After decades of creating subversive art and music, Yoko Ono will receive a lifetime achievement award. MacDowell, an organization that offers artists residencies, will honor the artist with its Edward MacDowell Medal at an event in Peterborough, New Hampshire, this summer.
Ono, 91, is not expected to attend the ceremony, though. Her longtime manager, David Newgarden, will accept the award on her behalf during the presentation on July 21. The event will include an opening of MacDowell’s studios.
“It’s an incredible honor that my mother, Yoko Ono, will be awarded the MacDowell Medal,...
Ono, 91, is not expected to attend the ceremony, though. Her longtime manager, David Newgarden, will accept the award on her behalf during the presentation on July 21. The event will include an opening of MacDowell’s studios.
“It’s an incredible honor that my mother, Yoko Ono, will be awarded the MacDowell Medal,...
- 4/22/2024
- by Kory Grow
- Rollingstone.com
Artist-turned-actor Sylvester Stallone will have a retrospective of his original paintings and art pieces at the Toronto Film Festival, starting today.
The exhibit with mixed-media art, writings and memorabilia by the Rocky and Expendables star will run throughout TIFF, leading up to the world premiere of Netflix’s Stallone documentary Sly that is set to close the Toronto festival on Sept. 16 with a gala screening.
The Bell Lightbox exhibit features 12 original paintings and art pieces created by Stallone from 1975 to 2020. Most are abstract, with vivid paintbrush swirls enveloping images of boxers and commentary on Hollywood fame and royalty. One work, Family Ties, depicts a pregnant mother and a distant father and illustrates the artist’s use of a limited color palette of black, white and red.
Stallone art exhibit
Before becoming a superstar in Hollywood, Stallone as a young man started out as a painter, before choosing script writing and then acting as a career.
The exhibit with mixed-media art, writings and memorabilia by the Rocky and Expendables star will run throughout TIFF, leading up to the world premiere of Netflix’s Stallone documentary Sly that is set to close the Toronto festival on Sept. 16 with a gala screening.
The Bell Lightbox exhibit features 12 original paintings and art pieces created by Stallone from 1975 to 2020. Most are abstract, with vivid paintbrush swirls enveloping images of boxers and commentary on Hollywood fame and royalty. One work, Family Ties, depicts a pregnant mother and a distant father and illustrates the artist’s use of a limited color palette of black, white and red.
Stallone art exhibit
Before becoming a superstar in Hollywood, Stallone as a young man started out as a painter, before choosing script writing and then acting as a career.
- 9/7/2023
- by Etan Vlessing
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The various facets of the art of the heist––from motivation to execution to life on the lam (or in detainment)––make it perennially ripe for high-stakes cinematic treatment. One of the most peculiar such stories of thieving involves Jerry and Rita Alter, retired teachers who were suspected of lifting Willem de Kooning’s “Woman-Ochre” in broad daylight from the University of Arizona in 1985. Some decades later and well after their deaths, the $160 million painting was uncovered at their New Mexico home. Without her subjects to tell their own tale, Allison Otto’s The Thief Collector draws from many sources to weave the web of deceit and globe-trotting adventure. Its twist-a-minute peeling back of the mystery around our subjects’ secretive way of life makes for a mostly riveting inquiry into lies hiding in plain sight, yet the results can feel unwieldy with its overstuffed roster of talking heads and distracting,...
- 5/18/2023
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
"You take it, you make it yours." FilmRise has revealed an official trailer for an indie crime caper titled The Thief Collector, marking the feature directorial of Allison Otto. This premiered at the 2022 SXSW Film Festival last year, and is opening to watch this month on VOD. The docu-drama film follows the true story of one of the most elaborate art heists of the 20th century, the theft of "Woman-Ochre," Willem de Kooning's iconic painting, and the eccentric couple – both schoolteachers – at the center of the heist. It was cut from its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. 32 years later, the painting was found hanging in a New Mexico home. The film stars Glenn Howerton & Sarah Minnich, with Brandon Ruiz & Hailee Cruzen. This "uniquely combines the strong appeal and captivating nature of crime documentaries together with the true story of one of the most audacious art heists in history,...
- 5/4/2023
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
This entertaining documentary looks at how teachers Rita and Jerry Alter walked into a museum and left with a rolled-up Willem de Kooning now worth $160m
It was a brazen case of daylight robbery. In 1985, a couple walked into an art gallery on the campus of the University of Arizona and left 15 minutes later with a rolled-up Willem de Kooning shoved up the man’s jacket. In 2017, the painting was finally recovered – not by the FBI, but by a trio of house clearance guys in New Mexico. It had been hanging for 30 years on the bedroom wall of retired teachers Rita and Jerry Alter.
How an ordinary couple like the Alters pulled off one of the biggest art heists of the 20th century is told in this mostly entertaining documentary. You can imagine the story being turned into a podcast and it’s perhaps stretched a little thin for a full-length documentary.
It was a brazen case of daylight robbery. In 1985, a couple walked into an art gallery on the campus of the University of Arizona and left 15 minutes later with a rolled-up Willem de Kooning shoved up the man’s jacket. In 2017, the painting was finally recovered – not by the FBI, but by a trio of house clearance guys in New Mexico. It had been hanging for 30 years on the bedroom wall of retired teachers Rita and Jerry Alter.
How an ordinary couple like the Alters pulled off one of the biggest art heists of the 20th century is told in this mostly entertaining documentary. You can imagine the story being turned into a podcast and it’s perhaps stretched a little thin for a full-length documentary.
- 3/29/2023
- by Cath Clarke
- The Guardian - Film News
New York-based film and TV studio and streaming network FilmRise has acquired North American distribution rights to true-crime documentary feature film “The Thief Collector.”
Directed by Emmy winner Allison Otto (“The Love Bugs”), the film follows one of the most audacious and puzzling art thefts of a generation. In 1985, Willem de Kooning’s seminal work, “Woman-Ochre,” was sliced from its frame and stolen off the walls of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, disappearing into the desert. Over 30 years later, in a remote town in New Mexico, the $160 million dollar painting was rediscovered in the unlikeliest of places – the home of an eccentric married couple, both schoolteachers, with a keen eye for great works but a very unconventional method of collecting them. The film features Glenn Howerton co-creator, director, writer and star of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
“The Thief Collector” had its world premiere at the 2022 SXSW Film...
Directed by Emmy winner Allison Otto (“The Love Bugs”), the film follows one of the most audacious and puzzling art thefts of a generation. In 1985, Willem de Kooning’s seminal work, “Woman-Ochre,” was sliced from its frame and stolen off the walls of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, disappearing into the desert. Over 30 years later, in a remote town in New Mexico, the $160 million dollar painting was rediscovered in the unlikeliest of places – the home of an eccentric married couple, both schoolteachers, with a keen eye for great works but a very unconventional method of collecting them. The film features Glenn Howerton co-creator, director, writer and star of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
“The Thief Collector” had its world premiere at the 2022 SXSW Film...
- 3/22/2023
- by Naman Ramachandran
- Variety Film + TV
Paul McCartney said he often does a “disappearing trick” when writing songs. He likes to pretend to be other artists when he doesn’t want to write a Paul McCartney song. Suddenly, there’s no pressure.
Paul McCartney | Frank Micelotta Archive/Getty Images Paul McCartney often does a ‘disappearing trick’ when writing songs
In his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote that he often does a “bit of a disappearing trick” when writing a song. For example, he imagines it having been recorded by another artist. In the case of The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road,” Paul thought of Ray Charles.
Sometimes, Paul doesn’t feel like writing songs as Paul McCartney. He doesn’t want it to be a Paul McCartney song. So he imagines he’s another person writing a tune. “This is a strategy for keeping things fresh,” Paul wrote.
The singer-songwriter uses the...
Paul McCartney | Frank Micelotta Archive/Getty Images Paul McCartney often does a ‘disappearing trick’ when writing songs
In his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote that he often does a “bit of a disappearing trick” when writing a song. For example, he imagines it having been recorded by another artist. In the case of The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road,” Paul thought of Ray Charles.
Sometimes, Paul doesn’t feel like writing songs as Paul McCartney. He doesn’t want it to be a Paul McCartney song. So he imagines he’s another person writing a tune. “This is a strategy for keeping things fresh,” Paul wrote.
The singer-songwriter uses the...
- 3/19/2023
- by Hannah Wigandt
- Showbiz Cheat Sheet
UK/Ireland deals have been sealed for ‘The Thief Collector’ and ‘Myanmar Diaries’.
Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s award-winning feature documentary Matter Out of Place, about waste disposal, has been acquired by Frenetic for Switzerland, Against Gravity for Poland, Zero Em Comportamento for Portugal, and You Shiu Enterprises for Taiwan from Autlook Film Sales.
Matter Out Of Place won the Green Leopard at Locarno in August and is now screening in the Masters section at this week’s International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).
Austrian outfit Autlook has also sold theatrical rights to Allison Otto’s The Thief Collector to Signature Entertainment...
Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s award-winning feature documentary Matter Out of Place, about waste disposal, has been acquired by Frenetic for Switzerland, Against Gravity for Poland, Zero Em Comportamento for Portugal, and You Shiu Enterprises for Taiwan from Autlook Film Sales.
Matter Out Of Place won the Green Leopard at Locarno in August and is now screening in the Masters section at this week’s International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).
Austrian outfit Autlook has also sold theatrical rights to Allison Otto’s The Thief Collector to Signature Entertainment...
- 11/14/2022
- by Geoffrey Macnab
- ScreenDaily
The 14th Annual Santa Fe International Film Festival has announced its juried award winners for the event which has run from Oct. 19-23.
More than 100 filmmakers have traveled to the Land of Enchantment state to show off their cinematic wares.
Says SFiFF Artistic Director Jacques Paisner, “We play strange movies, small movies and foreign films, and the audience is keen on a chance to see something they wouldn’t otherwise experience.”
Courtesy of Santa Fe International Film Festival A scene from Godfrey Reggios Once Within a Time.
Receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award tonight is Qatsi trilogy filmmaker Godfrey Reggio who is here with his new documentary, scored by longtime collaborator Phillip Glass and edited by Jon Kane, Once Within a Time. The pic is billed as a “fantasy of the real with themes of climate change and the perils of technology, and their effects on future generations. It is geared...
More than 100 filmmakers have traveled to the Land of Enchantment state to show off their cinematic wares.
Says SFiFF Artistic Director Jacques Paisner, “We play strange movies, small movies and foreign films, and the audience is keen on a chance to see something they wouldn’t otherwise experience.”
Courtesy of Santa Fe International Film Festival A scene from Godfrey Reggios Once Within a Time.
Receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award tonight is Qatsi trilogy filmmaker Godfrey Reggio who is here with his new documentary, scored by longtime collaborator Phillip Glass and edited by Jon Kane, Once Within a Time. The pic is billed as a “fantasy of the real with themes of climate change and the perils of technology, and their effects on future generations. It is geared...
- 10/22/2022
- by Anthony D'Alessandro
- Deadline Film + TV
Robert Pattinson has curated a collection fit for Bruce Wayne.
The “Batman” actor partnered with Sotheby’s on an exhibit for the Contemporary Curated program, which runs from September 23 through 29 at Sotheby’s New York. A live auction will conclude the exhibit on September 30.
Pattinson selected six pieces from artists including Willem de Kooning, Richard Serra, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. According to Artnet, estimated values for the works range from 100,000 to 2.5 million. Pattinson, who is deemed a “passionate art collector” by a Page Six source, previously auctioned one of his own sketches for charity in 2017.
“What I look for is when a piece has its own language,” Pattinson said in a press release of his curation strategy, especially applauding artist Julie Mehretu’s portrayals of “magnitude and abundance” in her “Untitled” ink drawing.
“It doesn’t necessarily feel like it just exists for its own sake and has a presence that...
The “Batman” actor partnered with Sotheby’s on an exhibit for the Contemporary Curated program, which runs from September 23 through 29 at Sotheby’s New York. A live auction will conclude the exhibit on September 30.
Pattinson selected six pieces from artists including Willem de Kooning, Richard Serra, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. According to Artnet, estimated values for the works range from 100,000 to 2.5 million. Pattinson, who is deemed a “passionate art collector” by a Page Six source, previously auctioned one of his own sketches for charity in 2017.
“What I look for is when a piece has its own language,” Pattinson said in a press release of his curation strategy, especially applauding artist Julie Mehretu’s portrayals of “magnitude and abundance” in her “Untitled” ink drawing.
“It doesn’t necessarily feel like it just exists for its own sake and has a presence that...
- 9/21/2022
- by Samantha Bergeson
- Indiewire
The Santa Fe International Film Festival (SFiFF) has announced its first 15 feature titles. These films are part of the Special Presentation section and will be followed by a full schedule of competition films, short films, panels and events. SFiFF starts October 19 and will run through October 23.
Broker directed by Hirokazu Koreeda
One rainy night, a baby is left at the baby box facility. Sang-hyun and Dong-soo secretly take it home to find suitable parents to adopt him. However, the next day, So-young unexpectedly returns, and calls the police when she discovers her baby is missing. Meanwhile, police detectives have been investigating the case for the past 6 months, waiting for the decisive moment when they can catch the duo in the act.
Holy Spider directed by Ali Abbasi
A journalist descends into the dark underbelly of the Iranian holy city of Mashhad as she investigates the serial killings of sex workers...
Broker directed by Hirokazu Koreeda
One rainy night, a baby is left at the baby box facility. Sang-hyun and Dong-soo secretly take it home to find suitable parents to adopt him. However, the next day, So-young unexpectedly returns, and calls the police when she discovers her baby is missing. Meanwhile, police detectives have been investigating the case for the past 6 months, waiting for the decisive moment when they can catch the duo in the act.
Holy Spider directed by Ali Abbasi
A journalist descends into the dark underbelly of the Iranian holy city of Mashhad as she investigates the serial killings of sex workers...
- 9/18/2022
- by Armando Tinoco
- Deadline Film + TV
The film has sold to UK (Curzon) and Australia (Madman Entertainment).
Austrian documentary sales specialist Autlook Filmsales has recorded a string of key deals on Bianca Stigter’s Holocaust documentary Three Minutes - A Lengthening.
The film has sold to UK (Curzon), Australia (Madman Entertainment), Spain and Portugal (FilmIn), Scandinavia and Baltics (NonStop), Poland (Against Gravity), Hong Kong (Pccw) and Former Yugoslavia (Discovery Film).
Neon’s boutique label Super Ltd will distribute to North America later this autumn. Japanese and German buyers are also reportedly circling the film.
From a three-minute home film from 1939, the director recreates the story of...
Austrian documentary sales specialist Autlook Filmsales has recorded a string of key deals on Bianca Stigter’s Holocaust documentary Three Minutes - A Lengthening.
The film has sold to UK (Curzon), Australia (Madman Entertainment), Spain and Portugal (FilmIn), Scandinavia and Baltics (NonStop), Poland (Against Gravity), Hong Kong (Pccw) and Former Yugoslavia (Discovery Film).
Neon’s boutique label Super Ltd will distribute to North America later this autumn. Japanese and German buyers are also reportedly circling the film.
From a three-minute home film from 1939, the director recreates the story of...
- 5/9/2022
- by Geoffrey Macnab
- ScreenDaily
In 2017, antique dealer David Van Auker purchased a house and all its contents at an estate auction. Van Auker and his team headed out to the extremely secluded home, located in the ultra-small town of Cliff, New Mexico, and began to take inventory. The domicile was filled with what appeared to be a random assortment of art, varying in style, but all of it paled to what the group ultimately discovered: "Woman-Ochre," a painting by expressionist artist Willem de Kooning. It was an original painting, too — not a print. And that wasn't all: as Van Auker soon found out, the painting had actually...
The post The Thief Collector: Did a Seemingly Normal Married Couple Pull Off a Major Art Heist? [SXSW] appeared first on /Film.
The post The Thief Collector: Did a Seemingly Normal Married Couple Pull Off a Major Art Heist? [SXSW] appeared first on /Film.
- 3/14/2022
- by Chris Evangelista
- Slash Film
“The Heist,” the true story of the theft of Willem de Kooning’s iconic “Woman-Ochre” from an Arizona art museum, is in the works from “The Love Bugs” director Allison Otto. Nonfiction studio Xtr will back the new documentary in partnership with
Roots Productions’ Jill Howerton and Josh Kunau, the producers of “The Devil We Know,” Museum + Crane’s Caryn Capotosto, the maker of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” Mark Monroe, writer of the Academy Award winning films “Icarus” and “The Cove,” penned the screenplay.
It’s easy to see why that caliber of talent was attracted to the story. The day after Thanksgiving, 1985, one of de Kooning’s most famous paintings was sliced from its frame and stolen from the walls of the museum where it was housed. The painting was originally acquired from de Kooning by Edward Joseph Gallagher Jr., a collector who later donated it to...
Roots Productions’ Jill Howerton and Josh Kunau, the producers of “The Devil We Know,” Museum + Crane’s Caryn Capotosto, the maker of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” Mark Monroe, writer of the Academy Award winning films “Icarus” and “The Cove,” penned the screenplay.
It’s easy to see why that caliber of talent was attracted to the story. The day after Thanksgiving, 1985, one of de Kooning’s most famous paintings was sliced from its frame and stolen from the walls of the museum where it was housed. The painting was originally acquired from de Kooning by Edward Joseph Gallagher Jr., a collector who later donated it to...
- 3/19/2021
- by Brent Lang
- Variety Film + TV
It’s hard to remember a moment in Hollywood when more production starts were announced or star commitments unveiled — witness Netflix’s slate of 70 films. The stars glow brightly in streamer heaven. And Donald Trump’s messy exit helped stoke the hubris.
The flurry of announcements may be a bit misleading, of course, since cutbacks and retrenchments still pervade the small print. Streamer hits like The Queen’s Gambit generate heat but, overall, subscriber churn has increased as subscribers sample a show, then cancel the service. This hasn’t kept the Netflix subscriber list from topping 200 million for the first time.
Still, the film business continues to flicker: Top Gun: Maverick has been awarded a hopeful July 2 release and the latest James Bond film, No Time to Die, may (or may not) re-appear in April, but Morbius, the Spider-Man spinoff, has been pushed back to October 8 along with most other tentpoles.
The flurry of announcements may be a bit misleading, of course, since cutbacks and retrenchments still pervade the small print. Streamer hits like The Queen’s Gambit generate heat but, overall, subscriber churn has increased as subscribers sample a show, then cancel the service. This hasn’t kept the Netflix subscriber list from topping 200 million for the first time.
Still, the film business continues to flicker: Top Gun: Maverick has been awarded a hopeful July 2 release and the latest James Bond film, No Time to Die, may (or may not) re-appear in April, but Morbius, the Spider-Man spinoff, has been pushed back to October 8 along with most other tentpoles.
- 1/21/2021
- by Peter Bart
- Deadline Film + TV
Indie veteran lining up development and production fund.
Rose Ganguzza, the New York producer of summer release Fatima, has unveiled a Rose Pictures development slate that includes new work from the directors of How To Build A Girl and Grudge.
Ganguzza, a veteran of the independent space whose producing credits include Margin Call and Kill Your Darlings, has partnered on the content pipeline for 2021 with Max Born, a producer The Devil All The Time, and Jake Alden Falconer, a producer on summer horror film 1Br.
As Fatima – the film released by Bob and Jeanne Berney’s Picturehouse – ranks in the...
Rose Ganguzza, the New York producer of summer release Fatima, has unveiled a Rose Pictures development slate that includes new work from the directors of How To Build A Girl and Grudge.
Ganguzza, a veteran of the independent space whose producing credits include Margin Call and Kill Your Darlings, has partnered on the content pipeline for 2021 with Max Born, a producer The Devil All The Time, and Jake Alden Falconer, a producer on summer horror film 1Br.
As Fatima – the film released by Bob and Jeanne Berney’s Picturehouse – ranks in the...
- 11/4/2020
- by Jeremy Kay
- ScreenDaily
Indie veteran lining up development and production fund.
Rose Ganguzza, the New York producer of summer release Fatima, has unveiled a Rose Pictures development slate that includes new work from the directors of How To Build A Girl and Grudge.
Ganguzza, a veteran of the independent space whose producing credits include Margin Call and Kill Your Darlings, has partnered on the content pipeline for 2021 with Max Born, a producer The Devil All The Time, and Jake Alden Falconer, a producer on summer horror film 1Br.
As Fatima – the film released by Bob and Jeanne Berney’s Picturehouse – ranks in the...
Rose Ganguzza, the New York producer of summer release Fatima, has unveiled a Rose Pictures development slate that includes new work from the directors of How To Build A Girl and Grudge.
Ganguzza, a veteran of the independent space whose producing credits include Margin Call and Kill Your Darlings, has partnered on the content pipeline for 2021 with Max Born, a producer The Devil All The Time, and Jake Alden Falconer, a producer on summer horror film 1Br.
As Fatima – the film released by Bob and Jeanne Berney’s Picturehouse – ranks in the...
- 11/4/2020
- by Jeremy Kay
- ScreenDaily
Annecy– Paris-based sales agent Doc & Film International has picked up international rights to Aurélien Froment’s feature debut “Josep,” which was presented during a packed Wip session at the Annecy Festival on Tuesday.
