a treasury for a precious collection. In ‘An Old Museum Adapted for
Modern Art Exhibitions’ published in Museum in 1951, he asks the question
boldly in the first paragraph of his article: ‘Why was our modern art museum
built? [. . .] As a place in which to collect exhibits, or to demonstrate to the
general public a line of evolution, a given development, a progression of ideas?’51
As an advocate of the second conception, Sandberg defended the decision to
turn the Stedelijk as much as possible into a white cube. ‘Emphasis has been
placed on general simplification of rooms to make them adaptable for different
types of exhibitions.’ For Sandberg, a museum’s exhibition space had to be as
neutral as possible, in order to receive the most divergent types of exhibitions,
just like the white screen in the movie theatre is apt to host any kind of film.
Next to his quest for innovation within the field of museum display,
Sandberg’s interest in the film on art can also be related to the great importance
he attached to art reproductions and their ability to disseminate art around the
globe. He was part of the scientific committee that prepared UNESCO’s
aforementioned Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Paintings.52 Apart from
the catalogue, the committee was also asked to consider themes for future
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 51

UNESCO Travelling Exhibitions of Reproductions.53 For the second and third

publication of the catalogue, Sandberg was joined by two other individuals
that can be linked to the film on art: his FIFA fellow, Italian art historian
Lionello Venturi, and the French director of the Musée de l’Art Moderne Jean
Cassou, who wrote the scenario and narrated the French voice-over
commentary in La Fenêtre ouverte (Henri Storck, 1952).54

AICA: art criticism on screen

The most direct liaisons with FIFA are perhaps to be found within the circles
of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA)., with several individuals
holding AICA’s highest positions remaining loyal towards FIFA from its very
beginning up to its slow decay at the end of the 1950s. Both Cassou and Venturi
were mentioned as vice-presidents of the first International Congress of Art
Critics. Together with René Huyghe, Lionello Venturi would become vice
president of FIFA and would remain so until 1958.55 The president of the
AICA Congress was Paul Fierens, the director of the Belgian Royal Museums
of Fine Arts, who would become FIFA’s president in 1951.56 Two vice-
presidents of that congress, Herbert Read and James Johnson Sweeney, can
also be linked to FIFA. Renowned art historian Herbert Read was the father of
film director John Read who would join FIFA in 1959, during the final years
of its existence.57 Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and AICA
director from 1957, James Johnson Sweeney is mentioned as a member of
FIFA’s administrative board in 1953.58 Sweeney would collaborate with
animation artist John Hubley for the scenario of the film Adventures of an
Asterisk (John and Faith Hubley, 1957), ‘which brilliantly visualized in terms
of design and characterization the clash between representational and
non-representational art’.59 In 1952, Jean Cassou and James Johnson Sweeney
commissioned the production of the film L’Oeuvre du vingtième siècle: Musée
national d’arts modernes: Peintures et sculptures, about the exhibition of the
same name curated by Sweeney for the Musée de l’Art Moderne in Paris.60 In
Les Arts Plastiques, Jean Cassou compared the different presentations when
the exhibition travelled to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Palais
52 Art in the Cinema

des Beaux-Arts in Brussels subsequently. Cassou was especially struck by

Sandberg’s asymmetric display of the artworks without any consideration of
school or chronology. ‘This dissymmetry is concerted and studied, and there’s
an idea behind it,’ Cassou writes:

It arouses the attention and directs it. When entering, a certain capital piece
may seem to be relegated in the corner of the room. The room’s door is not
situated on the room’s central axis though, but opens up exactly towards this
corner, so that, if you pass by in the neighbouring room, you continue to
perceive the work of art, standing out and framed, and persistent in its
manifestation. And you finally understand the wish of the curator is to call
your attention and not let it rest.61

The presentation thus evoked an almost cinematic experience, where suspense

is constructed from one work of art to another.
Next to Sweeney and Venturi, among the twenty-four members of the
general assembly, Simone Gille-Delafon is also mentioned as a delegate for
France. Starting in 1949, she became AICA’s secretary-general. Francis Bolen
mentioned her as executive secretary of FIFA from 1954 onwards.62 Gille-
Delafon was very active in the final years of AICA, establishing a bigger network
of sixteen independent national departments and moving FIFA’s seat from the
Louvre to FIAF.63 She also tried, though not always successfully, to establish
connections with other organizations with parallel ambitions such as the
Institut International du Film sur l’Art (IIFA) and the Conseil International du
Cinéma et de la Télévision (CICT).64 In 1965, she became part of FIFA’s expert
committee that edited the last catalogue on art film: Dix ans du film sur l’art.65
For the final session of the AICA Congress, the official agenda referred to
the ‘Opening of the Congress of films on Fine Arts’, held in the Salle de l’École
du Louvre, with an ‘address by Messrs. René Huyghe and Fernand Léger’.66 Part
of the FIFA conference was thus embedded in the AICA Congress. In his talk,
Léger described the art of cinema as ‘a new means of self-expression’ and
emphasized the similarities with painting, because both are trying ‘to find a
means of correspondence with the visual feeling of their time’.67 In the entire
FIFA conference this is the only intervention that does not somehow
instrumentalize the film on art but frames it as an independent art form.
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 53

The other interventions merely approach the film on art as a tool for art
criticism.
For the third AICA conference, held in the Netherlands in 1951, René
Huyghe was invited to be one of the speakers. Though his speech ‘Psychology
of Art’ does not touch on the film on art, it does express a similar aversion
towards a documentary, factual approach of art criticism similar to that
expressed by Diehl. Because, according to Huyghe, ‘the critic would not be
worthy of his task if he did not understand at first that any form of expression
[. . .] responds to [. . .] internal necessities raising from temperament.’68
Belgian art critic and filmmaker Paul Haesaerts also lectured at the 1951
conference, speaking on ‘Art criticism through the cinema’. Haesaerts explicitly
distanced himself from films on art with a pure ‘art historical’ bias and pleaded
for films with a critical stance.

Let’s forget about fiction films inspired by the painter’s style, or by a

civilization. Let’s forget about the cinematic representation of the flask of
which an artist made a legendary episode. Let’s forget about the
documentaries on the context, work and studio of an artist, and let’s pass on
to the craft of cinema used as a means to realize that what we might call
‘animated painting.’ Let’s focus only on this part of the ‘Cinema on Art’ that
has brought us new possibilities of critical expressions, of new tools.

Furthermore, Haesaerts pointed out the difference, the added value of a visual
critique over a written text:

Because this time the artwork, intransigent testimony, is constantly present.

The thousand images of it in the film, replace the letters, the words of our
sentences, so far removed of that of what they are speaking. Writing only allows
us to circulate in memories, while film offers us the present – a fictional present,
most certainly, but in a way more complete, more diverse than the real present.
Currently, if that what the critic says is true, this truth is directly verifiable,
immediately within reach of the eye and the judgment, almost of the hand.69

Being more easily transportable than real paintings and sculptures, the visual
language of art criticism through the cinema also enhanced an international
distribution of ideas. This dovetailed well with AICA’s statutes, aiming at
54 Art in the Cinema

‘bring[ing] together art critics, wishing to improve international cooperation

in the realm of the plastic, graphic and applied arts, and of architecture’ and ‘to
facilitate information and international artistic exchanges’.70

Film: seminars of the arts

Whereas the honorary committee of the conference did not include a

filmmaker, the organizing committee, as well as the board of directors of FIFA,
included several. In comparison to the honorary committee, the organizing
committee more closely reflected the international cinephile circles in which
the art documentary came about. The conference was chaired by French artist
Fernand Léger, who had already animated his own art on screen in 1924 with
his landmark experimental film Ballet mécanique. One of the vice chairmen of
the organizing committee was Belgian filmmaker Henri Storck, who had
gained fame with his Regards sur la Belgique ancienne (Views of Ancient
Belgium, 1936), a colour film on the art treasures of Belgium in which he
experimented for the first time with the cinematic exploration of artworks
through montage and animation. The other vice president, American journalist
Willam Mck. Chapman, would soon start filming prehistoric cave paintings
for Lascaux, Cradle of Man’s Art (1949–50). The report furthermore mentions
Luciano Emmer, who had made Racconto di un affresco (1938) and Il paradiso
terrestre (1946), as ‘general representative’.71 Other members of the organizing
committee included filmmaker and Emmer’s creative partner Enrico Gras,
photographer Thomas Bourchard who had made Fernand Léger in America,
his New Realism (1943), Belgian filmmakers André Cauvin and Jean Cleinge,
French filmmaker Maurice Cloche who had made several films on the Louvre
collection including Images de l’ancienne Egypte (1951), Robert Hessens who
collaborated with Alain Resnais and Gaston Diehl on the production of Van
Gogh (1948) and Malfray (1948), German filmmaker Curt Oertel who had
made the landmark Michelangelo: Das Leben eines Titanen (1940) and French
filmmaker Roger Leenhardt, who would direct a fair number of biopics on
French artists like Daumier (with Henri Sarrade, 1958), Le maître de
Montpellier: Frédéric Bazille (1960), and Pissarro (1976) as well as the television
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 55

series La vie des Estampes (1976) on the engravings and prints of Abraham
Bosse, Claude Lorrain, Cochin le père, Moreau le jeune, François Daumier,
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jean-Emile Laboureur and Victor Vasarely.72
Belgium was represented by the brothers Luc and Paul Haesaerts neither of
whom was a museum official but who both had strong connections with
Belgian museum institutions. In 1938, they established Les Compagnons de
l’Art, assembling influential contemporary Belgian artists such as René
Magritte, Léon Spilliaert, Edgar Tytgat and Constant Permeke. Renowned as
an art critic, Paul Haesaerts published widely on twentieth-century painting in
Belgium as well as producing numerous art documentaries. He became a
member of the Commission de Peinture Moderne of the Museés Royaux des
Beaux-Arts de Belgique. In 1945, Luc Haesaerts founded the Séminaire des
Arts (Arts Seminar), together with a periodical of the same name (Les Carnets
du Séminaire des Arts) publishing six issues between March and August 1945.
To revive their Club de l’Écran after the Second World War, Henri Storck,
André Thirifays and Piet Vermeylen, who had also founded the Belgian
Cinémathèque in 1938, decided to integrate it into Haesaert’s Séminaire des
Arts. This resulted in a new ciné club, named Écran du Séminaire des Arts
(Screen of the Arts Seminar) that soon had up to 3,000 members. Both Écran
and the Cinémathèque owed their survival mainly to the Palais des Beaux Arts
in Brussels, where most of the film screenings took place. The Écran film
programme leaflets were written and presented by Belgian journalist Paul
Davay, while the programming of the screenings was the work of Jacques
Ledoux, who also made the selection for the first Festival mondial du Film et
des Beaux-Arts (World Festival of Film and the Fine Arts) in 1947.73
In the first issue of the Carnets, in March 1945, Paul Haesaerts announced
the initiative of the founding of les Archives cinématographiques des Arts
within the context of the Séminaire.‘From now on,’ Haesaerts wrote,‘methodical
and concerted efforts will be undertaken within a domain where, up to this
moment, only fantasy and coincidence ruled.’ Haesaerts was referring to Sacha
Guitry’s Ceux de chez nous (1915), ‘a piece of film dedicated to Auguste Renoir,
a moving document where one sees the old painter in his wheelchair, his
brushes tight to his fingers with bandages, at work with a surprising energy’.
Regretting that ‘no similar documents exist on Douanier, Modigliani or
56 Art in the Cinema

Vuillard’, Haesaerts mentioned the efforts of Robert Cocriamont who dedicated

‘some excellent meters of film to Gustave De Smet’ and ‘also shot René Magritte’.
The establishment of the Archives cinématographiques des Arts was an attempt
to change this with additional initiatives for the production of films. ‘For the
Séminaire, Henri Storck went to film James Ensor in Ostend,’ Haesaerts wrote,
while also mentioning Storck’s Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (The World of Paul
Delvaux, 1946) that had been released to coincide with an exhibition at the
Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. While hinting at the Séminaire’s next
ambitions, similar films on Permeke, Tytgat, Daeye, Brusselmans or Spilliaert,
Haesaerts explicitly announced the emergence of a new film genre: ‘We are
practicing. It’s a totally new craft to learn. It is, in cinema, the inauguration of a
new genre, the cinematic art critique.’74 Already in the third issue of Carnets,
the sponsorship of such filmic projects was announced. The association Les
Amis de l’Art Populaire was prepared to finance the Séminaire and its Archives
filmées des Arts with an amount of 25,000 BFr.75 After this, no more references
were made to the archives or the film productions, although these initiatives
may be understood as embryonic predecessors of FIFA’s ambitions, such as
the establishment in 1951 of an art film library and distribution centre based
in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The discussions at the Séminaire
about portraying leading artists at work in line with Guitry’s landmark 1917
film, may also lay at the basis of Paul Haesaerts own films dealing with artists
at work such as Visite à Picasso (1950) and Quatre peintres belges au travail
(Four Belgian Painters at Work, 1952).
As a successor of Les Carnets du Séminaire des Arts, Luc Haesaerts founded
the monthly periodical Les Arts Plastiques: carnets du séminaire des Arts
together with Ernst Goldschmidt.76 Whereas within the Séminaire’s activities
the interest in the film on art is developed, within that of Les Arts Plastiques
the network of protagonists of the first Conference on Art Films, and as a
result, of FIFA, becomes apparent. Already in the first issues, a considerable
number of authors appear who would develop strong connections with
both the museum world and FIFA: Jean Cassou, Gaston Diehl, Paul Fierens,
Paul Haesaerts, René Huyghe, Herbert Read, and Lionello Venturi wrote
contributions. Painter Albert Dasnoy, who would later figure in Paul Haesaerts’
Quatre peintres belges au travail (1952) and René Micha, who would collaborate
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 57

Figure 1.1 Paul Haesaerts, ‘Caméra et spectateurs devant les Rubens de Munich’,
Les Arts Plastiques 2, 3–4 (1948): 146–4

on several art documentaries such as Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (Henri Storck,

1946), Noblesse du bois (Charles Dekeukeleire, 1955) and Paul Klee ou la genèse
(René Micha, 1958) contributed to the journal as well.77
Starting in 1948, Les Arts Plastiques often focused explicitly on the art
documentary. In his 1948 article ‘Caméra et spectateurs devant les Rubens de
Munich’, Paul Haesaerts included a frame enlargement of his Rubens film: a
manipulated reproduction of Sebastian Vrancx’ painting of the Jesuits’ church
in Antwerp, in which the location for Rubens’ interchangeable paintings above
the altar is coloured white as if it were a cinema screen.
‘Rubens was a film director,’ Haesaerts writes, ‘the location where, at the very
end of the church, his canvases alternated each other, prefigures the screen of
today; the church itself is a first cinema theatre.’78 In January 1949, Les Arts
Plastiques even dedicated an entire issue to the art documentary, containing an
extensive list of films on art together with articles on the art documentary in
several countries.79 An offprint of this issue was later republished by UNESCO
and counts as its first Catalogue on Films on Art.80 The second and third
UNESCO catalogue would also be offprints of Les Arts Plastiques.81
58 Art in the Cinema

Figure 1.2 Articles on art documentaries in UNESCO Courier 11 12, January

1950, 6–7.

Breeding ground or burial ground?

The number of intertwined voices that gathered during this single week in the
summer of 1948 in Paris is astounding. The paragraph of the conference
report entitled ‘Result of the Conference’ testifies to this flurry of activity,
stating that ‘an International Federation for Art Films was established, with
M. Fernand Léger as President; the vice-presidents were chosen from Italy
(Lionello Venturi), France (René Huyghe) and the United States of America
(William Chapman). Delegates will be appointed in all countries. The
Headquarter of the Federation is: Palais du Louvre, Direction des Musées
nationaux, Paris.’82
FIFA had been born. The majority of films produced after 1948 that were
included in the 1953 catalogue are proof of the enthusiasm within the film-
on-art community. But this initiative never really gained momentum. At the
third conference, which took place in July 1951 in Amsterdam, only twenty-
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 59

three films from eight countries were shown, whereas the 1948 one had
featured sixty-four films from eleven countries. The enthusiasm already
seemed to have dissipated right after the first conferences in Paris in 1948 and
in Brussels in 1949.
Undoubtedly, the disparity of interests put everything on hold. In all these
conferences, numerous hours were spent discussing whether FIFA should be
focusing on art films, films on art or artists’ films. In Amsterdam, FIFA
members would agree on the following description of its aims: ‘to promote,
through an as broad as possible international cooperation, the making, the
knowledge, the study, the conservation, the circulation, and the dissemination
of works related to the Arts’.83 The organization’s acronym (FIFA) would
henceforth tellingly stand for Fédération Internationale du Film d’Art, and no
longer for Film sur l’Art – an International Federation of Art Films rather than
Films on Art. A working document entitled ‘Projet de Statuts’ found among
the FIFA files in the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam uses ‘Fédération
Internationale du Film Artistique’, indicating that a third option was suggested.84
Within the next few years, the constitution of FIFA’s general assembly
changed numerous times. Between 1948 and 1958, the presidency of the
organization shifted from Fernand Léger to Paul Fierens, Pierre Francastel, Iris
Barry, Denis Forman and René Huyghe. In the same period, the seat of the
organization moved from the Louvre in Paris to the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in
1954, only to return to the Louvre, then to the FIAF headquarters in 1956, and
finally back to the Louvre in 1958. The number of filmmakers who sat on
FIFA’s board diminished. In 1958, the board consisted of René Huyghe,
Simone Gille-Delafon, Lionello Venturi, James Johnson Sweeney, Umbro
Apollonio, Willem Sandberg, James Quinn, Mary Meerson and Henri Storck.
The latter was the only filmmaker, who eventually had to leave as well, passing
on his responsibilities as secretary-general to Simone Gille-Delafon.85
In his 1966 report, Henri Lemaître divided films on art into four categories:
(a) entertaining films for everyone, without the necessity of prior knowledge
of art history; (b) cultural films for a wide public, with the ambition to initiate
the viewers into an art historical theme; (c) cinematic museums, functioning
as a filmic accompaniment to museum exhibitions, libraries and universities;
and (d) films with a scientific ambition, produced within the context of specific
60 Art in the Cinema

academic activities, by cinematic ‘laboratories’ studying the artworks in depth.86

It is telling that all categories referred to the film on art in an instrumentalizing
way. It would seem that from early on, FIFA lost track of its most inspiring
advocates: the filmmakers – especially those who advocated and made lyrical,
highly personal films on art. As we have seen, this narrowing down of the film
from an artistic product to a functional tool already existed within the mission
statements of the different institutions involved. For UNESCO, the art
documentary was at best a tool for international communications, for ICOM
an entertaining extra to the museum or an educational instrument, and for
AICA a visual device for art criticism. For neither of them, films on art were
first and foremost self-standing works of art, they were ‘second-hand
experiences’ of art. The institutional breeding grounds of the art documentary
were from the very beginning destined to also be its burial grounds.

Notes
1 The organization is mainly mentioned in articles concerning its founder, Gaston Diehl.
See for instance, Pierre Restany (ed.), Gaston Diehl (1912–1999). Un homme, une
Empreinte (Paris: Fondation National des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, 2000); and
Gaston Diehl, La Peinture en France dans les années noires, 1935–1945 (Nice: Z’éditions,
1999).

2 In the course of this chapter, these events will be referred to as ‘A ICA Congress’ and
‘ICOM Conference’. For more information on AICA’s and ICOM’s history, see Hélène
Lassalle, Histoire de l’AICA France 1949–1990 (Paris: AICA, 1990), 6. http://aicafrance.
org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/AICA-France-1949-1990.pdf; and Sid Ahmed
Baghli, Patrick Boylan and Yani Herreman (eds.), Histoire de l’ICOM (1946–1996)
(Paris: ICOM, 1998), 15–17.

3 Henri Lemaître, ‘La culture artistique et les moyens audiovisuels. Problèmes du film sur
l’art au cinéma et à la télévision’, in Dix ans de films sur l’art (1952–1962): Peinture et
sculpture (Paris: UNESCO, 1966), 11–100.

4 Henry de Morant, ‘Enfin les films sur l’art’, in Pierre Francastel, ‘Art et histoire de l’art’,
Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations 5, 3 (1950): 366.

5 De Morant, ‘Enfin les films sur l’art’, 366.

6 De Morant, ‘Enfin les films sur l’art’, 366.

7 Marie Berne, ‘Autoportrait du scientifique en artiste: Jean Painlevé’, Mnemosyne o la

costruzione del senso 6 (2013): 150.
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 61

8 Roxane Haméry, Jean Painlevé, le cinéma au cœur de la vie (Rennes: Presses

universitaires, 2013), 153.

9 Roxane Haméry, ‘Au cœur des institutions cinématographiques’, in Haméry (ed.), Jean
Painlevé, 153–4.

10 Lemaître, ‘La culture artistique et les moyens audiovisuels’, 92.

11 Film Unit Projects Division, Department of Mass Communications, UNESCO, Report

of the First Conference on Art Film (Paris: UNESCO, 1948), 9. (UNESCO/MCF/Conf.
1/1, Paris, 15 September 1948).

12 Natalie Adamson, Painting, Politics and Struggle for the École de Paris (1944–1964)
(London: Routledge, 2017).

13 Within its short period of existence, it changed name three times. In 1945–6, the first
four issues were called Les Cahiers des Amis de l’art; in 1946–7 Cahiers des Amis de
l’Art: mouvement de propagande et de culture artistiques; in 1948–52: Les Amis de l’Art.

14 Diehl, La Peinture en France dans les années noires, 15–17.

15 Marianne le Galliard, ‘Alain Resnais: initiation à l’art abstrait (1946–1948)’, Culture

visuelle 10 (March 2014), http://attractions.hypotheses.org/55

16 Film producer Pierre Braunberger had it realized in 35mm. See Suzanne Liandrat-
Guigues and Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: Liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds
(Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006), 212.

17 Liandrat-Guigues and Leutrat, Alain Resnais, 212.

18 Francis Bolen mentions all three of them as directors of the film. See Francis Bolen, Le
Film sur l’art. Panorama 1953. Répertoire international illustré (Bruxelles/Paris: Les Arts
Plastiques/UNESCO, 1953), 46. Other sources only mention Resnais and Hessens as
directors, and Diehl as commentator, for instance Gisèle Breteau, Abdécadaire des films
sur l’art moderne et contemporain 1905–1984 (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/Centre
national des arts plastiques, 1985), 150.

19 Francis Bolen mentions all three of them as directors of the film in Bolen, Le Film sur
l’art, 45.

20 Denys Chevalier and Gaston Diehl, ‘Pour et contre l’art abstrait’, Cahier Des Amis de
l’Art 11 (1947): 58.

21 Le Galliard, ‘Alain Resnais’.

22 https://www.archivesdelacritiquedart.org/auteur/diehl-gaston

23 Diehl, La Peinture en France dans les années noires, 15.

24 Diehl, La Peinture en France dans les années noires, 17.

25 Film Unit Projects Division, Report of the First Conference on Art Film, 8. (UNESCO/
MCF/Conf. 1/1, Paris,15 September 1948), 9.
62 Art in the Cinema

26 Luciano Emmer, ‘Pour un nouvelle avant-garde’, Cinéma d’aujourd’hui. Cahiers de

Traits 10 (1945): n.p.

27 Francis Guermann, ‘La Féderation International du Film sur l’Art (FIFA)’, Zeuxis, films
sur l’art/film on art 1 (2000): 14–19.

28 Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, ‘Structures du court métrage français, 1945–1958: De l’âge d’or

aux contrebandiers’, in Dominique Bluher and François Thomas (eds), Le Court
Métrage français de 1945 à 1968 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005),
29–46.

29 For a precise definition, see http://www.associations-midipy.org/aide.php?n=218

30 Walter Sharp, ‘The Role of UNESCO. A Critical Evaluation’, Proceedings of the Academy
of Political Science 24, 2 (1951): 101–14.

31 Sharp, ‘The Role of UNESCO’, 101–14.

32 N.N., ‘Fine art reproductions to be encouraged’, The UNESCO Courier I, 1 (February

1948): 8.

33 N.N., ‘Fine art reproductions to be encouraged’, 8.

34 N.N., ‘Film Catalogue on International Understanding’, The UNESCO Courier I, 4

(May 1948): 5.

35 N.N., ‘UNESCO Research Needs in Communication Techniques’, The UNESCO

Courier I, 4 (May 1948): 8.

36 An Italian translation of Bolen’s speech was published in the review SeleArte. Francis
Bolen, ‘Per il film sull’arte’, SeleArte VI, 31 (July–August 1957): 27–34.

37 Bolen, ‘Per il film sull’ arte’, 31.

38 N.N., ‘UNESCO and the Future of Museums’, The Burlington Magazine for
Connoisseurs 89, 527 (February 1947): 29–30; Grace L. McCann Morley, ‘UNESCO
and the Future of Museums’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 89, 530 (May,
1947): 136–7; N.N., The Organization of the Museum: Practical Advice (Paris:
UNESCO, 1960).

39 N.N., ‘The Organization of the Museum’, 49.

40 N.N., ‘Museum Directors Gather at First World Conference’, UNESCO Courier I, 6

(July 1948): 3.

41 In 1945, Georges Salles had succeeded Jacques Jaujard as director of Les Musées de
France. See Georges Salles, ‘The Museums of France’, Museum 1, 1–2 (1948): 10.

42 Gordon Mirams, Francesco Monotti, et al., ‘The Film and the Art Museum’, Museum 2,
3–4 (1948): 196–7; Gordon Mirams, ‘The Function of the Art Film’, Museum 2, 3–4
(1948): 198–203; Francesco Monotti, ‘Art and the Camera Eye in Italy’, Museum 2, 3–4
(1948): 204–7; Gordon Mirams, Francesco Monotti, et al., ‘The Use of Motion Pictures
in Museums of the Present Day’, Museum 2, 3–4 (1948): 208–9.
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 63

43 N.N., ‘The Film and the Art Museum’, Museum 2, 3–4 (1948): 196.

44 Film Unit Projects Division, Report of the First Conference on Art Film, 8 (UNESCO/
MCF/Conf. 1/1, Paris, 15 September 1948).

45 René Huyghe, ‘Changes in the department of paintings and the Grande Galerie; Le
Remaniement du département des peintures et la Grande Galerie’, Museum 1, 1–2
(1948): 94.

46 See Huyghe, ‘Changes in the department of paintings’, 11–18; René Huyghe, ‘The
Louvre Museum and the problem of the cleaning of old pictures’, Museum 3, 3 (1950):
191–206; René Huyghe, Coordination of International Art Exhibitions, Report for the
Second Biennial Conference of ICOM, London 17–22 July 1950 (Paris: ICOM, 1950).

47 René Huyghe, Coordination of International Art Exhibitions.

48 Film Unit Projects Division, Report of the First Conference on Art Film, 2.

49 Film Unit Projects Division, Report of the First Conference on Art Film, 8.

50 Film Unit Projects Division, Report of the First Conference on Art Film, 3.

51 Willem Sandberg, ‘An Old Museum Adapted for Modern Art Exhibitions’, Museum IV,
3 (1951): 155–60.

52 Program of the first Conference of Art Critics in Paris – June 1948, Archives de la
Critique d’Art, ref. FR ACA AICAI THE CON001 01/03. More on UNESCO’s
project for a Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Paintings from 1860 to 1955, see
Rachel E. Perry, ‘Immutable Mobiles: UNESCO’s Archives of Colour Reproductions’,
The Art Bulletin 99, 2 (2017): 166–85.

53 Willem Sandberg, Working Party on Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Paintings

from 1860 to 1955 (Paris: UNESCO, 1954).

54 Sandberg, Working Party.

55 See Statutes de la Fédération Internationale du Film d’Art, 1950 (Paris: UNESCO:

1950); and Correspondence between S. Gille-Dellafon and René Huyghe (18 March
1958), FIFA Archives Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

56 See the correspondence between Willem Sandberg and an unknown person and the
announcement of the 3rd international festival of films on art (20 May 1951), FIFA
Archives, EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam, as quoted in Leon Duyck, FIFA: Fédération
Internationale du Film d’Art Onderzoek naar de samenstelling, doelstellingen, werking en
activiteiten van de FIFA en de ondersteuning van de kunstdocumentaire na WOII tot en
met de jaren ’60 (Ghent University, MA diss., 2014), 25.

57 N.N., Rapport de UNESCO de l’Assemblée Générale de la Fédération Internationale du

film sur l’art 13 février 1959 (Paris: UNESCO, 1959), FIFA Archives Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam.

58 Francis Bolen, ‘Federation Internationale du Film d’Art, F.I.F.A’, in Le Film sur l’art, 14.
64 Art in the Cinema

59 John Read, ‘The Film on Art’, article for the Enciclopedia universale dell’arte, 7.
Document at The Getty Research Institute, Collection title ‘Art on Film 200080,
Articles by John Read’.

60 Director unknown. Information found online at the French Film Library archive of the
CNC, http://www.cnc-aff.fr/internet_cnc/Fiches/Oeuvre/ResultatRechercheSimple.
aspx
61 Jean Cassou, ‘Notes et Commentaires: L’art de l’accorchage’, Les Arts Plastiques 5, 6
(June–July 1952): 454–5.

62 Francis Bolen, ‘Per il film sull’arte’, Selearte VI, 31 (iuglio–agosto 1957): 26–34.

63 N.N., Rapport sur l’activité de la Fédération 1958, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

64 IIFA: Institut International du Film sur l’Art, formerly CIDALC, under direction of
art critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, and the International Film and Television Council.
Correspondence between S. Gille-Delafon and Carlo L. Ragghianti (15 January 1959),
FIFA Archives, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

65 Henri Lemaître, ‘La culture artistique et les moyens audiovisuels. Problèmes du film sur
l’art au cinéma et à la télévision’, in Dix ans de films sur l’art (1952–1962): Peinture et
sculpture (Paris: UNESCO, 1966), 6.

66 First International Congress of Art Critics, Agenda, https://www.archivesdelacritiquedart.

org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/AICA48-Programme-eng.pdf

67 Film Unit Projects Division, Report of the First Conference on Art Film, 8.

68 Communication 3 de René Huyghe, 1951 (Paris: AICA, 1951), Archives de la critique

d’art, Paris.

69 Paul Haesaerts, ‘La critique d’art par le Cinéma’, Communication au Congrès de l’AICA
Hollande, 1951 (Paris: AICA, 1951), Archives de la critique d’art, Paris, https://www.
archivesdelacritiquedart.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/AICA51-Com-Paul_
Haesaerts.pdf

70 IIe Congrès et 1ère Assemblée générale AICA. Paris. 27 juin–3 juillet 1949 (Paris: AICA,
1949), Archives de la critique d’art, Paris.

71 Film Unit Projects Division, Report of the First Conference on Art Film, 2.

72 With Daguerre ou la naissance de la photographie, Leenhardt would also make a film

on the early days of photography, featuring works by Louis Daguerre, Joseph-
Nicéphore Niepce and Henry Fox Talbot.

73 Jean Brismée, Cinéma: 100 ans de cinéma en Belgique (Liège: Mardaga, 1995), 94–6.

74 Paul Haesaerts, ‘Les arts plastiques: Notes et commentaire’, Les Carnets du Seminaire des
Arts 1, 1 (March 1945): 35.

75 N.N. ‘La vie du Séminaire des Arts’, Les Carnets du Séminaire des Arts 1, 4 (May 1945):
187.
 The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Post-War Film on Art 65

76 The periodical ran between 1947 and 1954, edited by Editions de la Connaissance,
Brussels.

77 Jean Cassou wrote on Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Fierens on Jean Vanden Eeckhout,
English Painting, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Hiëronymus Bosch, while Herbert Read
published several articles on Henry Moore. Painter Albert Dasnoy, who would later
figure in Paul Haesaerts’ Quatre peintres belges au travail (1952), wrote on Rubens,
while Paul Haesaerts himself published an article on recent developments in Belgian
painting. René Huyghe wrote on Flemish art, Lionello Venturi on Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec, and René Micha wrote on Olivier Picard. Finally, Gaston Diehl reported on
the reopening of La Grande Galerie du Louvre. For a complete survey on all the articles
published in Les Arts Plastiques, see http://agorha.inha.fr/inhaprod/servlet/Document
FileManager?source=ged&document=ged:IDOCS:319750&resolution=MEDIUM&re
cordId=musee:MUS_BIEN:141204

78 Paul Haesaerts, ‘Caméra et spectateurs devant les Rubens de Munich’, Les Arts
Plastiques 2, 3–4 (1948): 146–50.

79 Lionello Venturi wrote on Italy, Arthur Knight on the USA, Gaston Diehl on France.
Other articles included ‘Musique et tableaux filmés’ by composer André Souris on his
composition for Storck’s film Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (1946), a couple of excerpts of
the screenplay of Haesaerts and Storck’s 1948 film on Rubens and articles by Paul Davay
en René Micha. See special issue: ‘Le Film sur l’art’, Les Arts plastiques 3,1–2 (1949).

80 N.N., Films on Art: A Specialized Study and International Catalogue (Brussels: Editions
de la Connaissance, 1949).

81 See special issue ‘Le Film sur l’art’, Les Arts Plastiques 4, 5–6 (November–December
1950).

82 Film Unit Projects Division, Report of the First Conference on Art Film, 2.

83 The conference was held on 3–7 July at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. See
Communiqué 3e internationale festival van de film over kunst, 3–7 juli 1951, 357 FIFA
‘Grootboek Film d’Art’ (1953–1956); and the press review ‘Congres: film over kunst
verwacht 300 gasten’, Vrije Volk (13 April 1952), FIFA Archives, EYE Film Museum,
Amsterdam.

84 Fédération Internationale du Film Artistique, ‘Projet de statuts’, FIFA Archives, EYE

Film Museum, Amsterdam.

85 Réunion du conseil de direction de FIFA à Bruxelles,19 février 1958 (Paris: UNESCO,

1958), UNESCO Archives, Paris.

86 Henri Lemaître, ‘La culture artistique et les moyens audiovisuels’, 34–5.

66
 2
American art comes of
age: documentaries and
the nation at the dawn of
the Cold War
DIMITRIOS LATSIS

Today American art has captured public interest. Thousands are flocking to
museums and exhibits. There is a new nationwide art movement, which
critics say is greater in scope, greater in public interest than anything since
the Italian Renaissance. Is it just another fad? Or is there a deeper more
fundamental reason for America’s new-found interest in art?

Americaness and Art Discovers America

This confident voice-over, coloured with hope and hyperbole, boosterist spirit
and enthusiasm introduces the 1943 documentary Art Discovers America.
Billed as ‘an American commentary’, the film embodies the can-do spirit of the
early wartime years, but in a domain where Americans had not previously felt
that much confidence: American art.
For many decades leading up to the Second World War, American art was
considered a poor cousin to continental modernism.1 The same was arguably

67
68 Art in the Cinema

true of American cinema’s own claims to its status as an art form, rather than a
form of commercial entertainment. More specifically, American directors and
producers of non-fiction films had very rarely (even within educational
contexts) dealt with the visual arts as a subject. That all changed during the
mid-1940s when a number of factors converged to make American art a
prominent player on the global scene and a significant topic for documentaries
produced in the United States.
The process through which this came about at the outset of the Cold War
can be traced using two key documentaries as primary evidence: the
government-produced Art Discovers America (1943) and the omnibus film
Pictura: An Adventure in Art (1951). Meant as a piece of propaganda to be
screened primarily for foreign audiences, Art Discovers America was part of a
series that ‘portrayed the artistic, musical and literary background of the
United States, the talents of its people, further counteracting Axis propagandists
who characterize us as a nation of businessmen and industrialists’.2 The leading
ally in the fight against fascism had – or so the argument for a distinctive
American aesthetic in art went – long cultivated a native tradition in intellectual
and artistic pursuits that could rival, if not surpass, that of Europe. Emerging
from the Great Depression, re-energized by the ascendant nationalist spirit of
the war years and purged of a suspect ‘internationalism’, American art was
ready to conquer the world. Conversely, the second film placed European and
American films about art side-by-side, packaging them in a format that merged
education and entertainment. Its comparative structure implicitly argued for
the international stature of American art, pairing regionalist artists such as
Grant Wood with Leonardo Da Vinci and Paul Gauguin. Seeking to define
what was truly ‘American’ about American art while simultaneously claiming
cinema itself as the New World art form par excellence, these documentaries
actively participated in the larger political, cultural and social debates around
nationhood and cultural imperialism that dominated the years following the
Second World War.
The debate about the ‘American-ness’ of native-born art permeate the first
film’s references to the improved social status of artists (their works no longer
sold ‘for a few dollars, another meager meal’) and the shift away from ‘alien
modernisms’ (‘no longer dreaming wistfully of Paris and the Left Bank’)
 American Art Comes of Age 69

Figure 2.1 Thomas Hart Benton in Art Discovers America (1943). Digital still.

towards ‘subjects which Americans understood in life’. As a suitable

spokesperson of this latter tendency, the film presents the dean of the ‘American
Scene’ movement, Thomas Hart Benton.
He is shown outdoors on one of his walks in search of subject matter,
painting en-plein-air or modelling his scenes in plaster before ‘transferring’
them onto a two-dimensional canvas, a technique that the narrator praises for
its fidelity to rural life: ‘typically Benton and unmistakably American’.
Other artists represented as ‘quintessentially’ American range from John
Sloan (as a representative of ‘The Eight’) to Reginald Marsh, to American
modernists like Abraham Walkowitz, Charles Burchfield, Eugene Speicher,
Max Weber, Alexander Brook and Grant Wood. The narrator finds a way to
rhetorically redeem the ‘native modernists’ as distinct from European models
(‘they are painting New York cityscapes, or portraits of typical American
figures like a farmer’s wife’), but there is no mistaking where his preferences
lie: when American Gothic (1930) comes on screen he heralds Wood as ‘among
America’s best’. The artists of the time, the voice-over continues, have ‘an
enthusiasm for everyday American life’, which he proclaims to be ‘the subject
matter of a true national art’.
Moreover, American art had become big business: ‘it can be sold, it is sold’.3
The film thus directly links the narrator’s assertion about ‘a true national art’ with
what sells and what the public is interested in; the role of the press is highlighted
70 Art in the Cinema

as a popularizer alongside cinema. In this populist context, it is primarily

international reception and public acceptance that can in the final analysis
realize ‘American’s destiny in this war-torn world: to assume cultural and spiritual
leadership to the end that the pursuit of beauty shall not die’. This Lincolnesque
adage is spoken over a sunset that elegiacally brings the film to a close.

Soft power and Pictura Films

The way the film was promoted to audiences can cast an additional light on its
function as cultural propaganda and instrument of so-called ‘soft power
diplomacy’.4 An article entitled ‘Films Reinforce Hemispheric Ties’, written
by officers of the Office for Inter-American Affairs for Foreign Commerce
Weekly, provides a useful overview of the wartime use of non-theatrical films
produced or sponsored by the government for the purposes of external
propaganda and cultural diplomacy. With respect to art documentaries, the
authors proclaim that, ‘These are closely allied to pictures showing the respect
in this country for family life, pioneer ideals, inventive genius, social progress
and interests of the people of the United States in the welfare of other republics.’5
This remark, as well as the fact that a print of the film was found among the
papers of art collector, dealer and cultural administrator Alfredo Valente,
indicates the lengths to which the federal government went to forge a ‘unified
national aesthetic front’ to present to the world, one that involved artists,
producers, film studios, diplomats and the military.6 The activities of motion
picture departments across the various agencies of the federal government and
the collaboration of Hollywood during the war years directly presage similar
efforts during the Cold War years when propaganda was undertaken by the
newly minted US Information Agency.7
Given this atmosphere of aesthetic propaganda and Americanist discourse
in the arts, what was the standing of the film on visual art as a separate mode
of filmmaking in America at the end of the War? In his article ‘Art films in
America’, published as part of an international study of ‘Films on Art’ sponsored
by UNESCO in 1949, film critic and MoMA film curator Arthur Knight
addressed the fundamental confusion that plagued this subgenre’s emergence
 American Art Comes of Age 71

in the United States: ‘What is an art film? To many in America – perhaps to

most – it means any foreign film, a picture shown in a cinema that in the trade
is actually called an “art house”.’8 While it is true that most films on the visual
arts that Americans might have encountered up to that point were produced
abroad, this fact still does not account for the identification of the ‘art house’
movie (or the experimental film) with the documentary on subjects related to
the fine arts. In fact, Knight found the crop of films on art in the United States
quite wanting in matters of aesthetics, labelling them ‘invariably pedestrian’,
‘often crude’ and ‘oversimplified classroom demonstrations’.9 This in his
estimation stemmed from the need felt by producers to ‘sugar-coat’ the pill of
visual instruction with a bit of Hollywood glamour. While he concedes that
American films on the subject cannot begin to compare ‘with the work we have
been seeing from Europe’, he attributes this to the semi-professional status of
the filmmakers who are overshadowed by the art critics and the artists
themselves.10 This comparison to European filmmakers like Resnais, Emmer
and Storck would become all the more evident, he claimed, since audiences
were now able to see films by these directors, re-edited with an English voice-
over for distribution in the American market. The company that was almost
exclusively responsible for bringing such documentaries to a wider American
public was the newly formed Pictura Films.
After the Second World War, films played an increasingly central role in the
‘visual instruction movement’, culminating with the advent of educational
television. Several distributors of non-theatrical features and shorts emerged
during those years when marketing documentaries to schools, churches and
other groups became a viable profit-making proposition. The catalogues of
these distributors (Films Incorporated and Encyclopaedia Britannica Films
among many others) are filled with films on every aspect of art appreciation
and technique. Many of these were ‘repackaged’ from foreign producers, often
with an added English-language voice-over, as by this time European producers
(especially French, Belgian and Italian) had almost two decades of experience
in what was commonly called the ‘film sur l’art’.11
This seems to have been the strategy of Pictura Films Corporation, founded
in New York in the early 1950s by Leonid Kipnis and Herman Starr who were
also credited with planning the distributor’s first feature film.12 In 1949, Kipnis
72 Art in the Cinema

brought a short film by Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens on the life and work
of Vincent Van Gogh from France and had it dubbed with an English language
commentary spoken by Martin Gabel. Van Gogh was acclaimed at public
showings for cultural groups and art museums, and in 1949, it received the
Academy Award for Best Two-Reel Short Subject. Based on the success of the
short, Kipnis and Starr planned a feature-length film.13 An advisory committee
(called the ‘committee on educational art films’), comprising the directors of
all the major art museums and prominent curators in the country, met in
February 1951 in New York: artists were selected, scripts were developed,
commentaries prepared, musical scores written and performed, in a trilateral
(France, Italy and the US) collaboration.14

Pictura: An Adventure in Art

Pictura: An Adventure in Art was the first ‘omnibus’ (or compilation)

documentary on art produced anywhere in the world, although its genesis
might have had more to do with commercial considerations than a desire to
innovate. It represented a new concept in documentary feature films, consisting
of six episodes based on the lives and works of Hieronymus Bosch, Vittore
Carpaccio, Paul Gauguin, Francisco Goya, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and
Grant Wood. Not surprisingly, since his passion for art collecting was well
known by 1950, actor Vincent Price signed on to contribute the voice-over
narration for one of the segments.15 He was also featured on-screen, talking
about art with young listeners in the framing scenes.16 Price’s sequences were
filmed in Hollywood by E.A. DuPont who had several German silent films –
including Variety (1925) – to his credit. With this overarching structure
(consisting of Vincent Price’s discussions with eager young art students) to
hold the vignettes together, the feature was ready for distribution.
Pictura was shown widely and had a very positive reception by the art world
and film press, as well as by museum professionals.17 The director of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francis Henry Taylor, wrote a letter to producer
Herman Starr, commenting: ‘I found myself completely entranced with the
wonders of this picture [. . .] Your discriminating selection of famous stage and
 American Art Comes of Age 73

screen stars as narrators and the wonderful music scores especially composed
for it have made Pictura a production which provides fascinating entertainment
and real excitement for every movie goer. Your company should be
congratulated for its courage and accomplishment.’18 Variety also praised the
film for ‘exploring a new field for motion pictures in combining visual displays
of painting masterpieces by famous artists with explanatory narrative of the
creators and suitable mood music for the subjects presented’.19 Apart from
Price, the film featured other well-known actors providing the voice-overs,
including Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda (who narrated the segment on Grant
Wood)20 and Lilli Palmer, while the individual segments were directed by,
among others, Alain Resnais, Luciano Emmer and Robert Hessens – all
prominent European representatives of the film sur l’art.
What went largely unremarked at the time, however, was the film’s
contextualization of these individual segments, the larger narrative in which it
sought to frame the ‘story of art’. This was symptomatic of the boosterist
rhetoric of the New Deal whose influence was still actively felt in the public
discourse – especially concerning cultural matters. As art historians have
demonstrated, during the first few decades of the twentieth century, American
art and culture went through an intensive period of self-questioning in search
of ‘the Great American thing’ – a native-grown version of modernism that
would be free of European influence and represent the social and historical
makeup of American society.21 To achieve this goal, representational art
dealing with national or historical themes and landscapes was particularly
encouraged by the government’s Federal Art Project and regionalist artists like
Benton and Wood became very prominent in this effort during the 1930s and
1940s. Exhibitions like ‘Three Centuries of American Art’ staged in Paris in
1938 sought to present US artistic production as both a culmination of an
entire tradition stretching back to classical times and as a new, democratic
vision rising out of the fertile soil of the New World.22
It is thus not surprising that Pictura, which is structured precisely as a
chronological tour of great figures in the history of art, would adopt this
evolutionary template for its suitably American spin on the film sur l’art.23
Following the film’s narrative, from Bosch to Van Gogh to Gauguin and finally
to Grant Wood, the implication seems to be that the US had come into its own
74 Art in the Cinema

in the cultural arena, its painters forming a legitimate link in this cultural
chain. It is also particularly apt that such a history would be presented in
moving pictures rather than dusty old books, since cinema was considered to
be the artistic medium par excellence of the twentieth century, and largely an
American invention at that. Indeed, from Thomas Edison to poet and critic
Vachel Lindsay early commentators had envisioned that the primary use of
cinema would eventually be for visual instruction, in what Lindsay imagined
would be a ‘universal film museum’.24 Instead of a stroll through a museum
(which came to be a dominant narrative trope in art documentaries later on),
Pictura is framed as an informal lecture set in the verdant premises of an
American university campus.
Further touting the intellectual capital of the already economically dominant
superpower, higher education was seen as the great equalizer in the post-war,
GI-bill era. In the place of a professorial lecture, however, the more approachable
instructor played by Vincent Price adopts a genuinely American, more
interactive approach to teaching more usually associated with ‘art appreciation’.
He actively engages the students in the subject matter, which is in fact set up as
a story, a grand narrative of art through the centuries, ‘a moving panorama of
paintings’, as the reviewer for the New York Times described it.25 Although it is
difficult to ascertain today, since the introductory and intermediate sequences
have not been seen in more than sixty years, Price’s role was to introduce the
students to ‘a strange and interesting voyage into the world of art’, as exemplified

Figure 2.2 Vincent Price as art professor in a production photograph of one of the
intermediate scenes in Pictura (1952). Digital still.
 American Art Comes of Age 75

by six noted artists from the fifteenth century to the present time.26 Instead of
dwelling on the formal or technical characteristics of the paintings, he
emphasizes their narrative and historical aspects and thus it is only natural
that the familiar Midwestern scenery and episodes of American ‘types’ and
folklore as depicted by Grant Wood are placed at the conclusion of the
trajectory traced by Pictura.
This last segment was the only one produced especially for the movie, in
addition to being one of the earliest films dedicated to the work of an American
Artist.27 It presents a multi-strand story involving Wood’s own life as well as
the stories behind several of Wood’s most famous paintings, including John B.
Turner, Pioneer (1929), a portrait of a Midwestern undertaker; Woman with
Plants (1929) a study of his mother; and the famous American Gothic (1930),
in which his sister and his dentist were the models for the corn farmers. Using
an Aaron Copland-inflected score and with Henry Fonda’s stentorian voice-
over repeatedly referring to Wood as a ‘quintessentially American artist’, the
film features a multitude of symbols and imagery connected to the idea of the
region and the nation: maps situating the ‘Middle-West’, the rolling hills
of Iowa in Wood’s paintings, his humorous portrait of the fabled cherry
tree episode from George Washington’s life, and others of his ‘masterpieces
of Americana’.

Figure 2.3 One of Grant Wood’s landscape paintings seen through an outline of a
map of the state of Iowa in Pictura (1952). Digital still.
76 Art in the Cinema

Wood finally comes across as a gentle, self-taught ‘man of the people’ with
his artful hand on the pulse of the nation.28 He is quoted at the conclusion,
which also marks the end of Pictura, in a remark that neatly summarizes the
film’s overall intentions and place in history: ‘I had in mind a picture of the
country rich in the arts of peace, homely, lovable, and infinitely worth any
sacrifice.’ The place of American art at the outset of the Cold War would be as
the guardian of Western values and as a democratic (and even populist)
counterbalance to modernism, at least of the varieties associated with European
pre-war elite culture.29
For all its warm initial reception and wide exhibition, the film’s acclaim was
rather short lived – only some of its constituent parts have been screened since
1952. In fact, one of its shortcomings was evident to New York Times critic
Bosley Crowther who opined that ‘as a photographed recording of works of
art, rather than a real creation of cinematic art on its own, it is essentially a
transcript’.30 As a transplantation of an essentially European film genre on
American soil, Pictura embodied an expository slide-show approach to its
subject matter. But to those expecting to see an art film as well as a film on art,
the lack of formal innovation in the Grant Wood segment was obvious. The
style of painting foregrounded in it was also on the wane in public tastes at the
time, with the mix of old masters and contemporary figurative and quasi-
didactic painting, being fast replaced by abstract expressionism.

American art documentaries

More generally, the art documentary in the United States underwent a

transition during the later 1940s and early 1950s that took it away from a focus
on educational narratives on representational art towards an embrace of
modern abstraction, beyond the narrow focus on regional and national themes
towards a more international orientation, and beyond the homely values of
tradition and community towards a style and rhetoric that more closely
mirrored the politics of the Cold War. Films on art became more and more
experimental, escaping their initial placement in newsreels and educational
features and aspiring to become works of art in their own right.
 American Art Comes of Age 77

It is perhaps useful to pause here and reflect on what a typology of these

earliest documentaries on American Art would look like. Several subgenres
can be identified and the gradual shift in approach and style during the early
1950s is helpful in understanding the parallel but quite independent
development of this mode of documentary in the United States. A list of titles
from the period is evocative of this transition in both subject matter and style:
from folksy titles like Art Discovers America (1942), Grandpa Called it Art
(1944) and The Making of a Mural (1947) – all three prominently dealing with
the work of Thomas Hart Benton – via Pictura (1952), to films like Marie
Menken’s Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945), the equally experimental Works
of Calder (1950) and Jackson Pollock 51 (1951). More specifically, four main
strands can be traced.31
First, films with an anthropological or ethnographic focus recording the
arts and crafts of indigenous American or folk artists. This includes some of
the earliest examples of films on art made in America, often framed as
travelogues and rarely if ever dwelling on individual artists, preferring instead
to look at their subjects as examples of ‘local colour’ and tribal practices viewed
from a touristic or scientific perspective. The Human Studies Film Archives of
the Smithsonian Institution preserves a plethora of such films, many of which
were made for non-theatrical audiences and would thus not have, ordinarily,
come into broad public notice. Expedition films like Joseph K. Dixon’s The
Romance of a Vanishing Race (1916) – sponsored by department store magnate
Rodman Wanamaker, The Vanishing Indian (c. 1920) produced by Super Sioux
Films and Grover T. Sanderson’s American Indian Footage (c. 1926–32), all
include lengthy sections on traditional crafts like basket-weaving and pottery
in addition to covering the vernacular architecture of the Southwestern United
States. This trend continued into the 1940s and 1950s and the titles of such
films manifest a greater focus on art and artists (including folk artists) and a
greater geographic range: Robert Flaherty’s The Pottery Maker, An American
Episode of the 19th Century (1925) produced by the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, The Last of the Wood Engravers (1930) on artist Timothy Cole, Bryson
Jones’ travelogue The Lure of the West (c. 1935), Maria and Julian [Martinez]’s
Black Pottery (1938), Patterns of American Rural Art (1943), Tempera Painting
by Quincy Tahoma (1945), Hopi Indian Arts and Crafts (Coronet, 1947), One
78 Art in the Cinema

Hundred Years of Art and Artists in Indiana (Indiana University, 1949) and
Grandma Moses (Film Images, 1950). As the list of producers and distributors
indicates, these short documentaries were the first to be disseminated to a
wider public for educational purposes.
Secondly, films focusing on art appreciation, art technique and visual art
instruction. Museums, universities and independent filmmakers were all
engaged in the production of instructional film for further education audiences
(e.g. through university extension departments). As Richard Barsam has
observed, ‘the beginnings of the American tradition of films on art are found
in the more functional context of the educational film’.32 This category is by far
the largest and it includes Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Painting Reflections in
Water, Brush Techniques: The Language of Watercolor, The Making of a Mural
(all from 1947). Don Kingman Paints a Watercolor (1946) and Painting an
Abstraction (1950) are also representative of this trend, as is Etcher’s Art (1930),
a demonstration by Frank W. Benson, and Lewis Jacobs’ film on the
woodcarving technique of Chaim Gross, From Tree Trunk to Head (1939). The
Museum of Modern Art-produced What is Modern Art? (1948) and Art in Our
World (Paul Bunforth and Virginia Purcell, 1950) are examples of films that
were meant as visual aids in art appreciation classes.33 Quite a few films were
produced on sculpture, including Making of a Bronze Statue (Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1922) on A. Phimister Proctor’s equestrian statue of
Theodore Roosevelt, Lorado Taft, Sculptor (1930), Stone and Sculptor (1931),
Sculpture Today (1935), and Men of Our Age: The Sculpture of Jo Davidson
(1946). Many of these films are hybrid artist profiles (see below) and technique
demonstrations.
Thirdly, broad overviews of the development of American art and
biographical films on individual artists. This category is the closest one to the
‘mainstream’ of art documentaries in Europe as they emerged in the period
following the Second World War. That said, their tone, discursive framing and
reception differed significantly from the paradigm of the European film sur
l’art. These films did not set out to use the visual arts as raw material for
cinematic experimentation, as was the case with European directors like
Luciano Emmer, Robert Hessens and Alain Resnais. The names of American
pioneers of the genre, Robert Coffin, Stewart Moss, Kenneth Bloomer, Elias
 American Art Comes of Age 79

Katz, Lewis Jacobs, Evelyn Brown, Arthur E. Baggs and Francis Thompson are
not usually found in the annals of documentary history. Their aim was to
provide the audio-visual equivalent of a textbook or an entry in an
encyclopaedia – descriptive and concise, adopting the format of an illustrated
slide show guided by voice-overs and occasional interviews. Their films
include: Wayman Adams (1933), Childe Hassam Artist: A Short Personal Sketch
(1933), Alexander Calder: Sculpture and Constructions (1945), Fernand Léger
in America (1945), The Photographer (1948) on Edward Weston, the self-
produced Sierra Journey (c. 1947) by Western landscape painter Edgar Alwin
Payne, Frank Lloyd Wright: California Architecture (1948), Introduction of
Architecture (1949), Meet the Artist (1949) on illustrator Stevan Dohanos,
Franklin Watkins (1950) produced by the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Jefferson the Architect (1950), America: The Artist’s Eye (1950), American Art
from the Gilded Age to the Armory Show, 1865–1913 (c. 1950) and Birth of a
Painting: Kurt Seligmann (1950). These films mark the institutionalization and
entry of the art documentary into the mainstream of non-fiction filmmaking
in the United States and would have very likely been the first examples of the
genre that most audiences experienced in cinemas and/or museums.34 Even
more significant at this early stage is the distribution of documentaries that
singled out the work of minority and underrepresented artists, as seen in the
Harmon Foundation’s A Study of Negro Artists (1935), Creative Hands (1945),
The Negro and Art (1947) and Portrait of a New York Waterfront (1949), among
others. Quite a few films belonging to this category were produced by or on
behalf of the various agencies of the federal government (like the Works
Progress Administration), especially during the boom of government-
sponsored art in the 1930s. Special mention should also be made of early
National Film Board (NFB) of Canada documentaries on the visual arts that
form an integral part of the flourishing of the genre in North America.
Although the genre was already represented in government-produced films
made during the silent period, productions like Canadian Landscape (1941)
on painter A.Y. Jackson, Eskimo Arts and Crafts (1943), West Wind (1944) on
painter Tom Thomson, and Klee Wyck (1946) all of which were part of the
NFB’s ‘Canadian Artists’ series, marked what is likely the earliest state-
sponsored series of art documentaries anywhere.
80 Art in the Cinema

Fourth, films on art as ‘Art Films’. This last category represents a radical
departure (rather than an outgrowth) from the previous three. It marks the
maturation of the genre of the documentary on the visual arts in America and
was accompanied by a shift to works that could qualify as ‘art’ in their own
right, irrespective of their subject matter. This represents a belated turn to
modernism in style as well as content, of the kind that Anemic Cinema (1926)
and Entr’acte (1924) had marked in European cinema. Douglass Crockwell’s
Glenn Falls Sequence (1941), James and John Whitney’s series of Film Exercises
(1943–4), Marie Menken’s Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945), Works of Calder
(1949) and Jackson Pollock 51 (1951) share the aesthetic ambitions of two
nascent American avant-gardes: the rise of abstract expressionism as a quasi-
national aesthetic in the visual art of the United States and the development of
an experimental film culture that flourished in New York (and elsewhere) after
the end of the Second World War. These films accomplish to a much greater
extent than previous attempts Arthur Knight’s wish for films on art that would
be ‘a new experience, a new work of art [. . .] the film itself developing with the
same excitement and fervor as the original work of art’.35 The nationalist
discourse of earlier documentaries returns here, but in a markedly formal way,
while the films are also indirectly imbricated in the cultural rhetoric of the
Cold War, with lines drawn on aesthetic as much as geopolitical grounds.
Lastly, a development of equal importance was a newfound emphasis on
cinema itself as an art form worthy of preservation, documentation and
inclusion in museums. The Museum of Modern Art, an early leader in these
fields, sponsored an episode of the well-known newsreel The March of Time
that was in production at the same time as Art Discovers America.36 Entitled
The Movies March On, it provided an overview of the museum’s activities
related to the seventh art, prefaced with words that simultaneously anticipate
the emergence of the art documentary in America and encapsulate the role
that cinema, ‘the liveliest of all arts’ and a legitimate art form in its own right,
occupied in an American context:

No dusty storehouse for old Masters, this museum is a showroom for Art in
Our Time. Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Still Photography, and . . .
the Motion Picture.
 American Art Comes of Age 81

Notes
1 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and
contributions to the 2006 symposium ‘American Art in a Global Context’ available at
https://americanart.si.edu/research/symposia/2006

2 Jean A. Miller and Chauncey O. Rowe, ‘Films Reinforce Hemispheric Ties’, Foreign
Commerce Weekly: Journal of International Economy (2 June 1945): 9.

3 Several of the paintings shown in the film, by Marsh, Walkowitz, Birchfield, in addition
to those by Benton, are also landscapes. Even the cover of the book prominently
displayed in a bookstore (Peyton Boswell’s Modern American Painting, first published
in 1939) features a landscape painting: Benton’s Tornado Over Kansas (1929) which
must have looked particularly evocative to audiences in 1939, the year when The
Wizard of Oz was released in cinemas. The idea of representations of landscape as
‘valuable’ or mirroring the monetary value of the land itself has particular potency
within American art history, from topographic drawings of prospects to paintings of
the West, to the railways’ sponsorship of artists, but it became most explicit within
modernism. For instance, the painter Ralph Blakelock late in his career did a series
of small oil and watercolour paintings entitled Landscape Money that adopted the
shape and colouring of dollar bank notes. One should remember that this is also
the shape of widescreen cinematography that was so significant later on in the
dissemination of landscape to a wide public through the movies.

4 For a recent history of American cultural diplomacy see Michael L. Krenn, The History
of United States Cultural Diplomacy: 1770 to the Present Day (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2017).

5 Miller and Rowe, ‘Films Reinforce Hemispheric Ties’, 9.

6 Alfredo Valente papers, 1941–78, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,

Washington DC.

7 See Richard Dyer MacCann, The People’s Films: A Political History of U.S. Government
Motion Pictures (New York: Hastings House, 1973); and David Holbrook Culbert,
Richard E. Wood and Lawrence H. Suid (eds), Film and Propaganda in America: A
Documentary History, 4 vols (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).

8 Arthur Knight, ‘Art Films in America’, in Films on Art: A Specialized Study and
International Catalogue (Brussels: Editions de la Connaissance, 1949), 44. The original
French edition was published by the journal Les Arts Plastiques and UNESCO’s Film
Section, and was ‘the first attempt at a factual and critical introduction to a particularly
interesting and comparative new branch of the cinema’.

9 Knight, ‘Art Films in America’, 45. Another very enlightening appraisal of the status quo
of the ‘educational art film as a subdivision of the documentary’ in America is to be
found in a 7 February 1951 letter by Frank Stauffacher (filmmaker and curator of the
82 Art in the Cinema

pioneering ‘Art in Cinema’ series) to museum director Grace McCann Morley – Office
of the Director Records 1935–58 (ARCH.ADM.001), San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art Archives. Stauffacher also deemed that ‘Art films must be better made,
more interesting, more dynamic, even more entertaining’ and take a purely ‘filmic
approach to documentary material’. For a later, more scholarly appraisal of the
emergence of the American art film see Richard M. Barsam, ‘Beginnings of the
American Film Art’, in ‘Chapter 7: American Nonfiction Film: 1930–1939’, in Nonfiction
Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 137–9.

10 Knight, Art Films in America, 46.

11 See Steven Jacobs, ‘Camera and Canvas: Emmer, Storck, Resnais and the Post-war Art
Film’, in Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts: Film and the Visual Arts
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 1–37.

12 The company has long ceased to exist and prints of most of its films have not been
screened in more than sixty years, with ‘film prints lost somewhere in limbo’; Joel
Eisner, The Price of Fear: The Film Career of Vincent Price, In His Own Words (Antelope,
CA: Black Sheet/Diverse Media, 2013), 61. Pictura was just one of a number of
producers and distributors that sprang up during this time and which specialized in
films on art. A.F. Films Inc. is another example of such a short-lived venture. For a
fuller listing see Robert Goldwater (ed.), ‘Directory of Film Sources Listed’, in Guide to
Art Films (Washington DC: American Federation for the Arts, 1995), 28–31.

13 For more information on the history of the company (which is also a history of the
development of the art documentary in the United States), see the prospectuses ‘The
Pictura Story’, ‘Pictura – Adventure in Art’, and the catalogue ‘The Pictura Portfolio’ in
San Francisco Museum of Art, Women’s Board Records, 1934–77 (ARCH.ADM.003),
Film Department records (ARCH.ADM.008), and Office of the Director Records
1935–58 (ARCH.ADM.001). The director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (as it
was then called), Dr Grace McCann Morley, was instrumental in the conception and
promotion of Pictura. I would like to acknowledge the help of SFMoMA’s archivist
Peggy Tran-Le in reconstructing this history.

14 Letters of 16 January and 22 January 1951 between Leonid Kipnis and Grace Morley,
Office of the Director Records 1935–58, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Archives.

15 Price later wrote a popular book on the subject entitled The Vincent Price Treasury of
American Art (New York: Country Beautiful Corporation, 1972).
16 In 1954, Price’s segment on Bosch was also released as an 11-minute stand-alone short.
Plans were also made by Pictura to produce films on Edward Hopper and a short
called ‘American Processional’ although it’s not clear that these were ever realized.

17 The film premiered in several major American cities, each time sponsored by the local
art museum, including the Metropolitan, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the
Art institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Art under whose aegis it
premiered at the Clay theatre on 8 February 1952. Promotional materials featured
 American Art Comes of Age 83

quotes by major museum directors and film director John Huston praising the film for
its innovations. It should be noted that by this time almost all major American
museums had inaugurated film screenings as part of their regular programming. See
Suzanne Elizabeth Regan, The Utilization of the Film Medium by American Art
Museums (PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts, 1981).

18 Quoted in ‘Metropolitan Museum Supports Art Feature’ (press release of 27 March 1951)
in Women’s Board Records, 1934–77, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Archives.

19 ‘Pictura’ (review), Variety 186, 4 (2 April 1952): 22.

20 Wood and Benton’s work was collected by another Hollywood star of the time, Edward
G. Robinson, as Erika Doss has documented. See Erika Doss, Regionalists in
Hollywood: Painting, Film, and Patronage, 1925–1945, 2 vols, (PhD thesis: University
of Minnesota, 1983).

21 Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity,
1915–1935 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000) and Erika Doss,
Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract
Expressionism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

22 Regionalist artists were particularly well represented in exhibitions organized or

sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). For more on ‘Three
Centuries of American Art’, see Dimitrios Latsis, ‘À la Recherche de Yankee Art
Franco-American Exhibition Diplomacy between the Wars’, Transtlantica: Revue
d’Études Américaine 2 (2004).

23 For a similarly structured documentary see Grandpa Called it Art (MGM/NBC, 1944)
where Benton and Reginald Marsh are similarly touted as representing a home-grown
American art while older artists are dismissed as part of an older ‘artistically
challenged’ period of American history.

24 Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 13–40.

25 Bosley Crowther, ‘At the Little Carnegie’ (review), The New York Times (8 April 1952): 35.

26 As a witty review in the LA Daily News put it, ‘Price, as a kind of garrulous Sunday painter
given to park bench disquisitions before a cluster of young students, agreeably etches the
transitions between the several episodes and, with his unseen but audible thespian
colleagues, provides an entertaining narrative account of the temper and circumstances
that conditioned the several palettes.’ Review quoted in ‘The Pictura Portfolio’ in Women’s
Board Records, 1934–77, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Archives.

27 The segment on Grant Wood was one reel (14 mins) in length and was produced by
Leonid Kipnis. The director was Mark Sorkin, the music was composed by Lan
Adomian and it was photographed by John Lewis.

28 Implicit comparisons with acknowledged artists like Van Gogh (the subject of one of
the previous episodes in the film) are also made, as when a pair of shoes painted by a
young Wood pans across the screen.
84 Art in the Cinema

29 For more on the cross-pollination between American painting and American cinema
during this period (including the brief collaboration between Grant Wood, Thomas
Hart Benton and John Ford during the production of The Long Voyage Home (1940)),
see Christiane Viviani, ‘Promenade dans une tradition réaliste: Peinture et cinéma
américains, quelques pistes’, Ligeia: Dossiers sur l’Art 20, 77–80 (July–December, 2007):
196–205.

30 Crowther, ‘At the Little Carnegie’, 35.

31 These strands include only films on American artists, craftsmen and architects. In the
aforementioned article ‘Art Films in America’ from 1949, Arthur Knight arranged films
in three categories: ‘films about art technique, films about individual artists, and films
that seek to interpret a work of art’. Other films on visual art were, of course, produced
in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s, but they would be more properly dealt
with in the context of the contemporaneous flowering of educational and visual
instruction films. The American Federation of Arts’ Guide to Art Films (1950) lists no
fewer than 353 such titles, more than 100 of which had been produced in the preceding
year alone. Fifty-eight of those films dealt with some aspects of American visual art
and art instruction.

32 Barsam, ‘Beginnings of the American Film on Art’, 138.

33 What is Modern Art? was based on MoMA director Alfred Barr’s booklet of the same
name published in 1947. Additional films in this category saw a more limited
distribution, including: The Making of a Fresco (n.d.) produced by the Legion of Art
Museum in San Francisco on the making of Diego Rivera’s mural of the same name,
the series of instructional films on ‘Art Techniques and Appreciation’ produced by
Walter O. Gutlohn Inc. in 1944–5 and the ‘Artists at Work’ series produced by Elias
Katz, including films on Lynd Ward, George Grosz and William Gropper.

34 Some of these films were made to accompany related exhibitions. MoMA was a
pioneer of such productions dating to its early days with films on architecture
(Evolution of the Skyscraper, 1938) and art (World of Calder, 1949). To these must be
added films about American museums that were produced as early as the 1920s,
including the Metropolitan Museum’s Behind the Scenes: The Working Side of the
Museum (1928), Your National Gallery (1948) about the National Gallery of Art in
Washington DC, and The American Wing (1935) on the newly inaugurated wing of the
Metropolitan Museum. A number of additional documentaries focused on public art
with New York Heritage (1950), sponsored by the New York City Art Commission,
being a notable example.

35 Knight, ‘Art Films in America’, 47 (my emphasis).

36 Another early film on cinema and its preservation is The Film that was Lost (1942) that
was also produced for a popular newsreel (MGM’s Film Parade). The film is preserved
at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
 3
Art history with a camera:
Rubens (1948) and Paul
Haesaerts’ concept of
cinéma critique
STEVEN JACOBS AND
JOSÉPHINE VANDEKERCKHOVE

In the 1940s and 1950s, prominent art historians such as Roberto Longhi,
Lionello Venturi, Giulio Carlo Argan, Henri Focillon, Pierre Francastel, Carlo
Ludovico Ragghianti and Gaston Diehl among many others showed an
outspoken interest in art documentaries. Occasionally, they were also involved
in the production of such films. For these art historians, cinema was not only
capable of bringing art to wider audiences, it also made it possible to compare,
analyse and investigate artworks in original ways.1 Art documentaries,
consequently, became tools of the art historian, generating new art historical
methods and paradigms. This notion was crucial for Belgian critic and art
historian Paul Haesaerts (1901–74), who would become a leading filmmaker
specialized in art documentaries in the late 1940s and 1950s.
After his studies in painting, architecture, and philosophy, Haesaerts did not
only become a painter, illustrator, etcher, designer and architect, he also
developed into an accomplished art critic and writer. From the 1930s onwards

85
86 Art in the Cinema

he was a principal member of the Belgian art scene and he published several
books on Belgian artists such as on George Minne (1939), Constant Permeke
(1940), James Ensor (1957, 1973), as well as on illustrious international artists
such as Pablo Picasso (1938), Ossip Zadkine (1939) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(1947).2 In addition, Haesaerts regularly curated exhibitions such as the 1938
show of Les Compagnons de l’Art at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and
he often gave lectures at museums and universities.3 Shortly after the Second
World War, he started exploring a new way of practising art criticism by
experimenting with the medium of film.
Unlike most of his colleagues who collaborated with filmmakers, Haesaerts
went beyond the traditional role of advisory expert or author of the voice-over
text, taking the full responsibility of the film’s form and content. With his first film
Rubens (1948), which was made in collaboration with filmmaker Henri Storck
(1907–99), Haesaerts brought the art documentary into the domain of art analysis.
Through various cinematic devices such as camera movements, split
screens, dissolves and animation techniques, Rubens went beyond an art

Figure 3.1 Rubens (Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck, 1948). Still by Paul Bytebier.
 Art History with a Camera 87

historical reading of the work of the baroque painter by also providing a formal
analysis of his artworks. Following his concept of ‘cinéma critique’, Haesaerts
attempted to let images speak for themselves, presenting the medium of film as
an analytical tool capable of constructing a discourse based on the succession
and montage of images. Followed by art documentaries such as Visite à Picasso
(Visit to Picasso, 1950), De Renoir à Picasso (From Renoir to Picasso, 1950) and
Quatre peintres belges au travail (Four Belgian Painters at Work, 1952), Rubens
would become a landmark film, screened and praised all over the world.

Haesaerts and the illustrated art book

The Golden Age of the art documentary of the late 1940s and early 1950s
coincided with interesting experiments and innovations in the field of the
illustrated art book, epitomized by André Malraux’s Musée imaginaire
(Museum without Walls, 1947), which was based on the juxtaposition of
artworks of divergent styles, periods and cultures.4 Already in the early 1930s,
Haesaerts was aware of the fact that the perception and knowledge of art had
changed drastically through the ubiquitous availability of mechanical
reproductions. More than a decade before Malraux’s Musée imaginaire,
Haesaerts published Flandre: Essai sur l’art flamand depuis 1880 (Flanders:
Essay on Flemish Art since 1880) together with his brother Luc in 1931.5 This
book on Flemish impressionist painting was striking as it developed its
arguments first and foremost by means of illustrations, every left page only
showing a combination of reproductions. Even their method seems to prefigure
that of Malraux, who was famously presented by photographer Maurice
Jarnoux amidst a collection of reproductions scattered over the floor of his
room, as painter Jean Milo remembered how the Haesaerts brothers were
preparing their book by spreading out pictures on the floor of their room.6
Haesaerts was highly conscious of his method as the book also included a
preface entitled ‘un critique par la photographie’, in which he praises the ability
of the mechanical eye of the photo camera to surpass human vision by revealing
the touch, technique, and material aspects of paintings.7 According to Haesaerts,
combinations of photographic reproductions do not only demonstrate certain
88 Art in the Cinema

assertions of the text, they also enable the art critic to surpass textual discourse
and to dissect, analyse, reconstruct and situate artworks. By means of
juxtapositions, successions and a diversity of combinations of photographs, an
art book could tell a different, and often more accurate, story than one primarily
based on texts.8 Furthermore, photographic reproductions, and close-ups in
particular, could stimulate the formal analysis of works of art.9 In addition, the
book of Flandre contains a variety of techniques that anticipate Haesaerts’
approach of dealing with paintings in his films.10
Although the medium of photography supplied the materials for the art
book, it was cinema that provided its organizational model.11 According to
Malraux, the art book was, just like a film, a succession of images arranged on
the basis of montage.12 Strikingly, in his praise of the mobile eye, Haesaerts,
too, refers to film in his introduction on the use of photographs in art books:
‘Let us take inspiration from the experiments in the cinema, which, for a
long time, has recognised its capabilities and did not resist to attach cameras to
the shoes of pedestrians, reaping scythes and crashing airplanes.’13 According
to Storck, with whom Haesaerts would make his first film, the confrontations
and successions of images in the Flandre book evoked a kind of cinematic
montage. Storck described the book as ‘a cinematic exercise’, which was inspired
by the framings and close-ups of the cinema.14 In its turn, Haesaerts’ book
inspired Storck to make his innovative art documentaries of the late 1930s
and 1940s. Following his conviction that reproductions of artworks make the
accompanying text complete and generate new reflections in the reader’s mind,
Haesaerts kept on publishing art books throughout his career, in which the
role of illustrations remained important. However, it was with his 1948 film
Rubens, that Haesaerts would develop this concept of art criticism even further,
when he introduced his ideas into the practice of film.

Preparations, production and awards

Although Haesaerts and Storck only released their film in 1948, already before
the war there were intentions to produce a film dedicated to Peter Paul Rubens
(1577–40).15 In 1936, the script of Storck’s Regards sur la Belgique ancienne
 Art History with a Camera 89

(Views of Ancient Belgium) included a part devoted to Rubens, a part that

never made it into the final film.16 However, Storck stated that while filming
Rubens’ works in Antwerp Cathedral, he realized that ‘paintings come more to
life when you move the camera and take close-ups’, since the works of art ‘are
no longer part of the architecture’ and therefore the subjects of the paintings
come to life and they become more meaningful.17 Afterwards, Storck began
discussing the idea of a film on Rubens with Kamiel Huysmans, then mayor of
the city of Antwerp, who was very eager to start this project.18 Subsequently, in
1939, the city council of Antwerp launched the idea to commemorate the
300th anniversary of the death of Rubens and it even gave some guidelines
for the realization of a 20-minute black-and-white film.19 Serving as a
glorification of Antwerp as the city of Rubens, they wanted the film to be ‘as
dynamic, fascinating and varied as possible’,20 with different versions in Dutch,
French, English and German.21 Soon after the request of the city council of
Antwerp was released, Storck started working on Rubens, commissioned by
the Ministry for Public Education (Cinema Department) and the Ministry for

Figure 3.2 Rubens (Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck, 1948). Still by Paul Bytebier.
90 Art in the Cinema

Communication (State Tourism Commission).22 Eventually, after the

interruptions of the production process caused by the war, Paul Haesaerts
joined Storck, signing a contract in 1947, stating that Haesaerts was responsible
for the screenplay and the all-round assistance with the montage, the sound,
the commentary, and all other artistic and technical problems that might
occur.23 In addition, Haesaerts spent months creating a script that covered the
rich oeuvre of Rubens, which he divided thematically into five chapters: the
gothic and the sublime, Rubens and his environment, Rubens’ technique,
Rubens as a painter of abundance, the history of Christ evoked by Rubens, and
his paintings on music and dance.24 Extensive preparations in the Haesaerts
archives show that this thematic classification was already made at an early
stage.25
In the press release for the film, Haesaerts and Storck proclaimed that the
means of cinema in seeing works of art are far greater than the human eye,
since film ‘can go quickly from one museum to another’.26 They consequently
considered Rubens as a grand cinematic exhibition, presenting the art
documentary as a ‘tour du monde’, containing works from museums in
Madrid, Paris, London, Munich, Vienna, etc., all coming together on the silver
screen thanks to photographic reproductions.27 In a 1949 interview, Storck
declared that in order to collect all the images of Rubens’ paintings, he had to
(re-)photograph almost everything on-site.28
To translate Rubens’ works into cinema, Haesaerts and Storck called in a
wide variety of cinematic techniques, including camera movements, split
screens, overlap dissolves, multiple exposures, parallel editing and animation
techniques. Apart from the titles of the works that are included in the film and
the museums where they are situated, the elaborated script also contains the
voice-over texts and instructions on the use of these ‘special cinematic
movements’.29 The script also comprises notes and handwritten clarifications
by Haesaerts himself, emphasizing that, for example, ‘the movements of the
diagrams are only momentary visual indications quickly coming to underline
this or that characteristic of a painting on which we want to focus the attention
of the spectator’.30 In addition, together with two technical teams of twenty-
five collaborators, Storck worked for six months trying to make these images
‘come to life’.31 Due to the grand scale of Haesaerts’ screenplay and the
 Art History with a Camera 91

experimental character of the film, the originally intended length of twenty

minutes for Rubens was extended to one hour of film.
After working on the film for over a year, Rubens premiered in May 1948 at
the Venice Biennale, where Storck and Haesaerts won the Golden Medal in the
category of films on visual arts. They also won the prize for best documentary
of an artistic character (shared with Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh), awarded by
CIDALC (Comité International de Diffusion de l’Art et de la Littérature par le
Cinéma).32 Also in Belgium, where Rubens premiered in October 1948 in
Antwerp, the film was an immediate success. In the following months, it was
screened in galleries, museums and local cinemas all over the country, often
accompanied by a brief introduction by Haesaerts.
Furthermore, Rubens also found its way to several other European countries:
it was screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival;33 Roger Manvell discussed the

Figure 3.3 Rubens (Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck, 1948), Scenario. Henri Storck
Papers, Cinematek, Brussels.
92 Art in the Cinema

film in a Sight and Sound article tellingly entitled ‘And Finally a Great Film’;34
and Storck’s production company CEP (Cinéma Edition Production)35
planned to screen the film in Canada and the USSR.36 Also in the United
States, where Rubens was distributed by Brandon Films Inc. in New York,37 the
film was screened in art galleries such as the Museum of Modern Art in New
York and at several universities.38 As a result, the film became a landmark art
documentary that was often discussed in film and art journals, surveys and
books on the topic by authors such as Theodore R. Bowie and Siegfried
Kracauer among others.39

Rubens as art criticism without words

For Haesaerts, conventional art criticism was outdated and unadjusted to its
objects. Cinema, by contrast, offers a ‘new instrument of investigation and
thinking’, that enables us to comprehend artworks in a new way.40 Developing
his concept of ‘cinéma critique’, Haesaerts considers cinema a superior art
critical tool because written criticism can be separated from its subject, which,
according to Haesaerts, is not the case with film: ‘When a mistake is used in
a comparison, in a description of a form, in the nature of a confrontation or
an influence, the film will display this mistake and the viewer will see it
immediately. The succession of images compels the author to keep constantly
in contact with the images.’41 Additionally, Haesaerts distinguishes three types
of ‘cinéma critique’, which correspond to the possibilities of written criticism:
the anecdote, the technical analysis and the lyrical representation.42
In a 1951 lecture, Haesaerts presents cinema as the culmination of a process
of juxtaposing images that was earlier developed in lectures and art books,
while also emphasising film’s power to enable a close and intimate confrontation
with works of art: ‘Writing distances us from the object. Film brings us closer to
it. The beauty of a phrase, the eloquence of an affirmation may distract us easily
from the quality of the artwork, whereas a harmonious movement of the camera
or successful lighting can never distance our judgment from the real value of
the filmed object.’43 ‘Writing can now be abandoned,’ he states, and ‘commentary
is made by the voice and music, criticism is first and foremost achieved by the
 Art History with a Camera 93

movement of the camera.’44 In addition, Haesaerts advocates for images

replacing words, to let discourse become ‘an eloquent succession of images’.45
Already in the first and introductory part of the Rubens film, which deals
with the transition from a gothic to a baroque style, Haesaerts and Storck use
several innovative cinematic strategies to support the narrative of the voice-
over commentary. For example, instead of explaining Rubens’ concept of a
universe in motion and a fertile nature with words, a dissolve between paintings
and footage of water, clouds and flames is used to evoke these ideas. At other
times, Rubens is presented as a master of ultimate flexibility and movement by
means of animated circles and ovals that point out the characteristics of
Rubens’ compositions – his focal points, divisions, and the sweep of his
movements. These animated lines also share a striking resemblance to the
linear structures drawn by Picasso in the film Visite à Picaso, showing the
famous artist at work. However, in Rubens, this use of linear patterns to
emphasize or reveal Rubens’ compositions is somewhat remarkable, as the art
of Rubens is generally positioned against classicist tendencies favouring line
over colour.46 According to André Thirifays, Haesaerts used ‘a technique which
is perfectly adapted to the film medium, and which, moreover, in this case, is
more efficacious than the written word. By using graphs, pointing quick
contrasts, or introducing music, he succeeds in giving forceful expression to
his critical opinions, whilst at the same time, with a few swift touches, he
indicates various influences and successive trends in the realm of art and
dwells on the dramatic aspects of the works mentioned.’47
However, it is in the second, and more experimental half of the film, that
this cinematic language is used to its fullest potential and that the lyrical
representation of Rubens’ artworks is fully accomplished. Specially in the
sequence on Rubens’ representation of the life of Christ, the importance of the
voice-over commentary diminishes and sometimes even disappears completely,
whereas the shots of the paintings perfectly match the score by Belgian
composer Raymond Chevreuille, gradually intensifying as Christ’s death on
the cross approaches.48 This specific part was also praised by the local press as
one of the highlights of Rubens, calling it ‘a moment of pure cinema’,49 of an
‘almost unbearable dramatic intensity’,50 and lyricism at its best because it’s ‘not
bound by any comment’.51 Haesaerts, however, argues that technically, the first
94 Art in the Cinema

half of Rubens is the best part, while also recognizing that ‘as for the most
moving passage, it is obviously the reel dedicated to Christ’.52
The emphatic presence of the voice-over commentary in the first segment
of Rubens was often the target of criticism in reviews, accusing the film of
being too didactic, stating that for example ‘nothing is in fact more disturbing
than the teachers-tone of voice coming to tell us what to think about Rubens
or even what we can see with our own eyes’.53 André Bazin, too, used this
argument against the film, but he also stated that because of Rubens’ didactic
potential, Haesaerts and Storck were able to ‘seriously shorten the long path of
culture that only a privileged few can walk’.54 Likewise, Paul Davay stated that
Rubens has the ability to reach a wider audience, because ‘Storck and Haesaerts
oblige us to remain in front of the picture, to see it, with their eyes, but they give
us the right to protest, to disagree, and to join in a discussion which is always
open to our intelligence.’55

Rubens and the formalist tradition

In contrast with some other landmark art documentaries of the 1940s, Storck
and Haesaerts present cinema as an analytical tool to dissect artworks. They do
not use film to re-tell the story of a painting’s subject, as in several of Luciano
Emmer’s films. In addition, only to a certain extent do they attempt to enter the
biographical or mental world of the artist, as in Storck’s Le Monde de Paul
Delvaux (The World of Paul Delvaux, 1946) or Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh (1948).
First and foremost, Rubens consists of a formal and stylistic analysis of the
works of the baroque painter, facilitated by the use of a variety of cinematic
techniques in which the camera is presented as an instrument that enables us
to compare the artworks. In so doing, Haesaerts and Storck present themselves
as modernists – in one of his essays, Haesaerts refers to the famous formalist
definition of art by French painter Maurice Denis stating that ‘a picture, before
being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface
covered with colours assembled in a certain order’.56
In Rubens, for example, Haesaerts and Storck frequently isolate a fragment
of a painting through the device of an iris, sometimes even a shifting iris, the
 Art History with a Camera 95

subsequent shot showing a close-up of that fragment for a more detailed

analysis. At other instances, a moving camera and rapidly rotating images
reveal Rubens’ predilection for spiral-shaped movements. Furthermore, the
omnipresence of animated lines highlights the compositions and rhythm of
Rubens’ paintings. In addition, Haesaerts unmistakably situates himself in the
formalist tradition of art history, reaching back to the writings by Heinrich
Wölfflin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Usually considered
as one of the first art historians using parallel slide projections in his lectures,
Wölfflin also based his method on a visual analysis of artworks, implying that
art operates as a visual language.57 Wölfflin’s famous Kunstgeschichtliche
Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History, 1915) is based on a series of formal
oppositions in order to discuss the differences between renaissance and
baroque art.58 On the one hand, echoing Wölfflin’s juxtapositions, Storck and
Haesaerts frequently use split-screens to compare Rubens with earlier painters
such as Van der Weyden, Van der Goes, Van Eyck, Bosch or Bruegel. On the
other hand, split screens are invoked to demonstrate Rubens’ influence on later
artists such as Jordaens, Watteau, Delacroix, Wiertz and Renoir. Furthermore,
they also make comparisons between similar details from a number of works
by Rubens himself. For instance, a sequence juxtaposes a series of hands
painted by Rubens and investigates their significance in the construction of a
narrative, a topic already present in preparation sketches by Haesaerts, trying
to create an order in which the details of these hands could appear.59
Haesaerts continued to use the technique of split-screens in other films
such as De Renoir à Picasso in 1950, to make statements about the development
of modern art in general, attempting to trace three inspirational sources of
modern art – the so-called sensual or carnal (Renoir), the cerebral (Seurat)
and the instinctual or passionate (Picasso). Self-evidently, such confrontations,
which also structured Malraux’s Musée imaginaire, became only possible and
were even fostered by the availability of the mechanical reproduction of
images. In one of his texts on the film on art, Haesaerts asserted that the
discipline of art history and the practices of art analysis and art criticism are
no longer conceivable without mechanical reproductions.60 Furthermore,
reproductions made it possible to ‘investigate, understand, compare, and
explain artworks’ by means of ‘anything other than visual perception’.61 Just
96 Art in the Cinema

like Malraux, Haesaerts does not use a chronological framework in Rubens

but he juxtaposes works of art in a ‘temps esthétique’, comparing them
stylistically.62
Another idea that was important to Haesaerts is that the film has to adopt
the style and rhythm of the artworks being filmed: ‘The camera has to borrow
its gestures and demeanour from the subject it is talking about. The camera has
to be trecento with Giotto, impressionist with Renoir, classical and Poussinesque
with Poussin, baroque and Rubensian with Rubens.’63 Storck and Haesaerts’
hectic camera movements, swift editing and curling animated lines evoke the
dynamic compositions, the vertiginous spaces, the muscular power of the
figures, the vivid brush work, and the rich colour contrasts that characterize
Rubens’ paintings.
Because of the varying light and the falling and turning movements of the
camera used in the film, Rubens’ art is even presented as a proto-cinematic
spectacle. Storck and Haesaerts present Rubens as a precursor of cinema in a
scene in which the interior of a Jesuit church with an altarpiece painted by
Rubens is almost transformed into a cinema theatre. Suddenly, the image is
underexposed apart from the altar, which illuminates as a cinema screen
showing details of several Rubens paintings. With his staged spectacles on
large formats and compositions characterized by movements and spatial
depth, Rubens is perfectly fit for the film camera – Anne Hollander tellingly
described Rubens as an artist with ‘a cinematic understanding’.64
Haesaerts and Storck presented Rubens as a highly autonomous work of
cinema and they were often praised for the experimental character of their
film. For example, in a lecture on Haesaerts, Francis Bolen stated that with
Rubens ‘we were far away from the “clichés” which had begun to appear in the
ordinary brand of films on art’.65 Furthermore, H.W. Janson, author of a well-
known and popular survey of art history, wrote that:

ambitious and successful films such as the Belgian-made Rubens and Le

Monde de Paul Delvaux have demonstrated how effectively the moving
camera can guide the beholder’s eye so as to focus his attention and heighten
his perceptions. There is a strange excitement about viewing paintings thus
spread out upon the movie screen. A new dimension, we feel, has been
 Art History with a Camera 97

added to our experience, and we find ourselves in a state of visual alertness

that makes the forms speak to us with particular eloquence and intensity.66

Rubens as a film on art versus an art film

Rubens is, in some ways, a typical art documentary of the late 1940s and 1950s,
in the sense that it is a didactic film on art but, at the same time, it is an art film
that self-consciously touches upon the boundaries between painting and film,
oscillating between art and reality, stillness and movement, and two and three
dimensions. Thanks to the illusion of Rubens’ paintings, a new cinematic
illusion is created. In addition, its didacticism is developed thanks to cinematic
techniques and devices. Consequently, Rubens was not conceived as an
educational project, nor as pure cinema, but rather as something in between.
This ambiguity was also noted by Siegfried Kracauer, who wrote that:

Rubens combines cinematically brilliant camera penetrations of the painter’s

world with an attempt to drive home his predilection for gyrational
movements. Note that this film is neither pure cinema nor merely a teaching
instrument. It is a glamorous hybrid.67

Because of the experimental character of Rubens, however, Haesaerts and Storck

were also often criticized by art critics and historians, arguing that they attempted
to realize effects that sometimes had little to do with the original work of art or
showed it completely out of context. Furthermore, according to Beatrice Farwell,
art documentaries are confronted by a dilemma by definition: ‘The more a film
on art succeeds as a film, the less likely it is to increase one’s understanding of
painting.’68 Alluding to the film by Storck and Haesaerts, Farwell deals with the
example of Rubens, which, at first sight, seems like a natural for film treatment
because his art is full of movement. The point, however, is that Rubens was
capable of creating this movement in a static medium. When a painting is set in
motion by means of cinematic devices, the illusion Rubens skilfully created is
lost. A new filmic illusion is constructed, which, according to Farwell, falsifies
Rubens’ art and which can even lead to a misinterpretation of the art of painting
98 Art in the Cinema

in general. Haesaerts, however, contradicts the notion that cinema goes against
the nature of painting as an immobile art form. For Haesaerts, the art film is the
expression of the filmed artwork but also the expression of the spectator looking
at it. Furthermore, he denies the idea that by introducing movement to still
paintings, cinema betrays the intentions of the artists represented. Far from
doing harm to the painter or the sculptor, Haesaerts states, the filmmaker-critic
can help the artists in revealing their expression. For this purpose, filmmakers
can employ an entire cinematic toolkit. André Bazin, too, recognized this conflict
inherent to the art documentary, stating that these filmmakers use ‘an already
completed work sufficient unto itself’.69 But, he asserted:

it is precisely because it substitutes for the painting a work one degree

removed from it, proceeding from something already aesthetically
formulated, that it throws a new light on the original. It is perhaps to the
extent that the film is a complete work and as such, seems therefore to
betray the painting most, that it renders it in reality the greater service.70

Likewise, Theodore R. Bowie emphasizes that Haesaerts uses film as ‘an

instrument of interpretation’, and it is precisely this interpretative aspect that
holds the critical potential of the art documentary.71 This discrepancy between
the educational on the one hand and the artistic on the other did not only
result in divided opinions on the film, it also created disagreements between
Storck and Haesaerts. Letters from the Haesaerts archives indicate that the
division of tasks stipulated in the contract in 1947 – Haesaerts being responsible
for the analytical-didactic part of the script and Storck for the technical-artistic
part of the camerawork – also caused doubts regarding the authorship of
Rubens.72 Consequently, this raises questions about to what extent the
educational or the creative ability determines the value of the art documentary,
a topic which was often at the centre of discussions at international conferences
and in professional film and art journals at the time. However, with Rubens,
Haesaerts managed to break down the boundaries between an educational
document on the one hand and an independent work of art on the other. In
doing so, he created a new model of art historical scholarship, which, decades
later, certainly still amazes us by its attempts at developing new ways of
analysing artworks in cinematic ways.
 Art History with a Camera 99

Figure 3.4 and 3.5 Rubens Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck, 1948). Digital Stills.

