The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters

One is fixed on canvas, the other in constant flux. One is a solitary practice, the other—in most cases, at least—communal. Painting and filmmaking are, in many regards, arts a world apart, which perhaps explains the fascination that the practice of one holds for practitioners of the other. In The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, audiences will find fiction and documentary contemplations of the painter at work, including depictions of a self-taught Georgian painter of peasant life (Pirosmani), a Norwegian master of conjuring gut-gnawing dread (Edvard Munch), and a certain Spaniard using the very screen as a canvas (The Mystery of Picasso), as well as a successful painter turned filmmaker producing a biopic of an esteemed contemporary (Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat) and a failed painter turned successful filmmaker’s biopic of a ruinously unprosperous predecessor (Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh). In short, a collection that puts to shame those in the Prado, the Hermitage, or the Louvre—and all without leaving the five boroughs.