The feature is an emotional and beautifully crafted portrait of Josep Bartolí, the Catalan illustrator, soldier, Hollywood stage designer, and painter who fought in the Spanish Civil War and fled to Mexico after escaping from a concentration camp. In the U.S. he was part of the influential 10th Street artists group, which included luminaries like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. After landing on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s blacklist during his tenure in Hollywood, Bartolí was forced to flee to Mexico. He died in New York at the age of 85, leaving a noteworthy and yet poorly recognized artistic legacy.
Bartolí’s amazing life journey inspired the film, a veritable love-story and homage to a passion for drawing.
The feature is an emotional and beautifully crafted portrait of Josep Bartolí, the Catalan illustrator, soldier, Hollywood stage designer, and painter who fought in the Spanish Civil War and fled to Mexico after escaping from a concentration camp. In the U.S. he was part of the influential 10th Street artists group, which included luminaries like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. After landing on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s blacklist during his tenure in Hollywood, Bartolí was forced to flee to Mexico. He died in New York at the age of 85, leaving a noteworthy and yet poorly recognized artistic legacy.
Bartolí’s amazing life journey inspired the film, a veritable love-story and homage to a passion for drawing.
- 6/12/2019
- by Emilio Mayorga
- Variety Film + TV
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Emmy-winning EPs, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, have designs on the modern art scene, having optioned the non-fiction book Ninth Street Women for their next Amazon project.
Released in 2018, the Mary Gabriel-penned work chronicles the lives of five women — Lee Krasner (wife of Jackson Pollack), Elaine de Kooning (wife of Willem de Kooning), Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler — “who dared to enter the male-dominated world of 20th-Century abstract painting — not as muses, but as artists,” according to the book’s official logline. “These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing...
Released in 2018, the Mary Gabriel-penned work chronicles the lives of five women — Lee Krasner (wife of Jackson Pollack), Elaine de Kooning (wife of Willem de Kooning), Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler — “who dared to enter the male-dominated world of 20th-Century abstract painting — not as muses, but as artists,” according to the book’s official logline. “These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing...
- 4/24/2019
- TVLine.com
The 2018 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize has been awarded to U.K. playwright Alice Birch for her play Anatomy of a Suicide. Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, the Prize is awarded annually to recognize women from around the world who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre. The Winner will receive 25,000 and a signed and numbered print by renowned artist Willem de Kooning.
- 3/12/2018
- by BWW News Desk
- BroadwayWorld.com
Where does art exist? If it sounds like a trick question it’s because it is. It begins in the mind of the creator, but from there it can go off in many different directions. How we consume art and the role of the museum and the art collector is called into question in Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary The Price Of Everything. Instead of approaching the topic with fiery passion, Kahn takes his time to explore the subject from all sides, including dozens of artists, curators, historians, and collectors that are enveloped in the world. Everyone plays a role in the contemporary art world (regardless of your direct involvement) and Kahn calls into question the moral, financial, and creative concerns when art is more than just a means to express oneself.
In his introduction to the film, the director compared it to the work of Robert Altman. This isn’t too far off,...
In his introduction to the film, the director compared it to the work of Robert Altman. This isn’t too far off,...
- 3/12/2018
- by Michael Haffner
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Totally and tragically unconventional, Peggy Guggenheim moved through the cultural upheaval of the 20th century collecting not only not only art, but artists. Her sexual life was -- and still today is -- more discussed than the art itself which she collected, not for her own consumption but for the world to enjoy.
Her colorful personal history included such figures as Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and countless others. Guggenheim helped introduce the world to Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko and scores of others now recognized as key masters of modernism.
In 1921 she moved to Paris and mingled with Picasso, Dali, Joyce, Pound, Stein, Leger, Kandinsky. In 1938 she opened a gallery in London and began showing Cocteau, Tanguy, Magritte, Miro, Brancusi, etc., and then back to Paris and New York after the Nazi invasion, followed by the opening of her NYC gallery Art of This Century, which became one of the premiere avant-garde spaces in the U.S. While fighting through personal tragedy, she maintained her vision to build one of the most important collections of modern art, now enshrined in her Venetian palazzo where she moved in 1947. Since 1951, her collection has become one of the world’s most visited art spaces.
Featuring: Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Vasil Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Fernand Leger, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Jean Miro, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Kurt Schwitters, Gino Severini, Clyfford Still and Yves Tanguy.
Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Director and Producer)
Lisa Immordino Vreeland has been immersed in the world of fashion and art for the past 25 years. She started her career in fashion as the Director of Public Relations for Polo Ralph Lauren in Italy and quickly moved on to launch two fashion companies, Pratico, a sportswear line for women, and Mago, a cashmere knitwear collection of her own design. Her first book was accompanied by her directorial debut of the documentary of the same name, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012). The film about the editor of Harper's Bazaar had its European premiere at the Venice Film Festival and its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, going on to win the Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the fashion category for the Design of the Year awards, otherwise known as “The Oscars” of design—at the Design Museum in London.
"Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict" is Lisa Immordino Vreeland's followup to her acclaimed debut, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel". She is now working on her third doc on Cecil Beaton who Lisa says, "has been circling around all these stories. What's great about him is the creativity: fashion photography, war photography, "My Fair Lady" winning an Oscar."
Sydney Levine: I have read numerous accounts and interviews with you about this film and rather than repeat all that has been said, I refer my readers to Indiewire's Women and Hollywood interview at Tribeca this year, and your Indiewire interview with Aubrey Page, November 6, 2015 .
Let's try to cover new territory here.
First of all, what about you? What is your relationship to Diana Vreeland?
Liv: I am married to her grandson, Alexander Vreeland. (I'm also proud of my name Immordino) I never met Diana but hearing so many family stories about her made me start to wonder about all the talk about her. I worked in fashion and lived in New York like she did.
Sl: In one of your interviews you said that Peggy was not only ahead of her time but she helped to define it. Can you tell me how?
Liv: Peggy grew up in a very traditional family of German Bavarian Jews who had moved to New York City in the 19th century. Already at a young age Peggy felt like there were too many rules around her and she wanted to break out. That alone was something attractive to me — the notion that she knew that she didn't fit in to her family or her times. She lived on her own terms, a very modern approach to life. She decided to abandon her family in New York. Though she always stayed connected to them, she rarely visited New York. Instead she lived in a world without borders. She did not live by "the rules". She believed in creating art and created herself, living on her own terms and not on those of her family.
Sl: Is there a link between her and your previous doc on Diana Vreeland?
Liv: The link between Vreeland and Guggenheim is their mutual sense of reinvention and transformation. That made something click inside of me as I too reinvented myself when I began writing the book on Diana Vreeland .
Can you talk about the process of putting this one together and how it differed from its predecessor?
Liv: The most challenging thing about this one was the vast amount of material we had at our disposal. We had a lot of media to go through — instead of fashion spreads, which informed The Eye Has To Travel, we had art, which was fantastic. I was spoiled by the access we had to these incredible archives and footage. I'm still new to this, but it's the storytelling aspect that I loved in both projects. One thing about Peggy that Mrs. Vreeland didn't have was a very tragic personal life. There was so much that happened in Peggy's life before you even got to what she actually accomplished. And so we had to tell a very dense story about her childhood, her father dying on the Titanic, her beloved sister dying — the tragic events that fundamentally shaped her in a way. It was about making sure we had enough of the personal story to go along with her later accomplishments.
World War II alone was such a huge part of her story, opening an important art gallery in London, where she showed Kandinsky and other important artists for the first time. The amount of material to distill was a tremendous challenge and I hope we made the right choices.
Sl: How did you learn make a documentary?
Liv: I learned how to make a documentary by having a good team around me. My editors (and co-writers)Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng were very helpful.
Research is fundamental; finding as much as you can and never giving up. I love the research. It is my "precise time". Not just for interviews but of footage, photographs never seen before. It is a painstaking process that satisfies me. The research never ends. I was still researching while I was promoting the Diana Vreeland book. I love reading books and going to original sources.
The archives in film museums in the last ten years has changed and given museums a new role. I found unique footage at Moma with the Elizabeth Chapman Films. Chapman went to Paris in the 30s and 40s with a handheld camera and took moving pictures of Brancusi and Duchamps joking around in a studio, Gertrude Stein, Leger walking down the street. This footage is owned by Robert Storr, Dean of Yale School of Art. In fact he is taking a sabbatical this year to go through the boxes and boxes of Chapman's films. We also used " Entre'acte" by René Clair cowritten with Dadaist Francis Picabia, "Le Sang du poet" of Cocteau, Hans Richter "8x8","Gagascope" and " Dreams That Money Can Buy" produced by Peggy Guggenheim, written by Man Ray in 1947.
Sl: How long did it take to research and make the film?
Liv: It took three years for both the Vreeland and the Guggenheim documentary.
It was more difficult with the Guggenheim story because there was so much material and so much to tell of her life. And she was not so giving of her own self. Diana could inspire you about a bandaid; she was so giving. But Peggy didn't talk much about why she loved an artist or a painting. She acted more. And using historical material could become "over-teaching" though it was fascinating.
So much had to be eliminated. It was hard to eliminate the Degenerate Art Show, a subject which is newly discussed. Stephanie Barron of Lacma is an expert on Degenerate Art and was so generous.
Once we decided upon which aspects to focus on, then we could give focus to the interviews.
There were so many of her important shows we could not include. For instance there was a show on collages featuring William Baziotes , Jackson Pollack and Robert Motherwell which started a more modern collage trend in art. The 31 Women Art Show which we did include pushed forward another message which I think is important.
And so many different things have been written about Peggy — there were hundreds of articles written about her during her lifetime. She also kept beautiful scrapbooks of articles written about her, which are now in the archives of the Guggenheim Museum.
The Guggenheim foundation did not commission this documentary but they were very supportive and the film premiered there in New York in a wonderful celebration. They wanted to represent Peggy and her paintings properly. The paintings were secondary characters and all were carefully placed historically in a correct fashion.
Sl: You said in one interview Guggenheim became a central figure in the modern art movement?
Liv: Yes and she did it without ego. Sharing was always her purpose in collecting art. She was not out for herself. Before Peggy, the art world was very different. And today it is part of wealth management.
Other collectors had a different way with art. Isabelle Stewart Gardner bought art for her own personal consumption. The Gardner Museum came later. Gertrude Stein was sharing the vision of her brother when she began collecting art. The Coen sisters were not sharing.
Her benevolence ranged from giving Berenice Abbott the money to buy her first camera to keeping Pollock afloat during lean times.
Djuana Barnes, who had a 'Love Love Love Hate Hate Hate' relationship with Peggy wrote Nightwood in Peggy's country house in England.
She was in Paris to the last minute. She planned how to safeguard artwork from the Nazis during World War II. She was storing gasoline so she could escape. She lived on the Ile St. Louis with her art and moved the paintings out first to a children's boarding school and then to Marseilles where it was shipped out to New York City.
Her role in art was not taken seriously because of her very public love life which was described in very derogatory terms. There was more talk about her love life than about her collection of art.
Her autobiography, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1960) , was scandalous when it came out — and she didn't even use real names, she used pseudonyms for her numerous partners. Only after publication did she reveal the names of the men she slept with.
The fact that she spoke about her sexual life at all was the most outrageous aspect. She was opening herself up to ridicule, but she didn't care. Peggy was her own person and she felt good in her own skin. But it was definitely unconventional behavior. I think her sexual appetites revealed a lot about finding her own identity.
A lot of it was tied to the loss of her father, I think, in addition to her wanting to feel accepted. She was also very adventurous — look at the men she slept with. I mean, come on, they are amazing! Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, and she married Max Ernst. I think it was really ballsy of her to have been so open about her sexuality; this was not something people did back then. So many people are bound by conventional rules but Peggy said no. She grabbed hold of life and she lived it on her own terms.
Sl: You also give Peggy credit for changing the way art was exhibited. Can you explain that?
Liv: One of her greatest achievements was her gallery space in New York City, Art of This Century, which was unlike anything the art world has seen before or since in the way that it shattered the boundaries of the gallery space that we've come to know today — the sterile white cube. She came to be a genius at displaying her collections...
She was smart with Art of the Century because she hired Frederick Kiesler as a designer of the gallery and once again surrounded herself with the right people, including Howard Putzler, who was already involved with her at Guggenheim Jeune in London. And she was hanging out with all the exiled Surrealists who were living in New York at the time, including her future husband, Max Ernst, who was the real star of that group of artists. With the help of these people, she started showing art in a completely different way that was both informal and approachable. In conventional museums and galleries, art was untouchable on the wall and inside frames. In Peggy's gallery, art stuck out from the walls; works weren't confined to frames. Kiesler designed special chairs you could sit in and browse canvases as you would texts in a library. Nothing like this had ever existed in New York before — even today there is nothing like it.
She made the gallery into an exciting place where the whole concept of space was transformed. In Venice, the gallery space was also her home. Today, for a variety of reasons, the home aspect of the collection is less emphasized, though you still get a strong sense of Peggy's home life there. She was bringing art to the public in a bold new way, which I think is a great idea. It's art for everybody, which is very much a part of today's dialogue except that fewer people can afford the outlandish museum entry fees.
Sl: What do you think made her so prescient and attuned ?
Liv: She was smart enough to ask Marcel Duchamp to be her advisor — so she was in tune, and very well connected. She was on the cutting edge of what was going on and I think a lot of this had to do with Peggy being open to the idea of what was new and outrageous. You have to have a certain personality for this; what her childhood had dictated was totally opposite from what she became in life, and being in the right place at the right time helped her maintain a cutting edge throughout her life.
Sl: The movie is framed around a lost interview with Peggy conducted late in her life. How did you acquire these tapes?
Liv: We optioned Jacqueline Bogard Weld’s book, Peggy : The Wayward Guggenheim, the only authorized biography of Peggy, which was published after she died. Jackie had spent two summers interviewing Peggy but at a certain point lost the tapes somewhere in her Park Avenue apartment. Jackie had so much access to Peggy, which was incredible, but it was also the access that she had to other people who had known Peggy — she interviewed over 200 people for her book. Jackie was incredibly generous, letting me go through all her original research except for the lost tapes.
We'd walk into different rooms in her apartment and I'd suggestively open a closet door and ask “Where do you think those tapes might be?" Then one day I asked if she had a basement, and she did. So I went through all these boxes down there, organizing her affairs. Then bingo, the tapes showed up in this shoebox.
