Girl with a Pearl Earring

Starring: Colin Firth, Scarlett Johansson

Release: 2003

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a unique entry on this list, primarily in that the artist represented in the film, Johannes Vermeer (played by Colin Firth), really isn’t the movie’s main character. He’s a key figure to be sure and the film offers an interesting perspective on his work, but the story really revolves around a fictional character named Griet (played by Scarlett Johansson), a maid in Vermeer’s home.

After Griet shows an intelligent appreciation for her employer’s work – unsurprising, given that her father was himself a painter before being blinded and losing the use of one hand in an accident – Vermeer begins to view her as a sort of muse, basing paintings on her daily activities (particularly Woman with a Water Jug, shown below) and requesting her assistance in the mixing of paints. Eventually, the film shows her sitting as the subject of the film’s namesake, the stunning and intimate portrait Girl with a Pearl Earring. The film follows Griet’s journey as she enters into domestic servitude, spars with Vermeer’s wife and daughter, and becomes romantically involved with the local butcher’s apprentice, Pieter.

Basquiat

Starring: Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Benicio del Toro, Gary Oldman

Release: 1996

The career of the Neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is the subject of the film Basquiat, released just seven years after the painter’s death of a heroin overdose. The son of a Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father, Basquiat’s art reflected his ethnic heritage and the New York street scene, incorporating graffiti into his anatomically interested images. The film follows the painter’s uncomfortable journey from homeless street artist to member of the New York art elite.

Basquiat was a part of a circle of artists who incorporated multiple media into their works, and he performed music and DJed, while also selling homemade postcards to support himself early in his career. As the art community started to recognize his unique voice and viewpoint, the film represents him as drifting further away from his friends and musical collaborators, until he is left with very few close relationships. As the film nears its conclusion, Basquiat’s only lasting relationships are with Andy Warhol (played here by David Bowie) and characters played by Benicio del Toro and Gary Oldman.

From Dada to abstract expressionism to color-field to contemporary minimalists, there is one type of painting that shows up over and over again. The monochrome, multi-layered canvas. The monochrome painting is an exploration of one color only, though there may be other hues mixed and and textures added to the canvas it is truly a study of one shade. However, it has been said that this long celebrated type of painting (which has been critically upheld) began as simply a joke. One could point to the Dada movement for this, which almost always made art out of a place of jesting, either at the viewer's expense or the artist's.

Why is the monochrome so engaging? It has never truly taken over as a form of art and yet it remains there through decades of art movement, still grasping for life and finding it. The aesthetics of the monochrome painting are still seen as "contemporary." Although the form has been around for awhile. Monochrome paintings first garnered interest as early as 1915 with the Russian Suprematism school of painting. However this was an early start, and the paintings did not recieve critical love until later.

You've undoubtedly heard of the term Pop-Art. It seems by this point the genre of art is just as famous and American as the Campbell's soup cans it famously mocked! Yet pop-art didn't actually originate in America. The genre was first dabbled into during the 1950's in Britain, as theit take on American culture. However, Pop Art could really only be an art movement that was born in the 20^th century. With the boom of capitalism came a boom of consumerism and a flood of images and advertisements. Pop-art isolated these images and aesthetics that we were so constantly bombarded with for contemplation outside of the original context. What ensued would make some huff and puff that it wasn't art, and others call it genius.

In many ways, Pop-Art was the opposite of the Abstract Expressionism that had blanketed the cultural scenes of the world. It was a return to precise painting and realism. Even in Lichtenstein, with his poppy graphic images, there is "hard edge" painting and precision. With a base in ironic humor with an anti-consumerism edge Pop-Art runs very close with Dada, which I always considered the punk rock of the art world.

Pop-art has continued to grow and spread like wildfire (along with consumerism) all over the World today. Japan is home to one of the most respected and interesting forms of pop art, an artist collective called Kaikai Kiki. These artists are known for their super-flat style and use of shocking or obscure imagery, much of which is inspired by anime and Japanese street culture.