Painters Painting preceded by Jackson Pollock '51

Director: Emile de Antonio, Hans Namuth

2016 / 127min / 16mm

De Antonio had been an intimate of the American Pop artists well before turning to filmmaking, and as such brought a unique access and understanding to this documentary, a series of profiles of painters and art world figures based around the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970, whose cast includes Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler, modernist mandarin Clement Greenberg, art dealer Leo Castelli, and celebrity collectors Robert and Ethel Scull. Screens with Jackson Pollock ’51, in which the action painter’s process is captured in real time, a glass pane acting as his canvas and his attack filmed from beneath.

Painters Painting (Emile de Antonio, 1973, 116 mins, 16mm)

Jackson Pollock '51 (Hans Namuth, 1951, 11 mins, 16mm)

Part of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters