We was framed

One thing you can count on in the movies is that if art theft is involved it will be called a ‘heist’ or a ‘caper’.  Last Sunday's Doors open on UKTV was a classic in the caper category starring Stephen Fry as your typical bumbling curator (sic).  

The promo pic shows the cuddly crims holding what we assume to be the loot from some English art museum or stately home. They might just as well be coming out of a Dunbar Sloane auction with works by Charles Barraud, Raymond McIntyre, and practically any abstract painter showing at the New Zealand Academy up on Buckle Street in the early sixties. 

You can see a preview trailer for  Doors open here and links to other museum crime movies, a bunch of new ones plus a few we have covered in the past.
 
Images: top, promo for Doors open movie. Lower, OTN’s highly skilled Photoshop division re-jig distorted picture held by criminals as if by magic.

Art Heist: Yes, it's a steal the original, copy original, burn the copy, give original to evil collector movie

The art of stealing: A couple of bad hats are paid to nick a Van Gogh from an abandoned farm owned by an Argentinean countess. Watch the trailer here

Double trouble: Security guards from two Chinese cities join forces to catch art thieves. Trailer here

Dr No: A Classic. James Bond meets the evil cat stoker who owns the stolen portrait of the Duke of Wellington

Entrapment: Catherine Zeta-Jones snakes through those nifty red laser beams to steal a $40 million Rembrandt

Gambit: Statue stealing and a fake Monet with Colin Firth as the curator

The good thief: Nick Nolte steals a fortune in rare paintings from a Monte Carlo casino. Trailer here

Headhunters: HR operative by day, art thief by night

Ocean's Twelve: Vincent Cassel's climbs through more nifty red beam to steal a Fabergé Egg

Trance: After an art heist caper a hypnotist is called in to find a missing stolen painting (seriously).

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999): thieves pinch Monet’s landscape The island of San Giorgio Maggiore at dusk from the Met

The Train: Immaculately uniformed Germans are on the rails with hundreds of paintings from French museums but don’t reckon on Burt Lancaster. Trailer.

The Kramer

 
Let's face it just about every Sitcom in the history of the world has taken the piss out of art at some time or another so it’s not that surprising that Seinfeld had a go. Now thanks to one of our favourite readers, the tireless trawler P, it's only a mouse click away for your Saturday pleasure.

One day in the Disney studios

Animator 1: I am so sick of working for Disney.
 
Animator 2: Me too. If I have to animate another cute squirrel nibbling a nut I’ll go crazy.
 
A1: What? But we already have tons of squirrel stuff in stock.
 
A 2: Thanks. Another 123 days wasted.
 
A1: And that’s why I say we have to get out of here.
 
A2: But what would we do?
 
A1: It's tricky. I thought of going into animated porn but I think the Disney work has desensitised us.
 
A2: How about buying hats and becoming baristas?
 
A1: You need to know how to work a coffee machine…and wear a hat without looking stupid.
 
A2: (takes off hat) Oh.
 
A1: No, I was thinking of making an art film.
 
A2: (sits up) OK. An art film? Wow. That sounds totally cool.
 
A1: Yeah, something that delves into the mind and challenges assumptions.
 
A2: I’m there. Who’ll we get to star in it?

A1: I was thinking Van Gogh, Seurat, Magritte, Lichtenstein....
 
A2: Never heard of them.
 
A1: They’re artists.
 
A2: Oh…. You mean a film about art….an animated film.
 
A1: Absolutely. We’ll have this kick-ass kid discuss cosmetic surgery with van Gogh, do things like creep up behind the American Gothic couple and be chased all over the place by a mentally unstable art curator. All we have to do is set up a business and fund it.
 
A2: We could use Kickstarter.
 
And that was what they did.

When art goes to the movies: TV edition

Before Jack Nicholson turned up in his purple suit and beret in 1989 to mangle a Degas with red paint in Batman there was the TV Joker in pink tails. That was back in March 1967, the very month The Velvet Underground & Nico (recorded in 1966 during Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour) was released. 