Notes
1 See for instance: Carpaccio (Umberto Barbaro and Roberto Longhi, 1947),
Michelangelo (Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, 1964), and Van Gogh (Alain Resnais, Gaston
Diehl and Robert Hessens, 1948).
2 Of Haesaerts, see Beeldhouwwerken en tekeningen van George Minne (Amsterdam: De
Spiegel, n.d.); Permeke of de drang naar grootheid (Amsterdam/Antwerp: De Spieghel/Het
Kompas, 1940); James Ensor (Brussels: Elsevier, 1957); Picasso et le gout du paroxysme
(Antwerp/Amsterdam: De Spieghel/Het Kompas 1938); Renoir: Sculptor (New York:
Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), and Ossip Zadkine (Amsterdam: De Spieghel, 1939).
100 Art in the Cinema

3 In 1938, Paul Haesaerts, together with his brother Luc and artists René Magritte, Paul
Delvaux and Léon Spilliaert, founded the group Les Compagnons de l’Art, which
organized a landmark exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels that same
year including artists such as James Ensor, Valerius de Saedeleer and George Minne.
Forty years later, in 1978, the Palais des Beaux-Arts paid tribute to the brothers
Haesaerts with the exhibition Art in Belgium from Ensor to Jeune Peinture Belge, with a
focus on the 1938 exhibition of Les Compagnons de l’Art. See Karel Geirlandt,
introduction to Kunst in België 1880–1950: Hulde aan Luc en Paul Haesaerts by Karel
Geirlandt (ed.) (Brussels: Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, 1978), 5.
4 Malraux’s Le Musée imaginaire was originally published in 1947 as the first volume of
Psychologie de l’art (Genève: Skira) and was later adapted to become a part of Les Voix
du silence (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). In 1965, the text was republished as Le Musée
imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard). See also Walter Grasskamp, The Book on the Floor: André
Malraux and the Imaginary Museum (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2016);
Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Album de l’art à l’époque du musée imaginaire (Paris: Hazan,
2013); and Angela Dalle Vacche, Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
5 Paul and Luc Haesaerts, Flandre: Essai sur l’art flamand depuis 1880. Vol. 1:
L’Impressionnisme (Paris: Lazzaro, 1931). Dealing with impressionist art, the book of
more than 700 pages was originally intended to be part of a trilogy, the other parts
dedicated to Symbolism and Expressionism respectively. See Sofie Neuckermans,
‘Organization and Inventory of the Paul Haesaerts Archive’ (Masters diss., Vrije
Universiteit Brussels, 2006), 40.
6 Jean Milo, ‘Wij waren jong . . .’, in Geirlandt (ed.), Kunst in België 1880–1950, 40.
7 Haesaerts and Haesaerts, ‘Un critique par la photographie’, introduction to Flandre, 13.
8 Haesaerts and Haesaerts, ‘Un critique par la photographie’, 17.
9 Haesaerts and Haesaerts, ‘Un critique par la photographie’, 21. Haesaerts also refers
to the inventions of cubist and constructivist painting that enabled us to see pure
forms.
10 For example on page 46, split screens of photographic reproductions are used to compare
different ways of portraying the female body in the work of nineteenth-century artists
Louis Gallait and Henry Leys, a technique Haesaerts would frequently use in several of
his art documentaries such as De Renoir à Picasso (1950) to exemplify stylistic differences
in certain paintings. Or on pages 186–95, a succession of fragments of James Ensor’s
painting of Christ’s Entry into Brussels of 1889 are used to emphasize the attention of
detail versus the grandeur of the entire painting. This approach shows clear similarities to
the use of montage in Haesaerts’ later films on Ensor: Masques et Visages de James Ensor
(Masques and Faces of James Ensor, 1952) and Ik, Ensor (I, Ensor, 1972).
11 See also Douglas Smith, ‘Moving Pictures: the Art Documentaries of Alain Resnais and
Henri-Georges Clouzot in Theoretical Context’, Studies in European Cinema 1, 3
(2004): 167.
12 Smith, ‘Moving Pictures’, 167
 Art History with a Camera 101

13 Haesaerts and Haesaerts, ‘Un critique par la photographie’, 15.

14 Henri Storck, ‘Paul Haesaerts est mort’, Le Soir (2 February 1974).
15 Jean D., ‘Les Mystères de la cathédrale ou toute l’œuvre de Rubens a la clarté des
sunlights’, Hebdo (13 December1947): 21.
16 Regards sur la Belgique ancienne is divided into two parts: ‘The Treasures of Faith’ and
‘Communal Freedom’. The script also included two additional parts: ‘Rubens and his
Time’ and ‘Leopold the First, the Creation of Present-day Belgium’. See http://
fondshenristorck.be/en/henri-storck/filmography-hs/films-alphabetically/insights-
into-the-former-belgium/
17 Johan Swinnen, ‘Paradoxale sferen: Interview met Henri Storck’, in Johan Swinnen and
Luc Deneulin (eds), Henri Storck: memoreren (Brussels: VUB Press, 2007), 83–4.
18 Swinnen, ‘Paradoxale sferen: Interview met Henri Storck’, 84.
19 See the correspondence between Oscar Leemans and Leo Delwaide (Secretariat of the
sub-committee for the Rubens film) and Head of the ‘Soc. An. Belge. C.E.P.’,
Commemoration of Rubens 1940 (25 July 1940), Henri Storck Papers, Cinematek, Brussels.
20 Correspondence Leemans-Delwaide.
21 Before the film was finished, several copies were ordered from all over the world. Jean
D., ‘Les Mystères de la cathédrale’, 21.
22 Henri Storck, Academie des Beaux-Arts d’Anvers: Entrevue avec Messieurs Wappers et
Opsomer (13 September 1939), Henri Storck Papers, Cinematek, Brussels. See also
http://fondshenristorck.be/en/henri-storck/filmography-hs/films-alphabetically/rubens/
23 However, the division of tasks between Haesaerts and Storck during the production
process of the film remains unclear. This ambiguity also caused later problems
regarding the question of authorship of the film. Correspondence between Henri
Storck and Paul Haesaerts, Contract Paul Haesaerts (20 March 1947), Henri Storck
Papers, Cinematek, Brussels.
24 This thematic classification with an emphasis on the sublime, the cosmic and the
musicality in the works of Rubens is in line with the general Rubens scholarship.
Around the time of the film’s production, there was a tremendous interest in the
oeuvre and the life of Rubens exemplified in the research of German art historian
Ludwig Burchard from the 1930s onwards, resulting in the The Corpus Rubenianum
Ludwig Burchard Catalogue Project; the restoration and the purchase of the Rubenshuis
by the city of Antwerp in 1948; the founding of the Research Institution Centrum
Rubenianium in 1963; and numerous monographs such as Rubens et son temps (René
Huyghe, 1936), Rubens (Jakob Christoph Burckhardt, 1940), Rubens und sein Werk:
Neue Forschungen (Hans Gerhard Evers, 1943) and Les vies multiples de Rubens (Jef
Crick, et al., 1946), which all focus on the same ‘themes’ as the Haesaerts and Storck
film. See also Frans Baudouin and Roger d’Hulst, ‘Foreword’, in The Ceiling Paintings of
the Jesuit Church in Antwerp. Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, vol. 1, John Rupert
Martin (New York: Phaidon, 1968), vii–xiv, and Paul Huvenne and Hans Nieuwdorp,
Het Rubenshuis Antwerpen (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1990).
102 Art in the Cinema

25 This division already marked the very first version of a script as indicated in the
guidelines by the Antwerp city council. See the correspondence between Oscar
Leemans, Leo Delwaide and Head of the ‘Soc. An. Belge. C.E.P.’, Commemoration of
Rubens 1940 (25 July 1940), Henri Storck Papers, Brussels, Cinematek. These different
chapters contain minor changes compared with the final version of Rubens. The idea
was that these chapters could be shown and sold separately. See Paul Haesaerts and
Henri Storck, Script Rubens, 3.10.2, 504–6: ‘Rubens’, 1948, Scenario, Haesaerts Papers,
The Archives for Contemporary Art in Belgium, Brussels.
26 Paul Haesaerts, ‘Art Criticism and Art History by the Kinema: The Work of Rubens on
the Screen’, press release for the film Rubens (1948), Haesaerts Papers, The Archives for
Contemporary Art in Belgium, Brussels.
27 Jean D., ‘Les Mystères de la cathédrale’, 21.
28 Storck stated that some of the works of Rubens hadn’t been photographed for over fifty
years. Th. De Coster, ‘Une heure avec Henri Storck’, Jeunesse et Vie (3 March 1949): 10.
29 Haesaerts, Script Rubens, part I, 10.
30 Haesaerts, Script Rubens, part I, 10.
31 Th. De Coster, ‘Une heure avec Henri Storck’, Jeunesse et Vie (3 March 1949): 10.
32 Marc Turfkruyter, ‘Een Belgische triomf op het Venetiaans filmfestival: Rubens van
Henri Storck en Paul Haesaerts’, ABC Weekblad (17 October 1948).
33 Forsyth Hardy, ‘The Edinburgh Film Festival’, Film Quarterly 4, 4 (1950).
34 Roger Manvell, ‘And Finally a Great Film’, Sight & Sound 17, 67 (1948).
35 CEP was founded in 1934 by Henri Storck (as the artistic director), in collaboration
with Belgian business manager René-Ghislain Le Vaux and attempted to obtain
governmental protection for Belgian productions. Vincent Geens, ‘Een tijd van
begoochelingen: Le temps des utopies. L’ambition cinématographique d’Henri Storck,
de 1907 à 1940’, in Swinnen and Deneulin, Henri Storck: memoreren, 285–6.
36 Correspondence between Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck, Resultats de l’exploitation
du film ‘Rubens’ (10 January 1951), 3.10.2, 508: ‘Rubens’ (1948), letters between
Rispoloulos/Haesaerts/Van Raemdonck/Storck, Haesaerts Papers, The Archives for
Contemporary Art in Belgium, Brussels.
37 William McK. Chapman, Films on Art 1952 (New York: American Federation of
Arts,1952), 133. Katerina Loukopoulou mentions Brandon Films, Inc. as a distributor
of Rubens and emphasizes that advertisements for European films on art like Rubens
addressed a wide-ranging audience of teachers, artists and film enthusiasts. See
Katerina Loukopoulou, ‘Museum at Large: Aesthetic Education through Film’, in
Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, Devin Orgeron (ed.)
et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 364.
38 Marc D., ‘De film Rubens gaat de wereld door. Paul Haesaerts en Henri Storck ter ere’,
Weekblad Cinema (5 March 1949).
 Art History with a Camera 103

39 Rubens was discussed in journals such as Sight & Sound, College Art Journal, Film
Quarterly and Documentary Film News, among many others.
40 Paul Haesaerts, ‘Arts plastiques et caméra’, Festival (Cahier 4) (Brussels, 21 June 1947).
Also published in Arts de France 23–4 (1948): 25–31.
41 Haesaerts, press release for the film Rubens (1948), n.p.
42 The anecdote being the place, the time, the character, the friends, etc. of the artist, the
technical analysis being the scientific research of the different elements of a work of art
and, according to Haesaerts the most important one, the lyrical representation being
the expression of a personal message through a work of art, a style or time. Press leaflet
of Rubens, n.p.
43 Paul Haesaerts, ‘La Critique par le cinéma’ (Lecture at the third congress of the
Association international des critiques d’art (AICA) (1951), 3.10.2, 510–11, Haesaerts
Papers, The Archives for Contemporary Art in Belgium, Brussels.
44 Haesaerts, ‘La Critique par le cinema’, 26.
45 Haesaerts, ‘La Critique par le cinema’, 26.
46 The fact that Rubens was shot in black and white was often a subject of criticism, since
Rubens is usually considered a great colourist. This, however, should be situated in a
context in which the vast majority of art reproductions were in black and white.
Nevertheless, already in 1938 French art historian René Huyghe made a 35mm film in
colour on the baroque painter: Rubens et son temps (Rubens and his Time, 1938), which
can also be considered one of the first art documentaries in colour.
47 André Thirifays, ‘The Potentialities and Limitations of Films about Art’, in Films on Art
(Paris: UNESCO and Brussels: Editions de la connaissance, 1951), 9.
48 Haesaerts’ script also contains indications for the musical score written by Belgian
composer Raymond Chevreuille. Haesaerts, Script Rubens.
49 Armand Bachelier, ‘La Critique d’art par le cinéma: Rubens’, Le Phare (20 October
1948).
50 Bachelier, ‘La Critique d’art par le cinéma’.
51 ‘Rubens’, De Standaard (22 October 1948).
52 Armand Bachelier, ‘Quand un esthète-cinéaste rêve à haute voix’, Le Phare
(15 December 1948).
53 The didactic character of the voice-over commentary is often part of a more general
criticism of the ‘traditional’ film sur l’art which persists to the present day.
H. Vandersteen, ‘Film als reproductie en expressie’, De Spectator (29 October 1948).
54 André Bazin in Le Parisien libéré (10 June 1949), see ‘Rubens’ http://fondshenristorck.
be/nl/henri-storck/filmografie-2/filmsalfabetisch/rubens/
55 Paul Davay, ‘Compelled to See’, in Films on Art (Paris: UNESCO/Brussels: Editions de
la connaissance, 1949), 17, emphasis in original.
104 Art in the Cinema

56 Paul Haesaerts, ‘Art plastique et cinéma’, L’Amour de l’art 29, 37–9 (1949): 39.
57 According to Thomas Hensel however, Bruno Meyer, professor of Art History at the
Polytechnic Institut in Karlsruhe, was the first art historian who used side-by-side
projections and superimpositions in his classroom in 1880. Also Aby Warburg was
using parallel slide projections in his lectures at the same time as Heinrich Wölfflin. See
Thomas Hensel, Wie aus der Kunstgeschichte eine Bildwissenschaft wurde: Aby Warburgs
Graphien (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 144.
58 Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: das Problem der Stilentwicklung in
der neueren Kunst (München: Bruckmann, 1915).
59 Haesaerts, Script Rubens, part IV, n.p.
60 See also: Helene E. Roberts, Art History through the Camera’s Lens (London: Routledge,
1995); Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der
Kunstgeschichte (Berlin: Deutsche Kunstverlag, 2009); Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Photo
Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag,
2011); and Thomas Hensel, Wie aus der Kunstgeschichte eine Bildwissenschaft wurde:
Aby Warburgs Graphien (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), among others.
61 Paul Haesaerts, ‘Sur la critique par le cinéma’, 18.
62 Haesaerts, Flandre, 45.
63 Paul Haesaerts, ‘Kunstkritiek en kunstgeschiedenis door de kinema: Het werk van
Rubens op het scherm’, press release for the film Rubens (1948).
64 Anne Hollander, Moving Pictures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991),
112.
65 Francis Bolen, ‘The “critofilm d’art” as developed by Paul Haesaerts and Carlo
Ragghianti’ (Lecture at the 1951 congress at The Metropolitan Museum in New York),
Haesaerts Papers, The Archives for Contemporary Art in Belgium, Brussels.
66 H.W. Janson, ‘College Use of Films on Art’, in William Mck. Chapman (ed.), Films on
Art 1952 (New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1953), 40.
67 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 198.
68 Beatrice Farwell, ‘Films on Art in Education’, Art Journal 23, 1 (Autumn, 1963): 39–40.
69 André Bazin, ‘Painting and Cinema’, in What Is Cinema? (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1967), 169.
70 Bazin, ‘Painting and Cinema’, 169.
71 Theodore Bowie, ‘The Third Art Film Festival’, College Art Journal 17, 1 (1957): 70.
72 See the correspondence between Paul Haesaerts and Henri Storck (16 September
1948), 3.10.2, 508: ‘Rubens’ (1948), letters between Rispoloulos/Haesaerts/Van
Raemdonck/Storck, Cinematek, Brussels.
 4
Carlo Ludovico
Ragghianti’s critofilms and
beyond: from cinema to
information technology
EMANUELE PELLEGRINI

His contribution to the development of film studies is one of the most

investigated aspects of the multifaceted biography of the Italian art historian
Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (1910–87). Ragghianti played a pioneering role in
film studies in Italy and particularly in the field of the art documentary. He
named his art documentaries ‘critofilms’, standing for a form of art criticism
carried out through film. Ragghianti considered his critofilms not simply as art
documentaries but as a true form of art criticism. The twenty-one critofilms he
produced between 1948 (La Deposizione di Raffaello) and 1964 (Michelangiolo)
represent an attempt to interpret works of art through their own visual
language. Ragghianti was so committed to this goal that his films initially did
not include spoken commentary. The producers insisted on adding narrative
voice-over in an effort to reach a broader audience. The diversity of subjects
addressed by these critofilms – individual artists (L’arte di Rosai, 1957),
individual artworks (Cenacolo di Andrea del Castagno, 1954), individual
monuments (Certosa di Pavia, 1961), specific urban contexts (Pompei

105
106 Art in the Cinema

urbanistica, 1958; Canal Grande, 1963) – and their chronology (spanning from
ancient to modern times) perfectly reflect Ragghianti’s scholarly activities,
which were characterized by multiple interests and supported by meticulous
research methods.1
Considering the rich bibliography dedicated to critofilms and the different
kind of analysis already carried out, this chapter instead concentrates on
two aspects of Ragghianti’s work as an art documentarian, which are
connected to two specific phases of his critofilms, the initial and the final
one. The initial phase, which took place in the aftermath of the Second
World War (from around 1948, when the first critofilm on Raphael was
made), reveals the reasons for taking up a camera and presenting documentaries
as a tool for critically analysing artworks. The final phase, in the 1960s,
allows us to understand why he ceased to proceed with this project. In
particular, this last phase represents a highly important moment both
theoretically and experimentally. Ragghianti’s decision to stop writing and
producing art documentaries was not the result of a lack of creative impetus
but rather of his move to information technology as a means for reading
artworks. Indeed, research in Ragghianti’s archives enables us to confirm that
he shifted from film to IT equipment, then in its early stages, as a tool for
interpreting works of art. In so doing, Ragghianti prefigures the application of
information technologies to the humanities that took place in the following
decades.
Ragghianti’s first two critofilms were made on two different occasions. The
first one, realised in 1948 and dedicated to Raphael’s Deposition (better known
as Pala Baglioni, a painting currently on view in the Galleria Borghese in
Rome), is closely connected to an essay Ragghianti had written the year before
on the same subject. The second, made in 1949 (which unfortunately has been
lost) concerns the personality of Lorenzo the Magnificent, to whom Ragghianti
had dedicated an exhibition in Florence in 1949 on the occasion of the 500th
anniversary of Lorenzo’s birth.2
There may have been many reasons why Ragghianti decided to make an art
documentary. From a more general perspective, however, two elements in
particular deserve our attention. First, Ragghianti’s critofilms were part of
the flourishing of Italian art documentaries, which began in the 1930s.
 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critofilms and Beyond 107

As demonstrated in the introduction of this volume, in the 1940s, the art

documentary was radically reconceptualized by Luciano Emmer as well as by
the experiments by eminent art historians such as Roberto Longhi and Giulio
Carlo Argan, both of whom were close to the young Ragghianti.3 Second,
Ragghianti’s interest in film as a form of artistic expression was kindled at the
beginning of the 1930s (when he introduced the idea of film as a visual art)
and further developed after the Second World War. During this period,
Ragghianti’s interest in film broadened to encompass mass media – radio and
television – as he believed that they would prove crucial for the popularization
of (visual) culture.4 Hence, Ragghianti’s approach to critofilm stems from his
intention to explore the technical possibilities of film as well as from his
ambition to reform the field of the art documentary. The role of a film
theoretician was not enough for him. Experimentation as a film maker was
the only way to show directly his methodology as an art critic. One of his
main objectives was to transform the art documentary into a device for
disseminating visual culture, improving non-specialized audiences’ ability to
understand art.
It is clear that Ragghianti’s work differed from traditional Italian art
documentaries and especially the documentaries produced by the Istituto Luce
to flaunt the country’s artistic gems in an effort to attract tourists. However,
Ragghianti’s critofilms were not entirely against tourist promotion. Plenty of
archival documents demonstrate Ragghianti’s requests for financial support
from the Azienda Autonoma del Turismo di Firenze (the official tourist office of
Florence). Often involved in other Ragghianti initiatives during this period,
the Azienda Autonoma was a leading partner in the production of
documentaries that were of interest to the city of Florence and its image
(beginning with the 1949 critofilm on Lorenzo il Magnifico). Not only did the
Azienda Autonoma del Turismo agree to provide funding, it also suggested
using the critofilm on Lorenzo the Magnificent to promote tourism in the city
and its surroundings, which were slowly recovering from the disasters of the
war.5 It is no coincidence that, a few years later, Ragghianti made a similar
request to the Azienda Turistica for Lucca to make a critofilm about the city.
This film was not produced until 1955, following a fierce debate over measures
to safeguard Lucca’s historic city centre.6
108 Art in the Cinema

Yet Ragghianti did not only distance himself from the traditional format of
the art documentary. First and foremost, he sought to differentiate his activity
as ‘critofilm maker’ from the experimental documentaries made by other art
historians such as Roberto Longhi. Thanks to the collaboration with film critic
and essayist Umberto Barbaro, Longhi produced several films dedicated to
painters such as Carpaccio and Caravaggio, which were shot in 1948, the same
year as Ragghianti’s La Deposizione di Raffaello. While Longhi’s documentaries
focused on his exclusive area of interest, i.e. painting, with a rich verbal
commentary guiding the eye of the observers into the artwork’s hidden details,
Ragghianti’s critofilms evoked a broader theoretical aim, that of being able to
interpret images from different arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, etc.)
through images. His work was the culmination of a long philosophical research
process based on the axiom that visual language could and should be wholly
independent of verbal language.7
A critofilm is thus the concrete result of the application of his methodology
to investigate the visual arts, using Benedetto Croce’s philosophy as a starting
point. Artistic creation is a process based on freedom and autonomy, and visual
language is a language per se, with its own rules. Cinema, as a visual art, will
offer the unique opportunity to investigate images not through words but
through other images. Indeed, it is an active exercise of art criticism, not a
different way of presenting art to the public. Ragghianti’s essay on Raphael’s
Deposition, published at nearly the same time as the critofilm on the same
painting was released, allows us to follow the theoretical process that gave rise
to this body of work. His choice of subject was guided by the nature of the
artwork. It might be the ‘painting that most effectively enables the ultimate
proof of our ability to critically understand or, in other words, to retrace – by
following the shapes, regardless of any pattern or frame – a pictorial process in
which prose and poetry are inextricably connected, the living drama of artistic
creation’.8
This statement must be re-interpreted in light of the document that
introduced the first critofilm, focusing on precisely this painting. Instead of
reducing the film vision of an artwork to a static contemplation of a sequence
of fixed frames and details on the screen, connected and explained only by
verbal commentary, Ragghianti relied upon the authentic expressive resources
 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critofilms and Beyond 109

of film. The transition from one idea to another, artistic influences and
references are clearly explained through the deliberate use of fade-outs, mattes,
cuts, etc. All of what the artwork can teach us is truly enlightened by this
technique, showing that film can be persuasive and produce instant evidence
which, by virtue of being absolutely objective, is superior to that provided by
verbal commentary.9
Ragghianti must have judged the experiment as successful as he devoted
himself with renewed energy to other film projects in the years to follow. He
founded a ‘Cinematic Office’ as a part of the Studio Italiano di Storia dell’Arte,
an institute based in the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence where he had been
appointed commissioner in 1945, becoming ‘the first to have included
cinematic research and its relationship with the arts in its program’.10 Moreover,
in this specific period, the Italian government provided support for the
production of documentaries: law no. 379 issued 16 May 1947 guaranteed
3 per cent of ticket sales from the feature film screened after the documentary.
After being nominated president of the Comité international pour le cinéma et
les arts figuratifs in 1952,11 Ragghianti worked on his critofilms steadily for
over a decade, experimenting with both the content of the films and their
technical aspects.
It was during this period that Ragghianti developed an understanding of
the crucial role television could play as a means of popularizing culture, a true
bulwark against the return of dictatorships. Following the fall of the fascist
Regime, Ragghianti was increasingly driven to improve and facilitate the
process of spreading culture among wider strata of the population, beyond the
inner circle of experts. Film undoubtedly offered the possibility to pursue this
goal by significantly expanding potential audiences. The production of the
critofilms was closely connected to the new journal seleArte, which appeared
during this period (1952–66). It was the first Italian periodical focusing on art
history which was able to capture the interest of a broad, non-specialized
audience. The magazine was sponsored by Adriano Olivetti, who also funded
the critofilms from 1954 onwards.12 The popularization of visual arts through
a visual language became perfectly clear in the introductory text to the first
three critofilms funded by Olivetti (Comunità millenarie, Cenacolo di Andrea
del Castagno and Stile di Piero della Francesca), a brief leaflet still preserved in
110 Art in the Cinema

Ragghianti’s archive, probably given as a handout before the screenings. To

close the gap between art and popular culture, documentary films must be
short and address the widest possible audience:

Becoming aware of art, of this manifestation that is so important for the life
of our spirit, does not only entail enriching and broadening our experience
as civilized men. We are living in a century in which a truly great
phenomenon is being unveiled everywhere: the aesthetic need, figurative
art in particular, permeates every aspect of social and everyday life, from
the household to the industrial sector, from urban planning and architecture
to manufacturing and the most indispensable and common tools of
practical life. [. . .] At present, film is without a doubt the most universal and
immediate means of communication, a language that speaks to all with a
more direct power of persuasion and no language barriers.13

Extensive documentation about the preparation of each critofilm preserved in

the Fondazione Centro Studi Carlo e Licia Ragghianti in Lucca offers new
insights into the complex mechanisms that lay behind the creation of each
critofilm and reveals Ragghianti’s interest in the experimental possibilities of
cinema in visualizing art works. The documents include handwritten notes
and comments on both paper and photographs. Illustrating the very origins
and development of Ragghianti’s ideas, these notes contain both words and
images. The notes comprise descriptions of shooting plans, usually numbered
and listed, first drafted in pen and then typewritten, along with camera
movements and the soundtracks intended to accompany the footage. Rough
sketches in pen or crayon provide vivid impressions of his meticulous method:
they describe the way the camera had to move over the photographs or the
original artworks, describing movements that follow the geometrical patterns
emerging from the artwork itself. Having identified the patterns and forces
within the shapes, Ragghianti then used the camera to highlight their
trajectories, translating them into visual outlines to be projected onto a screen.
These elements consisted of vectors, arrows, axes, and underlinings of the
picture’s structural elements (field lines, symmetry lines, geometrical shapes
made of overlapping circles, squares, and isolated or intersecting rectangles
coming together to form complex architectural graphics), which were often
 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critofilms and Beyond 111

Figure 4.1 C.L. Ragghianti. Sketch, Fondazione Centro Studi sull’Arte Licia e Carlo
Ludovico Ragghianti, Lucca. Serie Critofilm.

sketched on paper. In many cases they are clearly recognizable despite the
hurried character of the scribbles.
Moreover, Ragghianti also carried out equally important work on the
photographs he obtained from numerous museums around the world. Indeed,
the use of the photographic medium as a point of departure and crucial
supporting aid for these documentaries is striking. Like many art historians,
Ragghianti left a very generous photographic archive featuring all kinds of
images, from cuttings of mainstream magazines to copies of works purchased
from professional reproduction photographers such as the firms of Anderson
or Alinari. In so doing, Ragghianti’s photographic archive contains fundamental
evidence of the construction his critofilms. The majority of the artworks
reproduced in Ragghianti’s documentaries are, in fact, not original artworks
but photographic reproductions over which the camera moves.14 In countless
cases, he drew graphic patterns directly onto photographs using a pen, tracing
112 Art in the Cinema

Figure 4.2 C.L. Ragghianti. Visual and verbal notes on a photograph showing Piero
della Francesca’s Pala di Brera, Fondazione Centro Studi sull’Arte Licia e Carlo
Ludovico Ragghianti, Lucca.

continuous or dotted lines as well as vectors, arrows and three-dimensional

solids, indicating his preliminary camera work.
In line with the paper sketches, the camera had to retrace the geometrical
shapes drawn directly onto the picture. Furthermore, Ragghianti placed
carefully cut clippings – many of which are, fortunately, still intact – directly
onto the photographs, leaving the parts of the image that were to be shot
uncovered.
He also applied this procedure to his critofilms addressing urban planning,
where the drawing is constituted by the spatial capacity of the urban perimeter of
cities such as Lucca and Venice, high viewpoints like spires and towers and the
structure of a square (such as the Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa), which Ragghianti
traced from above. The drawing interacts with the written notes describing camera
movements and soundtracks, and these two elements in turn intersect to give life
to the documentary’s task of telling a story through images. There are also diagrams
on the maps indicating the movements the helicopter had to make while flying
over historic city centres or the transparencies with geometrical constructions
involved in planning Michelangiolo (1964).15 This attempt to balance text, graphic
sketches and images leads to the definitive preparatory documents, which were
divided into two columns: a left column showing the critofilm’s images described
 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critofilms and Beyond 113

Figure 4.3 C.L. Ragghianti. Draft scenario of the critofilm on Lucca città comunale,
Fondazione Centro Studi sull’Arte Licia e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Lucca.

in words and a right one displaying the verbal comments that were to accompany
these images.
The last critofilm, dedicated to Michelangelo on the occasion of the 400th
anniversary of his death, was definitely the most elaborate and enjoyed great
success, both nationally and internationally.16
114 Art in the Cinema

When Ragghianti stopped producing critofilms in the mid-1960s, he began to

experiment with computer technology, an encounter said to have taken place at the
Euratom Centre at Ispra in 1968. There is no evidence of any direct relationship
between Olivetti, critofilm producer and head of one of the leading companies in
the field of computer manufacturing in Europe at the time, and Ragghianti’s
interest in information technologies. What is certain is that his research developed
further by using the plotter instead of the movie camera. Only four years had
passed between the last critofilm and the first experiments of Ragghianti with the
computer. This fruitful relationship led to the creation of the specialized centre
APAVOCA (Arts Processes and Visual Objects Computer Analysis) at the
International University of Art in Florence (UIA), funded by Ragghianti in 1968,
as well as the establishment of the periodical Sound/Sonda (1978–80), which
presented the results of research by Ragghianti and some of his fellow students
(Zanobini, Testi Cristiani and Bruno).17
However, Ragghianti’s shift towards information technology was actually
very gradual and, at least at the beginning, quite reluctant. As early as 1964, in
an essay in Critica d’Arte, Ragghianti openly opposed the idea that machines
might be able to express aesthetic judgement. This essay drew ironically on the
title of an article about comprehending art through artificial intelligence by
Silvio Ceccato, a philosopher expert on artificial intelligence, founder of the
Centro di Cibernetica e di Attività Linguistiche at the University of Milan, and
published in Il Giorno. His critique targeted the experiments carried out by the
Politecnico di Milano (Institute of Scientific Cinematography), strictly related
to Ceccato’s research. Ceccato and his research group went through one of the
first computer analyses of an art object, specifically an image of horn-blowing
angels from the monastery of San Pablo de Casserras, now kept in the Diocesan
Museum of Solsona.
According to Ragghianti, the weakest aspect of this attempt, which can be
considered one of the first true experiments in reading an artwork with a
computer in Italy, was the proposed double interpretation that re-traced the
trajectory of the eye along two different paths, which the research group of the
Centro di Cibernetica in Milan called ‘chronicle observation’ (‘a cronaca’, i.e.
more detailed) and ‘aesthetic observation’ (‘estetica’, i.e. eye movements free to
run along the artworks). On the contrary, in his own critofilms, Ragghianti was
 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critofilms and Beyond 115

Figure 4.4 Plotter experiments on Piero della Francesca paintings, in Sound/Sonda,

1, 1978.
116 Art in the Cinema

Figure 4.5 Angels with musical instruments (from San Pablo di Casseras), Museo
Diocesano y Comarcal de Solsona.

Figure 4.6 Chronicle reading on the angels with musical instruments from San
Pablo di Casseras (an experiment led by Silvio Ceccato, Milan).

trying to prove that it is the artwork itself that guides the eye of the observers
over it, and that the duty of art historians, as experts in the field of visual arts,
is to recreate the intimate images using camera movements. Thus, there is only
one possible way of seeing an image correctly.
However, Ragghianti did not reject the idea that a machine might be able
to carry out an analytical reading of formal languages or visual processes
 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critofilms and Beyond 117

(still associated with human capacities). But this would be possible only if the
machine in question applied a ‘capacity to see, a linguistics, aesthetics and
method that was more mature and modern’, and which certainly did not use
beauty as the selection criterion. In Ragghianti’s opinion, this machine ‘capable,
obviously if operated properly, of conducting a fitting visual interpretation of
visual or figurative processes’ already existed: ‘it is the film camera’.18
The situation changed quickly with the development of the plotter, digital
printers able to translate the output of data into a graphic form. Through a
1968 article on the possible applications of the plotter by engineer Roberto
Favero, published in La Stampa, Ragghianti once again came into direct
contact with the computer. In the same year, he visited the above-mentioned
Euratom Centre in Ispra, which also included a computer graphic information
centre. It is also worth noting, emphasizing the cyclical character of this
engagement, that in this period it was Bruno Munari who showed Ragghianti
the hypercube rotating in space, a computer program written by Michael Noll,
one of the pioneers of computer technologies applied to the visual arts.19 It did
not take Ragghianti too long to begin testing ways to use this new tool to
interpret works of art. Indeed, his first attempts were inspired by geometric
forms, such as a projection of the well from Piero della Francesca’s De
Prospectiva pingendi, an arch by Serlio and Dürer’s machina humana. It is not

Figure 4.7 Plotter experiments on Dürer’s Machina Humana, in Sound/Sonda,

1978.
118 Art in the Cinema

Figure 4.8 Ford graphic design on passengers, from Cybernetic Serendipity,

catalogue of the exhibition, London 1968.

a coincidence that, in the same period, two major industries such as Ford and
Boeing were carrying out graphic representation of experiments of a body
rotating in space whose visual results were quite similar to Dürer’s machina
humana.
Even though these experiments belonged to a completely different context
and were created with quite different objectives, the resulting visual renderings,
and the idea of using information technologies to let drawings rotate in space,
are remarkably similar.
According to Ragghianti’s interpretative lens, works of art, especially ones
with ‘imaginary’ depth such as paintings, can be considered ‘upside-down
orographies’, from the foreground to the background.
This is even possible when there is no perspective or when differences in
depth, according to the ideal or constructible stratigraphy of paintings are
rendered through optical or numerical references. Ragghianti referred to it as
an ‘artisan’ interpretation of artwork. The computer thus becomes a tool
capable of providing us with an objective analytical survey that is scientifically
verifiable, thereby delving into the compositional structure of the artwork.
This IT experimentation was based on two specific foundations: the first was
cultural, inherent in the philosophical premises of this technological
application, and the second technical. Norbert Wiener’s studies in cybernetics
 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critofilms and Beyond 119

Figure 4.9 Plotter experiments on Antonello da Messina’s Saint Sebastian, in Sound/

Sonda, 1978.

addressed this former aspect: as a matter of fact, Ragghianti dedicated several

publications to cybernetics and clearly understood the possible applications of
this science.20 His familiarity with cybernetics probably dates from the early
1950s when Wiener’s works were first published in Italian. However, in a 1978
article, Ragghianti once again engaged with Wiener’s work at exactly the same
moment that he once again became interested in applying information
technology to works of figurative art.21
Analysing the methodological premises for reading artworks, Ragghianti
highlighted the close relationship between critofilm and computers, almost as
if the one naturally followed the other. What plotters and IT machines are able
to accomplish is exactly what was being asked of the film camera. While Bell
Laboratories in New Jersey attempted to program a machine able to decode
artworks as tools of communication, Ragghianti sought rather to exploit the
potential of the computer as a sophisticated viewing device to explore works of
art. These experiments primarily generated graphics, geometric structures and
virtual reconstructions of the spaces inside works of art.
It was precisely the computer’s ability to delve into the space of an artwork
that was recognized as an entirely innovative step compared to film. In
Ragghianti’s view, this was different from cinema by virtue of the fact that,
while the camera lens is only able to move on the surface or what we might call
120 Art in the Cinema

the epidermis of the image, thus establishing a two-dimensional relationship

with the image, the computer is able to probe into the work of art, reconstructing
its interior spaces. In so doing, the computer provided a range of additional
information about the artist’s creative process. The plotter, a ‘planimetric-
volumetric sensor and tracer, that is, a tool for transforming two-dimensionality
into three-dimensionality’, thus entered the ‘universe of the artwork’. Ragghianti
compared the plotter to an ‘explorer’ travelling through the planetary system
and recording the dimensions and distances of celestial bodies.22 The drawings
produced by the plotter displayed a striking similarity to the purely visual
analysis he had carried out by hand and recorded in the notebooks. This use of
the computer remained closely linked with the use of the camera lens on
artworks, although the move to enter into the space of paintings can be
considered the forerunner of 3D analysis of cultural heritage. In a sense,
Ragghianti’s visual ideas and methodology were cinematic even if the relevance
of these primary efforts in applying information technology to artworks
remains a major landmark in history of art criticism and film studies.

Notes
1 Tiziana Tommei, Ut pictura pellicola: dissolvenze incrociate. Ragghianti, cinema e arti
figurative (Lucca: Fondazione Ragghianti, 2014); Marco Scotini (ed.), Ragghianti e il
carattere cinematografico della visione (Milan: Charta, 2000). Information concerning
the history of each critofilm can be found in Valentina La Salvia (ed.), I critofilm di
Carlo L. Ragghianti. Tutte le sceneggiature (Lucca: Fondazione Ragghianti, 2006). See
also the bibliography in Andrea Costa (ed.), Carlo L. Ragghianti, I critofilm d’arte
(Udine: Campanotto, 1995).

2 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, ‘La Deposizione borghesiana di Raffaello’, Critica d’Arte

157–9 (1978): 152–61 (first published in 1947). See also Ragghianti’s introduction
to La Deposizione di Raffaello Sanzio (Milan: Bompiani, 1957), a volume containing
full-scale representations of the painting’s details. See also Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti,
Lorenzo il Magnifico e le arti (Florence: Studio Italiano di Storia dell’Arte, 1949).

3 Lionello Venturi, ‘I documenti d’arte in Italia’, in Le Film sur l’art (Brussels: Unknown,
1950). Venturi emphasizes that many documentaries made before 1943 were produced
by the Istituto Luce and focused on Italy’s beautiful works of art. From 1940 onwards,
Luciano Emmer and Enrico Gras transformed ‘tourist’ documentaries into art
documentaries. See also Lionello Venturi, ‘Le Film sur l’art en Italie depuis le premier
congrès du film sur l’art’, Les Films sur l’Art (Brussels: Unknown, 1950), 1. For a
 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critofilms and Beyond 121

discussion of the Italian context, see also Rassegna nazionale del film documentario.
Catalogo (published at the occasion of a festival held in Vicenza, 14–18 September
1953); in particular see G. Carancini, Breve storia del nostro documentario, 9–15. On
Longhi, see A. Uccelli, ‘Due film, la filologia e un cane. Sui documentari di Umberto
Barbaro e Roberto Longhi’, Prospettiva 129 (2008): 2–40; Tommaso Casini, ‘Critica
d’arte e film sull’arte: una convergenza difficile’, Annali di Critica d’Arte 1 (2005):
431–57. See also Longhi, Ragghianti e il documentario d’arte (http://storiedellarte.
com/2013/03/longhi-ragghianti-e-il-documentario-darte.html).

4 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Cinema arte figurativa (Turin: Einaudi, 1952); Valentina La
Salvia, ‘L’esercizio della cultura come responsabilità sociale: Ragghianti e lo strumento
televisivo’, in Emanuele Pellegrini (ed.), Studi su Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (Ghezzano:
Felici Editore, 2010), 245–60.

5 Archivio Fondazione Ragghianti di Lucca (hereafter AFRL), Serie Critofilm, faldone 1,

letter written by President Tancredo Tancredi to Ragghianti (8 August 1948).

6 AFRL, Serie Critofilm, faldone 1, letter written by Ragghianti to Giulio Mandoli,

President of the Ente prov. Turismo of Lucca (7 September 1948). Regarding the debate
on Lucca’s historic centre, see Monica Naldi and Emanuele Pellegrini (eds), Carlo
Ludovico Ragghianti. Il valore del patrimonio culturale. Scritti dal 1935 al 1987
(Ghezzano: Felici Editore, 2010), 129–30, 138–41.

7 On Ragghianti’s method see in particular Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, L’arte e la critica

(Florence: Vallecchi, 1980); Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, La critica della forma
(Florence: Baglioni & Berner, 1986). For a general overview see also: Maria Teresa
Filieri (ed.), Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. Pensiero e azione (Lucca: Fondazione
Ragghianti, 2010); Emanuele Pellegrini (ed.), Studi su Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti
(Ghezzano: Felici Editore, 2010).

8 Ragghianti, ‘La Deposizione’, 161.

9 AFRL, Serie Critofilm, faldone 1: this folder also contains all the documents related to the
film framings, editing and text. An article in the press understood this critical need: N.,V.,
‘L’opera d’arte spiegata dal cinematografo’, La Nazione italiana (21 October 1948), 3.

10 AFRL, Critofilm. Studio italiano di storia dell’arte – Ufficio cinematografico (1947–51).

This folder is full of practical information, regarding, for example, costs and
promotional methods. The archival documentation about Ragghianti’s critofilms
consists of eight folders. In 1949, Raffaello was screened together with the film La Città
Magica (Magic Town) by William A. Wellman (1947); Lorenzo il Magnifico received
first prize at the Biennale d’Arte Cinematografica of Venice in 1949. In 1951, the
critofilm Lorenzo il Magnifico still existed and was conserved in the Studio Italiano of
Florence. In a letter dated 30 September 1949, Ragghianti requested the Biennale of
Venice to sponsor a festival dedicated to art documentaries to be held in Florence: a
letter by Luigi Chiarini (dated 5 October 1949) mentions the preparation of a
‘Settimana del Film documentario d’arte’ (AFRL, Critofilm. Studio italiano di storia
dell’arte – Ufficio cinematografico (1947–51)). Venice hosted the same art
documentary festival the following year.
122 Art in the Cinema

11 All these aspects are documented in seleArte; see seleArte 20 (1955) for an account of
the second Film and Arts International Congress and the constitution of the Istituto
internazionale del film sull’arte, whose executive committee included Paul Haesaerts,
Réné Jullian, Carl Lamb, Theodore Bowie, Mario Verdone and Ragghianti as president.
Beginning in issue 21 of 1955, seleArte started a new column called ‘Selezione del film
sull’arte’, edited by François N. Bolen, author of an art film repertoire commissioned by
UNESCO.

12 Ragghianti himself put seleArte and the critofilms on the same footing. See Carlo
Ludovico Ragghianti, ‘Informazione sul critofilm d’arte’, seleArte 23 (1956): 1–6. As
Ragghianti writes, critofilms ‘separate artwork from the normality of static and fixed
observation (and even more so from the perception of figural matter), repositioning it
along its true path’. Furthermore, ‘every effect or variation of the shooting, editing and
production (intersections, overlappings, cross-fades etc.) are strictly dependent from its
critical goal, as they cinematographically express the analysis of the artwork’s inner
structure and inner dynamics’ (4). See Maria Adriana Giusti, ‘Autre chose que le
massacre du paysage. Costruzione e ambiente nella visione di Le Corbusier, Olivetti,
Ragghianti’, in Susanna Caccia, Maria Grazia Eccheli, Mecca Saverio and Emanuele
Pellegrini, Ragghianti e Le Corbusier. Architettura, disegno, immagine (Florence: DIDA,
2015), 163–83; and Silvia Bottinelli, seleArte (1952–1966) una finestra sul mondo.
Ragghianti, Olivetti e la divulgazione dell’arte internazionale all’indomani del Fascismo
(Lucca: Fandazione Ragghianti, 2010).

13 AFRL, Serie critofilm, faldone 2, fasc. 4. For a discussion of cultural popularization,

see Silvia Bottinelli, ‘Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti e il concetto di divulgazione della
cultura storico-artistica’, in Pellegrini (ed.), Studi su Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti,
231–43.

14 AFRL, Serie Critofilm, Faldone n. 7, Carteggio Mortara A. Romor Film (1943–85);

AFRL, Serie Critofilm, faldone n. 8, carteggio (1954–75), 8.

15 See AFRL, faldone 2 and 3, the monographic folder concerning the work material of
each critofilm (for the city of Lucca see faldone 3, fasc. 1); for the Michelangiolo see
AFRL, Serie Critofilm, faldone 5, fasc. 1. There are also notebooks, not bearing
Ragghianti’s handwriting, including descriptions of the framings through words and
images (for the case of the city of Pisa see faldone 3, fasc. 3; or Rosai, Faldone 4, fasc. 1).
For the work on the city maps see, in particular, Terre alte di Toscana – winner of the
prize at the ‘IV Bergamo Internazionale del Film d’Arte’, under the category of ‘film on
architecture’, where many documents can be found (AFRL, Serie Critofilm, faldone 4,
fascicolo 4), see also Canal Grande (AFRL, Serie Critofilm, faldone 4, fasc. 4).

16 AFRL, Serie Critofilm, faldone 6. This critofilm, directed by Marco Chiarini, was
successfully shown in Italy and abroad, starting from the Festival in Venice in 1964. In
a letter (22 April 1966) to Ragghianti, Dorothy Macpherson from the Centre canadien
du film sur l’art described the great success of the screening of the Michelangiolo in
Ottawa: ‘more than three thousand people were turned away’: FRL, Serie Critofilm,
faldone 6, fasc. 4.
 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critofilms and Beyond 123

17 Elisa Bassetto, ‘Sound Sonda. Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti e gli esordi dell’approccio
informatico all’analisi dell’opera d’arte’, Luk 22 (2016): 60–3; Carlo Ludovico
Ragghianti, ‘Capire l’arte col computer’, Critica d’Arte 160–2 (1978): 3–13.

18 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, ‘Professore, me la fa questa macchinetta?’ Critica d’Arte

67–8 (1964): 3–8. All the articles written by Silvio Ceccato, one of the first Italian
philosophers interested in cybernetic and its application to the Humanities, were
collected in Silvio Ceccato, Cibernetica per tutti (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1968).

19 Michael Noll, ‘Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian’s

Composition with Lines (1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture’, The Psychological
Record 16 (1966): 1–16; Michael Noll, ‘The Beginnings of Computer Art in the United
States: A Memoir’, Leonardo 1 (1994): 39–44; Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs
and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2012).

20 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Norbert Wiener: i principi della cibernetica, in Arti della
visione. Il linguaggio visivo (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 83–102; Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti,
‘Lettura cibernetica delle opere d’arte’, in Arti della visione. Il linguaggio visivo (Turin:
Einaudi, 1979), 287–94.

21 Michael J. Apter, ‘Cybernetics and art’, Leonardo 3 (1969): 257; Norbert Wiener,
‘Cybernetics’, Bulletin of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1950): 2–4.

22 Ragghianti, ‘Capire l’arte’, 10–11; Cristiani Testi, Maria Laura, ‘Carlo Ludovico
Ragghianti: umanesimo e informatica’, in Raffaele Bruno (ed.), Ragghianti critico e
politico (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004), 182–91.
124
 5
André Bazin’s art
documentary in Saintonge
ANGELA DALLE VACCHE

French film critic André Bazin (1918–58) reviewed many art documentaries
before embarking on his own production in this genre. Bazin’s very first essay,
‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ in What is Cinema? and his very
last, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’ (1958) deal with his preference for the
Romanesque style over Renaissance perspective.1 In his critical biography of
Bazin, Dudley Andrew clarifies why Bazin’s Saintonge essay proposes a film-
making project which was financed and researched, but never fulfilled due to
the critic’s death:

Early in 1957, after some conversations with Pierre Braunberger, the man
who produced so many of the New Wave’s first efforts, Bazin contracted to
make a short documentary on the Romanesque churches of the Saintonge
district in France, the area in which he had grown up.2

Between 1957 and 1958, Bazin knew that he did not have much time to live or
much energy to work with. He was aware that every single day made a difference.
This intimation of death might explain his renewed interest in the Saintonge
region of his youth. After all, his engagement with this topic and location date
back to when he studied in La Rochelle and possibly rode a bicycle in his free
time, exploring the nearby countryside. Furthermore, the unexpected decision
to become a filmmaker suggests that he was eager to experience the cinema in

125
126 Art in the Cinema

front of as well as behind the camera before dying. Of course, Bazin knew very
well that the ancient stones of Saintonge make visible the destructive passage
of time and the persistence of human emotions. Most importantly, this project
offered Bazin the opportunity to summarize for his readers the major
coordinates of his film theory. Thus, his essay on Saintonge is like an intellectual
testament, written in the form of a preliminary treatment or scenario.
Notwithstanding the proximity of the Saintonge region to La Rochelle,
Bazin’s attachment to the Romanesque architecture may look suspicious to
some readers unfamiliar with his work. As Sarah Wilson explains:

The Romanesque and medievalist revival of the late 30s was accentuated
during the occupation of France, and was not, of course, unrelated to the
general return to artisanal and pre-industrial values that were being
promoted under Vichy.3

In regard to this reactionary movement back to the ‘blood-and-soil’ of the

Middle Ages, Bazin’s political record is crystal clear: in his critical biography,
Dudley Andrew mentions that the young critic constantly avoided Catholic
collaborators.4 Besides staying away from all political affiliations, Bazin
shunned intellectual elites and upper-class circles. After all, realism and
narrative are as essential as the gospels for the illiterate poor. Given this
perspective, it is worth mentioning that Bazin’s foray into religious art had
nothing to do with the Art Sacré movement centred around Père Marie-Alain
Couturier (1897–1954), who sponsored works by Henri Matisse and Fernand
Léger in the immediate post-war period.
Bazin wanted his Saintonge documentary to celebrate contemporary life
over the vestiges of the past, focusing on the daily life around the abandoned
ruins in a ready-made mise-en-scène. Eager to reach a new and larger audience
beyond the written page, Bazin focused on an ethnography of spontaneous
vitality. His ideal plan was to shoot the film in the spring, after the pruning of
the linden trees which typically grow on the roads to these churches. This
timing was already a gesture in favour of new life, the present and the future,
since more ‘art historical’ photographs of this site were usually taken in the
winter. At that time, the trees are so barren that artistic detail is easier to grasp
from a distance, and in context with the rest of the architecture.
 André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge 127

Despite the fact that Bazin engaged in all the preparatory art-historical
research necessary for this documentary, art history was not his major focus.
Besides preferring spring over winter, he avoided the specialized architectural
and sculptural language which Henri Focillon (1881–1943) expected from one
of his Yale students in a thesis on Saintonge.5 As usual, Bazin’s prose was fluid
and precise, but, most of all, brimming with details from daily life woven with
the rural dimension of the location.
The Saintonge region became geographically important during the eleventh
and twelfth centuries, because this period saw the development of a pilgrimage
route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, passing through the town of Saintes.
Despite the common association of medievalism with mysticism, an attentive
reading of Bazin’s Saintonge essay discloses that his orientation was more
existentially spiritual than traditionally Catholic or institutionally religious.
Although he wrote in a lyrical way, Bazin was no mystic.
Despite the Middle Ages’ reputation for darkness, fear of suffering in the
flames of Hell, and belief in a punitive God, Bazin points out that Saintonge’s
terrifying bestiary comes up against a deeply-rooted rural wisdom based on
serenity and moderation.6 Bazin’s approach was more anthropological and
meteorological than theological or political. Far away from powerful castles
and wealthy towns, Saintonge’s little churches sit in a fabric of farms, cemeteries,
open land and small villages. Their presence is barely noticeable, while their
modest size makes them look like barns turned into pilgrims’ shelters or
roadside reliquaries. The ambition behind Bazin’s film was to document an
anti-conformist and down-to-earth kind of spirituality. He cared to show how
the human element is only one among many aspects of life in motion. The
film’s anti-anthropocentric protagonists are the wind and motion itself,
embodied in the symbiotic encounter between wild vegetation and worn-out
stones that is provoked by the weather.
Through this project, Bazin returned to a place whose century-old
weathering he could transfigure into ‘the charm of the stones’.7 Still, he avoided
all nostalgic and picturesque temptations. The Saintonge region charmed
Bazin so much that he wanted his camera’s lens to soften the white stones and
move like a caress over the ‘white gown of the churches’. Innumerable
microscopic churches punctuate the countryside. Their overall effect is
128 Art in the Cinema

comparable to a blanket of white pebbles spread across the land. It is as if Bazin

were planning an aerial view. The exceptional frequency and humbleness of
these churches strike a note of contrast with more famous places of worship in
the Burgundy area or with the important centres of Poitiers and Angoulême.8
In these much bigger towns, the Romanesque churches have a triangulated
space on top of the central entrance with enough room for a causal narrative
with climax, dénouement and resolution.
By contrast, in Saintonge, small façades cannot sustain such an imposing
threshold. Without an architectural tympanum, they limit themselves to a few
series of sculptures. At the same time, these churches – often as large as a
private chapel – retain the round shape of the Roman arch. Characterized by
curvy domes outside, with low ceilings and billowy naves inside, the typical
little Saintonge church looks young and feminine. By contrast, the thickness of
its interior walls strikes a note of contrast with the harrowing decay of its
heavily punctured stones, devoured by sea salt.
In mixing sacred and profane elements, the sinuous sculptures of Saintonge
feature not only acrobats, musicians, comedians, craftsmen, farmers, centaurs,
sirens, virgins, madmen, fools and kings, but also Adam and Eve, Samson and
Delilah, Cain and Abel. In a word, just as Bazin spelled out the social
mythologies of different filmic genres in his film theory, Saintonge’s art relied
on a religious and mythological, vernacular and fantastic potpourri. Saintonge’s
sculpture freely drew from famous characters and stereotypes of human
behaviour, by reinventing old and well-known Biblical tales.
The sculptors in charge of decorating these churches became the equivalent
of oral storytellers wandering from village to village. The decorations resemble
a pre-Darwinian disorderly picture catalogue, the plant, the beast and the
human intertwine their extremities in a chain of mutual support, but also of
constant fear and destabilization. The anthropocentric humanism of the
Renaissance was still far away into the future. In Saintonge, all living creatures
need each other, while different species constantly battle with one another.
Altogether, interdependence, competition, mixed breeding and supernatural
occurrences explain why the farm animal can morph into a dragon with sharp
teeth, or a peasant can drop his plough and take St Peter’s keys to Paradise.
Mouths spew out flames and birds acquire fishlike fins. Any modern
 André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge 129

understanding of science is still impossible, since magic and alchemy cultivate

the bizarre, the occult, the monstrous and the hybrid.
Unravelling like a comic strip, these sculptural reliefs bear witness to a
humankind adrift in superstition. The world of Saintonge is so ancient and
steeped with magic and so strangely modern due to its sensorial overload that
it becomes a roller coaster of tears and laughs, cruelty and rebellion, blissful joy
and horror. These sculptures are based on metamorphosis, while their serial
unleashing of miracles and catastrophes invokes early medieval chronicles
called ‘annals’. In these texts, each event is uncontrollable and, therefore,
absolutely equal in importance to every other; the frequency of horny angels
and winged devils reminds the viewer that contingency and witchcraft rule;
medieval chronology is nothing but a flat list without any causality.
Just as neorealist cinema privileged a quasi-documentary approach to daily
life, likewise the sculptures of Saintonge specialized in the chores, skills, objects
and tools of nearby farms, cemeteries, hostels, artisanal spaces and merchants’
shops.9 At the same time, these sculptures chronicled the drinking, burials, lust,
music, feasting and dancing of the nearby inhabitants. By choosing the
Saintonge area over other locations, Bazin privileged local activities over the
picturesque and the monumental:

The sculptor of Saintonge rejects grand dramatic subjects. He’s an observer

of daily life, treating sacred themes and profane life with the same realism.
This is undoubtedly true of all Romanesque sculpture, but perhaps nowhere
other than in Saintonge has the artist restricted himself to that zone of
familiarity, far removed from the great terrors and the grand mystical
symbolisms that enliven so many Romanesque capitals and tympanums. It
could be said that a sort of rural wisdom, combined with serenity and
moderation, emerges from Saintonge, in harmony with its history and its
landscape, and has humanized and tempered the medieval religious soul
here.10

The characters of this elementary mise-en-scène smile, cry, scream and frown
with their protruding eyes, teethed or beaked mouths, triangulated faces and
round bellies. Hats and shoes tell stories dealing with profession, trade, poverty
and wealth. These sculptures are filled with missing limbs, eroded cheeks, wild
130 Art in the Cinema

beards. The typical and initially white Saintongese stone is malleable as well as
friable. These sculpted figures on their way to abstraction look like photographic
negatives in a state of progressive decomposition. In both sculpture and
photography, time is allegedly frozen when everything remains indoors.
However, due to their constant outdoor exposure, these chains of polymorphous
beings slowly disappear into nooks and crannies. The stones crumble into dust.
In a similar way, when photographic glass plates spend too much time in the
sun, their transparent skin-like images peel off and shrivel into waste.
In contrast to the fully three-dimensional Gothic style, so seriously devoted
to transcendence, apocalypse and punishment, Bazin praised the curvy,
Romanesque placidity. Boredom is not an issue in these isolated dwellings: any
accidental visitor can look at a church façade and experience amusement in
front of tongues sticking out, leaping shapes and grotesque couplings. In these
cases, the realist component is minimal, but the expressive power is at a
maximum.
By referring to a specific cultural group discussed by art historian Paul (le
chanoine) Tonnelier (1886–1977), called Combat des Vertus et des Vices, Bazin
lingered on how wavy folds of dress sit on top of flat arms and legs.11 Strange
flowers and leaves interrupt the animal menagerie typical of the Romanesque
style. Fancy peacocks, ominous bats and repulsive lizards run around portals
and down little columns. Without Renaissance perspective to establish
hierarchy inside an imaginary, mathematical space, any figure can become
independent and float into abstraction, as if a spiritual élan or an inspirational
encounter were a banal matter of fact.
Openly didactic rather than deceptively illusionistic, within the Romanesque
style each emotional state is experienced as if for the first time. Horror, joy,
pain, fear pierce every stone with an abstract intensity of motive and sincerity
of expression. Instead of triggering superficiality and condescension, the local
sculptors’ naïve skills guaranteed depth and seriousness.
While the passions stored in these sculptures may seem to challenge
photography’s indifferent automatism, Saintonge’s church façades can become
comparable to a cinematic screen. All around these little churches, a multiplicity
of forces takes over: scorching sun, frantic downpours of rain, blizzards of
snow, and thick layers of fog or mist. No matter the season, a special breed of
 André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge 131

Figure 5.1 André Bazin. Photograph taken in the Saintonge region. Courtesy of
Dudley Andrew.

wild and tenacious grass, Bazin’s lowest and most stubborn level of botany,
behaves like a moving image:

Asleep for centuries in the villages, but not dead, they have become a part of
and absorbed by the life and the vegetation around them. Many of the
churches have been invaded by the greenery – even penetrated by it, like the
chapel at Saint Ouen whose stones are held in place only by the roots of ivy
and new vines.12

In a state of semi-abandonment and quasi-anonymity that protects them from

ill-advised contemporary restorations, the churches surrender themselves to a
new form of random or experimental architecture.
132 Art in the Cinema

The famous French, nineteenth-century architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

(1814–79) would scorn any assignment in the region of Saintonge. In front of
the unruly greenery running all over the walls inside and outside, Viollet-
le-Duc would enforce a drastic cleaning. No weeds would interfere with his
preservationist aesthetics. In the Saintonge region, villages are too ordinary
and unadorned to justify landscape design and architectural restoration at any
level. Within this general state of calm disarray, seeds and spores can find
cracks in the stones. Thus, they begin a new level of vegetative life in systematic
defiance of time and weather.
Bazin called all this wild grass ‘l’herbe folle de l’espérance’ (the wild grass of
hope).13 Unexpectedly, the monopoly on narrative action reverses itself from
sculpture to weeds, sprouts and roots. The emphasis switches from art to
nature. Nothing could be more photographic in method, since, in his famous
‘Ontology’ essay, Bazin declared that nature through light becomes an artist.14
Similarly, Bergson’s erratic and discontinuous élan vital, along with Bazin’s
preference for contingency over coincidence, are the undisturbed rulers of
Saintonge.
Usually associated with stillness, plants evoke origins, grounding, passivity
and lack of action unless water, air, wind and fire take over and make the
vegetation move. Here, this rule does not apply. All by itself, wild grass travels
as fast as burning fire or flowing water. In addition, the sounds and cries of
farm animals may disturb the search for a museum-like sterile setting. The
most timid flowers, such as daisies, lavender and dandelions, have just enough
colour to look rebellious by sticking out of a few grey tombstones. Occasionally,
a tabernacle with a few votive candle stubs replaces a traffic sign.
Animals may dominate Saintonge’s sculptures, but botany looms large due
to Bazin’s appreciation of contingency. The co-dependence of architecture and
vegetation strikes Bazin, because the relentless spreading of wild grass amidst
the stones keeps these buildings’ physiognomies constantly changing and
lifelike. Although Bazin is adamant that his film would underline how these
churches integrate themselves into the local human geography of farms and
cemeteries, he does not stop there. He is so keen on movement, randomness
and change that he describes how the very profane local poultry takes over a
sacred space reserved only to saints inside the abbey of Trizay,
 André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge 133

where the chickens nest in the niches of saints, where the multi-lobed arches
are covered with wire netting to serve as chicken coops, where wood is
stored in the magnificent little apses as if next to the oven, where the chapter
house has become a hay barn. Meanwhile, from one column to another the
green beans are drying on wires.15

In this universe of domestic animals and green beans, Bazin’s technical and
ironic exactitude with ‘polylobes’ and ‘absidioles’ leaves no doubt that modest
agriculture is as important as religious architecture.
Possibly thinking of what his filmmaking crew might need to know in
advance for working in this location, Bazin hinted at the fact that the smallest

Figure 5.2 André Bazin. Photograph taken in the Saintonge region. Courtesy of
Dudley Andrew.
134 Art in the Cinema

churches look like abandoned private homes. Thus, contemporary visitors may
get a key from some neighbour, either the owner of a nearby farm or the
guardian of the adjacent cemetery.
Although Bazin did not go into this degree of detail, as soon as one opens
the door of a small church, a wave of century-old dust, a sort of physiochemical
micro-storm, rushes out of this airtight time-capsule and clouds their vision.
Inside, wooden religious figures made of straw and rocks, as well as shells and
worn-out candles, overwhelm one’s expectations with their pagan, irreverent
colours, so well preserved under seal. Protected inside an undisturbed
container, a chromatic wealth of saturated reds, yellows, blues and greens
survived with the defiance of gaudy crayons for young artists’ picture
books.
Besides his personal familiarity with the Saintonge area, the film critic’s
relationship to this geography was based on art historical research. Bazin’s
readings on the Romanesque style go back to his 1937–8 school year in the
École Normale d’Instituteurs in Versailles. At the time, this institution was
considered to be the best preparation for the entrance examination at the École
Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud. According to Ludovic Cortade, one
section of Bazin’s written exam gave the following instructions:

Gothic Art in France (Candidates are urged to visit and study one or more
monuments in their region. They can bring to the oral exam postcards of
these monuments.)16

Cortade also tells us that the reading assignment was a chapter from Louis
Réau’s (1881–1961) L’art primitif, l’art medieval (1955). French art historian
Réau owed his reputation to his research exploring the dialogue between
Western and folkloric Eastern European art. The transnational slant of Réau’s
work prepared Bazin for the early medieval ‘universalism’ hovering over the
Saintonge region.
A resting point for pilgrims walking from France to Spain, the town of
Saintes was most cosmopolitan around the year 1000. It was the unavoidable
crossroad of adventurous and determined travellers who walked from
Northern to Southern Europe. Back in those days, the time such a trip took
might coincide with a whole lifespan. Bandits and thieves, pregnancies and
 André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge 135

plagues were foils to the healthy independence and the communal support
required by such a long adventure. The Asian sculptural references included in
the churches’ facades lend Bazin the opportunity to further highlight his film
theory’s universalist bent:

That diabolical big-mouthed figure, devouring the column, [. . .] where the

Marquis de Chasseloup-Loubat seemed, rightfully, to see a resemblance to
Tao Tie, the Chinese glutton. It’s not only from [. . .] the Middle East via the
Crusades, with the manuscripts, ivories, and fabrics, but even from the Far
East.17

Just as the moving image travels and links different cultures, likewise the
Romanesque style involved a vast geography which, through merchants and
soldiers, monks and pilgrims, spread all over Christian Europe. Its range of
action absorbed images and themes from far-away countries such as China
and the Arab world.
So wary was Bazin of elitist models that he explained the Romanesque style
through parallels between cinema’s mass appeal and the shared official
language of the Middle Ages. The result is that cinema, just like Latin, becomes
the lingua franca of the twentieth century:

We are at the dawn of a sort of artistic technocracy comparable to that of

the Greco-Roman world, or the Christian era when, in the Middle Ages, a
renowned theologian could teach equally (depending on the facilities
offered him) in Ghent, Frankfurt, Paris, or Perugia.18

Besides percolating in his mind between 1938 and 1945, the Romanesque art
of Saintonge reappeared when Bazin reviewed Amédée Ayfre’s book Dieu au
Cinéma (1953). Prompted by Ayfre’s choice of examples, Bazin latched on to a
sequence from a little-known Swedish film. Concerned with witchcraft, greed
and forgiveness, Alf Sjöberg’s Himlaspelet (The Heavenly Play/Le Chemin du
Ciel (1942)) suggests a meta-textual definition of cinema as a medium capable
of turning itself towards the irrational, Otherness, and the unknown:

I would have chosen, at the beginning of Chemin du Ciel, that curious

travelling shot along a wall pierced by grilled openings behind which we
136 Art in the Cinema

follow the hesitant steps of a man with a lantern, as he seeks to find traces of
God in a series of naively religious paintings on the wall opposite.19

Sjöberg’s man with a lantern made an impression on Bazin, because he looks

like an imaginary director or hypothetical spectator. For either one the cinema
can turn to a lamp or a flashlight for secrets, or to a chandelier for spectacles.20
While art itself will never reveal the origins of human creativity, the cinema, at
least, can shed different kinds of light on reality’s darkness.
Furthermore, cinema’s penchant for a suspension of disbelief speaks to the
medium’s emotional power to inspire love. Even if God is love, for those who
believe, God remains ‘hidden’, namely inaccessible to any lantern. This theme
of the ‘hidden’ God sets up a resonance between Bazin and the eponymous title
of a book published in 1955 by Marxist literary critic, Lucien Goldmann
(1913–70). He underlined how the tragic nature of the human experience
results from a condition of quasi-blindness.21 Interestingly, Bazin’s film theory
argues that, on one hand, cinema’s light can distort; on the other, the non-human
eye of the camera enjoys a heuristic or revealing potential; it objectifies
everything. This dialectic between human creativity and technology can lead
to moments of illumination that bypass the blindfolding of human perception.
In Le Chemin du Ciel, the travelling shot explores a discontinuous layout of
openings and obstacles that reveal glimpses of ‘naively religious paintings’ on a
pockmarked wall. This scene enables Bazin to comment on how the chalky
stones of the Saintonge area crumble into Romanesque ruins:

But some of those harmonies, or at least the material of that stone, will
come through in black and white. I’m thinking especially of the manner in
which the stone has been eaten away, hardening in places, falling into dust
in others, and thus curiously superimposing on the original sculptural
ornamentation the hazardous tracery of wear and wind.22

A mixture of abstraction and figuration, the Romanesque style anticipates the

arabesques of Art Nouveau surrounding cinema’s invention and the grotesque
combinations of Surrealism sustaining photographic ontology.
Bazin’s essay on Saintonge starts with a quote from Émile Mâle (1862–1954):
‘Nowhere else in France has Romanesque art found greater appeal.’23 Possibly
 André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge 137

Bazin was exposed to writings on the Romanesque by Mâle and by Focillon

through Réau’s familiarity with these two towering scholars.
Here Bazin’s choice of Mâle stems from how the latter was the first to
popularize St Augustine’s proto-semiology of natural and cultural signs. In his
introduction to On Christian Doctrine, translator D.W. Robertson remarks that
for Mâle, ‘the symbolic technique of medieval art’ was ‘essentially analogous
with the symbolic techniques of Scriptural interpretations’.24 In contrast to
Mâle’s allegorical reading of medieval iconography in the light of spiritual
issues, Henri Focillon’s influence on Bazin is more complicated to chart.
In 1924, Focillon succeeded Mâle as professor of medieval archeology at the
Sorbonne. By 1931, he published his ground-breaking book L’an 1000, l’art des
sculpteurs romans. Focillon argued that art forms change over time. In addition,
since stylistic changes cannot be reduced only to external variables, he situated
formal mutations within the changing use of materials and techniques. One
thing is for sure: by the mid-1930s, when the discipline of film studies had not
even been born, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) and Focillon agreed that ‘cinema
is the medium of reality’.25 More specifically, according to Christophe Gauthier,
Focillon is intrigued by how the cinema expresses itself through the
documentary genre at the highest level:‘There are some admirable documentary
films: Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) are examples. But the
cinema as spectacle more often has recourse to fantasy.’26
In his essay, ‘Evolution and Event in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?’ Tom Conley
argues that Bazin’s ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’ (1951) and his
‘Evolution of the Language of the Western’ (1955) were influenced by Focillon’s
theories.27 Without a doubt, Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) was, in
turn, an important source for Focillon’s The Life of Forms (1934) – a book
published one year after the art historian started teaching six-week courses at
Yale. By 1938, he received a Chair in Medieval Art. Even if the link between
Bergson and Focillon is clear, a direct relationship between Bazin and Focillon
cannot be easily established. One can only acknowledge that Bazin thinks of
cinema as a living form that grows, matures and evolves. Bazin’s appreciation
of resilience and interconnections points to Bergson’s élan vital. The wild grass
growing within the stones of the Saintonge churches is the dominant figure of
such a vital impulse. One could even argue that Bazin’s wild grass stands for all
138 Art in the Cinema

the genre films ever made, never seen, or never discussed, a gigantic mass of
looping celluloid that slowly disintegrates into a powder of assorted chemicals.
Of course, movement means time, space, change and chance, in a word:
cinema itself, as soon as the elements of recording, editing and projection come
literally into the picture. Thus, Bazin’s focus on the wild grass is more than just
a way to answer his famous question ‘what is cinema?’ By stressing the humblest
roots of this medium, the theorist returns to how impure cinema oscillates
among mass communication, popular culture and previous art forms.
Bazin is delighted with wild grass. Very difficult to uproot, wild grass thrives
on specks of dust, the bits of soil and the ubiquitous seeds that the wind
randomly deposits between one stone and the next. Wild grass points to an
uncultivated origin that owes more to the earth, the rain and the sky than to
the plough. Through the tenacity of weeds turning into chainlike roots, Bazin
reminds his readers of the direct contact which binds model and copy, object
and trace in photography. Finally, the appearance of wild grass as an unintended
part of the architecture depends on the contingency of the wind, which is an
energizing as well as corrosive force. Of all the elements, Bazin speaks of the
wind most frequently.
A first example comes from his review of Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique
(1947). In the context of this quasi-documentary film, with nonprofessional
actors, the passing seasons become characters on the screen, and an
ethnography of farm life dominates the narrative. In dealing with Farrebique,
Bazin brings up the most famous of all film anecdotes:

‘Look,’ shouted the first viewers of the Lumière cinematograph as they

pointed at the leaves on the trees, ‘look, they’re moving.’ The cinema has
come a long way since the heroic days when crowds were satisfied with the
rough rendition of a branch quivering in the wind!28

As if the Farrebique example by itself were too uncouth, Bazin comes up with
a second reference proving that cinema’s wind circulates from the peasants to
the intellectuals. This new meditation on the leaves rustling in the wind on the
screen of early cinema emerges from Marc Allegret’s documentary Avec André
Gide (1952). There one can see the famous writer sitting in a garden with Jean-
Paul Sartre:
 André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge 139

The first aesthetic emotion ascribed to the cinema is that which moved the
spectators in the Grand Café to cry out ‘the leaves are moving’. Gide saw it
and this simple spectacle overwhelms us.29

Just one year later, in one of his 1953 reviews, Bazin writes of ‘the fresh wind that
blows over the cinema. As long as such revelations are possible, the cinema will
continue to live.’30 As a source of motion and life, visible changes and revealing
epiphanies, the cinema is as unpredictable as the wind, but the wind of history also
pushes the cinema towards new creative adjustments and technological stages.
One wonders if Bazin’s emphasis on the wind is his way of responding on
behalf of the cinema to poet Paul Valéry’s (1871–1945) famous line: ‘The wind
is rising, we must try to live!’ from Le Cimetière Marin (1920). In Le Cimetière
Marin, the illustrious polymath and incredibly popular Valéry meditates on
human finitude by thinking of his parents buried in the cemetery of his native
town, Sète. Unlike Valery, the ever-sickly Bazin, inflicted with tuberculosis and
leukaemia, preceded his own parents to the grave. November 11, 1958 was
Bazin’s last day alive.
As for graveyards by the sea, one should keep in mind that in Bazin’s
Saintonge essay, two buildings stand out for their respective involvement with
light and the sea. The first is the tower of Fénioux, made of stones cut like fish
scales. This building is not a church or a lighthouse for ships adrift in the sea,
but a ‘lantern of the dead’ standing out in an unmemorable rural area. Looking
like a piece of art brut, it is an orientation structure with a small opening on
top where a light shows the way towards a cemetery:

Also in the architecture, let’s not forget those enigmatic lanterns of the dead,
and especially the one at Fénioux, whose little scale-encrusted tower stands
on a bundle of slender columns, erected in the middle of a field where the
sheep graze.31

The second building mentioned by Bazin, Talmont, exemplifies an intriguingly

fortified Romanesque church. It looks halfway between a lighthouse on the
edge of the sea and a ship’s prow ready to cast off from the earth. In this case,
the whole planet is reduced to a spectacularly steep cliff. Religious architecture,
here, becomes a leap into the unknown.
140 Art in the Cinema

And how could Bazin not respond to the role assigned to the wind by the
Gospel of St John. Once it is transported in the context of Bazin’s film theory
as a whole, this very same wind takes on a special trajectory. On the one hand,
it links the cinema with wild grass, meteorological weather and cosmological
time. On the other, it spells out the paradoxical combination of human free
will and God’s providence. There is still more to tell in regard to the wind as a
spiritual trope and as a metaphor for the cinema in general. In Bazin’s language,
Bergson’s élan vital becomes a ‘souffle vital’.32 In his anthropology of religion,
Régis Debray (1940–), points out that the ‘spirit’ of spirituality is comparable to
breath. Significantly, the verb ‘to breathe’ in Greek is pneuma. Yet pneuma also
means soul, besides the scientific fact that energy or energheia depends on
deep breathing and oxygen intake.33
We may never know for sure whether the universe we belong to is the one
and only exception ever to have been born out of energy, time, space and
matter. Perhaps different universes co-exist in the cosmos at large, in such a
way that they, too, replicate the cinematic idea of parallel worlds. As far as this
planet is concerned, the photographic cinema of the twentieth century is a
spiritual mind-machine that allows for creativity and helps us to orient
ourselves as ethically responsible human beings.
In the end, what matters is that the very last word of Bazin’s essay on ‘Les
églises romanes de Saintonge’ is vent (wind). For Bazin, the wind as such
describes cinema’s promising, yet volatile nature.34 Wondering about the future
of the medium to which he dedicated his entire life, Bazin’s essay on the
churches of Saintonge reads like a farewell to his readers and colleagues. Was
Bazin thinking of his own imminent death or of the flight into dust of all living
things? If so, his focus on the wild grass of innumerable genre films suggests
that his legacy belongs entirely to his writings. No fancy tombstone is needed.

Notes
1 André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema? Vol. 1,
trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 9–16; André
Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge: Projet de film d’André Bazin’, Cahiers du
Cinéma 100 (October 1959): 55–61. Bazin’s piece was published posthumously.
 André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge 141

Consulted at Yale André Bazin Archive (YABA). All translations are the author’s
unless otherwise cited.

2 Dudley Andrew, André Bazin, revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013), 204.

3 Sarah Wilson, ‘Art and Politics of the Left in France: 1935–1955’ (PhD diss., Courtauld
Institute of Art, University of London, 1991), 3. See also: Romy Golan, Modernity and
Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, CT, and London:
Yale University Press, 1995); Michele Cone, French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art
before, during, and after Vichy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

4 Andrew, André Bazin, 41.

5 Elizabeth Lawrence Mendell, Romanesque Sculpture in Saintonge (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1940). The author of this monograph studied at Yale with Henri
Focillon. On Henri Focillon and the Life of Forms in relation to Henri Begson, one of
Bazin’s philosophical influences, see Andrei Molotiu, ‘Focillon’s Bergsonian Rhetoric
and the Possibility of Deconstruction’, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for
Visual Studies 3 (1 January 2000).

6 Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’, 58. For a cinematic overview of the French
regional landscapes, see: André Bazin, ‘Le Tour de France’, Écran Français 209 (26 June
1949): n.p.

7 Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’, 61.

8 For Bazin, the early medieval church of Torcello is comparable to the humble, but
resilient atmosphere of a small church in Saintonge: Parisien Libéré 1543 (30 August
1949): n.p. YABA.

9 Even though his preference for the Romanesque is unique, André Bazin is not the
first to relate the Middle Ages to the cinema. For example, Élie Faure, inspired by
Erwin Panofsky, compares a film’s complex organization to a medieval cathedral.
On this point, see Eva Kuhn, ‘La cinéplastique d’Elie Faure ou du cinéma et de la
plasticité des arts’, Regards Croisés 5 (2016): 69; Muriel van Vliet, “L’esprit des formes
est un” – Élie Faure: Pour une esthétique révolutionnaire’, Regards Croisés 5 (2016):
74–85.

10 Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’, 58.

11 Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’, 57–8.

12 Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’, 59.

13 André Bazin, ‘Les nuits de Cabiria’, Parisien Libéré 4073 (16 October 1957): n.p. YABA.

14 Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, 15.

15 Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’, 60.

16 E-mail from Ludovic Cortade (12 September 2012).

142 Art in the Cinema

17 Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’, 58. On universalism, see André Bazin, ‘Le
Tour de France’, Écran Français 209 (27 June 1949): n.p. YABA: ‘L’immense audience du
cinéma exige que le singulier y prenne valeur d’universalité simple et directe’. Also see
André Bazin, ‘Le langage de notre temps’, in Regards neufs sur le cinéma (Paris: Peuple
et Culture, 1954).

18 André Bazin, ‘L’auteur de La Grande Illusion n’a pas perdu confiance dans la liberté de
création’, Écran Français 230 (28 November 1949): n.p. YABA. On the Middle Ages and
the cinema, see also André Bazin, ‘Peut-on s’intéresser au cinéma?’ in Misc B: Bulletin
Intérieur: Maison des Lettres: ‘. . . la diffusion du cinéma est le plus grand fait esthético-
social qui se soit produit depuis le moyen-age’ (the widespread distribution of cinema is
the greatest aesthetic-social event since the Middle Ages.)

19 André Bazin, ‘Amédée Ayfre, Dieu au cinéma’, Cahiers du Cinéma 25 (July 1953): n.p.
YABA. Also see Mélisande Leventopoulos, ‘D’André Bazin à Amédée Ayfre: les
circulations du personnalisme dans la cinéphilie chrétienne’, in Contextes, L’engagement
créateur, Écritures et langages du personnalisme chrétien au XXe siècle 12 (September
2012): http://contextes.revues.org/5513; Mélisande Leventopoulus, ‘Une église
moderne en images: la cause cinématographique du père Raymond Pichard (1947–54)’,
1895 63 (Spring 2011): 70–89. Père Raymond Pichard was the priest who financed
Georges Rouquier’s Lourdes et ses miracles (1955).

20 André Bazin, ‘Theater and Cinema, Part II’, in What is Cinema? Vol. 1, 107.

21 Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal
and the Tragedies of Racine [1964], trans. Philip Thody (London and New York: Verso,
2016).

22 Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’, 61.

23 Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’, 55.

24 Saint Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. (New York:
Liberal Arts Press, 1958), xiii.

25 Tom Levin, ‘Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky’s Film Theory’, in Angela Dalle Vacche
(ed.), The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2003), 85–114.

26 Christophe Gauthier, ‘Une branche nouvelle sur l’arbre des formes? Focillon, Élie Faure
et le cinéma’, in Irène Bessier and Jean Gili (eds), Histoire du cinéma, problématique des
sources (Paris: INHA-Universite de Paris1-Maison des sciences de l’homme-AFRHC,
2004), 295–310.

27 Tom Conley, ‘Evolution and Event in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?’ in Dudley Andrew (ed.)
with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Opening Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 32–41.

28 Andre Bazin, ‘Farrebique ou le paradoxe du realism’, Esprit (1 April 1947): n.p. YABA.

29 André Bazin, ‘André Gide’, France Observateur 96 (13 March 1952): n.p. YABA.
 André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge 143

30 André Bazin, ‘Les enfants de l’amour’, France Observateur 185 (26 November 1953):
n.p. YABA.

31 Bazin, ‘Les églises romanes de Saintonge’, 58.

32 André Bazin, ‘La Cybernétique d’André Cayatte’, Cahiers du Cinéma 36 (1 June 1954):
n.p. YABA. Bazin’s breathing metaphor is important. See André Bazin, ‘Le Toit’, Parisien
Libéré 3800 (29 November 1956): n.p. YABA: ‘le souffle humain du néorealism’.

33 Régis Debray, Dieu, un itinéraire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001).

34 André Bazin, ‘Il Bidone après La Strada’, Parisien Libéré 3572 (5 March 1956):
n.p. YABA.
144
 6
Projecting cultural
diplomacy: Cold War
politics, films on art, and
Willard Van Dyke’s
The Photographer
NATASHA RITSMA

In 1948, The Photographer, a 26-minute film on art focusing on Edward Weston’s

artistic practice, lifestyle and inspiration, was screened to audiences around the
world. One of the first films on art to solely focus on the work and life of a
photographer, this film was directed by Willard van Dyke, one of America’s
leading documentarians. As the first and only film on art funded, produced and
internationally distributed by the US State Department, it functions as a unique
case study of how a narrative focused on a single American artist was strategically
used to win the hearts and minds of the global public through soft power. This
biographical film positions Weston as the quintessential American artist,
emphasizing the merits of hard work and rugged individualism, as well as
celebrating America’s natural beauty. As the International Motion Picture
Service screened this film to international audiences, Weston was transformed
into an iconic cultural figure of the Cold War while simultaneously symbolizing

145
146 Art in the Cinema

American patriotism and modernist sophistication. This chapter looks at the

cultural, diplomatic, political and personal factors that shaped the production
and circulation of The Photographer. This film had a dual function, to position
Edward Weston as a great American artist while strategically challenging the
ideological and cultural propaganda of the Soviets during the Cold War period
for a global audience.
After the conclusion of the Second World War and the emergence of the
United States as the leading global military power, the United States government
became increasingly concerned with America’s image overseas. The onset of
the Cold War brought on an onslaught of disparaging propaganda from
Moscow attacking every aspect of American life and character. Due to the fact
that the Office of War Information (OWI) was dissolved in 1945, the State
Department needed an agency to assume OWI’s overseas cultural and
informational propaganda activities. Accordingly, the State Department
established the International Motion Picture Service (IMPS) to assume the
overseas administration of promotional information and cultural programmes.1
In contrast to the non-intervention stance that the United States government
attempted to publicly convey during the Cold War, its agencies were greatly
invested in conveying a positive image of America and its people by promoting
and indirectly funding cultural and public diplomacy programmes including
films, art exhibitions and performances as a means of combating the negative
image of Americans.

Films on art and post-war American culture

Films on art were part of a larger movement that brought together high art,
mass culture and national identity following the Second World War when art
became an increasingly significant aspect of American culture. Not only was
the United States asserting itself as the new cultural leader of the world, it
drastically transformed the trajectory of what constitutes modern art. The
decade following the end of the Second World War was marked by economic
growth, increased leisure time, and technological advancements that prompted
an expansive interest in the visual arts across America and influenced aspects
 Projecting Cultural Diplomacy 147

of everyday life such as home improvement, interior design and the amateur
crafts movement not usually associated with the rarefied halls of art museums.
A 1952 Reader’s Digest article described the extent of this change by stating,
‘Once in a great while a society explodes in a flood of new ideas, new tastes,
new standards. A fresh and exciting age emerges, alive with expanding
opportunities.’2 Museums, cultural and educational institutions and the
government collaborated to encourage an unprecedented enthusiasm for the
visual arts. More new art museums were founded in the United States during
the 1950s than any other time in history.3
Interest in and promotion of the arts was evident in the popular press like
Life and Reader’s Digest as well as in mainstream media outlets like radio and
network television that regularly reported on developments related to
American art. In 1951, the Henry Francis Dupont Winterthur Museum
established the first American art and culture-training centre. Critics and
theorists who wrote for art publications focused on American art, while
organizations such as the College Art Association (CAA) highlighted
previously ignored American art.4 Additionally, in 1952, the editors of the
Partisan Review organized a highly publicized symposium, ‘Our Country and
Our Culture’, which explicitly concerned itself with American art.5 Furthermore,
art appreciation groups were formed, and art education and appreciation was
incorporated into the public school and university curricula. By the mid-1950s,
when New York had ‘officially’ replaced Paris as the capital of modern art,
doctoral graduates whose research focused on American art found themselves
in high demand filling academic and museum positions throughout the
nation.6
This multifaceted movement that included the American popular press,
educational and professional institutions, as well as international high culture
publications ensured the continuation of the importance of the American art
scene for decades to come. Government, corporate, philanthropic, cultural and
educational institutions were exceedingly optimistic about the potential of
films on art to advance art education and appreciation, and promoted the use
of these films, which numbered more than 1,500 by 1956.7 Their endeavours
are exemplified by four catalogues titled Films on Art, that were published by
the American Federation of Arts, UNESCO, the International Art Film
148 Art in the Cinema

Federation and Indiana University, all of which attempted to facilitate the use
of these films by listing and indexing them.8 In the March 1952 issue of
Educational Screen, art educator Nathan Resnick affirmed that films on art
‘could truly batter down the barriers which confine our art treasures to
sepulcher and bring them out where everyone can see them’.9 In another
Educational Screen article published in January 1954, Barbara Chapin,
chairwoman of the New York Division of the American Association of
University Women (AAUW), echoed a similar sentiment and referred to these
films as presenting new ways of seeing ‘treasures and travels and special visions
of rare persons available to people everywhere. If we use them, what riches can
develop in our cultural life!’10
Numerous scholars, such as Eva Cockcroft, Max Kozloff and Serge Guilbaut,
have skillfully demonstrated how art was used to further America’s political
agenda immediately following the war. American art was positioned to
symbolize the strength of American ideology and to represent the merits of
American democracy as progressive, innovative and cutting edge in stark
contrast to the highly regulated and controlled Soviet socialist realist art.
However, these new innovations in American modern art were often difficult to
comprehend for the untrained eye, and films on art were regarded as effective
tools to help the American public appreciate modern art. While films on art
were discussed in popular discourse and in trade journals as the great
pedagogical equalizer, they also served as a form of indoctrination that
encouraged citizens to appreciate a specific brand of American art.11 Films on
art sit between high and lowbrow culture, between commercial and non-profit
enterprises, and between art as entertainment and art as edification. They were
promoted and used by very diverse constituencies including museums,
institutions of formal education, philanthropic organizations like the Carnegie,
Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, non-profit organizations like the American
Federation of Art, and membership-funded film societies like Cinema 16 as
well as international cultural organizations like UNESCO.12 After the end of
the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, the films on art
genre was vitalized by aesthetic, social, economic, technological, intellectual
and political motivations and was backed by educational institutions, cultural
organizations, media outlets and government organizations.
 Projecting Cultural Diplomacy 149

The Cold War and the art of cultural diplomacy

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the American government
received accounts from its agents around the world revealing that disparaging
representations of Americans were being strategically disseminated to
international audiences. Reports indicated that Americans were regarded as:
uncultured and unappreciative of other cultures, materialistic, intolerant of
others’ views, unpredictable and unreliable, impractically idealistic, and blind to
injustices in their own society.13 Initially the US refrained from responding to
these attacks. However, James F. Byrnes, a powerful political figure who was
gravely concerned about the United States’ delay in enacting vigorous public
diplomacy initiatives, wrote a letter to President Harry S. Truman cautioning
that America was ‘the last of the great nations of the earth to engage in informing
other peoples about its policies and institutions’.14 In addition, after visits to
Europe in 1946 and 1947, several members of Congress gave first-hand accounts
of Communist propaganda designed to depict Americans in a negative light.15
In response to these concerns, David Wilson, a staffer at the State Department
who worked with the United States Mission to the United Nations, stated the
need to expand cultural diplomacy as ‘a means of making other people
favourably disposed toward us, of diffusing among them an atmosphere of
liking and respect for us which will aid in the implementation of our national
policies’.16
Subsequently, strengthening the positive perception of the United States
overseas was identified as the most important goal for American cultural
diplomacy.17 In January 1948, President Truman signed the United States
Information and Educational Exchange Act, also known as the Smith-Mundt
Act, to advance the understanding of the United States by other countries.18
Moreover, only four months later, in April 1948, Truman signed the European
Recovery Program (ERP) also known as the Marshall Plan that appropriated
almost thirteen billion dollars to be dispersed over four years to help rebuild
the European economies after the devastation of the Second World War. The
impact of such post-war initiatives in shaping American perception overseas
cannot be overstated. Substantial funds were directed toward ‘soft power’
initiatives; the fact that the United States was the only country whose economy
150 Art in the Cinema

benefited from the war allowed them to generously fund cultural diplomacy.19
Richard MacCann maintained that:

budgets for films [. . .] and other expensive representations of the U.S. image
would never have been granted in such large amounts by the U.S. Congress
without the overshadowing threat of Soviet infiltration [. . .] in every case,
the Russian budget for propaganda was part of the plea for the American
budget.20

Strategies for indirectly supporting cultural diplomacy were crucial for fighting
the ideological and cultural propaganda of the Soviets during the Cold War
period without appearing heavy-handed or overly didactic. Providing funding
to showcase a range of American artistic achievements in the form of modern
dance performances, jazz concerts and art exhibitions was paramount in
demonstrating American cultural leadership. In her essay on the global impact
of Louis Armstrong’s music during the Cold War, the cultural historian Penny
M. Von Eschen states,

Indeed, cultural exchange was the commodity that closely pursued the
quintessential Cold War commodities, oil and uranium, along with many
others critical to America’s seductive abundance. Tracing the steps of the
artists offers a window into the sheer enormity and originality [. . .] of the
U.S. global project of domination by way of modernization and
development.21

Von Eschen highlights the fact that the State Department’s cultural programmes
functioned to showcase ‘a distinctly American alternative to Soviet and
European dominance in the arts, and that the programme committees became
venues for debating what was considered “modern” and “uniquely American”
in dance, art, and music’.22
Concerts, film screenings, performances and art exhibitions worked in
tandem to promote a curated vision of American culture abroad; however, not
all efforts went without challenges. One such example occurred in 1946 and
greatly impacted the content and production of future cultural initiatives. In
an effort to reach people around the world and convey a positive image of
 Projecting Cultural Diplomacy 151

America and its people, the State Department charged Joseph LeRoy Davidson,
visual-arts specialist at the State Department, to curate an art exhibit to signal
America’s advancement in the fine arts ‘for the government to use as a political
tool abroad’.23 Davidson curated the exhibition ‘Advancing American Art’ that
featured paintings by many of the most celebrated twentieth-century American
artists including Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn
and Jacob Lawrence. William Benton, Assistant Secretary of State for Public
Affairs and publisher of Encyclopedia Britannica (1943–73), celebrated this
exhibition as a mechanism to challenge ‘those abroad who thought of the
United States as a nation of materialists’, and to demonstrate ‘that the same
country which produces brilliant scientists and engineers also produces
creative artists’.24 The exhibition was to tour Europe, South America and Asia,
and to demonstrate to the world America’s new stature as a cultural leader, and
to underscore the freedom of expression the United States government grants
its artists in contrast to the Soviets.
Although the exhibition received positive reviews when it was shown at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as in Paris and Prague, in early 1947 it
was withdrawn and brought back to the United States after conservative
politicians and newspaper editors deemed it dangerous to America’s image
and accused its creators of furthering the Communist agenda. This conservative
campaign to discredit the exhibition also resulted in reporting the artists who
participated in the exhibition to the House Un-American Activities Committee
for further investigation, the auctioning off of all the paintings, and the
dismissal of Joseph LeRoy Davidson.25

Celluloid as soft power diplomacy

After the ‘Advancing American Art’ fiasco, effectively implementing soft power
in the post-war political climate involved the intricate process of navigating
numerous international and domestic cultural and political influences.
Although State Department agencies sought to dissociate themselves from
directly funding the arts, they needed to find a way to ideologically and
culturally fight the Cold War without stirring controversy in the United States.
152 Art in the Cinema

Hence, they strategized to use their financial resources to indirectly fund the
arts through a variety of cultural tools. Films on art were recognized as such
tools.
The dissolution of the OWI in 1945 threatened the financial survival of
filmmaker and documentarian William Van Dyke and his production company
Affiliated Films that had worked closely with the State Department during the
war and produced propaganda films funded by OWI that promoted and
idealized American cultural values, including Oswego (1943), Steeltown (1944),
Pacific Northwest (1944) and San Francisco (1945). According to the art scholar
and photographer James Enyeart, the producer Irving Jacoby, who worked
with Van Dyke and who had contacts with the State Department, approached
IMPS and proposed that Van Dyke’s production company make a series
of films featuring American artists to demonstrate America’s cultural,
intellectual and artistic wealth to international audiences.26 Jacoby’s proposal
corresponded with the agency’s desire to use films on art as a means for
political and cultural propaganda. As Van Dyke’s productions were of known
quality to them, Jacoby’s proposal was accepted and funds were assigned to
Affiliated Films.
In producing this film, Van Dyke balanced numerous challenges in order to
create a work that would honour Weston’s oeuvre without provoking unwanted
attention in Washington. Van Dyke selected the subject of his film, chose the
locations where the film was shot, and oversaw the cinematography.27 The
Photographer strategically presented Edward Weston as the quintessential,
rugged American artist, endowed with an extraordinary artistic vision, an
observant eye and an exceptional set of skills. To nullify Soviet representations
of Americans as materialistic, shallow and frivolous, the film strategically
revealed Weston’s modest lifestyle by having the camera enter Weston’s humble
home while commenting, ‘He [Weston] feels rich though he owns nothing but
his tools, his personal effects and his cats.’ In another scene documenting
Weston and his assistant in a car wash in Los Angeles, the commentator states,

In Europe people say that this is America, Weston likes it and thinks it’s fun,
but he doesn’t think it’s America. Machines and gadgets are convenient, but
they can’t do our living for us. He won’t let himself be used by them, he
 Projecting Cultural Diplomacy 153

tends to weigh their value against what he has to give for them in terms of
freedom and self respect.

To counterpoint Cold War perceptions of Hollywood as representative of the

entire nation, the voiceover explains ‘LA is only a small part of America’ as
the film showcases California’s diverse natural riches, from the Pacific Coast to
the desert. The film follows Weston and his assistant as they travel throughout
California exploring potential sites for his photographs. During these trips the
camera reveals the grandeur and splendour of California’s distinct landscapes
where Weston, with the help of his assistant, sets up his camera for a shoot. Van
Dyke documents Weston working at the same locations that his photographs
made famous, such as Yosemite, Point Lobos and Death Valley. These sequences
effectively document Weston’s process in creating some of the most iconic
photographs focusing on America’s vast landscapes and striking natural
beauty.
In post-production, Van Dyke’s stunning cinematography was paired with
Ben Maddow and Irving Jacoby’s didactic commentary read by Mel Brandt.
The voice-over and editing strategically protrayed Weston as an American
artist that above all else values freedom. Positioning Weston as a free thinker
and aesthetic pioneer successfully produced the highly calibrated message the
State Department aimed to portray. This constructed representation of an
American artist navigated a variety of choices regarding content and form. It’s
worth noting that although the film is an intimate portrait of Weston and his
art, Van Dyke judiciously avoided using any of the nudes or other suggestive
abstract photographs that are featured in many of Weston’s works. Having
already made films for the State Department, Van Dyke understood the
parameters within which he was expected to operate and directed the film in a
manner that satisfied the post-war conservative political environment, and
met the State Department’s goal of presenting an idealized image of America
and American life while simultaneously portraying his friend in a positive
light.
The Photographer marks a milestone in the history of the film on art genre
as it was the first film to feature an American photographer, and was ‘one of the
very first films from any country to regard photography seriously as an art
154 Art in the Cinema

form’.28 Throughout the film, Van Dyke strategically emphasizes the artistry
Weston demonstrates as he composes, shoots and develops his photographs.
Van Dyke’s camera followed Weston into the darkroom documenting the
artist developing a photograph ‘with infinite skill’ and demonstrating the
interconnection between art and science. Referencing Weston’s predecessors
such as Nadar, Matthew Brady, Eugène Atget and Alfred Steigiltz, Van Dyke
decisively inserts him in this prestigious lineage.
Beginning in 1948, The Photographer was distributed by the IMPS through
UNESCO’s international non-theatrical film circuit that was developed by the
Allied Forces during the Second World War. This international non-theatrical
film circuit facilitated the exhibition of The Photographer in locations around
the world that would have been otherwise inaccessible during the Cold War
period.29 This extensive exposure transformed Weston into an iconic cultural
figure while simultaneously conveying an idealized version of American values
and America’s modernist sophistication. In a letter to Van Dyke, Weston wrote,
‘. . . every now and then I meet someone who has seen it [The Photographer] in
Siam or Alaska!’30
According to Richard Barsam, the early post-war films on art that were
commissioned by IMPS including The Photographer (1948) were not intended for
American viewers but for audiences in foreign countries.31 However, there is
evidence, through letters written by Van Dyke to Weston, that in 1950 a silent
version of the film was screened in at least one theatre in Los Angeles with Weston
narrating in real time, much like the travelogue programmes popular in the first
half of the century.32 A final version of the film was formally released in the United
States in 1951, and was exhibited at film societies, museums and academic
settings. It was declared an overall success and described as offering ‘insight into
the environment, the sources of inspiration and the creative processes of an
artist’,33 and characterized as ‘technically first rate in every department’.34
Educational Screen published the following glowing review of the film:

This truly remarkable motion picture through skillful editing, excellent

camera work, penetrating interpretation of photography as an art, a sensitive
presentation of Weston and his art does capture for its audience intimate
and revealing incidents and experiences in the life of Edward Weston. For
 Projecting Cultural Diplomacy 155

both critical and lay audiences it offers much documentary evidence to

establish photography as one of the important creative arts in America.35

Furthermore, the Educational Screen’s review applauded Van Dyke’s stunning

cinematography depicting the California coast.36
The Photographer was at the forefront of the post-war American film on art
movement and became a prominent example of early Cold War era cultural
propaganda. Van Dyke sidestepped congressional criticism, censorship and
other attempts of interference by making a quality film that represented
America in a way that met with the State Department’s approval and portrayed
Weston as a serious, hardworking and stoic artist ‘that shows American beauty
in a language all can understand’.37 By prudently producing a patriotic portrait
of his friend that embodied the values the government wished to communicate,
Van Dyke was capable of conferring upon his friend an international and
domestic standing as one of the foremost artists of the time. In a letter to
Weston, Van Dyke writes, ‘I guess we did alright, no? It was wonderful to be
able to do it for you, Edward, and I’m happy that I could express my love and
appreciation in my own way.’ 38
In conclusion, mid-century films on art played an important role on the
international front as soft power weapons of cultural diplomacy posed to
counteract the ideological and cultural propaganda of the Soviets during the
Cold War period without appearing heavy-handed or overly didactic. As
filmmaker and artist Paul Haesaerts remarked, ‘the art film has an exceptional
power to penetrate deeply into the psyche, an imagination – to photograph, in
a way, the very inside of certain minds or certain collective mentalities’.39
Turner Shelton who became the head of IMPS in 1953, expounded on the
important role films on art play in cultural diplomacy and proclaimed, ‘Motion
pictures [. . .] create an atmosphere of receptivity. They create an aura that
makes people receptive to what we specifically have to say to them [. . .] I think
motion pictures can make America understood.’40 While The Photographer
functioned as a strategic vehicle of cultural diplomacy that conveyed a positive,
friendly and sophisticated image of America to international audiences and
promoted photography as a fine art to domestic audiences, it also became one
of the most viewed films on art in the mid-century.
156 Art in the Cinema

Notes
1 Richard M. Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 278.

2 Reader’s Digest as quoted in Douglas Miller and Marion Nowar, The Fifties: The Way We
Really Were (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1977), 9.
3 Between the years 1950 and 1977, $561,700,000 was committed to the construction of
123 American art museums and visual arts centres across the country. Michael
Kammen reports that in the mid-1950s museum attendance became a popular form of
entertainment, almost matching the number of annual moviegoers of 1954 in
American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (New York:
Knopf, 1999), 117. Also see Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate
(New York: Harper and Row, 1985) for a series of essays addressing the rise of Abstract
Expressionism and the politics of the Cold War.

4 Erika Doss, ‘The Visual Arts in Post-1945 America’, in Jean-Christophe Agnew (ed.),
A Companion to Post-1945 America (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002).

5 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and
Letters (New York: The New York Press, 1999), 159.

6 See Doss, ‘The Visual Arts’, and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern
Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1983).

7 Theodore Bowie, Films on Art: A Critical Guide (Bloomington: Indiana University

Audio-Visual Center, 1956), 6. In his Introduction, Bowie elaborates on the vast
number of films on art created in the decade following the conclusion of the war.

8 Margaret I. Rufsvold and Carolyn Guss, Guides to Newer Educational Media (Chicago,
IL: American Library Association, 1961), 67.
9 Nathan Resnick, ‘A Modest Proposal on Art Films’, Educational Screen (March 1952): 99.

10 Barbara Chapin, ‘New Ways of Seeing’, Educational Screen (January 1954): 13. AAUW
was invested in exhibiting art films, because the organization regarded these films as a
means of educating the public as well as pertinent tools for cultivating understanding
of other societies and cultures and for fostering international relations.

11 Eva Cockcroft, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, in Frascina (ed.),
Pollock and After. Also see Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.

12 For a detailed account of the relationship between philanthropic and government

organizations in relation to the mobilization of non-theatrical film in the post-war era,
see Charles Acland, ‘Screen Technology, Mobilization, and Adult Education in the
1950s’, in William J. Buxton (ed.), Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy’s
Transformation of Culture, Communication, and the Humanities (New York: Lexington
Books, 2009), 261–79.
 Projecting Cultural Diplomacy 157

13 Theodore A. Wilson, ‘Selling America Via the Silver Screen? Efforts to Manage the
Projection of American Culture Abroad, 1942–1947’, in Reinhold Wagnleitner and
Elaine Tyler May (eds), Here, There, and Everywhere: The Foreign Politics of American
Popular Culture (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000), 85.

14 Richard MacCann, The People’s Film: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion
Pictures (New York: Hastings House, 1973), 176.

15 MacCann, The People’s Film, 176.

16 Wilson, ‘Selling America’, 84.

17 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea, 193. For a comprehensive history of US cultural
diplomacy see Michael L. Krenn, The History of United States Cultural Diplomacy: 1770
to the Present Day (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

18 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea, 190.

19 Reinhold Wagnleitner, ‘The Irony of American Culture Abroad: Austria and the Cold
War’, in Lary May (ed.), Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold
War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 286.

20 MacCann, The People’s Film, 194.

21 Penny M. Von Eschen, ‘Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz, Race, and Empire during
the Cold War’, in Wagnleitner and Tyler May (eds), Here, There, and Everywhere, 164.

22 Von Eschen, ‘Satchmo Blows Up the World’, 166.

23 Dennis Harper, ‘Advancing American Art: Leroy Davidson’s “Blind Date with Destiny” ’,
in Scott Bishop et al., Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of
Cultural Diplomacy (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2012), 8.

24 William Benton, ‘Vernissage: Advancing American Art’, Art News (October 1946): 19.

25 This action effectively ended the careers of many of these artists.

26 James Enyeart, Willard Van Dyke: Changing the World Through Photography
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 245.

27 For a more detailed account, see L.S. Calmes, The Letters Between Edward Weston and
Willard Van Dyke (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2005) and Enyeart’s
Willard Van Dyke.

28 Barsam, Nonfiction Film, 296.

29 Zoe Druick, ‘Reaching the Multimillions: Liberal Internationalism and

the Establishment of Documentary Film’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee
Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2008), 81–102.

30 Calmes, The Letters, 49.

31 Barsam, Nonfiction Film, 279.

158 Art in the Cinema

32 Calmes, The Letters, 44–5. Letters 58 and 59.

33 William McK. Chapman (ed.), ‘The Films’, in Films on Art (New York: American
Federation of Arts, 1952), 126.

34 Theodore Bowie, Films on Art: A Critical Guide (Indiana University Audio-Visual

Center, Bloomington, IN, 1956), 23.

35 L.C. Larson, Carolyn Guss, Betty Stoops, ‘Evaluation of New Films’, Educational Screen
(January 1952): 27.

36 Larson, Guss, Stoops, ‘Evaluation of New Films’, Educational Screen, 27.

37 Quote from The Photographer (1948). Produced by Willard Van Dyke for USIS (United
States Information Service) distributed by United World Films.

38 Calmes, The Letters, 45.

39 Paul Haesaerts, as quoted in George Amberg, ‘Art, Films, and Art Films’, Magazine of
Art, (March 1952): 132.

40 MacCann, The People’s Film, 178.

 7
Henry Moore and
A Sculptor’s Landscape:
modernity, the land and
the bomb in two television
films by John Read
JOHN WYVER

At a conference in Ghent in December 2013, I introduced a screening of a

35mm print of A Sculptor’s Landscape, a half-hour BBC Television documentary
about Henry Moore.1 Observing Moore at work in his studios and the grounds
of his home in Hertfordshire, and showcasing both sculptures and drawings,
the 1958 film was written and directed by John Read (1923–2011).2 As the
audience watched the pin-sharp monochrome images of Moore’s art set in a
rural Britain from more than fifty years before, the accompanying soundtrack
was simply Humphrey Searle’s modernist score mixed with a range of audio
effects. The original television narration spoken by the distinguished classical
actor Ralph Richardson was missing; nor was this the only puzzling aspect of
the fine print generously made available by the Cinematek Brussels. Stranger
still was why this archive should possess a pristine copy of this particular
British arts documentary. Its presence can only be a consequence of Expo ’58,

159
160 Art in the Cinema

the world’s fair held in the Belgian capital in the summer of the year in which
Read’s film was completed. Henry Moore was one of the participating artists in
the event’s ‘Fifty Years of Modern Art’ exhibition, and although to date it has
proved impossible to confirm any screenings, the film print that we viewed
must surely have been shown, with a now-lost Flemish or French narration
track, in conjunction with this presentation of the artist.
The British pavilion at Expo ’58 was an angular modernist structure created
by architects Howard V. Lobb and Partners working with John Ratcliff.3 The
self-conscious alignment of national identity with modernity was qualified by
the pavilion’s interior commissioned from designer James Gardner. Here a
future-facing ‘Hall of Technology’ was flanked by a ‘Hall of Tradition’ lit by
stained-glass windows, hung with heraldic banners and showcasing Pietro
Annigoni’s celebrated portrait of Elizabeth II. Moreover, as Elizabeth Darling
has written, ‘In a souvenir brochure published by the Daily Mail – then as now
a deeply traditional and conservative paper – the pavilion was described as
representing “the country in which tradition is stubbornly and gracefully
preserved,” but it also “shows clearly the United Kingdom is still foremost
amongst the pioneers in this nuclear age.” [. . .] Britain’s modernity was
proclaimed and projected through the exterior of the pavilion but conveyed
more ambiguously within.’4
This ambivalent conjunction of past and present is also a defining
characteristic of A Sculptor’s Landscape (first broadcast 28 June 1958), just as it
is of John Read’s earlier BBC profile Henry Moore (1951).5 In both films,
Moore’s modernism, and the modernist visual style of the cinematography and
editing, are contrasted with and contained by a supposed timelessness of the
land and of the human figure. The films negotiate other tensions too, including
those between the construction of Moore as an individual genius and his
practice as a public, socially engaged figure, and between Moore the Englishman
born and bred in Yorkshire, and Moore the internationalist. The key difference
between the films, however, is that the later A Sculptor’s Landscape was made in
the shadow of the atomic bomb and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Despite
the second film nowhere explicitly addressing these concerns, in its treatment
of landscape, of the human figure and of Moore’s developing work, the film
betrays the nuclear anxieties that since the early 1950s had changed the world.
 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape 161

Exploring the tensions and highlighting the determining forces, this chapter
outlines the production frameworks of Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s
Landscape, locating them within the emerging tradition of the visual arts on
British television in the 1950s. It details the shared approaches and concerns of
the two films and foregrounds the contrast between them determined by this
new factor of nuclear fear.

A unique collaboration

A Sculptor’s Landscape, broadcast seven years after Henry Moore, was the second
of six films that John Read made with the artist for BBC Television between
1951 and 1979. Steven Jacobs has related the earlier films in this sequence to a
post-war flourishing of arts documentaries concerned with the representation
of sculpture including Jacques Lipchitz (1951), directed by Frank Stauffacher,
and Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Les Statues meurent aussi (1953).6
Demonstrating both a consistent approach and a sense of development, Read’s
films are distinguished by their clarity and confidence, and represent a unique
collaboration between a major creative figure, a distinctive filmmaker and a
broadcaster.7 Throughout a career at the BBC that lasted until 1978, Read wrote
and directed numerous films about visual artists, including other documentaries
during the 1950s about prominent painters, several of whom were identified
after the Second World War as ‘neo-Romantic’ artists:8 Graham Sutherland
(1953), John Piper (1953), and two 1956 films on Stanley Spencer, Cookham
Village and War and Peace. Each of these films is a significant document of
British modernism and yet, like so many documentaries engaged with the
visual arts, they remain largely unknown, including amongst cultural historians
with an interest in this period. Such neglect has been in part because archival
access has until recently been limited. Yet despite the centrality of these artists
to British post-war culture, there has also been a resistance amongst scholars
working with traditional hierarchies of the value of historical sources who have
consistently privileged printed materials over the moving image.
Born in 1923, John Read was the son of the noted art critic Herbert Read
and his first wife, Evelyn. He spent much of his childhood living in Edinburgh
162 Art in the Cinema

with his mother after she and Herbert separated. Fascinated by the cinema
from early on, he made his first film when he studied after the war in Oxford
and in 1948 he published the article ‘Is There a Documentary Art?’ in the film
journal Sight & Sound. In this, he laid out principles that would underpin all of
his work for the BBC across three decades, and at the same time he detailed
both a personal and a social understanding of post-war reconstruction and
regeneration that would run throughout his work:

Documentary is the natural expression of the modern democratic

community in terms of creative leadership. As such, it is a form of public
service in the new and ever-widening field of adult education. [. . .] Much of
our learning and knowledge of life is apprehended through our senses
moved by poets, actors and painters, arousing in us the sense of pleasure
that is also understanding. The highest purposes of Documentary can be
achieved in a like manner, where the educational is implicit in the artistic.9

The article helped secure Read a lowly position with the documentary producer
John Grierson, who was former head of the GPO Film Unit and at this point
the controller of the Central Office of Information’s film operations, and then,
with his father’s assistance, a position with the fledgling BBC television service.
Working in the Alexandra Palace studios, he began to produce live presentations
illustrated with photographs about subjects such as English pub signs and the
Elgin Marbles. He also worked on a weekend magazine series with host Joan
Gilbert and, on being instructed to appeal to a more up-market audience, he
introduced art spots, including one with artist John Minton discussing his
painting The Death of Nelson. As had been the case between 1936 and 1939 and
since the single channel’s resumption after the war in 1946, almost all BBC
television broadcasts at the time were made with multiple electronic cameras
and transmitted live from a small studio or as an outside broadcast. Filmed
productions were rare in the schedules, although after 1947 the Corporation
began to make short films, having reassured suspicious feature film producers
and the film technicians’ union that it had no interest in competing in the
theatrical marketplace. As John Read later recalled, there was widespread
resistance to film throughout the television service: ‘The attitude then was: it
was the great new electronic medium, the wonder of seeing it as it happens –
 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape 163

or, often, seeing it go wrong as it went wrong. I suppose they had to make
claims for the new medium. But I saw [television] as a marvellous method of
film distribution.’10
In the run-up to the May 1951 opening of the Festival of Britain, Read was
offered the chance to make a feature about Henry Moore, almost certainly
because of the personal and professional connections between his father and
the artist. As Ben Cranfield has written,

Herbert Read and Henry Moore were not just connected by their ubiquity
within the canonical formation of mid-twentieth century modernism and
their over-exposure as doyens of British art: the development of their
respective work as critic and artist was enmeshed for nearly forty years,
from the first time Read visited Moore’s studio in 1931 to Read’s death in
1968 [. . .] Moore remained more solidly in Read’s favour than any other
artist, contemporary or historic [. . .] Read described Moore’s work and
process in the manner of Vasari, the Renaissance father of biographically
dominated art history, tellingly the story of genius as an unfolding and
indisputable fact.11

In 1950, both in Britain and abroad, and in part thanks to Herbert Read’s
promotional efforts, Moore was increasingly recognized as a singular genius.
In the United States in 1946, the artist had been honoured with an exhibition
at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the first solo show there by a British
artist, and at the Venice Biennale in 1948 he had won the prestigious sculpture
prize. After concentrating in the early years of the war on his Tube shelter
drawings, and then working as an official war artist making drawings of
miners, he had returned to carving in 1943. A number of high-profile
public commissions followed including a Family Group for a Stevenage
school. Geoffrey Grigson’s 1944 book Henry Moore, published in the ‘Penguin
Modern Painters’ series, sold 48,000 copies in its first four years. And as
Andrew Stephenson has argued, this was a period in Moore’s life ‘when he
was eager to comment publicly on the civic responsibilities of the artist and
patron in post-war reconstruction and become energetically involved with
the advisory committees directing public arts organisations, museums and
galleries’.12
164 Art in the Cinema

Planning a feature about Moore in 1950, John Read argued on pragmatic

grounds that it was essential that he should be able to use film. The artist’s
sculptures were too bulky to bring in any quantity to the studio and Moore
himself stressed how they should be seen in natural light against the landscape.
The artist had a keen interest in how his works were photographed, and as
Elizabeth Brown has written, ‘Henry Moore photographed his own sculptures
frequently, often beginning with a specific function in mind.’13 In her perceptive
essay, Brown analysed the ways in which throughout his career Moore used
photography to highlight specific details and finishes and to create for his
works particular moods and visual effects. In a later interview John Read
acknowledged Moore’s influence on the cinematography in his films: ‘I
remember learning everything from Moore about photographing sculpture,
and especially about the use of natural light for “modelling”; he taught me, and
I think the cameraman too.’14 All of the sculptures were newly filmed from the
original artworks by Alan Lawson, chief cameraman at BBC’s Television
Newsreel. He employed innovative cinematographic techniques, a number of
which were reprised in the making of A Sculptor’s Landscape. Light and shadow
moving across the sculptures contributes to the sense of their plastic form and
jump cuts are used to animate qualities in materials. In her detailed and
rigorous consideration of the film, Katerina Loukopoulou suggested the jump
cuts ‘make common materials appear strange through their sudden appearance.
They also make the viewer aware of the film’s editing, pointing reflexively to
film’s capacity to construct a visual rhetoric. Just as modernist sculpture
frequently departed from wholly representational forms, so these jump cuts
depart from the realism of conventional editing.’15 The attempt at
de-familiarization is continued with works filmed against the sky, and so
abstracted from any sense of scale. Read and Lawson, almost certainly with
Moore’s approval, frequently set the camera in motion, most strikingly in the
closing sequence, for which the sculpture was placed on a large turntable in
the open air and spun around in front of the camera. The camera then joined
the sculpture on the spinning platform, and the images, including the
backgrounds glimpsed through the artwork, create a rapidly changing pattern
in which the previously clear relationships between figure and ground shift,
change and collapse.
 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape 165

Figure 7.1 Spinning on a turntable with the sculpture, Alan Lawson’s camera films
through the limbs of Reclining Figure (1951) in Henry Moore (John Read, 1951).
Digital still. BBC Television.

Yet if the film’s form is at times giddily modernist and challenging, the tone
of its narration is defensively conservative, and this combination is repeated in
A Sculptor’s Landscape. The format of the 1951 film is essentially that of an
illustrated radio talk, with Read’s elegant commentary read by actor Bernard
Miles constantly stressing historical precedents for Moore’s work. There is a
single sequence in which Moore speaks with synchronous sound and addresses
the camera directly. Filmed at his home in Hoglands, this was a far from trivial
technical achievement at the time. Speaking in what appears to be a carefully
rehearsed manner, the artist locates his practice in a response to natural forms.
‘The central tradition of sculpture,’ he explains to the viewer, ‘is rooted in a
respect for the materials of sculpture. One can learn from all sorts of natural
forms, such as these. Take for instance this stone. It has a hole right through it.
It has a strong, slow, structural rhythm which perhaps shows nature’s way of
working stone.’
Near the start of Henry Moore there is a focus on the artist’s hands, working
with tools, carving stone and modelling clay. The impulse to capture creation
on celluloid is strong throughout the film. A cut from a blank sketchbook page
to a close-up of Moore’s eyes, underlined as so much of the film is by William
Alwyn’s music, is intended to suggest ‘inspiration’. The second half of the film
follows the creation of Reclining Figure (1951, now in the Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art) that the artist began in October 1950 for the following
166 Art in the Cinema

year’s Festival of Britain. There is a fascination in witnessing those aspects of

Moore’s working processes, especially the casting of bronze, that he was
prepared to reveal to the camera. But this is clearly incomplete – Moore’s studio
assistants, for example, are only glimpsed in the background (although they
are explicitly acknowledged in A Sculptor’s Landscape), and, as Philip Hayward
has discussed as a general feature (and failure) of documentaries about visual
artists, the actual moment of creation inevitably eludes both the filmmaker and
the viewer.16
The film was broadcast on the evening of 30 April 1951.17 The following day,
a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s works organized by the Arts Council of
Great Britain, ‘Sculpture and Drawings by Henry Moore’, was shown to the
press at London’s Tate Gallery. That same evening, on London’s South Bank,
King George VI opened the Festival of Britain. Adjacent to the ‘Origin of the
Land’ exhibit, and around the corner from a display devoted to the still
comparatively new medium of television, was a plinth on which was mounted
Moore’s Reclining Figure. Television, exhibition and festival reinforced Moore’s
status as the emblematic visual artist of the moment. Moreover, Henry Moore
was just one of more than 2,000 broadcasts, mostly on radio, made by the BBC
about every aspect of the Festival of Britain. The Festival and broadcasting
forged a productive partnership which together constructed an image of the
nation that both looked back to the triumphs of the first Elizabethan age and
anticipated the second that would begin when Princess Elizabeth ascended to
the throne.18 Henry Moore was promoted as one finely balanced expression of
this conjunction of tradition and modernity.

Return to Hoglands

Five years after his first film profile, having made documentaries with Graham
Sutherland, John Piper and Stanley Spencer as well as programmes about the
landscapes of the Lake District and English parish churches, John Read
returned to Moore as a potential subject. He was planning a series titled The
Artist Speaks that would put into practice ideas that the director had expressed
in a 1957 article:
 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape 167

I do not myself believe that the art film is a legitimate instrument of

criticism. The opportunities for contrived argument are too many and the
impact of the screen too authoritarian. I prefer to think that sympathetic
interpretation and the identification of the audience with the artist are more
legitimate objectives. When possible the artist should be in the film to speak
for himself and I prefer building up commentary and explanation from the
artist’s own opinions and statements, leaving the spectator to form his own
judgement.19

The respect for the artists with whom he filmed that Read expresses here,
together with his sense that his documentaries were created essentially in their
service, remained firmly consistent throughout his long career. Read
understood his practice as that of a facilitator and educator, developing a
broader and better-informed audience for modern art within a framework of
public service broadcasting derived from John Reith and of the understanding
of culture from the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold and his influential study
Culture and Anarchy. Unlike other makers of films about sculpture in these
years, such as Carl Theodor Dreyer or Henri Alekan, Read resisted the idea
that he was a creative artist who imposed his own sensibilities and concerns on
his depiction of his subjects and their artworks.20 Such reticence and modesty
were common attributes of programme makers working for BBC Television in
the post-war years.
Read’s sense of his subservient role in working with Moore is caught in
an October 1956 internal memo preserved in the BBC Written Archives at
Caversham in which he recounted a recent visit to Moore’s home and studios
at Hoglands. Read had invited the artist to contribute to his new series, but
‘This he firmly declined to do for reasons I fully understand and respect [. . .]
He did offer to give full co-operation and assistance in making with me a
further film study of his more recent sculpture.’21 Read did not detail Moore’s
reasons for his reluctance but it is likely that the artist had no interest in being
featured in a series with other contemporary artists. Throughout the
documentaries with John Read, and indeed in almost all of the films made
during his lifetime, the artist is always presented as individual, distinct, separate
from the other artists of his time, and where there are comparative references
168 Art in the Cinema

to other artists it is invariably to the giants of the past, to Michelangelo mostly,

Leonardo, Cezanne and Rodin, or to anonymous makers of Chacmool figures
or African masks.22
The correspondence between Read and Moore during the preparations for
the second film reveal the ways that Read welcomed the artist as a collaborator,
and how the director saw himself as a conduit for the artist’s self-expression.
Moore sent Read a copy of a talk written by him for the British Council called
‘Sculpture in the Open Air’, and parts of this were incorporated into the script.
After Moore declined being part of The Artist Speaks, John Read reassured the
artist that, ‘I have reported back that the thing to do is to follow your own
wishes and to make a film about your sculpture in its setting.’23 The following
July, Read wrote again to Moore that he ‘would be most grateful if you could
find time to look through the enclosed script [. . .] I would like to discuss with
you more exactly which drawings and sketches we might use in the film, and
also the selection of sculpture to be shown.’24 Reflecting on the process once
the film was finished, Read wrote, ‘All through the making of the film I tried to
keep the artist as close to the actual filming as possible [. . .] This collaboration
rarely became a difficulty and it created freedom of action rather than inhibited
it.’25 Both Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape should therefore be seen as
in many ways Moore’s expression of ideas and concerns that the artist wished
to emphasize. Yet inevitably the collaborative process of filmmaking entailed
mediation by the director, cinematographer and others, and the final result is
inflected both by the intentions of the production team and by broader social
and cultural currents as well as by the interests and concerns of the viewer’s
active engagement with the film. I wish to argue that in the case of A Sculptor’s
Landscape, for example, concerns about nuclear war in the late 1950s saturate
the film although neither the narration nor Moore himself makes any reference
to the topic.
A Sculptor’s Landscape opens where Henry Moore closes, with a sequence of
sculptures abstracted against the sky. Filmed so that they appear similarly
sized, they dissolve into each other as they turn, blending together almost as if
they are a metamorphosing organism. As is the case throughout both films, the
works are not identified by either title or date, even though they come from
more than twenty years of Moore’s career. As a consequence, they are cut free
 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape 169

Figure 7.2 Henry Moore sketches in the doorway of a shed in the grounds of
Hoglands in Henry Moore (John Read, 1951). Digital still. BBC Television.

from history, at the same time as their singular origin is reinforced; as the
script says of Moore, aligning his creativity with that of a writer,‘his handwriting
is on everything he creates’. The first location, to which the film frequently
returns, is Hoglands, with its studios located in the extensive grounds. Moore
is immediately distanced from urban society and rooted in the English
landscape; we are told that he ‘has lived in the country for many years. His
home is in a Hertfordshire village, among country lanes, leafy hedgerows and
green fields.’ Scenes shot around the working studios of Hoglands emphasize
the rural location and its remoteness from the city. A visit to the Battersea
open-air sculpture exhibition places Warrior with Shield (1953–4) alongside
the work of other artists including Reg Butler and Elizabeth Frink who remain
unidentified.
On the return to Hoglands, Moore is discovered seated in the doorway of a
potting shed, enclosed in a leafy bower and with a gardener tending a vegetable
patch to the side. He is exploring visual ideas through doodles and drawings,
and it is almost as if these thoughts are growing from the same soil as the
cabbages. Sculptures are seen elsewhere in the extensive grounds of Hoglands
and the film briefly visits Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire. Moore is
portrayed by John Read as inspired by rocks and roots, the shapes of the land
170 Art in the Cinema

and of the female body. One shot, for example, tracks left to right along a
drawing of a reclining female figure and then dissolves to a landscape of hills
in the distance, echoing the shapes of the drawn body and especially its raised
knees, a placid lake in the middle-ground, and close to the camera a dry stone
wall also suggestive of the contours of the body. A cut to another wild landscape
motivates a right to left pan, once more linking the land and Moore’s abstracted
bodies. A move in on a round hole in another drawing of a body cuts to a
similar hole in a cliff at Brimham and then to a similar opening in a sculpture
through which a treeline can be glimpsed. The accompanying narration,
written by Read, speaks of the ‘timeless, epic quality’ of Moore’s work, with its
‘ancient and primitive associations’; associations between the human figure
and landscape are stressed at several points in the commentary, including the
reflection that, ‘One of the most characteristic aspects of Moore’s work is the
way the suggestion of the human figure merges into the forms of the landscape,
without either of these losing their separate identity.’ A tight equivalence is
established between the female body, the nation’s landscape untouched by
tourism, agriculture or other agents of historical change, and Moore’s art.
In the most striking sequence, we are shown the then recently installed
group of works close to the Glenkiln Reservoir in Scotland: Standing Figure
(1950), King and Queen (1952–3) and Upright Motive No.1: Glenkiln Cross
(1955–6). Filming these, with background sheep but no humans or other signs
of the modern world in shot, involved a four-day trip driving to Scotland and
back, undertaken by a crew under cinematographer Walter Lassally. Moore’s
works are shown as if they have been part of the landscape for centuries, a
quality reinforced by the high contrast monochrome images that remove the
works from a historical moment in a way in which colour cinematography
would not. The visual language of sculptural modernism that had been
developed by Moore (and others) since the 1930s is subjected to a process that
the critics Jane Beckett and Fiona Russell have described as being ‘intertwined
with, held safe, and contained, by a mythology of pastoral England’.26 Ideas of
antiquity and timelessness are central to this operation, as is the focus on
Moore’s musée imaginaire of found objects, flints and bones, arrayed
throughout the artist’s studios. In 1944, Herbert Read contributed the
introduction to the monograph Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings, the
 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape 171

most comprehensive study of the artist to date. This text revised the modernist
and moderately politicized discourse about Moore of the 1930s, and according
to Beckett and Russell,

initiated a rereading of Moore as a post-war humanist and introduced a

number of new elements into the discussion of his work, notably an
emphasis on the public commissions, a notion of Moore’s ‘Englishness’, and
a description of Moore’s reworking of sculptural form, now positioned as
having a fundamentally human content. This was by no means a fixed view
of Moore’s new sculpture in the 1940s and 1950s, which [. . .] could still be
read as disturbing, but it gradually became the dominant account.27

John Read’s films work to establish this vision of Moore, grounding the
sculptures in the land and the body at the same time as they construct a
persona for the artist as intuitive rather than intellectual, heroic yet
determinedly down-to-earth, modern and forward-looking, yet at heart
profoundly traditional. Moreover, his modernized classicism and his explicit
humanism are set forth in the documentaries in the context of a post-war
return to order and societal reconstruction. Yet there are glimpses in A
Sculptor’s Landscape of alternative constructions of Moore, including the

Figure 7.3 New social housing in Harlow New Town is juxtaposed with Harlow
Family Group (1954–5) in A Sculptor’s Landscape (John Read, 1958). Digital still.
BBC Television.
172 Art in the Cinema

understanding of the artist as an increasingly international figure, exemplified

by the half-size model UNESCO Reclining Figure (1957–8) being loaded for
transport to the Italian quarry where its marble will be cut. To underline his
‘English-ness’, however, the commentary for A Sculptor’s Landscape twice
mentions that Moore is the son of a Yorkshire miner. Equally notable is a
sequence that features Harlow Family Group (1954–5) in its original parkland
setting with the houses of Harlow New Town in the distance. In one shot, the
gaze of the carved child appears captivated by the distant homes, and in the
next the male’s arm draped over the female figure’s shoulder seems almost to
embrace the dwellings as well. Here is the film’s only explicit presentation of
the social milieu in shots of urban Britain populated by the children of a
generation looking forward to a reconstructed future.
Despite the fact that in the fifteen years after the end of the war most of
Moore’s large-scale work was made for urban spaces, the brief Harlow sequence
is the only one of its kind in A Sculptor’s Landscape. Instead, the film’s
presentation of major works in the landscape fulfils the two modes that Penelope
Curtis and Fiona Russell have identified in the post-war still photography of
Moore’s work. One of these, they suggested, ‘is a sculpture of comfort and
renewal, figured upon a harmony with the historical landscape. The emptied
out body of a reclining female figure is filled by the landscape which it frames
or holds.’28 This is a sculpture of apparent continuity, draining the landscape of
‘its historical uneasiness and particularity’.29 One reclining female form is filmed
in a lush meadow with a gentle treeline beyond. ‘His reclining figures,’ the film’s
commentary relates, ‘which spread like a range of hills, seem as massive and as
sure as the earth herself.’ In the other mode, employed especially in the Glenkiln
sequence, sculptures are iconized as ‘ageless, rather than aged, overtly prehistoric
rather than historical’. Standing Figure, King and Queen and Glenkiln Cross, as
filmed by Read and his team, exemplify Curtis and Russell’s analysis: ‘This is a
sculpture which is singular, anomalous, set apart from the continuum of
everyday life and history. It and the landscape it inhabits offer little hope of
renewal, other than to gather up our fears within its frame.’30 The fears that
might be seen as gathered up within the frames of Moore’s sculptures as filmed
by Read in these depopulated landscapes were, in the Britain of 1958,
overwhelmingly those of nuclear annihilation.
 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape 173

Henry Moore and the bomb

Awareness of the nuclear threat had developed rapidly over the previous
decade, and had been focused by the country’s ‘Operation Grapple’ nuclear
tests in the Pacific Ocean between May 1957 and September 1958, as well as by
the potentially catastrophic fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor facility in
October 1957.31 The National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons
Tests (NCANWT) was set up in February 1957, and this was a precursor to
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) established in November that
year. Henry Moore, along with the artist Barbara Hepworth, was a sponsor of
both organizations, reflecting a commitment to this cause that had also seen
him as early as 1950 sign a letter to The Times opposing the use of nuclear
weapons in Korea. Moore himself chose not to make explicit connections
between his politics and sculptures, leaving them free to be co-opted by liberal
humanists in his home country, across Europe and in the United States. But as
Robert Barstow has argued,

Henry Moore produced sculpture in the 1950s and 1960s that was widely
seen as a direct response to the prevailing climate of nuclear anxiety. Even
[the leftist critic John] Berger, an unlikely champion of Moore, proposed
that his Falling Warrior (1956–57) become an emblem for the CND and the
preliminary studies the subject of a CND-sponsored exhibition.32

Catherine Jolivette has observed that the male nude is rare in Moore’s work,
with the ‘warrior’ sculptures of the 1950s, including Warrior with Shield and
Maquette for Fallen Warrior (1956) almost the only examples to put alongside
Falling Warrior. ‘In these works,’ she has written, ‘the heroic figure is rendered
vulnerable, protected only by a shield, his ribs exposed, limbs tense with fear
and hollowed features – round staring eyes, or a mouth agape with pain.’33
Both Warrior with Shield and Falling Warrior are prominent in A Sculptor’s
Landscape, the former on display in the Battersea exhibition and the latter
being unceremoniously transported by and then lifted out of a wheelbarrow.
For all that the film notes the classical precedents for such a work, the images
suggest that it might be an abject corpse being carted to a grave pit, the detritus
of a nuclear attack.
174 Art in the Cinema

Other sculptures by Moore featured in the film can also be seen, at least in
retrospect, to speak of the Cold War politics of the moment. Towards the end
of the 1950s, Britain was still involved in societal reconstruction, a process in
which, as Gregory Salter has detailed, ‘the nuclear family had become central’.34
The family was also important to Moore’s work during the decade, and this is
acknowledged in A Sculptor’s Landscape with numerous images of maquettes
for family groups, with the inclusion of ‘Harlow Family Group’ and a line in the
commentary confiding that ‘sometimes [Moore] just draws to amuse his young
daughter’. In a richly detailed analysis of the Cold War at home focused on
John Bratby’s paintings but equally applicable to Moore’s work, Salter has
explored the significance of the family in the art of the decade:

The family serves as a site for Cold War ideals (democracy and consensus)
as well as anxieties (breakdown of society, destruction of the self, annihilation
through nuclear war). In many ways the domestic arena is a refuge from the
battles of the Cold War. But it is also the locus of the internalisation of the
many anxieties from which Britons hoped to escape.35

The nuclear anxieties are perhaps also signalled by the harsh, modernist score
by Humphrey Searle that plays a disturbing and determining role in A Sculptor’s
Landscape, especially so when – as during the 2013 Ghent screening – the
narration is stripped away. The music is strikingly different from the romantic,
pastoral accompaniment that William Alwyn contributed to Henry Moore.
There are other elements on the soundtrack that also suggest a gathering
storm: the wind whistling around the Glenkiln sculptures and an unexplained
noise that sounds like thunder at the close of an earlier sequence highlighting
the terrace outside one of Moore’s studios.
Nor is it only the insistent wind that suggests that the Glenkiln landscape is
constructed somewhat differently from those shown previously in the film.
These earlier landscapes might be seen as similar to those celebrated in the
1950s by the historian W.G. Hoskins, who David Matless in his foundational
study Landscape and Englishness identified as ‘a key figure in the emergence of
an anti-modern, anti-state, anti-progress culture of landscape from the late
1940s’.36 Matless has suggested that Hoskins typified a powerful post-war
response to change, for which ‘turning away is the only possible sensible
 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape 175

gesture, away from an England of roads, bombs and planners and towards a
humbler ground of deserted village and obscure country church, of ridge and
furrow and bench ends’.37 But the eruption of Moore’s assertive, challenging
figures into the landscape, their insistent verticality disrupting the equivalence
of the reclining body and gently rolling hillsides, and the manner in which the
film presents them dominating the surrounding vistas suggests that here
‘turning away’ from modernity is not an option. Nor is the avoidance of
modern conflict, or at least preparations for such, since the commentary speaks
of Standing Figure as ‘stand[ing] like a sentinel’ and King and Queen seated on
rising ground ‘in a position of command’. And the consequences of the conflict
are then suggested by a hard cut to Fallen Warrior being wheeled towards the
camera on a barrow that has become a bier.
Catherine Jolivette has written that in the art of the 1950s ‘representations
of landscape [. . .] [were revealed] to be sites of anxiety, rather than security.’38
She argues that images of Britain’s geography and geology were mobilized by
artists and by the wider culture both in support of a backward-looking pastoral
ruralism and to suggest how precarious was both the land and the nation in an
age in which nuclear war appeared increasingly likely. In A Sculptor’s Landscape
Henry Moore’s art and the fields, hills, lakes and moorlands of Britain are

Figure 7.4 A cast of Falling Warrior (1956–7) is unceremoniously transported in a

wheelbarrow in A Sculptor’s Landscape (John Read, 1951). Digital still. BBC
Television.
176 Art in the Cinema

presented within both of these frameworks, resulting in a film that is both

complex and contradictory.

Conclusion

John Read’s two films, Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape, together with
his other artist profiles made for BBC Television in the 1950s and with the
television arts magazine Monitor that began in February 1958, contributed
along with many other cultural manifestations, many of which were supported
by the Arts Council of Great Britain, to changing conceptions of the arts and
to developing audiences for exhibitions, concerts, theatre and dance. As
Katerina Loukopoulou has argued, ‘these films were part of the wartime and
post-war momentum of a neo-romantic belief in the transformative power of
the arts, endorsed by a wide political spectrum of artists, filmmakers and
critics’.39 As he made clear in a 1983 interview, John Read saw his work as
celebrating the central role of art and artists to develop and extend the
progressive, anti-materialist ideals that had been given form during the war
and the years of the progressive Labour administration immediately afterwards:

The basic reason for doing it [making arts films] is simply that you’ve got to
stand up for the imaginative world, the imaginative element in the human
personality, because I think that’s constantly threatened. It’s a very
materialistic society; it’s an increasingly technological society, or economic
society; and there are other values – people do have imagination and
sensibilities, and I think that does need constant exposition.40

Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape can be seen as exemplary expositions of

this approach, and ones that were viewed by significant audiences both in their
initial broadcasts and also in the extensive non-theatrical distribution that they
received courtesy of the Arts Council of Great Britain. At the same time, they
can be understood as revealing much about the politics of the decade in which
they were created and about contemporary conceptions of the land, of the
nation, of the family, of ideas of the past and the future, and of the fear of nuclear
annihilation that, thankfully, at least to date, have proved to be unfounded.
 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape 177

Notes
1 ‘Art & Cinema: On the Aesthetics, History, and Theory of the Art Documentary’ was
held at the KASKcinema, Ghent, 7 December 2013. This paper is developed from my
introduction, and I am grateful to organizer Steven Jacobs for the invitation to
participate in both the event and this collection. The conference also featured
contributions by Jacobs himself and Angela della Vache, who also contribute to the
current volume.

2 On Read, see John Wyver, ‘John Read’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/104066, accessed 6 June 2018.

3 See Jonathan Woodham, ‘Entre Plusieurs Mondes: Le Site Britannique’, in Rika Devos
and Mil de Kooning (eds), L’Architecture Moderne À L’Expo 58: ‘Pour Un Monde Plus
Humain’ (Essen: Mercator Foundation, 2006), 246–61.

4 Elizabeth Darling, ‘ “Britain Today” at Expo 67’, in Rhona Richman Kenneally, Johanne
Sloan, Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); Daily
Mail, The British Pavilion from Brussels (London: Associated Newspapers, 1959), n.p.

5 Henry Moore can be viewed online in the United Kingdom in the ‘BBC British Art and
Artists’ archive collection, http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/henrymoore/8801.shtml; A
Sculptor’s Landscape is also available, http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/henrymoore/8802.
shtml; both accessed 10 April 2018.

6 See Steven Jacobs, ‘Carving cameras on Thorvaldsen and Rodin: mid-twentieth century
documentaries on sculpture’ in Steven Jacobs, Susan Fellman, Vito Adriaensens, Lisa
Colpaert, Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2017), 67.

7 The later films are Henry Moore: One Yorkshire Man Looks at his World (1967), which
reprises sections of the first two films as well as taking Moore to his home town of
Castleford; the 1974 pair The Language of Sculpture (which was partly shot in Florence)
and Henry Moore at Home; and the elegiac Henry Moore at Eighty (1978), which pays
particular attention to the artist’s works on paper. For discussion of these films and of
British television’s presentation of Henry Moore more generally, see John Wyver,
‘Myriad mediations: Henry Moore and his works on screen 1937–83’, in Henry Moore:
Sculptural Process and Public Identity (London: Tate Research Publication, 2015),
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moore/john-wyver-myriad-
mediations-henry-moore-and-his-works-on-screen-1937-83-r1151304; accessed
2 April 2018.

8 On British ‘neo-Romanticism’, see David A. Mellor (ed.), A Paradise Lost: The

Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935–55 (London: Lund Humphries/Barbican
Art Gallery, 1987).

9 John Read, ‘Is There a Documentary Art?’ in Sight & Sound, 17, 68 (1948–9): 157.

10 Quoted in ‘P.L.’ [Peter Lennon], ‘Portrait maker’, in The Listener (15 January 1983): 27.
178 Art in the Cinema

11 Ben Cranfield, ‘ “A stimulation to greater effort of living”: The importance of Henry

Moore’s “credible compromise” to Herbert Read’s aesthetics and politics’, in Henry
Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity (London: Tate Research Publication,
2015), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moore/ben-cranfield-a-
stimulation-to-greater-effort-of-living-the-importance-of-henry-moores-r1151301;
accessed 2 April 2018.

12 Andrew Stephenson, ‘Fashioning a post-war reputation: Henry Moore as a civic

sculptor c. 1943–58’, in Henry Moore, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/
henry-moore/andrew-stephenson-fashioning-a-post-war-reputation-henry-moore-as-
a-civic-sculptor-c1943-r1151305; accessed 2 April 2018.

13 Elizabeth Brown, ‘Moore looking: photography and the presentation of sculpture’, in

Dorothy Kosinski, Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century (New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press, 2001), 288.

14 Author’s interview with John Read, 12 May 1995.

15 Katerina Loukopoulou, ‘The mobile framing of Henry Moore’s sculpture in post-war

Britain’, in Visual Culture in Britain, 13, 1 (Fall 2012): 73.

16 See Philip Hayward ‘Introduction – representing representations’, in Hayward (ed.),

Picture This: Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists, 2nd edition (Luton:
University of Luton Press, 1998), 7.

17 Radio Times, 27 April 1951, 44; the listing was accompanied in the listings magazine by
a feature article written by the art critic Eric Newton, ‘The evolution of a genius’, 42.

18 On the Festival of Britain, see Harriet Atkinson, The Festival of Britain: A Land and its
People (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012).

19 John Read, ‘The art film and television’, Athene, 7, 4 (June 1956): 18.

20 On Dreyer’s Thorvaldsen (1949) and Alekan’s L’Enfer de Rodin (1957), see Jacobs,
‘Carving cameras’.

21 John Read, ‘letter to Assistant Head Talks, Television, 18 October 1956’ Folder: BBC
Written Archives Centre (WAC), Caversham, TEL1/C/1494/1313A.

22 See Wyver, ‘Myriad mediations’.

23 John Read, ‘letter to Henry Moore, 23 October 1956’, WAC TEL1/C/1494/1313A.

24 John Read, ‘letter to Henry Moore, 16 July 1957’, WAC TEL1/C/1494/1313A.

25 John Read, ‘Filming A Sculptor’s Landscape’, Painter and Sculptor, Summer 1958, 4.

26 Jane Beckett and Fiona Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Beckett and Russell (eds), Henry
Moore: Critical Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 12.

27 Beckett and Russell, Henry Moore, 6.

28 Penelope Curtis and Fiona Russell, ‘Henry Moore and the post-war British landscape:
monuments and modern’, in Beckett and Russell (eds), Henry Moore, 140.
 Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape 179

29 Beckett and Russell, Henry Moore, 140.

30 Beckett and Russell, Henry Moore, 140.

31 On Operation Grapple, see the detailed Wikipedia entry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Operation_Grapple, accessed 10 June 2018; on the Windscale fire, see Lorna Arnold,
Windscale, 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992).

32 Robert Barstow, ‘Geometries of hope and fear: the iconography of atomic science and
nuclear anxiety in the modern sculpture of world war and nuclear Britain’, in Catherine
Jolivette (ed.), British Art in the Nuclear Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 63.

33 Catherine Jolivette, Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950s Britain (Abingdon: Ashgate,
2009), 59.

34 Gregory Salter, ‘Cold War at home: John Bratby, the self and the nuclear threat’, in
Jolivette (ed.), British Art in the Nuclear Age, 153.

35 Salter, British Art in the Nuclear Age, 155.

36 David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 274.

37 Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 276.

38 Jolivette, Landscape, Art and Identity, 2.

39 Katerina Loukopoulou, A Cultural History of Films on Art, Unpublished PhD. thesis,

School of Art, Film and Visual Media (Birkbeck College, University of London, 2010), 22.

40 Quoted in ‘P.L.’ [Peter Lennon], ‘Portrait maker’, 27.

180
 8
Creative process, material
inscription and Dudley
Shaw Ashton’s Figures in a
Landscape (1953)
LUCY REYNOLDS

Two circular forms of curved white marble sit in the sand under the rocky
arches of a cliff. Framed in close up, the angle of the camera exaggerates the
scale of these small sculptures so that they appear to dominate the view of the
Cornish coastline behind them. The solidity and stillness of the marble forms
counterpoint the agitated surf running beneath them, which, glimpsed through
small apertures carved into them, sets in motion a play of rhythmic relations
between contrasting and complementary surfaces and spaces. The spell of this
intense interplay of the organic and man-made is broken by the interposition
of one hand – then another – which lifts the smaller sculpture of the two, and
slots it into the hole within the larger. The hands pause, resting on the co-joined
sculptures, anonymous except for the punctuating rhythm of a further stone,
flat, dark and round, set into their owner’s ring.
It is a fleeting, if indelible, sequence in the 1953 film Figures in a Landscape,
and contains many of the distinctive features that the filmmaker Dudley Shaw
Ashton (1909–85) brings to his portrait of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

181
182 Art in the Cinema

Figure 8.1 Figures in a Landscape (Dudley Shaw Ashton, 1953). Digital still.
Courtesy of the British Film Institute.

It is striking that the artist’s hands upon the sculptures in the surf marks
Hepworth’s first appearance in the film, which begins with arresting images of
the Zennor peninsula in Cornwall in which a number of her sculptures – in
small groupings and in isolation – appear against its atmospheric cliffs,
standing stones and quarries. These unpeopled images of the landscape are
accompanied by the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes’ meditation on human
presence in the Cornish landscape, voiced by poet Cecil Day-Lewis, and to the
accompaniment of an original sound score by modernist composer Priaulx
Rainier. By situating Hepworth’s sculptures directly within the contours and
against the landmarks of Cornwall’s southern-most tip, where she had
famously established her St Ives studio, Shaw Ashton audaciously literalizes his
argument for the profound relationship between the artist’s work and its
Cornish context. Yet the artist and her sculptures embody not only the
influence of land on individual creative endeavour, but also reflect how the
film’s images of these figures in the landscape sought to project more widely
a cohesive vision of nationhood at a transitional time. Made on the cusp
of the country’s post-war regeneration, and the brink of a new modernity,
Shaw Ashton’s film is illuminating for how it encapsulates this uncertain
moment.
As Dudley Shaw Ashton’s most well-known film, Figures in a Landscape has
found most frequent reference within the framework of Hepworth scholarship,
rather than documentary film history. His studied framing of the worker could
 Creative Process, Material Inscription 183

be seen as out of step with the more free-wheeling expressions of everyday

experience portrayed by Lindsay Anderson, Lorenza Moretti and the new
generation of filmmakers associated to documentary forms in Britain’s
immediate post-war culture. Priaulx Rainier’s atonal score, the patrician voice-
over of Cecil Day-Lewis and the artful, Surrealist infused, juxtapositions of
Figures in a Landscape contrast starkly to the representations of working-class
culture in Anderson’s contemporaneous O Dreamland (1953), for example;
whose portrait of a seaside funfair was described by the critic Gavin Lambert
as ‘like a blow in the face’, which ‘assaults eye and ear with a rough-edged but
sharp-centred impression’.1 Rather, Figures in a Landscape could be seen to
ascribe to all the class bound, generational conventions which Anderson’s ‘Free
Cinema’ screenings, and the burgeoning new strain of realism in British arts
culture, from theatre and poetry to pop art, sought to eschew.
Yet, whilst the solemn didacticism of Figures in a Landscape might not
chime with the desire to document authentic experience sought by Andersen
or playwrights such as John Osbourne, it alludes to a more complex moment in
British film history than mere generational opposition. Figures in a Landscape
could be read as a potent reflection of how the cultural hiatus created by the
Second World War was to have repercussions on the art produced in the decade
that followed. Rendered dormant by five years of fighting, the Blitz and war-time
privations, it could be argued that the cultural canons of modernist form which
had dominated British cultural life and its institutions in the 1920s and 1930s,
still remained the primary co-ordinates for a cultural landscape utterly changed
in the war’s aftermath. Shaw Ashton’s focus on Hepworth reflects not only his
own investment in these pre-war touchstones, but also points to the role
assigned to artists such as Hepworth, who had a high profile before the war, to
act as agents of cultural regeneration in the decade that followed.

Ashton and Cornwall: landscape at stake

Despite a successful premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1954, Figures in a

Landscape was seen as a curiosity with which Hepworth herself remained
dissatisfied, in comparison to more prominent portrayals of her practice in
184 Art in the Cinema

film and television, in particular John Read’s 1961 documentary for the BBC,
Barbara Hepworth. Inga Fraser notes that the artist felt her ‘keen sense of scale
and sensitivity to movement’ was ‘distorted’ in Shaw Ashton’s film,2 and was
displeased with how Shaw Ashton’s interest in the representation of the creative
process overshadowed her artistic autonomy:

The portrayal of her sculpture was mediated via a combination of Shaw

Ashton’s visual focus on the uncanny, Rainier’s esoteric score, Hawkes’s
poetic narrative and Day-Lewis’s theatrical delivery [. . .] it is conceivable
that with these additional artistic contributions Hepworth felt her own
narrative and conception of sculpture too much compromised.3

Fraser’s observation certainly supports the privileging of process characteristic

of Shaw Aston, including the foregrounding of the film’s other elements such
as sound and commentary. Furthermore, as she argues, Figures in a Landscape
has ‘set the tone for future portrayals, especially in the emphasis on the
connection between her art and the Cornish landscape’ and as a result obscured
other potential readings of Hepworth’s work, particularly relating to the earlier
influences of international modernism.4
However, rather than seeing Figures in a Landscape as a summation of
Hepworth’s work to date, the film might be more fruitfully considered as a
reflection of the artist’s concerns at a particular, and potent, time in both her
practice as well as wider societal and national shifts. Both artist and filmmaker
experienced how landscape came to be at stake and was nationally asserted in
a different way from the previous era of international modernism in which
both were protagonists. And whilst Shaw Ashton’s focus on artist and landscape
might indeed be considered narrow, it is important to stress that this was
a period when Hepworth identified herself strongly with her Cornish
environment. In 1952 she clearly articulates this idea in an auto biographical
insert to the catalogue she developed on her work with Herbert Read. Setting
her observations chronologically between 1939 and 1946, which charted
her arrival and settlement in Cornwall, she describes herself as part of the
landscape, rather than an observer of it, writing eloquently of how: ‘From
the sculptor’s point of view one can either be the spectator of the object or the
object itself. I was the figure in the landscape.’5
 Creative Process, Material Inscription 185

Hepworth’s declaration suggests not only her own agency in positioning her
practice, but also why Shaw Ashton was drawn to her work in order to explore
a wider argument. Rather than standing apart from her environment as an
artistically autonomous presence, the camera inscribes Hepworth within the
landscape alongside her sculptures. Appearing first through her disembodied
hands, Shaw Ashton asserts Hepworth’s creative process as a sculptor and
stone carver, in order to position her as a point of artistic continuity within
Hawkes’ narrative of a landscape overwritten with centuries of human –
habitation and labour. Shaw Ashton’s images and Hawkes’ narrative reflect the
stabilizing role deployed for the British landscape in officially endorsed culture
at this transitional period in the early 1950s. The film brings to mind Robert
Burden’s observation on how images of landscape are used to allay and stabilize
times of national anxiety: ‘[at] moments in history when landscape needed to
represent something essentialist about the national culture – as nostalgia for
an imagined organic past or idyllic childhood (a symbolic regression); as
counterweight to an industrializing economy; as consolation for the horrors of
war’.6 In this way, Shaw Ashton’s film might thus be considered compelling, not
only for its unusual portrait of an artist at work in her environment but also for
its assertion of landscape as deeply and enduringly connected to creative
endeavour, in a reflection of the anxieties and sensitivities of a country for
whom notions of land, both domestic and international, were in crisis.
Other subjects of Shaw Ashton’s films from the 1950s, such as Henry
Moore’s sculpture Reclining Figure, situated outside the new UNESCO
building in Paris, which he made for the British Film Institute (BFI) in 1958,
for example, or 1959’s Coventry Cathedral, which documents the bombed
cathedral’s reconstruction, reflect the tentative construction of a post-war
culture then at work across Europe, where official endorsements of culture by
established artists such as these might be harnessed as hopeful messages for
future transnational unities. Yet again, in his desire to explore more profound
questions about creative labour, Shaw Ashton goes beyond official narratives
of regeneration. In Coventry Cathedral, with its pans across Basil Spence’s
architectural drawings and the artist Graham Sutherland at work on
preliminary drawings for its tapestry, the camera becomes a tool for his more
profound and enduring enquiry into the material processes of the maker.
186 Art in the Cinema

Like many of the films about artists and art works which Shaw Ashton
would go on to make for cultural institutions such as the BFI and the Arts
Council in the decades that followed, Figures in a Landscape shows an unusual
sensitivity to creative process rather than artistic persona. His emphasis on the
former is borne out in the first sentence of the ‘Preliminary Rough Outline’ for
the film, which Shaw Ashton proposed in 1952 to the British Film Institute’s
newly established Experimental Film Fund, when he writes that ‘the film
should be experimental in its approach to the modern movement in art.
Initially it should be so in its method of showing the influences which have
been at work on the creative mind of the artist.’7 Poetically epitomized as the
sculptor’s hand reaches into the surf to rest on her sculptures in Figures in a
Landscape and apparent across a body of films on artists as various as Francis
Bacon (Francis Bacon: Paintings 1944–1962, 1963) and Nicolas Poussin
(Poussin – The Seven Sacraments, 1968), Shaw Ashton used a number of
experimental strategies, such as visual and musical counterpoint and
unconventional framing, in his attempt to understand what motivated and
determined the creative methods in question. In his first letter to Jacquetta
Hawkes in 1952, concerning her engagement to conceive the script for Figures
in a Landscape, Shaw Ashton puts this point clearly, writing that: ‘The film is
not intended to be in any way didactic but is rather a form of film form on
landscape and its reference to the work of one particular artist.’8 With this in
mind, Figures in a Landscape and the art documentaries which followed it
until his final 1976 film, Sam Smith: Genuine England,9 might be considered
discursive rather than didactic, asserting the process of art making as a complex
dialogic, and active, enquiry between the artist and their environment. Echoing
documentary forebears such as Alberto Cavalcanti or John Grierson, Shaw
Ashton frequently commissioned original sound scores and scripts to heighten
his cinematographic experimentation, seeing the collaborative consultations
with Hawkes and from experimental composers such as Rainier as bringing
further creative dimension to his portraits.
Like Shaw Ashton, and despite the prominence afforded them through
official channels such as the 1951 Festival of Britain or the Venice Biennale,
Hepworth and her contemporaries Henry Moore and Sutherland, could also
be understood as increasingly out of step with a new post-war mood at odds
 Creative Process, Material Inscription 187

with the officially sanctioned optimism that the Festival attempted to assert. At
the same time that the sculptures of Moore or Hepworth were being reframed
as post-war embodiments of a universal symbolism by state-endorsed
institutions, another generation of artists were perceiving them as elitist and
establishment. For the artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, and the
critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham, meeting as the Independent
Group at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in 1952, the popular forms
of burgeoning commercial culture, from comic books to advertisements, were
far more relevant to the art of post-war experience than the mute formalism of
Hepworth or Moore’s sculpture.

Ashton’s films on art and the

development of Figures

Whilst Figures in a Landscape may have contributed, even negatively, to

Hepworth scholarship, Shaw Ashton’s wider film corpus has gained little
recognition within film historical discourse. A reason for his marginality could
be partly attributed to his lack of visibility, as a filmmaker operating outside
both the professional canon of the British film industry and its London apex.
His filmmaking experience was honed not in film school but through his
engagement in Britain’s wide-spread and established amateur film culture in
the years leading up to the Second World War. Documentary was an
increasingly popular form at Film Society screenings throughout the 1930s,
which Jamie Sexton relates to the ‘growing (if never total) disillusion with
commercial cinema’.10
In 1938, Shaw Ashton won an award from Amateur Cine World for the short
film Land Fall, which recorded the construction of the modernist house he
commissioned from the architect Oliver Hill in 1938 at Poole in Dorset.
Amateur Cine World was one of the key publications to reflect the growing
regional spread of the film club movement, aided by the establishment of the
Institute of Amateur Cinematographers in 1932 and the Independent Film-
makers Association in 1933. That the latter’s stated aim was to ‘bring together
and assist those who are interested in the production of Documentary,
188 Art in the Cinema

Experimental, and Educational films’11 underlines the documentary and fact-

based focus of many amateur filmmakers such as Shaw Ashton, and also
reflects the influence of Soviet and British documentary films by Basil Wright,
John Grierson, Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, which they were
encountering in the pages of amateur film publications and at film society
screenings. Based in Dorset rather than London, Shaw Ashton’s exposure to
this culture came through the Bournemouth Film Society, particularly during
and in the years following the war.
Whilst he was not involved in the London milieu of Ivor Montagu’s Film
Society and other well-known screening spaces for alternative cinema form,
Shaw Ashton did, however, benefit from the regional networks of amateur film
enthusiasts, which had spread since the 1930s, and from the connections he
made through them socially. For example, Thorold Dickinson, an influential
figure in post-war British cinema for his work with Ealing Studios as an editor
and director, and later as the pioneer of film studies at the Slade School of Art,
became a close friend, having taken a cottage not far from Land Fall. Thorold’s
later position as Chief of Film Services for UNESCO from 1956–60, for
example, undoubtedly had a bearing on Shaw Ashton’s 1959 commission to
depict Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure outside the UNESCO building.
At the same time, Land Fall, the subject of Shaw Ashton’s winning film,
indicates his strong affiliations to the wider currents of modernism in arts and
design, which allowed him, as a young man of means with a family trust fund,
to commission Hill to build his house, having first considered and consulted
Wells Coates – later responsible for the Royal Festival Hall – and Berthold
Lubetkin. According to the Pevsner guide to The Buildings of England, Shaw
Ashton’s film of his house – in ‘the International Modern Style [. . .] made the
career of the owner’.12 In Land Fall’s carefully composed frames of workers
shifting bricks and rendering plaster, and pans across the completed house’s
sinuous modernist planes, it is possible to trace the twin co-ordinates of
modernism in the visual arts and design and the politically infused
experimentalism of the pre-war era documentary, which would later inform
Shaw Ashton’s documentary films on art and, in the case of Hepworth and her
sculpture, the depiction of modernist forms situated within the British
landscape.
 Creative Process, Material Inscription 189

Pevsner’s allusion to Shaw Ashton’s future direction reflects the career in

art documentary which he went on to establish, often but not exclusively
through his production company Samaritan films, the credits of which first
appear on his 1961 visual improvisation on Claude Debussy’s composition, La
Cathedrale Engloutie, made for the Marlborough Gallery with sponsorship
from the Arts Council. It was the devaluations of his trust fund stock following
the war, which catapulted Shaw Ashton from amateur to professional, driven
by the need to turn creative interest into commercial gain, beginning with
public safety information films for children, such as Trouble in Toy Town
(1946). However, rather than moving into the more commercial realms of
advertising or the film industry, he built a career close to his amateur interest
and knowledge in the visual arts, taking advantage of the buoyant post-war
film funding becoming available through public bodies and institutions
such as the British Film Institute and the Arts Council of Great Britain,
for whom he documented the lives and work of artists and architects as various
as Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Francis Bacon. However, the early promise
of the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund as a regular source of funding did
not materialize. As the decade progressed the fund moved away from its
originally stated intention to document films about artists, and to reflect the
educational aims of amateur film production, towards more varied short
film forms such as experimental fiction.13 Working in a freelance capacity
and predominately in the small field of educational arts documentary for a
cinema context, rather than the burgeoning televisual arts programming
strands then becoming more established, with the arts magazine series
Monitor (BBC 1958–65) and high profile television arts commentators such
as the art historian Kenneth Clark, Shaw Ashton’s career was based on
pitching ideas to arts commissioners such as the Arts Council and the
educational independents which had emerged from the government-
sponsored Crown Film Unit, such as the Blackheath Film Unit. These
attempts would, as his son Peter Shaw Ashton recalls, occasionally ‘hit a
bullseye’.14 The precariousness of finding funding to pursue his film projects
accounts for Shaw Ashton’s relatively small output compared to other
filmmakers, such as John Read, who was also producing documentaries on
artists in the post-war period.
190 Art in the Cinema

Ashton and Hepworth: geometry and abstraction

Shaw Ashton was clearly attracted to Hepworth’s method of working marble,

wood or granite, seeing her approach as a profound enquiry into how to
represent objects in space, at the same time that he identified it with pre-war
modes of modernism. Hepworth was committed to overturning previous
conventions of sculptural practice that employed maquettes and models,
choosing instead to adhere to the modernist maxim of ‘truth to materials’
and to carve directly into stone. Her slow and incremental chiselling away
at the stone or wood’s surfaces, manifested the desire to understand the
material’s intrinsic nature, and the spatial dynamics it occupied. Through his
representations of Hepworth in the act of carving, Shaw Ashton’s intent was to
offer an insight into the often mystified processes of creative labour, which are
frequently divorced from the completed art object. His imperative, as I have
argued, finds its roots in earlier representations of labour encountered through
film society culture, seen not only in the films of the Soviet avant-garde, such
as Vertov, but the portrayal of the British working class by the indigenous
documentary movement of the GPO film unit: Alberto Cavalcanti’s Coal Face
(1935), for example, or Humphrey Jennings’ 1939 Spare Time, which presented
a portrait of Britain at work and leisure. Figures in a Landscape makes the case
that processes of creative practice such as Hepworth’s operate under the same
dynamic and are worthy of equal attention to their working-class counterparts.
First represented through the agency of her hands, as signifiers of her creative
instrumentalization, Hepworth is framed throughout the film in haptic
attachment to her sculptures; proximately positioned either in the act of
chiselling or touching, and represented in an ongoing engagement with them
through Shaw Ashton’s use of textural close-ups and assertive fixed frames.
Hepworth’s focus on direct carving into her material drew on skills that she
had learnt during time spent in Italy on a travelling scholarship in the late
1920s, and her interest in this way of working was encouraged by close
friendships with European artists from Constantin Brancusi and Piet
Mondrian to Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp, who had briefly made
London – and significantly in the case of her close friendship with Nam Gaubo,
Cornwall, their home in the decade to come. Reinforced by her connection to
 Creative Process, Material Inscription 191

influential figures in the British modernist firmament like Herbert Read, as

well as her second husband Ben Nicolson, her affinities, like those of Shaw
Ashton, were to the international modernist movement that had its ascendancy
during the 1930s. Furthermore, she was highly instrumental in the discourses
circulating around abstraction and the Constructivism movement, seen in her
involvement as the designer of the 1937 publication Circle: International
Survey of Constructivist Art, which featured the work of artists, architects and
designers including Le Corbusier, Brancusi and László Moholy-Nagy. Whilst
Hepworth had long considered the landscape around her as key to the forms
and formulations of her sculptures, her enquiry into her relationship to
landscape intensified following her move, on the eve of war, from London to St
Ives in the Penwith peninsula of Cornwall in 1939. It was here that she began
to look more closely at the corporeal and spatial dynamics of human
relationships to landscape and to identify herself as the ‘figure in the landscape’,
writing in 1946 of how: ‘first and last there is the human figure which in the
country becomes a free and moving part of a greater whole’.15 The need that she
writes of in 1952 to ‘discover some absolute essence in sculptural terms giving
the quality of human relationships’ (36) can be glimpsed in the relational
interplay of tension and harmony between grouped spheres, forms and taut
strings, presented in the film in works such as Wave (1943), Conoid, Sphere
and Hollow II (1937) or Group 1 (1952).
Certainly, as Catherine Jolivette has argued very cogently, the figure in the
landscape, particularly through the sculptures of her close contemporary
Henry Moore, to whom she was compared throughout her career – often
disparagingly – was figured as female, and linked to a spurious relationship
between the land and an essentialised female body as signifier of nature. As
Jolivette contends:

Her work, though far more concerned with geometry and abstraction than
Moore’s, was frequently discussed in terms of the sculptor’s gendered body,
and in relation to her maternity, which in turn, was construed to grant her
a closer connection to nature and to the land.16

Rather, Jolivette suggests an affinity to the landscape that was for Hepworth
‘emotional and intellectual, not corporeal’,17 and I would argue that Shaw
192 Art in the Cinema

Ashton’s film is consciously engaged in making the argument for a tangible

connection between sculpted matter and geological matter facilitated by,
rather than situated in, her body. His use of comparative proximity between
artist and landscape is less concerned with the artist’s gendered body, than in
an attempt to investigate and convey through the medium of the camera how
external, contingent and localized features of the Cornish landscape have a
significant role in the development of her work. In his outline to the BFI, he
writes how its first section should be devoted to: ‘the influences of landscape,
natural form and the continuous Cornish feeling for shape, light and texture
and how these influences have been heightened and turned into a form of
visual poetry by the artist”18
Indeed, the cut that follows Shaw Ashton’s images of her marble sculptures
in the sand brings the viewer into abrupt confrontation with the eye of the
sculptor, gazing back at them through an aperture of her own making, carved
out of the wooden centre of the 1949 sculpture Lyric Form. Carrying the viewer
from the open spaces inside Hepworth’s sculpture to the eye of the artist
herself, Shaw Ashton’s self-reflexive choreography of images possesses a
Vertovian resonance. But, looking beyond its Kino Eye allusions, Shaw Ashton’s
film also makes the argument that sculpture too can be an instrument for
seeing more closely, throwing into relief the environment around it through its
equivalent, or contrasting, surfaces and shapes. Resting on sand rather than a
plinth, Hepworth’s sculptures in the surf also assert a Surrealist incongruity.
Indeed, Shaw Ashton refers directly in his preliminary outline to ‘the deliberate
placing of her figures in the natural landscape giving something of the surprise
of a Surrealist painting’.19 It is telling that he uses the word ‘surprise’ rather than
shock; for the challenge to the viewer is not imparted by the slitting of an eye,
but by the confident authorial gaze of the artist, asserting her creative presence
as she looks back into the camera.
Figures in a Landscape’s use of striking juxtapositions references a Surrealism
more akin to British contemporaries such as filmmaker and artist Humphrey
Jennings and painter Paul Nash than European counterparts such as Breton or
Buñuel. Nash’s nationally distinct version of Surrealism during the 1930s and
1940s strongly engaged with the incongruities of forms in the landscape, a
motif which was to be continued in a more emotive strain by artists of the so
 Creative Process, Material Inscription 193

called neo-romantic school during and in the aftermath of the war, such as
Graham Sutherland or John Minton. In one of the few contemporaneous
articles on the film in a 1954 issue of Architectural Review, Reyner Banham
makes reference to Nash’s famous 1935 assertion of ‘a statue in a ditch or the
middle of a ploughed field’, to argue for the Surrealist shock tactic of
incongruous juxtaposition in the film, as a means through which the viewer
may see both landscape and sculpture anew. He writes that ‘the object itself
becomes far more provocative than it would be in a man-made setting while
the relative values of all the other objects in the landscape are resolved and
altered’.20 Yet, in Figures in a Landscape, I would argue that the altered spatial
relations between form and landscape, which Banham refers to as ‘a kind
of field of aesthetic force’,21 are opened up to a more complex set of reciprocities
than that offered by Surrealist counterpoint; one in which the artist and
cinematographer (Shaw Ashton himself) act as dynamic agents of interaction
between sculpture and its setting. Developing further on her notion of being
a figure in a landscape, Hepworth herself spoke of how ‘every sculpture
contained to a greater or lesser degree the ever-changing forms and contours
embodying my own response to a given position’.22 In wooden works such as
Pelagos (1946) and Wave (1944) – both depicted in the film – we can, according
to Chris Stephens, see this reflected as ‘a sense of tension, of energy held in
equilibrium’,23 which expresses this phenomenological exchange. Positioned

Figure 8.2 Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture Wave, as featured in Figures in a