It was the longest interview Peggy had ever done and it became the framework for our movie. There's nothing more powerful than when you have someone's real voice telling the story, and Jackie was especially good at asking provoking questions. You can tell it was hard for Peggy to answer a lot of them, because she wasn't someone who was especially expressive; she didn't have a lot of emotion. And this comes across in the movie, in the tone of her voice.
Sl: Larry Gagosian has one of the best descriptions of Peggy in the movie — "she was her own creation." Would you agree, and if so why?
Liv: She was very much her own creation. When he said that in the interview I had a huge smile on my face. In Peggy's case it stemmed from a real need to identify and understand herself. I'm not sure she achieved it but she completely recreated herself — she knew that she did not want to be what she was brought up to be. She tried being a mother, but that was not one of her strengths, so art became that place where she could find herself, and then transform herself.
Nobody believed in the artists she cultivated and supported — they were outsiders and she was an outsider in the world she was brought up in. So it's in this way that she became her own great invention. I hope that her humor comes across in the film because she was extremely amusing — this aspect really comes across in her autobiography.
Sl: Finally, what do you think is Peggy Guggenheim's most lasting legacy, beyond her incredible art collection?
Liv: Her courage, and the way she used it to find herself. She had this ballsiness that not many people had, especially women. In her own way she was a feminist and it's good for women and young girls today to see women who stepped outside the confines of a very traditional family and made something of her life. Peggy's life did not seem that dreamy until she attached herself to these artists. It was her ability to redefine herself in the end that truly summed her up.
About the Filmmakers
Stanley Buchtal is a producer and entrepreneur. His movies credits include "Hairspray", "Spanking the Monkey", "Up at the Villa", "Lou Reed Berlin", "Love Marilyn", "LennoNYC", "Bobby Fischer Against the World", "Herb & Dorothy", "Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child", "Sketches of Frank Gehry", "Black White + Gray: a Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe", among numerous others.
David Koh is an independent producer, distributor, sales agent, programmer and curator. He has been involved in the distribution, sale, production, and financing of over 200 films. He is currently a partner in the boutique label Submarine Entertainment with Josh and Dan Braun and is also partners with Stanley Buchthal and his Dakota Group Ltd where he co-manages a portfolio of over 50 projects a year (75% docs and 25% fiction). Previously he was a partner and founder of Arthouse Films a boutique distribution imprint and ran Chris Blackwell's (founder of Island Records & Island Pictures) film label, Palm Pictures. He has worked as a Producer for artist Nam June Paik and worked in the curatorial departments of Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, Mfa Boston, and the Guggenheim Museum. David has recently served as a Curator for Microsoft and has curated an ongoing film series and salon with Andre Balazs Properties and serves as a Curator for the exclusive Core Club in NYC.
David recently launched with his partners Submarine Deluxe, a distribution imprint; Torpedo Pictures, a low budget high concept label; and Nfp Submarine Doks, a German distribution imprint with Nfp Films. Recently and upcoming projects include "Yayoi Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots", "Burden: a Portrait of Artist Chris Burden", "Dior and I", "20 Feet From Stardom", "Muscle Shoals", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Rats NYC", "Nas: Time Is Illmatic", "Blackfish", "Love Marilyn", "Chasing Ice", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Cutie and the Boxer"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Wolfpack, "Meru", and "Station to Station".
Dan Braun is a producer, writer, art director and musician/composer based in NYC. He is the Co-President of and Co-Founder of Submarine, a NYC film sales and production company specializing in independent feature and documentary films. Titles include "Blackfish", "Finding Vivian Maier", "Muscle Shoals", "The Case Against 8", "Keep On Keepin’ On", "Winter’s Bone", "Nas: Time is Illmatic", "Dior and I" and Oscar winning docs "Man on Wire", "Searching for Sugarman", "20 Ft From Stardom" and "Citizenfour". He was Executive Producer on documentaries "Kill Your Idols", (which won Best NY Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival 2004), "Blank City", "Sunshine Superman", the upcoming feature adaptations of "Batkid Begins" and "The Battered Bastards of Baseball" and the upcoming horror TV anthology "Creepy" to be directed by Chris Columbus.
He is a producer of the free jazz documentary "Fire Music", and the upcoming documentaries, "Burden" on artist Chris Burden and "Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots" on artist Yayoi Kusama. He is also a writer and consulting editor on Dark Horse Comic’s "Creepy" and "Eerie 9" comic book and archival series for which he won an Eisner Award for best archival comic book series in 2009.
He is a musician/composer whose compositions were featured in the films "I Melt With You" and "Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Radiant Child and is an award winning art director/creative director when he worked at Tbwa/Chiat/Day on the famous Absolut Vodka campaign.
John Northrup (Co-Producer) began his career in documentaries as a French translator for National Geographic: Explorer. He quickly moved into editing and producing, serving as the Associate Producer on "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012), and editing and co-producing "Wilson In Situ" (2014), which tells the story of theatre legend Robert Wilson and his Watermill Center. Most recently, he oversaw the post-production of Jim Chambers’ "Onward Christian Soldier", a documentary about Olympic Bomber Eric Rudolph, and is shooting on Susanne Rostock’s "Another Night in the Free World", the follow-up to her award-winning "Sing Your Song" (2011).
Submarine Entertainment (Production Company) Submarine Entertainment is a hybrid sales, production, and distribution company based in N.Y. Recent and upcoming titles include "Citizenfour", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Dog", "Visitors", "20 Feet from Stardom", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Muscle Shoals", "Blackfish", "Cutie and the Boxer", "The Summit", "The Unknown Known", "Love Marilyn", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Chasing Ice", "Downtown 81 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Wild Style 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Good Ol Freda", "Some Velvet Morning", among numerous others. Submarine principals also represent Creepy and Eerie comic book library and are developing properties across film & TV platforms.
Submarine has also recently launched a domestic distribution imprint and label called Submarine Deluxe; a genre label called Torpedo Pictures; and a German imprint and label called Nfp Submarine Doks.
Bernadine Colish has edited a number of award-winning documentaries. "Herb and Dorothy" (2008), won Audience Awards at Silverdocs, Philadelphia and Hamptons Film Festivals, and "Body of War" (2007), was named Best Documentary by the National Board of Review. "A Touch of Greatness" (2004) aired on PBS Independent Lens and was nominated for an Emmy Award. Her career began at Maysles Films, where she worked with Charlotte Zwerin on such projects as "Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser", "Toru Takemitsu: Music for the Movies" and the PBS American Masters documentary, "Ella Fitzgerald: Something To Live For". Additional credits include "Bringing Tibet Home", "Band of Sisters", "Rise and Dream", "The Tiger Next Door", "The Buffalo War" and "Absolute Wilson".
Jed Parker (Editor) Jed Parker began his career in feature films before moving into documentaries through his work with the award-winning American Masters series. Credits include "Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart", "Annie Liebovitz: Life Through a Lens", and most recently "Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides".
Other work includes two episodes of the PBS series "Make ‘Em Laugh", hosted by Billy Crystal, as well as a documentary on Met Curator Henry Geldzahler entitled "Who Gets to Call it Art"?