We slip this in because one of the characters in the TV version of the Joker vs art - Pop goes the Joker - is Baby Jane Towser, a cute reference to Baby Jane Holtzer one of Warhol’s super stars. In the 1989 movie the Joker gets a laugh by not defacing a Francis Bacon, “I kinda like this one, leave it”. In the TV version, along with paintballing some well-known images, the Joker lets loose and makes his own art. His blank canvas Death of a bat wins an art competition and this, in the logic of TV shows, entitles him to open his own art Academy as a front to skim (ok, steal) money off rich people. “We artists should not be judged by ordinary standards. We’re a very special breed.” 

You can see the Batman movie clip here and our previous post on it here. Sadly Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp pulled the TV version off YouTube while we were writing this post.
 
Images: Top, the Joker acts tough on art. Middle left, the big competition and right, the Joker with Mary Jane Towser. Bottom, the Joker with his winning work.

Art in the movies: on the matte

Although you’d never convince an art auctioneer that painting was dead, some say it's so. One form of the art though that has indisputably flourished for the last century or so is matte painting. This is the painting on glass that has added dimension and magic to the movies. So now, as it goes into freefall at the hands of CGI, let’s hear it for matte painting - that extraordinary combination of film and paint that has pimped up indifferent locations, created impossible ones and given us a whole genre of how-the-hell-did-they-do-thats? 
 
The first matte painting was created for Mission of California by Norman Dawn in 1907. A mansion was 'aged' via a painting on glass and the camera rather than the art department having to take an axe to it. Famous matte paintings include the Emerald City and Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz, just about everything apart from the horses and actors in Ben Hur, the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, a shattered LA in Earthquake, the landing bay in Star Wars, and stuff you wouldn’t see on an average day in Lord of the Rings and Avatar. You can see fifty great examples from the history of film at Shadowlocked.com here.
Images: top to bottom left to right matte painting hard at work in The Wizard of Oz, Ben Hur,  Planet of the Apes, Earthquake, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings 

Top of Top of the lake

A surprise cast member in Jane Campion’s much-anticipated crime series Top of the lake is a terrific set of opening credits based on a painting by Seraphine Pick. Apparently the original concept was to use images showing the painting evolving as Pick made it, but in the end the final work was filmed along with details of some of Pick’s signature elements and then animated by Leonie Savvides. 

Pressured no doubt by trying to fit a handful of sub-plots into a TV 'hour', the credits run very fast. After getting over the intrigue of working out whether you're watching the real thing, a photograph or a painting, they come to an end before you can catch your breath. This is definitely not Tony Soprano chomping on a cigar cruising through New Jersey in his own goddamn sweet time. But they are definitely worth viewing in their own right. 

You can see the complete sequence of individual frames from the credits here

When art goes to the movies

Another movie featuring an art heist is about to hit New Zealand, this time from Danny Boyle. Trance starts with a painting being snatched mid-auction and hidden away somewhere. Its hiding place is the question that drives the rest of the story.

The nicked work looks like the Goya's Witches in the air that is (in the real world) safely on display at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Boyle probably picked this painting because it shows a typical Goya character with his head wrapped in a sheet  to block out the obscene sight of witches dining (you have to figure Magritte probably saw this painting too). Anyway, the blindfold is a neat metaphor for the amnesia that propels the thieves to hire a hypnotist to prize the whereabouts of the painting out of the recalcitrant mind of one of the gang. It’s that sort of film. You can watch the trailer and pretty much the whole of the heist stuff here.

Images: Top Goya Vuelo de brujos(Witches in the air) 1797-98. Lower, the auction room heist and removing the painting from the frame shot in the storerooms of the V&A. Click on images to enlarge.

Saturday at the movies

It’s Saturday morning so why not settle back and watch this clip from the US TV show Portlandia taking a friendly pot shot at conceptual art.

Two’s company

Most of you will know that a great art-in-the-movies-moments was when the creepy Grady twins (played by Lisa and Louise Burns) popped up in front of Danny as he raced around the corridors of the Overlook hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. “Come play with us Danny, for ever and ever.” The two girls were based on the Diane Arbus photograph Identical twins Roselle, N.J. Kubrick in fact studied photography under Arbus but always denied any relationship between his twins and the Arbus pair (good luck with that one).

Arbus photographed the twins (Cathleen and Colleen Wade) in 1967 when they were seven years old and attending a Christmas party for twins and triplets. They have since been tracked down and still live in New York. More about them and other who-are-they? revelations including one Arbus's famous baby shots being of ace TV reporter Anderson Cooper here.

Images: Top left,  Diane Arbus Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. and right Cathleen Mulcahy and Colleen Yorke (the Wade twins). Bottom, the Grady twins (Lisa and Louise Burns) before and after. 

You can read another OTN Arbus post here

Head turner

It’s hard to believe that had the painter J M W Turner been playing the who-would-you-want-to-play-you-in-a-movie game he would have picked Timothy Spall. Turner’s self portrait shows he had a very different view of himself. The Mike Leigh directed pic is about to start shooting in the UK and Italy.

Images: Top left, Turner’s self portrait and right, actor Timothy Spall

Gripping stuff

You don’t expect to see much art in a Tarantino movie (how to remove bloodstains from art here) but Django unchained has a major surprise. Giving some art cred to the movie's persistent wrestling theme there's a major cameo for a copy of The wrestlers based on a copy of The wrestlers at the Uffizi. There they are (a small scale version of a copy of the original that was lost long ago) sitting on a sideboard behind OTN featured bird handler Leo DiCaprio who plays Calvin Candie. Yes, this is the same sculpture that dominated the dome gallery of the Sarjeant in Wanganui until Billy Apple gave it permission to spend some time in the storeroom. We had our own encounter with The wrestlers when it featured in the 1987 exhibition When art hits the headlines.

 

You can learn more than you want to know about The wrestlers here including the alarming fact that both heads were later additions, that this wrestling position is known as the ‘cross-body ride’ and that such a close arrangements of figures are called symplegmata. There are thousands of copies of The wrestlers in varying sizes located all over the world. The Sarjeant copy is by Raffaello Romanelli who is most famous for his equestrian statue of Charles Albert of Sardinia in Rome. The Django copy was probably made by a Hollywood version of WETA.

Image: The Wrestlers butt into Django.

Stop thief... whoever you are

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One of our readers (thanks D) has pointed us to the recently published finale of the theft alluded to in Dr No. The portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Goya seen in the movie was stolen from the National Art Gallery in London and eventually recovered. Kempton Bunton, a 61-year-old unemployed bus driver, confessed to the crime and spent three months in jail although he was eventually found not guilty of nicking the painting only of stealing the frame. It now appears that it was in fact his son John who did the deed. Friday’s Guardian tells all:

“Just before dawn on Monday 21 August 1961, John Bunton – a temporary van driver living not far away in digs off Tottenham Court Road – stood on a parking meter to get over the gallery's back wall. He then used a six-metre ladder left by builders to climb through the unlocked window of a men's toilet to get into the main building of the gallery.

"The painting was standing on an easel in a roped-off enclosure at the top of the main stairs. 'I went up to it, took hold of it, and carried it back to the gents toilet,' he told the police. He climbed back out of the window, down the ladder, and retraced his steps to the back wall by St Martin's Street. 'I climbed over the wall, still holding the picture in one hand ... I put the picture on the back seat of the car and drove back to [his furnished room in] Grafton Street. I then put the picture under my bed.'"

Bunton said that he hadn't carried a jemmy and if the toilet window had been shut he would have had to give up. He had to push-start the small black Wolseley that he used as a getaway car.

You can read more of this strange art story here.

