American Art on the Silver Screen
Juuly 22 – October 31, 2008

Through a selection of film clips, this installation invites visitors to discover how American art has been represented on the Silver Screen, especially in popular fiction movies. Indeed, since the early 1980s, Americans have become increasingly aware of the importance of historical American art, and it was around this same time that works of American art began to appear regularly in certain Hollywood movies.

Throughout the history of cinema, painting and sculpture have been represented in and structured into films in a variety of way. These appearances are never haphazard and often induce a curious tension for the viewer by evoking multiple associations. Carefully chosen paintings placed in the foreground or background of a movie scene can infer desire, wealth, status, or patriotism. Depending on the particular use of a painting within the framework of the movie, a director can evoke, through this clin d’oeil, an entire society or particular moment in history. Historical portraits of early American presidents which appear in numerous popular fiction movies set in the White House point to a national history while huge paintings by American Abstract Expressionists or Minimalists that often appear on the walls of New York offices in films set in the 1980s tend to signify the power of money.

From among the films chosen, consider Dressed to Kill (1980, Brian de Palma) where the main female character contemplates modern art at a museum, especially West Interior by Alex Katx from 1979 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) The Age of Innocence (1993, Martin Scorsese) that shows Samuel Morse Gallery of the Louvre, 1831, a painting that belongs to the Terra Foundation for American Art.