Credits
Director, Writer, Producer: Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Produced by Stanley Buchthal, David Koh and Dan Braun Stanley Buchthal (producer)
Maja Hoffmann (executive producer)
Josh Braun (executive producer)
Bob Benton (executive producer)
John Northrup (co-producer)
Bernadine Colish (editor)
Jed Parker (editor)
Peter Trilling (director of photography)
Bonnie Greenberg (executive music producer)
Music by J. Ralph
Original Song "Once Again" Written and Performed By J. Ralph
Interviews Featuring Artist Marina Abramović Jean Arp Dore Ashton Samuel Beckett Stephanie Barron Constantin Brâncuși Diego Cortez Alexander Calder Susan Davidson Joseph Cornell Robert De Niro Salvador Dalí Simon de Pury Willem de Kooning Jeffrey Deitch Marcel Duchamp Polly Devlin Max Ernst Larry Gagosian Alberto Giacometti Arne Glimcher Vasily Kandinsky Michael Govan Fernand Léger Nicky Haslam Joan Miró Pepe Karmel Piet Mondrian Donald Kuspit Robert Motherwell Dominique Lévy Jackson Pollock Carlo McCormick Mark Rothko Hans Ulrich Obrist Yves Tanguy Lisa Phillips Lindsay Pollock Francine Prose John Richardson Sandy Rower Mercedes Ruehl Jane Rylands Philip Rylands Calvin Tomkins Karole Vail Jacqueline Bograd Weld Edmund White
Running time: 97 minutes
U.S. distribution by Submarine Deluxe
International sales by Hanway...
Her colorful personal history included such figures as Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and countless others. Guggenheim helped introduce the world to Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko and scores of others now recognized as key masters of modernism.
In 1921 she moved to Paris and mingled with Picasso, Dali, Joyce, Pound, Stein, Leger, Kandinsky. In 1938 she opened a gallery in London and began showing Cocteau, Tanguy, Magritte, Miro, Brancusi, etc., and then back to Paris and New York after the Nazi invasion, followed by the opening of her NYC gallery Art of This Century, which became one of the premiere avant-garde spaces in the U.S. While fighting through personal tragedy, she maintained her vision to build one of the most important collections of modern art, now enshrined in her Venetian palazzo where she moved in 1947. Since 1951, her collection has become one of the world’s most visited art spaces.
Featuring: Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Vasil Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Fernand Leger, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Jean Miro, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Kurt Schwitters, Gino Severini, Clyfford Still and Yves Tanguy.
Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Director and Producer)
Lisa Immordino Vreeland has been immersed in the world of fashion and art for the past 25 years. She started her career in fashion as the Director of Public Relations for Polo Ralph Lauren in Italy and quickly moved on to launch two fashion companies, Pratico, a sportswear line for women, and Mago, a cashmere knitwear collection of her own design. Her first book was accompanied by her directorial debut of the documentary of the same name, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012). The film about the editor of Harper's Bazaar had its European premiere at the Venice Film Festival and its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, going on to win the Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the fashion category for the Design of the Year awards, otherwise known as “The Oscars” of design—at the Design Museum in London.
"Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict" is Lisa Immordino Vreeland's followup to her acclaimed debut, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel". She is now working on her third doc on Cecil Beaton who Lisa says, "has been circling around all these stories. What's great about him is the creativity: fashion photography, war photography, "My Fair Lady" winning an Oscar."
Sydney Levine: I have read numerous accounts and interviews with you about this film and rather than repeat all that has been said, I refer my readers to Indiewire's Women and Hollywood interview at Tribeca this year, and your Indiewire interview with Aubrey Page, November 6, 2015 .
Let's try to cover new territory here.
First of all, what about you? What is your relationship to Diana Vreeland?
Liv: I am married to her grandson, Alexander Vreeland. (I'm also proud of my name Immordino) I never met Diana but hearing so many family stories about her made me start to wonder about all the talk about her. I worked in fashion and lived in New York like she did.
Sl: In one of your interviews you said that Peggy was not only ahead of her time but she helped to define it. Can you tell me how?
Liv: Peggy grew up in a very traditional family of German Bavarian Jews who had moved to New York City in the 19th century. Already at a young age Peggy felt like there were too many rules around her and she wanted to break out. That alone was something attractive to me — the notion that she knew that she didn't fit in to her family or her times. She lived on her own terms, a very modern approach to life. She decided to abandon her family in New York. Though she always stayed connected to them, she rarely visited New York. Instead she lived in a world without borders. She did not live by "the rules". She believed in creating art and created herself, living on her own terms and not on those of her family.
Sl: Is there a link between her and your previous doc on Diana Vreeland?
Liv: The link between Vreeland and Guggenheim is their mutual sense of reinvention and transformation. That made something click inside of me as I too reinvented myself when I began writing the book on Diana Vreeland .
Can you talk about the process of putting this one together and how it differed from its predecessor?
Liv: The most challenging thing about this one was the vast amount of material we had at our disposal. We had a lot of media to go through — instead of fashion spreads, which informed The Eye Has To Travel, we had art, which was fantastic. I was spoiled by the access we had to these incredible archives and footage. I'm still new to this, but it's the storytelling aspect that I loved in both projects. One thing about Peggy that Mrs. Vreeland didn't have was a very tragic personal life. There was so much that happened in Peggy's life before you even got to what she actually accomplished. And so we had to tell a very dense story about her childhood, her father dying on the Titanic, her beloved sister dying — the tragic events that fundamentally shaped her in a way. It was about making sure we had enough of the personal story to go along with her later accomplishments.
World War II alone was such a huge part of her story, opening an important art gallery in London, where she showed Kandinsky and other important artists for the first time. The amount of material to distill was a tremendous challenge and I hope we made the right choices.
Sl: How did you learn make a documentary?
Liv: I learned how to make a documentary by having a good team around me. My editors (and co-writers)Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng were very helpful.
Research is fundamental; finding as much as you can and never giving up. I love the research. It is my "precise time". Not just for interviews but of footage, photographs never seen before. It is a painstaking process that satisfies me. The research never ends. I was still researching while I was promoting the Diana Vreeland book. I love reading books and going to original sources.
The archives in film museums in the last ten years has changed and given museums a new role. I found unique footage at Moma with the Elizabeth Chapman Films. Chapman went to Paris in the 30s and 40s with a handheld camera and took moving pictures of Brancusi and Duchamps joking around in a studio, Gertrude Stein, Leger walking down the street. This footage is owned by Robert Storr, Dean of Yale School of Art. In fact he is taking a sabbatical this year to go through the boxes and boxes of Chapman's films. We also used " Entre'acte" by René Clair cowritten with Dadaist Francis Picabia, "Le Sang du poet" of Cocteau, Hans Richter "8x8","Gagascope" and " Dreams That Money Can Buy" produced by Peggy Guggenheim, written by Man Ray in 1947.
Sl: How long did it take to research and make the film?
Liv: It took three years for both the Vreeland and the Guggenheim documentary.
It was more difficult with the Guggenheim story because there was so much material and so much to tell of her life. And she was not so giving of her own self. Diana could inspire you about a bandaid; she was so giving. But Peggy didn't talk much about why she loved an artist or a painting. She acted more. And using historical material could become "over-teaching" though it was fascinating.
So much had to be eliminated. It was hard to eliminate the Degenerate Art Show, a subject which is newly discussed. Stephanie Barron of Lacma is an expert on Degenerate Art and was so generous.
Once we decided upon which aspects to focus on, then we could give focus to the interviews.