Images: Look and Learn magazine illustrations for a story on the theft. Thanks to this new information we now know they got the thief wrong and that the painting wasn’t taken off a wall. The illustrations Recovery of the stolen Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington are by Andrew Howat / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / The Bridgeman Art Library

I spy

The second episode in our series When art goes to the movies came out back in 2008 and featured Goya's The Duke of Wellington. It had been stolen from the National Gallery in London and turned up as a prop in the 1962 James Bond movie Dr. No.

Now 50 years later the stolen-painting story has been revived for Skyfall. This time the feature item is Modigliani's 1919 canvas Woman With A Fan stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris in May 2010 and making a brief appearance in the villain's Shanghai apartment. In good news for Modigliani collectors it turns out to be bullet proof as there is no sign of damage after a direct hit with a high-powered rifle. 

Bond is also up-cultured with a visit to the National Gallery in London (where he gazes pensively at Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. This ship fought at Trafalgar and is seen on its way to the knacker’s yard in one of Skyfall's many I’m-a-metaphor moments. In this case let us consider the demise of old-school spy craft. Back in 2005 The Fighting Temeraire was voted ‘greatest painting in a British art gallery’ and for Trivial Pursuit fans there's even an Ian Fleming moment; he grew up in a house on Cheyne Walk that once belonged to J M W Turner.

Other art references in Skyfall? OK, there’s a fallen ‘socialist-style’ statue on the Japanese island of Hashimathat serves as the villain’s lair, and it turns out that the middle name of Bond’s mother was Delacroix. Slim pickings.

Images: Left, Modigliani's Woman With A Fan. Right top, James Bond at the National Art Gallery (behind him Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (left) and Mr and Mrs William Hallett by Thomas Gainsborough). Right middle, The Fighting Temeraire by J M W Turner and bottom right broken socialist sculpture prop thing

Art in the movies: Arbitrage

Anyone who catches the new Richard Gere vehicle Arbitrage will immediately connect it with Wall Street the famous greed-is-good pic. While Arbitrage is not so hot on great one-liners, once again art is used to supply the fabulous wealth metaphor and like Wall Streets I and II the art is real-stuff borrowed in. According to the New York Times the budget for getting art onto the walls of the various locations was $US60,000. 

All this spending on packing, transport, lease and copyright fees was in the charge of critic/curator/consultant Linda Yablonsky who writes for the NYT, Artforum and other art mags. Her selection includes a number of artists whose work is fairly easy to recognise in the film including Donald Baechler, Brice Marden, Laurie Simmons, Alexander Calder and Marilyn Minter (and we did spot the inevitable Mock Rothko in the background of one shot). On a more local note, a good deal of the art came from the New York dealer Salon94 that has Francis Upritchard in its stable although we didn't spot a Upritchard sculpture up on the screen. 

Then, as the movie includes the now almost mandatory female art dealer as a key character, an opening had to be arranged. The subject of this solo exhibition is photo-realist painter Victor Rodriguez who was the choice of the movie's director Nicholas Jarecki (sorry curatorial team but that’s what directors do best). Given that the production was using Vic’s apartment on White Street in Tribeca (it used to be the famous Mudd Club – Basquiat, Haring, Madonna) for the gallery location there are no surprises there.  

OTN PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: as anyone in the film world will tell you (unless they are on the hunt for a location) never, ever, under any circumstances, let a feature film crew into your house, apartment, office or boatshed.

For most of Arbitrage art pretty much serves as I-am-rich wallpaper although a Brice Marden does get a small speaking part when the mogul (Gere) praises his art dealer and girlfriend on the side with, “She bought me these Brice Mardens here and over time they’ve gone up in price.” Spoiler alert – it doesn’t help her at all, not one little bit. 

Images: Left Robert Miller (Richard Gere) walks past Ryan McGinley's Dusk flip smoke strip and right Detective Michael Bryer (Tim Roth) partly obscures a blurry Brice Marden. Bottom, the mock Mark Rothko