Art imitating life: five of the best artist biopics
Lust for Life
Kirk Douglas is often terrifying but always lovable as Vincent van Gogh in Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film of the Dutch painter’s struggle to find meaning in the world. Among many Van Gogh biopics, this is the greatest.
A Bigger Splash
Technically, Jack Hazan’s 1973 film about Hockney and his circle is a documentary, but everyone plays themselves in acted cameos and it is edited into an artfully structured drama. The result is one of the most compulsive films ever made about art, as Hockney paints his way through the end of an affair.
Andrei Rublev
Tarkovsky’s black-and-white masterpiece plunges you into the strange and remote world of medieval Muscovy, where the great icon painter Rublev toils to create ethereal visions of Christ. Its genius is never to translate past into present or simplify the mystery of art – a gorgeous encounter with the unfamiliar.
Big Eyes
Tim Burton’s story of (another) quirky American genius, the painter Margaret Keane, whose cute characters with outsized eyes stole hearts in the 1950s and 60s. But Keane’s husband Walter took credit for her work and the film portrays her fight for recognition.
Camille Claudel
Isabelle Adjani and Gérard Depardieu star in one of the saddest stories in art. Claudel was a sculptor just as gifted as her lover Rodin but she had no chance of equal recognition. Their affair as portrayed here is both a creative and destructive journey into madness.