Landscape (Dudley Shaw Ashton, 1953). Digital still. Courtesy of the British Film
Institute.
194 Art in the Cinema

against Cornwall’s tin mines, shorelines and megalithic stones through the
camera’s shifting alignments of scale, light, distance, view and contour, Shaw
Ashton is able to make a more nuanced argument for the potency of the
sculptural form, beyond mere comparative contrast.
For, to return to Hepworth’s point about the human figure ‘as a free and
moving part of the whole’, the case that Shaw Ashton makes, along with
Hepworth and the other contributors to the film’s conception and realization,
is for the human being not as separated out from the contours of the
landscape but greatly implicated in it, historically, socially and politically.
Shaw Ashton’s focus on land and landscape, and his choice of Hawkes and
Hepworth as its interlocutors, reflects how it was a subject very much at
stake in the cultural discourse of the period. The representation of Britain
through its landscape, which had helped to promote the notion of a cohesive
national identity during the war, and which was asserted at regenerative
projects such as the 1951 Festival of Britain, was itself being eroded by
geographical factors both domestic and international. Britain’s territorial
dominance abroad was increasingly in question as more parts of the empire
asserted their independence or marked new immigrations into the country.
At the same time, the recent ravages and ruination of bomb damage was
still markedly visible across the country as the slow process of rebuilding
began. Territorial metaphors, always conflicted in British history and
culture, thus took on new significance for a country still uncertainly held in
post-war recovery, and finding, as Jolivette notes, that, due to unfolding
events abroad and conditions at home: ‘the very significations of nationhood
and a collective British identity were subject to examination and revision’.24
Furthermore, the catastrophic effects of atomic power wielded at Nagasaki
and Hiroshima brought a new dimension of anxiety to the image of landscape
as a space of desolation and destruction beyond Britain’s domestic bomb
damage, imbuing it with a fragility and vulnerability in the face of more
widespread forms of atomic annihilation. The anguished sculptures by artists
such as Reg Butler could be seen as responses to this global precarity, heralded
by Herbert Read on the advent of the show of sculptures in which they were
included at the 1952 Venice Biennale as representative of the ‘geometry of fear’.
As Robert Burstow observes:
 Creative Process, Material Inscription 195

Coming at a moment when the ideological conflict of the Cold War had
been transformed into military confrontation in Korea and increased risk
of nuclear warfare, Read’s memorable phrase slipped into the discourse of
post-war British sculpture, shifting the associations of ‘geometry’ away from
the Constructive art of Utopian Socialism (familiar to regular Biennale
visitors from Hepworth’s 1950 exhibit) towards an Expressionist art of
dystopian anxiety.25

National narratives: the film’s reception

Rather than endorse these reflections of nuclear anxiety, official culture

countered the ‘geometry of fear’ with alternative narratives connecting British
identity to its geography. Contemporaneous to the production and conception
of the film, the timing of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, for example,
signalled the stability of sovereignty over Britain’s increasingly fragmented
international territories. The 1951 Festival of Britain also asserted the image of
land as a national signifier of continuity, endurance and solidity against the
backdrop of nuclear crisis. In displays such as ‘Britain at Land’ and ‘the Living
World’, geological and archaeological exhibits and information helped to
reinforce territorial identifications between the British people and their land,
fabricated through a narrative of its geography as an ancient and enduring
habitation.
Made between 1952 and 1953 when these concerns at home and abroad
were at their apex, Figures in a Landscape also offers a compelling reflection of
how images of land and art might be used to allay such fears of annihilation.
The timeless stability, which official culture had associated to Hepworth’s
sculptures, was further determined by their placement in corresponding
patterns and contours of landscape also designated as symbols of stability,
through their archaic reference to Cornish myth and history. Shaw Ashton’s
choice of the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes as ‘ideal’ to write the commentary
also reinforced this narrative of Cornish land, particularly since she was
responsible for the Land exhibitions at the Festival of Britain and thus had a
role in profoundly influencing the post-war narrative of social cohesion based
196 Art in the Cinema

on notions of national terrain. Hawkes was a well-known public intellectual in

British culture at the time, she had popularized archaeology through her
television appearances, such as the quiz series Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. Most
significantly, her best-selling book A Land (1951), a lyrical chronicle of Britain’s
geographical development and the human role in its formation, had caught the
public imagination with its timely argument for the continuities across time
between the British people and their environment.
It was her poetic, yet accessible, language that Shaw Ashton wished to
engage. But importantly, her argument for the peopled histories of the land, as
much inscribed with myth and culture, as by geographic sedimentation,
echoed back to the resonant figure in the landscape shared by Hepworth and
himself. In the suggestive and alliterate embellishments of her script, she
alludes to earlier figures of ‘ancient pagans’ in the landscape: ‘the granite knew
the feel of its crystalline surface from the touch of their fingers. There were
figures in the landscape’.26 Hawkes started to develop her script at the end of
1952, guided by the footage that Shaw Ashton had already shot; and a close
bond developed between them.
The South African composer Priaulx Rainier, known for her spare, experimental
scores and also with a residence in St Ives, was not Shaw Ashton’s first choice for
the film, as Hawkes had been.27 She became involved through her close friendship
with Hepworth, for whom she had composed in the past. As correspondence
shows, Rainier became a significant point of communication between Shaw
Ashton, Hawkes and an increasingly disengaged Hepworth. Hepworth had not
only displayed concerns about the wording of Hawkes’ script in the final months
of production, but was also suffering a series of personal tragedies: this included
the break-up of her marriage to Nicolson, but more significantly, the death of her
eldest son in a plane crash while serving in the Korean War in early 1953. Rainier
worked closely with Hawkes and Ashton to develop the score in dialogue with
Hawkes’ script and in response to Shaw Ashton’s images. Her attention to the
balance and rhythm between image, voice and music is apparent in a letter to
Hawkes of March 1953, when she writes of how:

Yesterday I saw the film twice with Dudley reading the script as far as he
was able. The shortened phrases in the new version are much better leaving
 Creative Process, Material Inscription 197

space to absorb visually [. . .] This showed one how fragmentary sound

should be except in long unbroken sequences. I am hard at it now.28

Following the addition of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis’ voice-over commentary,

the film was finished in time to launch as the British short film entry for the
fourteenth Venice Film Festival (20 August to 4 September 1953), at the same
time inaugurating the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund, as its first production.
Despite this early visibility, and the endorsement of key figures in British film
and art culture such as Edgar Anstey and Roland Penrose on the accompanying
BFI publicity, beyond Reyner Baynam’s sustained consideration in Architectural
Review, the film garnered few further reviews outside the amateur film press.29
Information surviving in the BFI archives suggests that, beyond its screening
at the Venezuela Film Festival the following year, Figures in a Landscape relied
on regional educational circuits for its distribution and received little further
attention until more recent curatorial and scholarly attention in a new
millennium.30
The reasons for the lack of visibility at the time of its making for either the
film or its filmmaker in the intervening years return us to its author’s lack of
purchase and provincialism amongst film industrial networks, at the same
time that the formal experimentations of both filmmaker and artist as
appearing increasingly out of step with the concerns of a society and culture
looking forward after the privations of war time and its aftermath. As I have
observed, the film reflects thus the cultural hiatus in which it was conceived,
where pre-war modernism was pressed into the service of bolstering
regeneration efforts and Cold War fears. However, with hindsight, Figures in a
Landscape functions as a rich repository for the conflicting ideas around
culture and national identity playing out across Cornwall’s idealized landscape.
Already dated at its release, Hawkes’ grandiose narrative of the land’s temporal
inscriptions and its historic continuities now finally reveal an archival potency
on retrospective viewing. Read beyond a staged formalism out of step with
new freedoms, the audacious materialism of Hepworth’s situated sculptures
also takes on new weight.
But even as Figures in a Landscape may seem out of time, it is also prescient
of how Shaw Ashton, Hepworth and Hawkes’ engagement with questions of
198 Art in the Cinema

the landscape might shift from a celebration of historical potency to one of

environmental urgency. For Hepworth, the ‘war ended a certain idealism’ and,
like Hawkes, she was ‘a passionate advocate’ for post-war social reconstruction.
Revelations of the Holocaust and Hiroshima caused ‘the relationship of the
individual to their social and natural environment’, to become as Christopher
Stephens notes ‘an overriding concern’,31 for Hepworth. All of the film’s
protagonists were later to become involved with the anti-nuclear activism
precipitated by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament later founded by
Hawkes and her husband J.P. Priestly. Despite not being an active participant
in the fighting,32 Shaw Ashton, as his son remembers, was also profoundly
politicized by revelations of war-time atrocity, and its atomic aftermath.
Whether in Figures . . . or his later films on Bacon, Mantegna or Sam Smith,
Shaw Ashton’s politics were implicit within the experimental rationale of his
filmmaking, and his enduring interest in creative instrumentalization.
However, there is no doubt that, in tandem with Hawkes and Hepworth, he
identified himself as the figure in the landscape, finding in this position a
resonant space from which to respond and reflect the political conditions of a
Britain in transition.

Notes
1 Mark Cousins and Kevin Macdonald, Imagining Reality (London: Faber and Faber,
1996), 212.

2 Inga Fraser, ‘Media and Movement: Barbara Hepworth beyond the Lens’, in Penelope
Curtis and Chris Stephens (eds), Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for the Modern World
(London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 78.

3 Fraser, ‘Media and Movement’, 78.

4 Inga Fraser, ‘Hepworth on Film’, in Tate Etc, 34 (Summer 2015), http://www.tate.org.uk/

context-comment/articles/hepworth-on-film (accessed 4 January 2018).

5 Barbara Hepworth, ‘The War, Cornwall, and Artist in Landscape’, in Herbert Read,
Barbara Hepworth Carvings and Drawings (London: Lund Humphries, 1952), 60.

6 Robert Burden, ‘Introduction: Englishness and Spatial Practices’, in Robert Burden and
Stephan Kohl, Landscape and Englishness (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2006), 24.

7 Dudley Shaw Ashton, ‘Preliminary Rough Outline Treatment for Proposed Film on the
Work of Barbara Hepworth’, Jacquetta Hawkes Archive, Bradford University, 1.
 Creative Process, Material Inscription 199

8 Letter from Dudley Shaw Ashton to Jacquetta Hawkes (4 September 1952), Jacquetta
Hawkes Archive, Bradford University.

9 Sam Smith: Genuine England was commissioned by the Arts Council and the Crafts
Advisory Committee for BBC2’s Arena arts series, on the occasion of an exhibition of
the wood sculptor Sam Smith.

10 Jamie Sexton, Alternative Film Culture in Interwar Britain (Exeter: University of Exeter
Press, 2008), 104.

11 ‘Notice of Formation of Independent Film-Makers Association’, Cinema Quarterly, 2, 1

(Autumn 1933): 70, quoted and footnoted in Sexton, 106.

12 John Newman and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Dorset (London:
Penguin Books, 1972), 337.

13 For an in-depth study of the BFI Experimental Film Fund, see Michele Pierson,
‘Amateurism and Experiment: The BFI’s Experimental Film Fund (1952–1966)’, in The
Moving Image, 5, 1 (2005): 68–94 and Christophe Dupin, ‘The BFI and Film
Production: Half a Century of Innovative Independent Film-Making’, in Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith and Christophe Dupin (eds), The British Film Institute, the Government
and Film Culture, 1933–2000 (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press,
2012).

14 Interview between Peter Shaw Ashton and the author, 30 November 2017.

15 Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth Carvings and Drawings, 280.

16 Catherine Jolivette, Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950s Britain (Abingdon: Ashgate
Publishing, 2009), 64.

17 Jolivette, Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950s Britain, 53.

18 Dudley Shaw Ashton, ‘Preliminary Rough Outline Treatment for Proposed Film
on the Work of Barbara Hepworth’, Jacquetta Hawkes Archive, Bradford University,
1952, 2.

19 Shaw Ashton, ‘Preliminary Rough Outline Treatment for Proposed Film on the Work
of Barbara Hepworth.

20 Banham, Reyner, ‘Object Lesson’, Architectural Review CXV, 689 (May 1954): 404.

21 Reyner, ‘Object Lesson’, 406.

22 Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth Carvings and Drawings, 60.

23 Chris Stephens, ‘Landscape Sculpture’, in Chris Stephens (ed.), Barbara Hepworth:

Centenary (London: Tate, 2003), 65.

24 Jolivette, Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950s Britain, 16.

25 Robert Burstow, ‘Geometries of Hope and Fear: The Iconography of Atomic Science
and Nuclear Anxiety in the Modern Sculpture of World War and Cold War Britain’, in
Catherine Jolivette (ed.), British Art in the Nuclear Age (Routledge: London, 2014), 53.
200 Art in the Cinema

26 Jacquetta Hawkes, working copy of script for Figures in a Landscape, Jacquetta Hawkes
Archive, Bradford, 1953, 3.

27 According to Shaw Ashton’s Preliminary Rough Outline for the BFI, he was
considering James Butt for the composer, as recommended by the composer Imogen
Holst: ‘I suggest that the music should be written by James Butt, who had been very
highly recommended to me by Imogen Holst after I had made enquiries through the
Arts Council in connection with the Battersea film last year. I was also in touch with a
small chamber orchestra.’ Shaw Ashton, ‘Preliminary Rough Outline Treatment for
Proposed Film on the Work of Barbara Hepworth, 3.

28 Letter to Jacquetta Hawkes from Priaulx Rainier dated 17 February 1953, Jacquetta
Hawkes archive, Bradford University.

29 See Register of Releases in The Film User, March 1954.

30 It found new visibility as part of the Arts Council funded LUX touring film
programme, curated by Lucy Reynolds, entitled Describing Form, which toured
nationally to the Henry Moore Institute, Tate Britain, Mead Gallery, Kettles Yard,
Spacex, New Art Centre, Roche Court, Hull Film Festival, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff,
Outpost Gallery, Norwich between 2005–2006.

31 Chris Stephens, ‘The Quality of Human Relationships’, in Chris Stephens (ed.), Barbara
Hepworth: Centenary (London: Tate, 2003), 35.

32 Due to his severe asthmatic condition, Shaw Ashton was not able to fight in the Second
World War and served as a home guard in the Dorset area.
 9
Neoplasticism and cinema:
Ilya Bolotowsky’s
experimental films on art
HENNING ENGELKE

In the late 1950s, the artist Ilya Bolotowsky shot a film at Leo Castelli’s gallery
on East 77th Street in New York. The scene was the elegant, and in its time
quite famous, spiral staircase leading up to the exhibition space. A dancer in
tights, captured from various angles, performs on the stairs, adapting her
movements to the curved shape of the architectural structure. Castelli’s face, in
close up, comes into view. More people appear, climbing up and down the
stairs, others sit on the chequered tiles at the bottom. At some point, a prismatic
lens splits up the image. The spiral curve of a Nautilus shell, turning around its
own axis, is superimposed over images of the staircase. Rotating ever more
rapidly, the view from the top of the stairs is eventually converted into an
abstract spiral-shape. It is as if the gallery space – at that time an important
venue for a rapidly changing artworld – were transformed in the image
of Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nu descendant un escalier no. 2 (1912) and
his film Anémic cinéma (1926). Some shots, on the other hand, seem to
undermine the aura of high-art in a kind of obscure irony: spliced in at the
beginning of the film, we see home movie-style footage of a college graduation
ceremony.1

201
202 Art in the Cinema

Poised between historical document, artistic hommage, home movie and

cinematic experiment, this short and probably unfinished film, titled The
Nautilus Shell, condenses central elements of Ilya Bolotowsky’s filmmaking:
the combination of aesthetic exploration with an insider’s record of the 1950s
art world, happening-like improvization oscillating between sincerity and
irony. The odd footage at the beginning may well have ended up on the reel by
accident, but its ironic effect still matches the playful approach of other works.
Bolotowsky’s films surprised many of his contemporaries, familiar with the
strict geometric order of his paintings. Following the example of Piet Mondrian,
but vastly extending the latter’s primary colour scheme, he sought to evoke in
his paintings ‘a feeling of timeless harmony and dynamic equilibrium’, emerging
from the tensions between strictly non-figurative, rectangular colour blocks.2
The free-wheeling aesthetic exploration, wealth of art historical allusion, loose
narrative structures and representational imagery of his films seemed
irreconcilable with the controlled minimalism of the paintings. Commenting
on this contradiction, the experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek described

Figure 9.1 Ilya Bolotowsky, The Nautilus Shell (c. 1957–58). Courtesy of Andrew
Bolotowsky.
 Neoplasticism and Cinema 203

Figure 9.2 Leo Castelli appearing in Ilya Bolotowsky’s The Nautilus Shell
(c. 1957–58). Courtesy of Andrew Bolotowsky.

Bolotowsky as ‘a marvelous example of an extremely rigid geometric painter

who makes the most romantic nineteenth-century movies’.3 Bolotowsky
himself suggested that filmmaking helped him to keep ‘all irrelevant literary,
representational, romantic, and surrealist elements’ out of his paintings.4
This remark does not necessarily mean that Bolotowsky considered
filmmaking a mere auxiliary to painting or an outlet for improper artistic
urges. He may equally have regarded painting and filmmaking as
complementary activities. The sheer quantity of films and the amount of work
invested in them supports this view. From 1953 to 1970, Bolotwsky made more
than forty films, ranging from very brief, almost unedited records of encounters
with artist colleagues and friends, exhibition openings, drawing classes and
museum visits to more elaborate films. He described his cinematic work as
consisting of ‘creative, experimental black-and-white films and documentaries
of artists’.5 Open to aesthetic conceptions other than his own, he filmed painters
like George L.K. Morris, Jean Xceron, Balcomb Greene, Wolf Kahn, Alice
204 Art in the Cinema

Baber, and Milton and Sally Avery, but also, continuing through the 1950s and
1960s, sculptors Louise Nevelson, David Smith, Jose de Rivera or Ruth Asawa,
dancer and choreographer Midi Garth, the art dealer Sam Kootz and, twice,
Marcel Duchamp. Often the artists and their artworks are shown in the private
spaces of their homes and studios, occasionally Bolotowsky focuses on a
specific artwork and, in a few isolated instances, on the process of artistic
production. The more finished experimental films similarly rely on the
participation and collaboration of other artists, the dancer Yvonne Rainer
performs in Subways (1958), the painters Leon Polk Smith and Knut Stiles
appear in a number of films.
Viewed from today’s perspective, Bolotowsky’s films provide fascinating
glimpses into the mid-twentieth-century New York art world. They are not
straight ‘records’, though. Even Bolotowsky’s most simple ‘documentaries of
artists’ deploy cinematic devices such as multiple exposures, prismatic images,
deliberate out-of-focus shots and unusual camera angles. Sometimes he seems
to have used film as a kind of sketchpad to note down creative ideas resulting
from his encounters with artists.6 The longer works use similar techniques,
often to evoke mythological themes, as in Narcissus in a Gothic Mood (1960/64),
The Last Orpheus (1962) or the somewhat more enigmatic Metanoia (1961).
Rarely depicting artworks, except by allusion or quotation, they are nevertheless
‘about’ art in the sense that they engage, through cinematic myths, with artistic
concepts. These films, in particular, seem to reflect back on Bolotowsky’s own
work as a painter and his position within a changing artworld. After all, he
continued to paint in a non-objective mode that had been deemed ‘obsolete’
since he adopted it in the mid 1940s. His paintings, while appreciated by
collectors and included in important museum collections, never received the
public attention given to his Abstract Expressionist colleagues, some of whom
he had known and worked with since the 1930s. It may be for this reason that
his films resist the idea of a linear chronology of styles that dominated modernist
discourse on art. But his cinematic work goes beyond the personal. Through
film, Bolotowsky was able to situate his painting – dedicated to ‘timeless’ formal
tensions and harmonies – in the context of a changing art world and changing
media. This becomes evident in The Nautilus Shell, where Duchamp’s already
canonized works – notably a ‘last’ painting evoking Eadweard Muybridge’s
 Neoplasticism and Cinema 205

proto-filmic chronophotographies and the film Anémic cinéma – quite literally

interfere with the current artistic business of Leo Castelli’s gallery.
What I wish to discuss in what follows is how film not only contrasts with
Bolotowsky’s painting – as he may seem to indicate in the above quote – but
also complements it, and is in some way important for his work as a painter.
Reflecting on painting and film not in abstract terms, but through concrete
aesthetic procedures, his films can, moreover, shed a light on the complex
interrelations between media, histories and artistic myths that have been
repressed in modernist discourse on art with its focus on medium specificity,
autonomy and, as Michael Fried claims, ‘presentness’.7 Although Bolotowsky’s
paintings aspired to a kind of absolute formal purity, his films show that even
at this extreme pole, painting was part of a larger system of image production
or, as David Joselit has termed it, an ‘interrelated image ecology’.8 It is in this
respect that his films, as I will argue in concluding, intersect and contrast with
the policies and histories of American art documentaries of the 1950s, shaped
by modernist conceptions of art and liberal subjectivity as well as integration
into programmes of democratic education and cultural diplomacy.

Encounters in the art world

Bolotowsky was already an established painter when he started to make films

in 1953. An emigrant from Russia, he had arrived in New York as an adolescent
with his parents in 1923 and subsequently studied at the National Academy of
Design. In the 1930s he became intensely involved, alongside artists such as
Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, with the American abstract painting
movement.9 For several years he worked for the Works Progress Administration
(WPA) Federal Arts Project, creating a number of abstract murals for public
buildings in New York such as the Williamsburg Housing Project (1936), the
Hall of Medical Sciences at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and the Chronic
Diseases Hospital (1941). His murals, like most of his easel paintings of this
time, drew on a somewhat eclectic but aesthetically efficient combination of
biomorphic shapes and diagonal lines (inspired, according to Bolotowsky, by
Russian Suprematism).10
206 Art in the Cinema

It was only after his military service in Alaska, and after Mondrian’s death in
1944, that he took up the Neoplasticist style that would shape the rest of his
career.11 Through his many contacts in the New York art scene he would have
been aware of the upcoming surge, manifesting itself in the work of Gottlieb,
Rothko, Arshile Gorky or Hans Hofmann, in more spontaneous forms of
abstraction. But he nevertheless staunchly adhered to geometric abstraction,
deepening the non-objective approach he had pursued since the 1930s. Some
of his colleagues from this time, like Harry Holtzman, Burgoyne Diller, Fritz
Glarner, Charmion von Wiegand and Leon Polk Smith, continued along
similar lines, which increasingly fell out of favour with the official art world.
From 1946 to 1948, Bolotowsky temporarily replaced Josef Albers, who was on
a leave of absence, as Head of the Art Department at the influential Black
Mountain College.12 This was certainly a prestigious position, but Bolotowsky’s
turn towards teaching, which became a constant preoccupation throughout
his career, also indicates the need to supplement his income from the sale of
paintings. Despite his renown as a painter, he never achieved the prominence
of his Abstract Expressionist colleagues and his art increasingly came to
occupy a place that fell outside the scope of standard accounts of art history on
the ‘rise of American painting’.13 From 1948 to 1957, he taught art at the
University of Wyoming in Laramie, but he stayed in contact with his colleagues
in New York, where he regularly exhibited at Grace Borgenicht Gallery and
where he returned from 1954 to 1956 for a stint as adjunct professor at
Brooklyn College.
Both the increasing predominance of Abstract Expressionism and his
teaching experiences formed a background for Bolotowsky’s filmmaking. A
grant for ‘experimental film work’ from the University of Wyoming Graduate
School in 1953 allowed him to make his first films.14 He started modestly on
8mm, filming a drawing class and a model, a visit to the Denver Art Museum
and his experiments with Duchamp-inspired spiral discs, rotating on a potter’s
wheel. His productivity and ambitions as a filmmaker increased during his
time at Brooklyn College when he was able to reconnect with his New York
colleagues. A substantial number of films from this period were made on the
occasion of his visits with artists friends, as if he wanted to capture on film his
encounters with people and artworks. Bolotwsky’s 1956 colour film on the
 Neoplasticism and Cinema 207

Figure 9.3 Ilya Bolotowsky David Smith (1956). Digital still. Courtesy of Andrew
Bolotowsky.

sculptor David Smith shows the famous steel sculptures outside Smith’s studio
in Bolton Landing alongside the artist at work, his home and his family.
The Dancer Midi Garth (1956) similarly combines shots – both in colour
and black-and-white – of quotidian actions inside Garth’s studio, with indoor
and outdoor dance scenes, sometimes by a lake, and views of the porch of a
house.
Rather than implying a connection between artistic creation and
surroundings, Bolotowsky’s loosely arranged shots with their intimacy and
spontaneity suggest an open, exploratory approach. A more conventional art
documentary like Herbert Matter’s Works of Calder (1950) seeks, for instance,
to explain Calder’s mobiles through comparison with natural objects near his
studio, waves rippling on a beach or leaves moving in the wind. Bolotowsky,
instead, appears to use film to record his perceptions and ideas, resulting from
the encounter with artists and their artworks. Representation merges with
reflections on art and film. Frequently, the sense of film as a means of aesthetic
exploration and heightened perception is supplemented by art historical
allusions that oscillate between seriousness, irony and obscure personal
humour. Setting the lens on infinity and only bringing into focus a rotating
metal sculpture at the very end of the single-shot Jose de Rivera (1958) creates
a cinematic pun on the sculptor’s preoccupation with ‘infinite’ bands of
208 Art in the Cinema

polished metal. In the black-and-white (and rather underexposed) Louise

Nevelson (1956) the sculptor ‘sits’ for her cinematic portrait in a way reminiscent
of James McNeill Whistler’s painting of his mother – Arrangement in Gray and
Black No. 1 (1871) – whose foregrounding of colour and tonalities played an
important role for American abstract painting. Superimposed images of
Nevelson’s studio and her sculptures do not so much cohere into some general
art historical comment or explanation, but rather explore multiple possibilities
of cinematic engagement with aesthetic perception. The intricate structures of
Nevelson’s sculptures are brought into dynamic interaction with each other,
forming an ‘arrangement in gray and black’ with an art historical reference of
the artist’s portrait. The colour film showing Duchamp in his studio on West
14th Street (1956) with his back mostly turned toward the camera, on the other
hand, hints at a shared sense of artistic irony.

Reflections on painting

Bolotowsky continued to make similar films on other artists until the

mid-1960s, but early on, he also began making longer and more ambitious
films. Drawing on some of the same techniques used in the shorter films, and
casting many artist friends, these films are mainly distinguished by their
suggestion of loose, but nevertheless evident fictional narratives and by people
assuming certain ‘roles’. The interplay of formal exploration and art historical
allusion, however, continues the approach of the shorter films. The Nautilus
Shell with its combination of staged performance and documentary footage
underlines this continuity. It is also noticeable in the 17-minute Fire Escapes
(1956) with its rich structure of references, aesthetic exploration and cinematic
reflection which merit closer scrutiny.
While in his short films Bolotowsky documented visits with artists, shooting
Fire Escapes, possibly his first 16mm film, provided him with the occasion for
assembling a group of artist friends along with family members. The cast
includes the fellow Neoplasticist painter Leon Polk Smith, the philosopher
Lucian Krukowski, the sculptor Michael Lekakis and the painter Knut Stiles, a
former student of Bolotowsky at Black Mountain College and a collaborator
 Neoplasticism and Cinema 209

on several of his films. The photographer and filmmaker Vladimir Telberg is

credited along with Bolotowsky as the creator of the ‘camera angles’. Telberg
is best known for his surrealist inspired photomontages, he was closely
associated with Anaïs Nin’s literary and artistic circle and he was also a member
of the short-lived but influential Independent Filmmakers Association whose
members included, among others, Maya Deren, Willard Maas, Marie Menken
and Nin’s husband Ian Hugo. Telberg’s expertise in creating multi-layered
images is evident in Fire Escapes, but his surrealist approach is transformed
through Bolotowsky’s specific engagement with art and art history.
Although the connection between scenes is loose, Fire Escapes hints, through
association and allusion, at a kind of narrative development. A recurring female
figure played by two different actresses, may even be regarded as something like
a protagonist. The film begins with a brief tilted view from a window onto flat
roofs and a fire escape landing, followed by prismatically distorted images,
reminiscent of Mondrian’s painting Composition With Lines (1917). The female
‘protagonist’, dressed in tights, climbs down the fire escape, with multiple
exposures of her body underlining the reference, again, to Duchamp’s Nu
descendant un escalier. For the next several minutes we see people walking up
and down flights of stairs, moving back and forth, passing each other, and
climbing over the handrails, all in a kind of choreographed pattern.
Human figures stand out against and merge with the intricate grid of the
architecture and its play of light and shadow. In-camera superimpositions,
tilted views and prismatic distortions enhance this effect, flattening the image
and creating a sense of spatial disorientation. Such abstraction then gives way
to more conventional images. As in early film comedies, multiple actions are
condensed within the space of a single shot – a man running around with an
umbrella, the ‘protagonist’ sunbathing, a boy carrying a bucket, a newspaper
drifting in the wind. Briefly, the film returns to the people on the fire escapes.
Towards the end, the female protagonist knocks on a door and miraculously
vanishes. In another reference to early cinema, this is achieved through a
substitution splice. Instead of the protagonist, we then see, in the very last
shots, another woman with a baby in her arms climbing up yet another flight
of stairs into the glaring sunshine. The end title ambiguously reads ‘Fire Escape’
rather than, as at the beginning, ‘Fire Escapes’.
210 Art in the Cinema

One might regard Fire Escapes as a treatise on the intertwined histories of

art and film: a passage leading through the geometric spaces of the modern
city, the semi-abstraction of city symphonies and cubism, surrealist collage
and the spaces of early movies, towards the sacred tranquillity of pure light –
what Bolotowsky called his striving ‘for the timelessness of Platonic ideas’.15 An
exclusive focus on such symbolic aspects, however, would neglect the film’s
irony and play, its happening-like openness, and its engagement with the
relationship of painting and film on an aesthetic level. The film’s ironic
approach is evident, for instance, in a shot, interrupting the opening stairs
sequence, of three men intently and somewhat confusedly looking at
something. This is revealed by a nearly abstract prismatic ‘reverse-shot’ to be
the curiously distorted action of the film itself.
If this seems like a comment on the confusion that abstract art often evoked,
the back-and-forth movement of the people within and across the actual grid-
pattern of the fire escapes hints at the balanced tensions of Bolotowsky’s
paintings themselves, even if in temporal succession and in the three
dimensional space of architectural diagonals. The virtual movement evoked in
the dynamic equilibrium of his paintings, in such scenes, becomes actual
movement. This transformation brings into focus problems associated with
the relationship between film and painting but also contradictory claims
inherent in Neoplasticism itself.16
When Bolotowsky evokes the grid patterns of his paintings in the structure
of fire escapes, or when he cinematically emulates paintings by Mondrian and

Figure 9.4 and 9.5. Ilya Bolotowsky Fire Escapes (1956). Digital still. Courtesy of
Andrew Bolotowsky.
 Neoplasticism and Cinema 211

Duchamp (a constant point of reference in his films from the 1950s), he lends
‘reality’ to abstract art in a way reminiscent of André Bazin’s observation that in
art documentaries ‘what is symbolic and abstract takes on the solid reality of a
piece of ore’.17 In one sense, he thereby affirms the distinction between film and
painting (appropriating Wilhelm Worringer’s art historical terms): the one
‘an art of empathy’ with an ‘eye that sees from nature’, the other an art of
conceptual ‘abstraction’.18 In another sense, however, Fire Escapes also presents
a ‘reality’ that is, at least in part, shaped by principles of abstract art that Rosalind
Krauss associates with ‘a paradigm or model for the antidevelopmental, the
antinarrative, the antihistorical’.19 One might think here of Mondrian’s belief,
emerging from his engagement with Theosophy and Kabbalah, that his
paintings revealed truths about the actual world.20 Apparently less mystically
inclined than Mondrian, Bolotowsky was nevertheless convinced that the
‘universal’ quality he sought to achieve, was ‘best expressed as a Platonic idea or
archetype of an ideal, harmonious relationship’.21
I will discuss Bolotowsky’s cinematic involvement with myth more
extensively in the next section. Fire Escapes, however, also presents the idea of
timelessness through narrative devices, the ‘antidevelopmental’ is inserted, one
could say, into a developmental – historical – structure. For Bolotowsky this
had a personal dimension. Fire Escapes creates a complex, but certainly not
arbitrary, web of interconnections between inner and outer space, chance and
order, film and painting, the sacred and the profane. It evokes not only multiply
layered spaces but also – in contradistinction to the idea of a linear passage –
heterogeneous temporalities. This, in turn, reflects back on Bolotwsky’s
criticism (at least in part biographically motivated) of the idea of art history as
a ‘one-goal development’, emerging from ‘the nineteenth-century idea of
progress’ that ‘may be responsible for the “tradition of the new” and the
resulting idea of “obsolescence in art”.’22

Myths of cinema and painting

When Bolotowsky wrote or spoke about his paintings, he usually described

them in matter-of-fact terms as solutions to aesthetic problems. References
212 Art in the Cinema

to spiritual dimensions, prominent in the writings of Mondrian, are sparse. In

his films, however, Bolotowsky sometimes went further. In an interview in
1974, Bolotowsky remarked that, in these films, ‘the plot develops out of the
visual elements and generally there’s some connection with some myth,
either a Greek myth, or some myth I adapt to fit my own interpretation’.23 Such
an orientation towards mythological structures and motifs was a common
feature of 1950s experimental film. The critic Parker Tyler, for instance,
regarded experimental film as a conscious reflection of the unconscious myths
of Hollywood cinema. Despite its capacity to represent ‘reality’, or rather
because of it, film seemed, as he stated in a symposium on ‘Symbolism, Myth
and Film’, particularly suited to depict symbolic worlds in which nothing ‘is
what it seems’, transforming real space into ‘abstract and imaginative space’.24
Although Bolotowsky kept a certain distance from the various groups and
factions of the experimental film scene in New York, he sometimes collaborated,
as mentioned above, with other filmmakers, and he was certainly familiar with
contemporary experimental film. He also personally knew Parker Tyler, who,
in his function as an art critic, had written appreciatively about his paintings.25
But while experimental film provided a model or template, Bolotowsky’s
engagement with myth also extended to his paintings. It may seem, as if he
coped with the split between spirituality and materialism – which Rosalind
Krauss regards as the core of the ‘schizophrenic’ structure of the grid in
modernist painting – by releasing in one medium what he needed to repress in
the other (as he seems to indicate in the aforementioned quote). Shifting from
one medium to another, however, simultaneously challenges the conceptions
of autonomy and medium specificity presupposed in Krauss’s modernist
conception of the grid.
Through the creation of myth, Metanoia, one of Bolotowsky’s most
ambitious and aesthetically successful films, explores such interrelationships
between film and painting, physical and spiritual reality. The film, shot in 1960
and completed in 1962, exists in two versions. The first one (also titled Positive
Negative) consists of a negative and a positive reel, each showing the complete
action. The second version, which was more widely shown, is entirely in the
negative. Made strange by the reversal of tonal values, the film depicts
arrangements of windows and doorways that appear as grey and black fields
 Neoplasticism and Cinema 213

Figure 9.6 Ilya Bolotowsky Metanoia (1961). Digital still. Courtesy of Andrew
Bolotowsky.

on a dirty white ground. These fields somewhat resemble the flat colour blocks
of Bolotowsky’s paintings, but they can also be recognized as parts of intricate
spatial structures.
Shooting in the vast interior of an abandoned brewery with collapsed floors
and precarious catwalks, Bolotowsky used semi-transparent mirrors to further
complicate spatial relations. People move through this inscrutable arrangement
of interlocking spaces – most prominently a male figure wearing an Eskimo
mask surrounded by a halo-like ring of irregularly shaped attachments.26
A small hooded figure opens a door, and the protagonist with the Eskimo
mask appears, his white silhouette standing out against the black doorway.
We then see him walking in measured steps, rising from the ground,
climbing through the disturbing architecture, balancing over an abyss or
suspending himself from a wall – his chest rising and falling with each breath.
Other figures appear and disappear, often in multi-layered images with
confusing dimensions and spatial relationships. Windows are opened and
closed again in one scene, appearing as opaque surfaces flooded with black
light. Sometimes the mask is held up in the air, then, towards the end, the
protagonist takes it off and solemnly places it on the ground. The film concludes
with an image of the protagonist approaching the camera, one arm raised over
his head, the mask double exposed above him into a separate ‘frame’.
214 Art in the Cinema

Figure 9.7 Ilya Bolotowsky Metanoia (1961). Digital still. Courtesy of Andrew
Bolotowsky.

In its choreographed structure and use of cinematic effects Metanoia merges

the exploration of filmic space with images that suggest both shamanistic ritual
and modern dance. The sound track, a composition for the modern ballet,
underlines this latter reference, while also contributing to the film’s dramatic
effect. The main conflict, as Bolotowsky describes it, is between two opposing
ways of perceiving the protagonist, as ‘a poor lost soul in a tremendous,
frightening world’ and as ‘a triumphal [. . .] god-like figure’.27 Recognizing the
interrelation between these two aspects, between physicality and spirituality,
may be part of the transformation suggested in the film’s title, which literally
means remorse or repentance. As a theological and psychological term,‘metanoia’
refers to a fundamental spiritual or therapeutic conversion often associated with
an existential crisis, a dramatic event or a mental breakdown. Such an idea of
radical change, of turning around, is conveyed already, on a perceptual and
metaphorical level, by the positive-negative reversal. The intricate multi-layered
cinematic spaces and planes similarly challenge ‘normal’ perception.
One might object that this reading overburdens the film with meaning. In a
contemporaneous programme note Metanoia is succinctly described as ‘dark
 Neoplasticism and Cinema 215

vision of classic simplicity by noted painter’.28 On the other hand, to create

complexity out of simple forms was precisely the aim of Neoplasticist painting.
Moreover, a quote from Antonin Artaud’s essay ‘On the Balinese Theatre’ that
serves as the film’s epigraph explicitly introduces the idea of a spiritual
conversion: ‘Eyes of dreams which seem to absorb our own, eyes before which
we ourselves appear to be fantome.’ According to Artaud, it is a higher reality
that, in the ritual performance, gazes back at us, radically transforming our
own self-image. Artaud’s gnostic search may have resonated with Bolotowsky’s
own ideas on art. What Artaud saw in the Balinese theatre was an art that
transformed dancers into ‘living hieroglyphs’ (‘hiéroglyphes animés’). Gestures
became cyphers for states of mind, linked, ultimately, to ‘the absolute’.29 The
strangeness of spaces, the measured, almost hieratic movement of the
protagonist and the ritualistic use of the mask in Metanoia evokes something
similar.
In this film, Bolotowsky associates himself, through cinematic ‘myth’, with
a broader avant-garde tradition that considered art as an expression of the
ideal abstract forces permeating the phenomenal world. Art, in this tradition,
is a form that can, like Balinese dances or shamanistic rituals, potentially
render these forces accessible to perception and lead to a fundamental
transformation of consciousness – to metanoia. But in connecting gesture to
timelessness, Bolotowsky not only expressed, in the medium of film, his artistic
convictions, and, at the same time, distanced himself from the individually
expressive painterly gestures of Abstract Expressionism so influentially
represented in Paul Falkenberg and Hans Namuth’s film Jackson Pollock 51
(1951). He also manifested his separation from a contemporary art world
driven by the idea of historical progression.
Striving for ‘the absolute’ in both its aesthetic and esoteric meaning,
Neoplasticism could be understood, as Jack Burnham observes, to not simply
represent ‘another “ism” within the progression of twentieth century abstract
styles’.30 Mondrian himself frequently suggested that Neoplasticism was but a
step towards the ‘realisation of pure art in our surroundings [. . .] a plastic
expression of the equally balanced proportion of the polarity of life’.31 Questions
of redundancy and originality, from this perspective, became of secondary
importance. Neoplasticism rather offered a scheme of formal/spiritual evolution
216 Art in the Cinema

in its own right, a higher order, detached from art history as we usually understand
it. This conception provided a rationale for the continuation of Neoplasticist
painting by Mondrian’s American ‘followers’. They nevertheless had to cope with
the art world’s demand – shared by the avant-garde and consumerist ideology –
for originality and innovation. It is these contingent historical circumstances
that Neoplasticist painting, in its avoidance of all figurative, symbolic and
narrative ‘content’, was categorically incapable of expressing.
When Bolotowsky turned to film he found a way to relate his painting,
through another visual medium, to ideas and discourses that were essential to
but could not be part of painting. Robert Haller observes: ‘For Bolotowsky the
world contains other invisible [images], images awkward to paint realistically,
let alone by his highly formal, geometric style, but possible on film.’32
Considering a film like Metanoia, simultaneously presenting transcendental
ideals and physical reality, two dimensional shapes and strange, ritualistic
spaces, one gets the sense that such images were not wholly external to
Bolotowsky’s paintings, but rather emerged from them. Film, on the other
hand, could also inspire painting, as in the mural he made for the lobby of
Cinema I in Manhattan (1963), creating, in neoplasticist style, ‘an effect
somewhat like an abstract motion picture’.33
Painting and film, materialism and myth, autonomy and openness do not so
much contradict or exclude as complement and permeate each other.

Figure 9.8 Ilya Bolotowsky Cinema I Mural (1963). Courtesy of Andrew Bolotowsky.
 Neoplasticism and Cinema 217

Policies and histories of art and film

It is only from the perspective of modernist medium specificity and artistic

autonomy that such heterogeneity must appear as ‘schizophrenic’ in the
negative sense of ‘a delusionary concept’. This heterogeneity also points to
another history of abstraction in America, obscured by the rise of modernist
ideologies of art and the construction of ‘national’ art histories – a history of
interrelated media, where painterly ‘purity’ merges with social and cultural
concerns and which unfolds outside the perceptual regime of the museum. If
this other history has gained increasing attention in recent decades, it fell
outside the dominant ideologies and institutional policies of the 1950s art
world.
Bolotowsky’s films were not widely distributed. He personally showed them
at galleries, art schools and artist’s venues such as the famous Club on New
York’s Lower East Side. Metanoia was screened at Cinema 16 in New York
which was then one of the most prominent venues for independent and
experimental film, in 1962, and was awarded first prize at the Midwestern Film
Festival in Chicago in the following year. Such public recognition was an
exception. The generally limited circulation can be attributed to financial and
personal reasons as well as to changing distribution economies and the
transformation of the experimental film scene in the early 1960s. The short
‘artist documentaries’, on the other hand, were incompatible with standard
genres of educational films on art. Yet, Bolotowsky’s cinematic work as a
whole – simultaneously reflecting on art and film – raised issues that lay at the
core of debates on the status of films on art, and, more generally, the question
of film as an art form. In the US, these issues circumscribed (like the shared
16mm non-theatrical film sector) a multifaceted field of intersection and
competition between experimental film cultures and art documentaries.34 The
critic Arthur Knight, for instance, claimed that it was only through ‘the
application of film art, the aesthetic of cinema’ that films could create a ‘visually
exciting art experience’.35 What defined ‘film art/art films’, however, in the
eyes of powerful institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art or UNESCO
was significantly shaped by the very ideologies of art and art history that
Bolotowsky’s films challenged.
218 Art in the Cinema

When films on art became a major element in strategies of democratic

education and cultural diplomacy after the Second World War (see Dimitrios
Latsis’ and Natasha Ritsma’s chapters in this volume), it was under the premise
of artistic autonomy. The relationship between film and art was certainly the
subject of a highly productive debate – as the theories of André Bazin and
Siegfried Kracauer attest to. But its stakes were set by modernist conceptions.
Paul Falkenberg and Hans Namuth’s Jackson Pollock 51 (1951) could thus
function ‘in a dialogic relation with Pollock’s paintings as objects’, despite its
innovative depiction of the process of painting.36 Introducing a ‘closed system
of interpretation’ the film reinforced art historical narratives that celebrated
Abstract Expressionism as the ‘first’ American abstractionist movement and
epitome of liberal consumerist subjectivity.
Unfashionable as Bolotowsky’s ideas on art may have appeared, his paintings
and films point beyond narrow modernist orthodoxy. Painting may have had
priority for Bolotowsky, but his films also demonstrate that he was aware of
them as part of larger systems of image production. Through cinematic myth
he was able to acknowledge heterogeneity, complementarity and copresence –
of painting in cinema and cinema in painting, but also of different temporalities
and histories. In his films the modernist myth of ‘the absolute’ is disassociated
from rigid conceptions of an artistic medium and historical teleologies – even
at what might seem to be the culmination of the pursuit for aesthetic ‘purity’.
What his work also highlights is the need to consider the histories, policies and
aesthetics of ‘art’ and ‘films on art’ not isolated from each other, but as elements
of interrelated image ecologies and media histories.

