Art imitating art
Frederic Remington, Cowboy, ca. 1890, Oil on canvas, Private Collection
From CBS Sunday Morning (my favorite show):
They were called “moving pictures.” The earliest films really were more like “art that moved” than the plot-based “movies” of today. Nancy Mowll Mathews spent 10 years collecting examples that illustrate just how much painters and sculptors influenced early filmmakers — and vice versa. The exhibit she created, called “Moving Pictures,” shows in a very dramatic way, the extraordinary connection between art and early films.
The collection can be found at The Phillips Collection, a museum in Washington, D.C.
This exhibition will present American realist painting from the late 19th and early 20th centuries side-by-side with the earliest experiments in film. Approximately 100 works, including nearly 60 short films (a few minutes long) by Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers, and the Cinémathèque Française, along with works by American masters such as George Bellows, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, Maurice Prendergast, and John Sloan, will provide a new context for looking at the artists’ choice and presentation of subject matter. For the first time, film will be fully integrated into the history of American art.
The exhibition was organized by the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts and made possible in part by The Henry R. Luce Foundation and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
It ends May 20th and if I lived anywhere near Washington, D.C., I’d spend time studying this presentation. It’s fascinating!