Notes
1 With few exceptions, Bolotowsky’s films, including The Nautilus Shell, only exist as
16mm camera originals. A release print of Metanoia was distributed by Cinema 16, this
film was also transferred, along with Fire Escapes and Narcissus in a Gothic Mood, to
Betamax video for an exhibition at SUNY Stony Brook in 1985. I wish to thank
Andrew Bolotowsky for making his father’s films available to me, for sharing his
recollections and for providing images for this article. Thanks are also due to Andrew
Lampert and Robert Haller for allowing me to view the films on an editing table at
Anthology Film Archives.
 Neoplasticism and Cinema 219

2 Quoted in Lawrence Campbell, ‘Squaring the circle and vice-versa’, Art News 68, 1
(1970): 40.

3 Willard Van Dyke, ‘Interview with Stan Vanderbeek’, unpublished transcript

(1 February 1966), 19, MoMA Film Study Center, file on Stan Vanderbeek.

4 Ilya Bolotowsky, ‘On Neoplasticism and my own work’, Leonardo 2, 3 (1969): 230.

5 Ilya Bolotowsky, ‘Statment’, Film Comment 2, 3 (1964): 12.

6 Bolotowsky’s use of sketches in painting varied greatly. According to Andrew

Bolotowsky, his father ‘never followed a formula for developing a painting’, sometimes
sketching with a ball point pen, or creating a collage out of a cut up silkscreen print, or
using no sketch at all (e-mail to the author, 25 May 2018). The use of film as a
‘sketchpad’ seems to fit in with such a practice.

7 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 167.

8 David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT

Press 2007), 45.

9 Bolotowsky, ‘On Neoplasticism’, 222–4; Ilya Bolotowsky/Henry Geldzahler, ‘Adventures

with Bolotowsky’, Archives of American Art Journal 22, 1 (1982): 22–6; Susan C. Larsen,
‘The American Abstract Artists: A Documentary History, 1936–1941’, Archives of
American Art Journal 14, 1 (1974): 2, 7.

10 Bolotowsky, ‘On Neoplasticism’, 224.

11 Bolotowsky, ‘On Neoplasticism’, 224.

12 For a general account see Vincent Katz and Martin Brody (eds), Black Mountain
College: Experiment in Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Bolotowsky’s teaching
is referenced in: Helen Molesworth/Ruth Erickson (ed.), Leap Before You Look:
Black Mountain College, 1933–1957 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (2015),
182 and 354.

13 In the 1970s some exhibitions attempted to correct this view by including work by
Bolotowsky. See Stephen Prokopoff (ed.), Post Mondrian Abstraction in America
(Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, 1973); Nancy J. Troy (ed.), Mondrian and
Neo-Plasticism in America. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1979).
Bolotowsky had a one-man retrospective at the Guggenheim, see Adelyn D. Breeskin
(ed.), Ilya Bolotowsky (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1974).
14 Breeskin (ed.), Ilya Bolotowsky, 121.

15 Bolotowsky, ‘On Neoplasticism’, 230.

16 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October 9 (1979): 60.

17 André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. I (Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of

California Press, 1967), 168.
220 Art in the Cinema

18 Louise Averill Svendsen, ‘Interview with Ilya Bolotowsky’, in Breeskin (ed.), Ilya
Bolotowsky, 22.

19 Krauss, ‘Grids’, 64.

20 Jack Burnham, ‘Mondrian’s American Circle’, Arts Magazine 48, 1 (1973): 38.

21 Bolotowsky, ‘On Neoplasticism’, 226.

22 Bolotowsky, ‘On Neoplasticism’, 221.

23 Svendsen, ‘Interview with Ilya Bolotowsky’, 22.

24 Parker Tyler, ‘Symbolism, Myth and Film’, sound recording, Anthology Film Archives,
New York.

25 Parker Tyler, ‘Ilya Bolotowsky’, Art News 54, 9 (1956): 51.

26 Bolotowsky claims to have become interested in Eskimo art during his military service
in Alaska (Breeskin (ed.), Ilya Bolotowsky, 121). The term ‘Eskimo’ is used here, as the
mask is made by Alaskan people who, unlike the Inuit of Eastern Canada and
Greenland, do not regard it as derogatory.

27 Svendsen, ‘Interview with Ilya Bolotowsky’, 22.

28 Cinema 16, programme note (5 December 1962), in Scott MacDonald (ed.), Cinema
16: Documents Toward the History of the Film Society (Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 2002), 409.

29 Jane Goodall, ‘Artaud and painting: the quest for a language of gnosis’, Paragraph
12, 2 (1989): 110.

30 Burnham, ‘Mondrian’s American Circle’, 39.

31 Mondrian, ‘Neo-Plasticism’, in Troy (ed.), Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism, 62.

32 Robert Haller, diary entry (24 March 2007), Anthology Film Archives, file on Ilya
Bolotowsky.

33 Bolotowsky, ‘On Neoplasticism’, 226.

34 For a detailed discussion see Henning Engelke, Metaphern einer anderen Filmgeschichte
(Marburg: Schüren, 2018), 127–35.

35 Arthur Knight, ‘A Short History of Art films’, in William McK. Chapman (ed.), Films
on Art (New York: The American Federation of the Arts, 1952), 6.

36 Caterine M. Soussloff, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Post-Ritual Performance: Memories Arrested

in Space’, TDR 48, 1 (2004): 66.
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 Index

1848 (1948) 32 Annigoni, Pietro 160

Adomian, Lan 83 Anstey, Edgar 197
Adventure of an Asterisk (1957) 51 Antal, Frederick 30
AFA, see American Federation of Arts Anthology Film Archives 218, 220
Agneau mystique, L’ (1939) 5 Antwerp 57, 85, 89, 91, 101
AICA, see Association international des APAVOCA, see Arts Processes and Visual
critiques d’art Computer Analysis
Albers, Josef 206 Apollonio, Umbro 13, 59
Alechinsky d’apres nature (1970) 36 Appel, Karel 22, 24, 36
Alechinsky, Pierre 14, 24, 36 Argan, Giulio Carlo 85, 107
Alekan, Henri 2, 19, 167, 178 Argos Films 10
Alexander Calder (1944) 19, 79 Aristide Maillol, sculpteur (1943) 19
Alinari, Leopoldo, Giuseppe and Armstrong, Louis 150
Romualdo (Fratelli Alinari) 111 Arnheim, Rudolf 2, 17, 32, 35
Allegret, Marc 138 Arnold, Matthew 167
Alloway, Lawrence 187 Arp, Hans 190
Alwyn, William 165, 174 Art City of Munich, The (1912) 11
American Federation of Arts (AFA) 58, 32, Art Discovers America (1943) 24, 67–9,
82, 84, 102, 104, 147–8, 158, 220 77, 80
America: The Artist’s Eye (1950) 79 Art in Our World (1950) 78
American Art from the Gilded Age to the Art institute of Chicago 82
Armory Show, 1865–1913 (c. 1950) 79 Art of Timothy Cole, The (1930) 11
American Indian Footage (c. 1926–1932) Artaud, Antonin 215, 220
77 arte di Rosai, L’ (1957) 105, 122
American Wing, The (1935) 84 Artists at Work (1937–8) 2, 38, 84
Amis de l’Art, Les (Friends of the Arts) 10, Arts Council of Great Britain 166, 176,
39, 41–4, 56, 61 189
Amis de l’Art Populaire, Les 56 Arts Processes and Visual Computer
Amsterdam 6, 16, 50–1, 56, 58–9, 63–5 Analysis (APAVOCA) 114
Anderson, James 111 Asawa, Ruth 204
Anderson, Lindsay 183 Association international des critiques
Andrew, Dudley 125–6, 131, 133, 141–2 d’art (AICA) 51–3, 60, 63–4, 103
Anemic Cinema (1926) 80, 201, 205 Atget, Eugène 154
Angers 40 Auriol, Jean Georges 44
Angoulême 128 Aus Berliner Museen (1937) 28

225
226 Index

Avec André Gide (1952) 138 Brady, Matthew 154

Avery, Milton and Sally 204 Brancusi, Constantin 19, 190, 191
Ayfre, Amédée 135, 142 Brandon Films, Inc 92, 102
Braunberger, Pierre 10, 61, 125
Baber, Alice 203–204 Bruegel, Pieter (the Elder) 5, 95
Bacon, Francis 186, 189, 198 Brimham Rocks 169–70
Baggs, Arthur E. 79 British Council 168
Ballet mécanique (1924) 54 British Film Institute (BFI) 185–6, 189,
Bamberger, Rudolph 3 192–3, 197, 199–200
Banham, Reyner 187, 193, 199 Brook, Alexander 69
Barbara Hepworth (1961) 184 Brooklyn College
Barbaro, Umberto 99, 108, 121 Brown, Elizabeth 164, 178
Barry,Iris 5–6, 33, 35, 41, 59 Brown, Evelyn 79
Battersea 169, 173, 200 Bruno, Rafaelle 114, 123
Bazin,André 2, 18, 23, 32, 35–7, 43–4, 94, Brush Techniques (1947) 78
98, 103–4, 125–43, 211, 218–9 Brusselmans, Jean 56
Beckett, Jane 170, 171, 178–9 Brussels (Bruxelles) 6, 35, 52, 55–6, 59, 61,
Behind the Scenes (1928) 28, 84 86, 91, 99–104, 159, 177
Bell Laboratories 119 Bunforth, Paul 78
Benjamin, Walter 27, 30, 37 Buñuel, Louis 192
Benson, Frank W. 78 Burchfield, Charles 69
Benton, Thomas Hart 69, 73, 77, 81, 83–4 Burden, Robert 185, 198
Benton, William 151, 157 Burgundy 128
Berger, John 15, 30, 173 Burnham, Jack 215, 220
Bergson, Henri 23, 32, 36, 132, 137, Burstow, Robert 194, 199
140–1 Butler, Reg 169, 194
Beuys, Joseph 31 Butt, James 200
BFI, see British Film Institute Byrnes, James F. 149
Birchfield, Charles 81
Birth of a Painting: Kurt Seligmann (1950) Calder, Alexander 7, 19, 24, 77, 79–80, 84,
79 207
Blackheath Film Unit 189 Calligraphie japonaise (1955) (Japanese
Blakelock, Ralph 81 Calligraphy) 24, 36
Bloomer, Kenneth 79 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 173,
Boehm, Gottfried 24, 36 198
Bolen, Francis 33, 35, 46–7, 52, 61–4, 96, Canadian Landscape (1941) 79
104, 122 Canal Grande (1963) 106, 122
Bolotowsky, Ilya 201–20 Cantico delle creature (1943) 8
Borneman, Ernest 45 Caravaggio (1948) 108
Bosch, Hieronymus 65, 72–3, 82, 95 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 108
Bosse, Abraham 55 Carpaccio 9, 16, 72, 99, 108
Boswell, Peyton 81 Cassou, Jean 51–2, 56, 64–5
Bourchard, Thomas 54 Castelli, Leo (Gallery) 201, 203, 205
Bournemouth Film society 188 Castleford 177
Bowie, Theodore 92, 98, 104, 122, 156, 158 Cauvin, André 5, 9, 33, 54
 Index 227

Cavalcanti, Alberto 186, 190 Cochin, Charles-Nicolas (Cochin le père)

Caversham 167, 178 55
Ceccato, Silvio 114, 116, 123 Cocriamont, Robert 56
Cenacolo di Andrea del Castagno (1954) Cocteau, Jean 44
105, 109 Coffin, Robert 78
Centro di Cibernetica e di Attività Cole, Timothy 11, 77
Linguistiche 114, 123 Comité Internationale pour la Diffusion
Certosa di Pavia (1961) 105 des Arts et des Lettres par le Cinéma
Ceux de chez nous (1915) 2, 33, 55 (CIDALC) 6, 64, 91
Cézanne (1989) 168 Compagnons de l’art, Les 55, 86, 99
Cezanne, Paul 168 Conseil International du Cinéma et de la
Chapman, William McK. 32–3, 54, 58, 102, Télévision (CICT) 52
104, 158, 220–2 Cookham Village (1956) 161
Chappell, Sally 18, 35 Copland, Aaron 75
Chasseloup-Loubat, Marquis de 135 Corinth, Lovis 3
Chausserie-Laprée, Jacques 44 Cornwall 182–4, 190–1, 194, 197–8
Chevalier, Denys 42, 61 Coronet 77
Chevreuille, Raymond 93, 103 Cortade, Ludovic 134, 141
Chiarini, Luigi 121 Couturier, Marie-Alain 126
Chiarini, Marco 122 Coventry Cathedral (1959) 185–6
Chicago 37, 82, 217, 219 Cranfield, Ben 163, 178
Childe Hassam Artist (1933) 79 Creative Hands (1945) 79
CICT, see Conseil International du Croce, Benedetto 108
Cinéma et de la Télévision Crockwell, Douglass 80
Cinema I 216 Crown Film Unit 189
Cinema 16 148, 217–8, 220 Crowther, Bosley 76, 83–4
Chronic Diseases Hospital 205 Cürlis, Hans 3, 21, 28, 33
CIDALC, see Comité Internationale pour Curtis, Penelope 172, 178, 198
la Diffusion des Arts et des Lettres par
le Cinéma Daeye, Hippolyte 56
Cinéma Edition Production 92 Daguerre ou la naissance de la
Cinematek (Belgian Cinémathèque) 33, photographie (1964) 64
55, 99, 101, 104, 159 Daguerre, Louis 64
Cinémathèque française 6, 39, 44 Darling, Elizabeth 160, 177
Civilisation (1969) 26, 30, 38 Dancer Midi Garth, The (1956) 207
Clark, Kenneth 26, 30, 37–8, 189 Dasnoy, Albert 56, 65
Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée) 55, 189 Dauman, Anatole 10
Cleinge, Jean 54 Daumier (1958) 54
Cloche, Maurice 28, 54 Daumier, François 54–5
Cloquet, Ghislain 15 Davay, Paul 34, 55, 65, 94, 103
Clouzot, Henri Georges 1, 21–4, 37, 100 David Smith (1956) 207
Club de l’Écran 55 Davenport, Lisa 7, 34
Coal Face (1935) 190 Davidson, Jo 78
Coates, Wells 188 Davidson, Joseph Leroy 151, 157
CoBrA 22–4, 36 DaVinci, Leonardo 68
228 Index

Day-Lewis, Cecil 182–4, 197 Elgar, Edward 30

de Heusch, Luc 25, 36–7 Elizabeth I 166
De Morant, Henry 40–1, 60 Elizabeth II 160, 166, 195
de Rivera, Jose 204, 207 Elsen, Albert 19
De Renoir à Picasso (1950) 12–3, 87, 95, 100 Eluard, Paul 10
de Saedeleer, Valerius 99 Emmer, Luciano 1, 6, 8–11, 14–17, 29, 32,
De Smet, Gustave 56 34, 42, 44, 54, 62, 71, 73, 78, 82, 94, 107,
Debray, Régis 140, 143 120, 222
Debussy, Claude 30, 189 Encyclopedia Britannica 8, 78, 151
Degas, Edgar 2 Encyclopedia Britannica Films 71
Dekeukeleire, Charles 4–5, 57 Enfer de Rodin, L’ (1957) 2, 19–20, 178
Delacroix, Eugène 95 Ensor, James 56, 86, 99, 100
della Francesca, Piero 9, 109, 112, 115, 117 Entr’acte (1924) 80
Delvaux, Paul 1, 9–11, 34, 56–7, 65, 94, Erlanger, Philippe 44
96, 99 Ernst, Max 10
Denis, Maurice 94 Eskimo Arts and Crafts (1943) 79
Denver Art Museum 206 Etcher’s Art (1930) 78
Deren, Maya 209 Euratom Centre 114, 117
Deposizione di Raffaello, La (1948) 105, European Recovery Program 149
108, 120–1 Evolution of the Skyscraper (1938) 84
Dickinson, Thorold 188 EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam 59,
Diehl, Gaston 10, 12, 41–3, 53–4, 56, 60–1, 63, 65
65, 85, 99
Diller, Burgoyne 206 FIFA, see International Federation of
Dix, Otto 3 Films on Art
Dixon, Joseph K. 77 Falkenberg, Paul 1, 21–4, 215, 218
Dohanos, Stevan 79 Farrebique (1947) 138, 142
Doméla, César 10 Farwell, Beatrice 16, 35, 97, 104
Don Kingman Paints a Watercolor (1946) Faure, Élie 141–2
78 Favero, Roberto 117
Dorset 187–8, 199, 200 FCC (Federal Communications
Dotremont: Les logogrammes (1972) 36 Commission) 29
Dramma di Cristo, Il (1948) 8–9 Federal Art Project 73, 205
Dreyer, Carl Theodor 1, 19–20, 167, 178 Fédération internationale des Archives du
Duchamp, Marcel 201, 204, 206, 208–9, Film (FIAF) 6, 41, 52, 59
211 Fédération Internationale des Ciné Clubs
DuPont, E.A. (Ewald André) 72 41
Dürer, Albrecht 117–8 Fédération Internationale des Films sur
l’art (FIFA), see International
École du Louvre 43, 52 Federation of Films on Art
École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud Fenêtre ouverte, La (1952) 51
134 Fénioux 139
Écran du Séminaire des Arts (Screen of Fernand Léger in America (1945) 54, 79
the Arts Seminar) 55 Festival of Britain 163, 166, 178, 186,
Eisenstein, Sergei 188 194–5
 Index 229

FIAF, see Fédération internationale des Gauthier, Christophe 137, 142

Archives du Film George VI 166
Fiedler, Konrad 25 Ghent 135, 159, 174, 177
Fierens, Paul 6, 51, 56, 59, 65 Gide, André 138–9, 142
Figures in a Landscape (1953) 19, 20, Gilbert, Joan 162
181–200 Gilbert & George 31
Film Exercises (1943–4) 80 Gille-Delafon, Simone 52, 59, 64
Film Images (distributor) 78 Giotto 8–9, 96
Film Parade (newsreel) 84 Glarner, Fritz 206
Film that was Lost, The (1942) 84 Glenkiln 170, 172, 174
Films de la Pleiade, Les 10 Glenn Falls Sequence (1941) 80
Films Inc 8, 71, 82 Goetz, Henri 43
Fire Escapes (1956) 208–211, 218 Golden Prison: The Louvre, A (1964) 43
Flaherty, Robert 4, 32, 77 Goldmann, Lucien 136, 142
Florence 3–4, 106–7, 109, 114, 120–2, 177 Goldschmidt, Ernst 56
Fluxus 24 Gorky, Arshile 206
Focillon, Henri 85, 127, 137, 141–2 Gottlieb, Adolph 205–6
Fonda, Henry 73, 75 GPO Film Unit 162, 190
Fondation de l’Union Mondiale du Grace Borgenicht Gallery 206
Documentaire 41 Graham Sutherland (1953) 161
Forman, Dennis 59 Grandma Moses (1944) 78
Forms in Space (1949) 19 Grandpa Called it Art (1950) 77, 83
Fourré-Cormeray, Michel 44 Gras, Enrico 8, 34, 54, 120
Fra Angelico 9, 14 Greenberg, Clement 17
Francastel, Pierre 2, 32, 59–60, 85 Greene, Balcomb 203
Francis Bacon: Paintings 1944–1962 (1963) Grierson, John 162, 186, 188
186 Grigson, Geoffrey 163
Frank Lloyd Wright: California Architecture Gropper, William 84
(1948) 79 Gross, Chaim 78
Frankfurt 135 Grosz, George 2–3, 78, 84
Franklin Watkins (1950) 37, 79 Guernica (1950) 11, 15, 34, 42
Fraser, Inga 184, 198 Guggenheim Museum 6, 51, 219
Fratelli miracolosi (1946) 8 Guitry, Sacha 2, 33, 55–6
Fried, Michael 205, 219 Gyromorphosis (1958) 19
Frink, Elizabeth 169
From Tree Trunk to Head (1939) 78 Haesaerts, Luc 55–6, 99, 100–1
Haesaerts, Paul 1, 8–9, 11–3, 15–6, 21–4,
Gabel, Martin 72 29, 35, 53, 55–7, 64–5, 85–104, 122, 155,
Galerie Colette Allendy 43 158
Galerie Denise René 43 Haller, Robert 216, 218, 220
Galerie Lydia Conti (Conti Gallery) 43 Hamilton, Richard 187
Garth, Midi 204, 207 Harlow New Town 171–2, 174
Gates of Hell, The (1954) 19 Harmon Foundation 79
Gauguin (1950) 11, 42 Hartley Productions 19
Gauguin, Paul 68, 72–3 Hartung, Hans 10
230 Index

Hawkes, Jacquetta 182, 184–6, 194–200 ICOM, see International Council of

Hayward, Philip 25, 37, 166, 178 Museums
Heilbehandlung von Kunstwerken (1939) IIFA, see International Institute of Films
28 on Art
Henry Francis Dupont Winterthur Ik, Ensor (1972) 100
Museum 147 Images de l’ancienne Egypte (1951) 28, 54
Henri Goetz (1947) 43 IMPS, see International Motion Picture
Henry Moore (1951) 19, 160–1, 163, 165–6, Service
168–9, 174, 176–7 Independent Filmmakers Association 187,
Henry Moore at Eighty (1978) 177 199, 209
Henry Moore at Home (1960) 177 Indiana University 35, 78, 148, 158
Henry Moore Institute 200 Institut für Kulturforschung 3
Hensel, Thomas 103–4 Institute of Amateur Cinematographers
Hepworth, Barbara 173, 181–8, 190–200 187
Hessens, Robert 1, 10, 42, 54, 61, 72–3, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) 187
78, 99 Institute of Scientific Cinematography
Hill, Oliver 187–8 114
Himlaspelet (1942) 135 International Art Film Federation (IAFF)
Hiroshima 194, 198 6, 147–8
Hirsch, Hy 19 International Council of Museums
Hodin, Josef Paul 18, 35 (ICOM) 28, 39, 46–9, 60, 63
Hofmann, Hans 206 International Federation of Films on Art
Hoglands 165–7, 169 (FIFA) 6, 14, 16, 33, 40–1, 47–9, 51–2,
Hollander, Anne 96, 104 54, 56, 58–60, 62–5
Hollywood 36, 70–12, 83, 153, 212 International Institute of Films on Art
Holst, Imogen 200 (IIFA) 6, 52, 64
Holtzman, Harry 206 International Motion Picture Service
Hopi Indian Arts and Crafts (1947) 77 (IMPS) 145–6
Hopper, Edward 82, 151 International Scientific Film Association
Hoskins, W.G. (William George) 174 (ISFA) 41
House Un-American Activities International University of Art (IUA) 114
Committee 151 Introduction of Architecture (1949) 79
Hubley, Faith 51 Invenzione della croce, L’ (1948) 8
Hubley, John 51 ISFA, see International Scientific Film
Hughes, Robert 30 Association
Hugo, Ian 209 Ispra 114, 117
Huillet, Danièle 15 IUA, see International University of Art
Human Studies Film Archives 77 Ivens, Joris 41
Huston, John 83
Huyghe, René 6, 43, 48–9, 51–3, 56, 58–9, Jackson Pollock 51 (1951) 1, 21–3, 77, 80,
63–5, 101, 103 215, 218
Huysmans, Kamiel 89 Jackson, A.Y (Alexander Young) 79
Jacobs, Lewis 78–9
IAFF, see International Art Film Federation Jacobs, Steven 33–7, 82, 161, 177–8
ICA, see Institute of Contemporary Art Jacques Lipchitz (1951) 19, 161
 Index 231

Jaeger, Claude 44 Language of Sculpture, The (1974) 177

Janson, H.W. (Horst Waldemar) 96, 104 Language of Watercolor, The (1947) 78
Japanese calligraphy (1955) 36 Laramie 206
Jaujard, Jacques 43–4, 48, 62 Lascaux, cradle of man’s art (1949–50) 54
Jefferson the Architect (1950) 79 Lassally, Walter 170
Jefferson, Thomas 79 Last Orpheus, The (1962) 204
Jennings, Humphrey 190, 192 Latsis, Dimitrios 1, 67, 83, 218
John Piper (1953) 161 Lawson, Alan 164–5
Jolivette, Catherine 173, 175, 179, 191, 194, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)
199–200 122, 191
Jones, Bryson 77 Le Douanier (Rousseau, Henri) 55
Jordaens, Jacob 5, 95 Le Galliard, Marianne 43, 61
Jose de Rivera (1958) 207 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 65
Joselit, David 205, 219 Ledoux, Jacques 55
Joxe, Louis 44 Leenhardt, Roger 54, 64
Jullian, René 122 Legend of Saint Ursula, The (1962) 16
Léger, Fernard 6, 14, 52, 54, 58–9, 79, 126
Kahn, Wolf 203 Leggenda di S. Orsola, La (1948) 1, 8
Kandinsky, Wassily 3 Legion of Art Museum 84
Kaprow, Allan 24, 36 Lekakis, Michael 208
Katz, Elias 2, 33, 79, 84, 219 Lemaître, Henri 2, 32, 59–61, 64–5
Kipnis, Leonid 71–2, 82–3 Lewis, Mark 83
Klee Wyck (1946) 79 Leys, Henry 100
Klee, Paul 57 Lichtspiel, Ein (1930) 20
Klein, Yves 24 Liebermann, Max 3
Kleine, George 11 Lipchitz, Jacques 19, 161
Knight, Arthur 3, 5, 7, 33–4, 65, 70–1, Lindsay, Vachel 74
80–2, 84, 217, 220 Living Stone The (1959) 8
Kollwitz, Käthe 3 Lobb, Howard V. 160
Kootz, Sam 204 Lods, Jean 19
Kracauer, Siegfried 2, 13, 15, 32, 35, 92, 97, London 49, 63, 90, 166, 187–8, 190–1
104, 218, 222 London Film Society 187–8, 190
Krauss, Rosalind 211–2, 219 Longhi, Roberto 12, 85, 99, 107–8, 121
Krenn, Michael 7, 34, 81, 157 Looking at Sculpture (1949) 18–9
Krukowski, Lucian 208 Lorado Taft, Sculptor (1930) 78
Kurgäste hinter Museumsmauern (1934) Lorenzo Il Magnifico (1949) 13, 107,
28 120–1
Los Angeles 82, 152, 154
Lampert, Andrew 218 Los Angeles County Museum of Art 82
La Rochelle 125–6 Louise Nevelson (1956) 204
Laboureur, Jean-Emile 55 Loukopoulou, Katerina 33, 35, 102, 164,
Lamb, Carl 122 176, 178–9
Lambert, Gavin 183 Louvre 6, 28, 37, 39, 43, 47–9, 52, 54, 58–9,
Land Fall (1938) 187–8 63, 65
Langlois, Henri 6, 41, 44 Lubetkin, Berthold 188
232 Index

Lubow, Sidney 19 Men of Our Age (1946) 78

Lucca 107, 110–3, 120–2 Menken, Marie 8, 19, 77, 80, 209
Lure of the West, The (1935) 77 Mercanton, Victoria 32
Lust for Life (1954) 11 Metanoia (1961) 204, 213–4
LUX 200 Metropolitan Museum of Art 28, 46, 72,
Lyford, Richard 4 77–8, 82–4, 104, 151
Meyer, Bruno 103
Maas, Willard 209 Micha, Réne 10, 56–7, 65
MacCann, Richard Dyer 81 Michelangelo (1964) (Michelangiolo) 13,
Madrid 90 99, 105, 112, 122
Magritte, ou la leçon de choses (1960) 25, Michelangelo (di Lodovico Buonarroti
37 Simoni) 3–4, 13, 54, 99, 105, 112, 122,
Magritte, René 25, 37, 55–6, 99 168
Maillol, Aristide 19 Michelangelo: Das Leben eines Titanen
Making of a Bronze Statue (1922) 78 (1940) 3–4, 54
Making of a Fresco, The (1935) 84 Michelangiolo (1964) (Michelangelo) 13,
Making of a Mural, The (1947) 77–8 99, 105, 112, 122
Mâle, Émile 136–7 Midwestern Film Festival 217
maître de Montpellier: Frédéric Bazille, Le Milo, Jean 87, 100
(1960) 54 Minelli, Vincente 11
Malfray (1948) 42, 54 Minne, George 86, 99
Malfray, Charles 42, 54 Minton, John 162, 193
Malraux, André 26–8, 37, 47, 87–8, 95–6, Mirams, Gordon 33, 49, 50, 62
99, 223 Moana (1926) 137
Mantegna, Andrea 198 Modigliani, Amedeo 55
Manvell, Roger 91, 102 Moholy-Nagy, László 20, 191
March of Time, The (1935–51) 80 MoMA, see Museum of Modern Art
Maria and Julian (Martinez)’s Black Monde de Paul Delvaux, Le (1946) 1, 10,
Pottery (1938) 77 34, 56–7, 65, 94, 9
Marker, Chris 1, 15, 19, 161 Mondrian, Piet 123, 190, 202, 206,
Marlborough Gallery 189 209–212, 215–6, 219–220
Marsh, Reginald 69, 81, 83 Monet, Claude 2
Marzelle, Fernand 19, 28 Monitor (1958–1965) 30, 176, 189
Masques et Visages de James Ensor (1952) Montagu, Ivor 188
100 Montpellier 54
Matisse, Henri 126 Moore, Henry 19, 29, 65, 159–179, 185,
Matless, David 174, 179 187–8, 191, 200
Matter, Herbert 19, 207 Moreau, Jean-Michel (Moreau le Jeune)
McCann Morley, Grace 45, 47, 62, 82 55
McLaren, Norman 14 Moretti, Lorenza 183
McNeill Whistler, James 208 Morris, George L.K. 203
Meerson, Mary 59 Moss, Stewart 78
Meet the Artist (1949) 79 Munari, Bruno 117
Memling (1939) 5 Munich 11, 57, 65, 90
Memling, Hans 5 Musée de l’Art Moderne, Paris 51
 Index 233

Musée de l’Homme 39 Noguchi, Isamu 7, 19–20, 77, 80

Musée de l’Orangerie 42–3 Noll, Michael 117, 123
Musée des Beaux-Arts Angers (Angers
Fine Arts Museum) 40 O Dreamland (1953) 183
Musée du Louvre 6, 28, 37, 39, 43, 47–9, 52, Oertel, Curt 3–5, 11, 29, 54
54, 58, 63, 65 Oeuvre du vingtième siècle, L’ (1952) 51
Musées Nationaux de France (National Office of War Information (OWI) 146, 152
Museums of France) 47, 58, 62 Olivetti, Adriano 109, 114, 122
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de One Hundred Years of Art and Artists in
Belgique (Belgian Royal Museums of Indiana (1949) 77–8
Fine Arts) 55 Ostend 56
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 6, 19, Oswego 152
70, 78, 80, 84, 92, 163, 217, 219 OWI, see Office of War Information
Muybridge, Eadweard 204
Mystère Picasso, Le (1956) 1, 21–2, 32, 36 Pacific Northwest (1944) 152
Painlevé, Jean 41, 60–1
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) Painting an Abstraction (1950) 78
154 Painting Reflections in Water (1947) 78
Nagasaki 194 Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels 6, 51–2,
Namuth, Hans 1, 21–4, 215, 218 55–6, 86, 99
Nanook of the North (1922) 137 Panofsky, Erwin 137, 141–2
Narcissus in a Gothic Mood (1960/64) 204, Paolozzi, Eduardo 187
218 paradiso terrestre, Il (1946) 54
Nash, Paul 192–3 Paris 6, 39, 42–3, 46, 51, 58–9, 63–4, 68, 73,
National Academy of Design 205 90, 135, 147, 151, 185
National Council for the Abolition of Parker Tyler, Harrisson 212, 220
Nuclear Weapons Tests 173 Patinir, Joachim 5
National Film Board of Canada 79 Patterns of American Rural Art (1943) 77
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Paul Klee ou la genèse (1958) 57
38, 84 Payne, Edgar Alwin 79
National Gallery, London 26, 37 Pechstein, Max 3
Nautilus Shell, The (c. 1957–58) 202–4, Peck, Gregory 73
208, 218 Pellegrini, Emanuele 121–2
Negro and Art, The (1947) 79 Penrose, Roland 197
Nevelson, Louise 204, 208 Permeke, Constant 5, 55–6, 86, 99
New York 5–7, 28, 34, 46, 69, 71–2, 74, 79, Pevsner, Nikolaus 19, 188–9, 199
80–1, 84, 92, 104, 147–8, 156–7, 163, Phaidon 26
201, 204–6, 212, 217, 220 Philadelphia Museum of Art 37, 79
New York City Art Commission 84 Photographer, The (1948) 7, 79,145–158
New York Heritage 84 Picard, Olivier 65
New York World’s Fair (1939) 5, 205 Picasso, Pablo 1, 11–3, 21–5, 32, 36, 56,
Newton, Eric 178 86–7, 93, 95, 99, 100, 221
Niepce, Joseph-Nicéphore 64 Pictura Films Corporation 8, 70–1
Nin, Anaïs 209 Pictura: An Adventure in Art (1951) 8,
Noblesse du bois (1955) 57 68–77, 82–3
234 Index

Pierres vives, Les (1951) 19, 28 Reith, John 167

Piper, John 161, 166 Rembrandt: A Self-Portrait (1954) 8,32
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 15 Rembrandt (Harmenszoon van Rijn) 8, 32
Pissarro (1976) 54 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 2, 12–3, 55, 86–7,
Pissaro, Camille 54 95–6, 99–100
Poitiers 128 Resnais, Alain 1, 6, 8, 10–1, 14–5, 17–19,
Politecnico di Milano 114 29, 32, 34, 37, 42–3, 54, 61, 71–3, 78, 82,
Pollock, Jackson 1, 7, 21–5, 36, 77, 80, 83, 91, 94, 99–100, 161
156, 215, 218, 220 Reynolds, Lucy 181, 200
Pompei urbanistica (1958) 105–6 Richardson, Ralph 159
Pop Goes the Easel (1962) 30 Richter, Hans 14
Portrait of a New York Waterfront (1949) 79 Ritsma, Natasha 7, 11, 32, 34–5, 145, 218,
Positive Negative (1961) 212 223
Pottery Maker, The (1925) 77 Rivera, Diego 84
Poussin - The Seven Sacraments (1968) Robertson, D.W. (Durant Waite) 137, 142
186 Rodin, Auguste 2, 19–20, 35, 168, 177–8
Poussin, Nicolas 96, 186, 189 Roëll, David Cornelis 50
Power of Art (2006) 30 Roizman, Morrie 32
Prague 151 Romance of a Vanishing Race, The (1916)
Priaulx Rainier, Ivy 182–4, 186, 196, 200 77
Price, Vincent 72–74, 82–3 Roosevelt, Theodore 78
Proctor, A. Phinister 78 Rosenberg, Harold 23, 36
Purcell, Virginia 78 Rothko, Mark 205–6
Rouch, Jean 15
Quatre peintres belges au travail (1952) 56, Rouquier, Georges 138, 142
65, 87 Rubens (1948) 1, 12–3, 57, 65, 85–104
Queval, Jean 15, 35 Rubens et son temps (1936) 43, 48, 101, 103
Quinn, James 59 Rubens und sein Werk: Neue Forschungen
101
Racconto da un affresco (1938) 8, 44, 54 Rubens, Peter Paul 1,9, 12–3, 16, 43, 48, 57,
Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico 12–3, 32, 35, 65, 85–104
64, 85, 99, 104, 105–123, 223 Russell, Fiona 170–2, 178–9
Raphael (Raffaello) 105, 106, 108, 120–1 Russell, Ken 30
Rainer, Yvonne 204
Ratcliff, John 160 Saint Augustine 137, 142
Read, Herbert 51, 56, 65, 161, 163, 170, Saint Ouen 131
191, 194–5, 198 Saintes 127, 134
Read, John 1, 19, 29, 51, 64, 159–162, Saintonge 125–143
164–9, 171–2, 175–8, 184, 189 Salles, Georges 47, 62
Reality of Karel Appel, The (1962) (De Salon de Mai 42–3
werkelijkheid van Karel Appel) 22, 36 Salter, Gregory 174, 179
Réau, Louis 134, 137 Sam Smith: Genuine England (1976) 186,
Regan, Suzanne 11, 34, 83 199
Regards sur la Belgique ancienne (1936) 9, San Francisco 82–4, 152
54, 88, 100 San Francisco (1945) 152
 Index 235

San Francisco Museum of Art (now Spence, Basil 185

SFMOMA) 82–3 Spencer, Stanley 29, 161, 166
Sandberg, Willem 50–2, 59, 63 Spilliaert, Léon 55–6, 99
Sanderson, Grover T. 77 St Ives 182, 191, 196
Santiago de Compostela 127 Starr, Herman 71–2
Sarrade, Henri 54 State University of New York (SUNY)
Schaffende Hände (1922) 3, 21, 33 218
Schama, Simon 30 Statues meurent aussi, Les (1953) 1, 15, 19,
Schatzkammer Deutschland (1939) 28 161
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Stauffacher, Frank 19, 81–2, 161
165 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 6, 38, 50–1,
Sculpture Today (1935) 78 56, 59, 63–5
Sculptor’s Landscape, A (1958) 1, 19–20, Steeltown (1944) 152
159–179 Steigiltz, Alfred 154
Searle, Humphrey 159, 174 steinernen Wunder von Naumburg, Die
Seligmann, Kurt 79 (1935) 3
Séminaire des Arts 55–6, 64 Stephens, Chris 38, 193, 198–200
Serlio, Sebastiano 117 Stephenson, Andrew 163, 178
Serra, Richard 31 Sterling, Charles 48
Seurat, Georges 12, 95 Stevenage 163
Sexton, Jamie 187, 199 Stiles, Knut 204, 208
Seydoux, Roger 44 Stone and Sculptor (1931) 78
Sharp, Walter 45, 62 Storck, Henri 1, 6, 8–17, 29, 32, 34, 41, 51,
Shaw Ashston, Dudley 19, 181–200 54–5, 57, 59, 65, 71, 82, 86, 88–102, 104
Shaw, Alexander 18–9 Straub, Jean-Marie 15
Shelton, Turner 155 Study of Negro Artists, A (1935) 79
Shock of the New (1979) 30 Subways (1958) 204
Sierra Journey (c. 1947) 79 SUNY, see State University of New York
Sjöberg, Alf 135–6 Super Sioux Films 77
Skira 26 Sutherland, Graham 29
Slade School of Art 188 Sweeney, James Johnson 6, 51–2, 59
Sloan, Joan 69 Swerdloff, Arthur 19
Smith, David 204, 207
Smith, Douglas 36–7, 100 Taeuber-Arp, Sophie 190
Smith, Leon Polk 204, 206 Taft, Lorado 78
Smith, Sam 186, 198–9 Tahoma, Quincy 77
Smithsonian Institution 77 Talbot, Henry Fox 64
Snyder, Robert 4, 32 Taylor, Francis Henry 72
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Telberg, Vladimir 209
York 6, 51, 219 Tempera Painting by Quincy Tahoma
Solsona 114, 116 (1945) 77
Sorkin, Mark 83 Testi Cristiani, Maria-Laura 114, 123
Souris, André 10, 65 Thèmes d’inspiration (1938) 4–5
Spare Time (1939) 190 Thirifays, André 93, 103
Speicher, Eugene 69 Thompson, Francis 79
236 Index

Thomson, Tom 79 Venice Biennale 91, 163, 186, 194

Thorvaldsen (1949) 1, 19 Venice Film Festival 32, 183, 197
Thorvaldsen, Bertel 1, 19–20, 35, 177–8 Venturi, Lionello 34, 49, 51–2, 56, 58–9, 65,
Titan: The Story of Michelangelo, The 85, 120, 122
(1950) 4–5, 19, 32 Verdone, Mario 122
Tonnelier, Chanoine 130 Vermeylen, Piet 55
Torcello 141 Vertov, Dziga 15, 188, 190, 192
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 55, 65, 72 Victoria and Albert Museum 18
Trizay 132 vie des Estampes, La (1976) 54–5
Trouble in Toy Town (1946) 189 Vienna 90
Truman, Harry S. 149 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 132
Türck, Walter C. 3 Visite à Picasso (1950) 21–2, 56, 87, 93
Tytgat, Edgard 55–6 Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)
19–20, 77, 80
UFA (Universum Film AG) 3 Vlad, Roman 9
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Von Eschen, Penny M. 150, 157
Scientific and Cultural Organisation) 1, von Wiegand, Charmion 206
6–7, 32–5, 39, 41, 45–7, 49–51, 57–8, Vrancx, Sebastian 57
60–5, 70, 81, 103, 122, 147–8, 154, 172, Vrijman, Jan 22, 36
185, 188, 217 Vuillard, Édouard 56
United States Information Agency (USIA)
7, 70 Walkowitz, Abraham 69, 81
University of Milan 114 Walter O. Gutlohn Inc 84
University of Wyoming 206 Wanamaker, Rodman 77
Urban, Charles 11 War and Peace (1956) 161
Warburg, Aby 37, 103
Valente, Alfredo 70, 81 Ward, Lynd 2, 84
Valéry, Paul 25, 139 Washington DC 38, 84, 152
Van der Goes, Hugo 95 Washington, George 75
Van der Weyden, Rogier 95 Watkins, Franklin 37, 79
Van Dyke, Willard 7, 147–158, 219 Watteau, Antoine 15, 95
Van Eyck, Jan 5, 9, 33, 95 Wayman Adams (1933) 79
Van Eyck, Hubert 5 Ways of Seeing (1972) 15, 30–1
Van Gogh (1948) 1, 10, 15, 32, 34, 42, 54, Weber, Max 69
72, 91, 94, 99 werkelijkheid van Karel Appel, De (1962)
Van Gogh, Vincent 1, 10–11, 15, 32, 34, 42, (The Reality of Karel Appel) 22, 36
54, 65, 72–3, 83, 91, 94, 99 West Wind (1944) 79
Vanden Eeckhout, Jean 65 Weston, Edward 79, 145–6, 152–5,
Vanderbeek, Stan 202, 219 157
Vanishing Indian, The (c. 1920) 77 What is Modern Art (1948) 78, 84
Vasarely, Victor 55 Whitney, James and John 8, 80
Vasari, Giorgio 36, 163 Wiener, Norbert 118–9, 123
Venezuela Film Festival 197 Wiertz, Antoine 95
Venice 32, 91, 112, 121–2, 163, 183, 186, Williamsburg Housing Project 205
194, 197 Wilson, David 149
 Index 237

Wilson, Sarah 126, 141 Wright, Frank Lloyd 79

Wölfflin, Heinrich 95, 103 Wyver, John 29, 31, 37–8, 159, 177–8
Wood, Grant 68–76, 83–4
Works of Calder (1949) 19, 24, 77, 80, Xceron, Jean 203
207
Worringer, Wilhelm 211 Your National Gallery (1948) 84
WPA (Works Progress Administration)
79, 83, 205 Zadkine, Ossip 86, 99
Wright, Basil 188 Zanobini, Maria Teresa Leoni 114
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