There were so many of her important shows we could not include. For instance there was a show on collages featuring William Baziotes , Jackson Pollack and Robert Motherwell which started a more modern collage trend in art. The 31 Women Art Show which we did include pushed forward another message which I think is important.
And so many different things have been written about Peggy — there were hundreds of articles written about her during her lifetime. She also kept beautiful scrapbooks of articles written about her, which are now in the archives of the Guggenheim Museum.
The Guggenheim foundation did not commission this documentary but they were very supportive and the film premiered there in New York in a wonderful celebration. They wanted to represent Peggy and her paintings properly. The paintings were secondary characters and all were carefully placed historically in a correct fashion.
Sl: You said in one interview Guggenheim became a central figure in the modern art movement?
Liv: Yes and she did it without ego. Sharing was always her purpose in collecting art. She was not out for herself. Before Peggy, the art world was very different. And today it is part of wealth management.
Other collectors had a different way with art. Isabelle Stewart Gardner bought art for her own personal consumption. The Gardner Museum came later. Gertrude Stein was sharing the vision of her brother when she began collecting art. The Coen sisters were not sharing.
Her benevolence ranged from giving Berenice Abbott the money to buy her first camera to keeping Pollock afloat during lean times.
Djuana Barnes, who had a 'Love Love Love Hate Hate Hate' relationship with Peggy wrote Nightwood in Peggy's country house in England.
She was in Paris to the last minute. She planned how to safeguard artwork from the Nazis during World War II. She was storing gasoline so she could escape. She lived on the Ile St. Louis with her art and moved the paintings out first to a children's boarding school and then to Marseilles where it was shipped out to New York City.
Her role in art was not taken seriously because of her very public love life which was described in very derogatory terms. There was more talk about her love life than about her collection of art.
Her autobiography, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1960) , was scandalous when it came out — and she didn't even use real names, she used pseudonyms for her numerous partners. Only after publication did she reveal the names of the men she slept with.
The fact that she spoke about her sexual life at all was the most outrageous aspect. She was opening herself up to ridicule, but she didn't care. Peggy was her own person and she felt good in her own skin. But it was definitely unconventional behavior. I think her sexual appetites revealed a lot about finding her own identity.
A lot of it was tied to the loss of her father, I think, in addition to her wanting to feel accepted. She was also very adventurous — look at the men she slept with. I mean, come on, they are amazing! Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, and she married Max Ernst. I think it was really ballsy of her to have been so open about her sexuality; this was not something people did back then. So many people are bound by conventional rules but Peggy said no. She grabbed hold of life and she lived it on her own terms.
Sl: You also give Peggy credit for changing the way art was exhibited. Can you explain that?
Liv: One of her greatest achievements was her gallery space in New York City, Art of This Century, which was unlike anything the art world has seen before or since in the way that it shattered the boundaries of the gallery space that we've come to know today — the sterile white cube. She came to be a genius at displaying her collections...
She was smart with Art of the Century because she hired Frederick Kiesler as a designer of the gallery and once again surrounded herself with the right people, including Howard Putzler, who was already involved with her at Guggenheim Jeune in London. And she was hanging out with all the exiled Surrealists who were living in New York at the time, including her future husband, Max Ernst, who was the real star of that group of artists. With the help of these people, she started showing art in a completely different way that was both informal and approachable. In conventional museums and galleries, art was untouchable on the wall and inside frames. In Peggy's gallery, art stuck out from the walls; works weren't confined to frames. Kiesler designed special chairs you could sit in and browse canvases as you would texts in a library. Nothing like this had ever existed in New York before — even today there is nothing like it.
She made the gallery into an exciting place where the whole concept of space was transformed. In Venice, the gallery space was also her home. Today, for a variety of reasons, the home aspect of the collection is less emphasized, though you still get a strong sense of Peggy's home life there. She was bringing art to the public in a bold new way, which I think is a great idea. It's art for everybody, which is very much a part of today's dialogue except that fewer people can afford the outlandish museum entry fees.
Sl: What do you think made her so prescient and attuned ?
Liv: She was smart enough to ask Marcel Duchamp to be her advisor — so she was in tune, and very well connected. She was on the cutting edge of what was going on and I think a lot of this had to do with Peggy being open to the idea of what was new and outrageous. You have to have a certain personality for this; what her childhood had dictated was totally opposite from what she became in life, and being in the right place at the right time helped her maintain a cutting edge throughout her life.
Sl: The movie is framed around a lost interview with Peggy conducted late in her life. How did you acquire these tapes?
Liv: We optioned Jacqueline Bogard Weld’s book, Peggy : The Wayward Guggenheim, the only authorized biography of Peggy, which was published after she died. Jackie had spent two summers interviewing Peggy but at a certain point lost the tapes somewhere in her Park Avenue apartment. Jackie had so much access to Peggy, which was incredible, but it was also the access that she had to other people who had known Peggy — she interviewed over 200 people for her book. Jackie was incredibly generous, letting me go through all her original research except for the lost tapes.
We'd walk into different rooms in her apartment and I'd suggestively open a closet door and ask “Where do you think those tapes might be?" Then one day I asked if she had a basement, and she did. So I went through all these boxes down there, organizing her affairs. Then bingo, the tapes showed up in this shoebox.
It was the longest interview Peggy had ever done and it became the framework for our movie. There's nothing more powerful than when you have someone's real voice telling the story, and Jackie was especially good at asking provoking questions. You can tell it was hard for Peggy to answer a lot of them, because she wasn't someone who was especially expressive; she didn't have a lot of emotion. And this comes across in the movie, in the tone of her voice.
Sl: Larry Gagosian has one of the best descriptions of Peggy in the movie — "she was her own creation." Would you agree, and if so why?
Liv: She was very much her own creation. When he said that in the interview I had a huge smile on my face. In Peggy's case it stemmed from a real need to identify and understand herself. I'm not sure she achieved it but she completely recreated herself — she knew that she did not want to be what she was brought up to be. She tried being a mother, but that was not one of her strengths, so art became that place where she could find herself, and then transform herself.
Nobody believed in the artists she cultivated and supported — they were outsiders and she was an outsider in the world she was brought up in. So it's in this way that she became her own great invention. I hope that her humor comes across in the film because she was extremely amusing — this aspect really comes across in her autobiography.
Sl: Finally, what do you think is Peggy Guggenheim's most lasting legacy, beyond her incredible art collection?
Liv: Her courage, and the way she used it to find herself. She had this ballsiness that not many people had, especially women. In her own way she was a feminist and it's good for women and young girls today to see women who stepped outside the confines of a very traditional family and made something of her life. Peggy's life did not seem that dreamy until she attached herself to these artists. It was her ability to redefine herself in the end that truly summed her up.
About the Filmmakers
Stanley Buchtal is a producer and entrepreneur. His movies credits include "Hairspray", "Spanking the Monkey", "Up at the Villa", "Lou Reed Berlin", "Love Marilyn", "LennoNYC", "Bobby Fischer Against the World", "Herb & Dorothy", "Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child", "Sketches of Frank Gehry", "Black White + Gray: a Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe", among numerous others.
David Koh is an independent producer, distributor, sales agent, programmer and curator. He has been involved in the distribution, sale, production, and financing of over 200 films. He is currently a partner in the boutique label Submarine Entertainment with Josh and Dan Braun and is also partners with Stanley Buchthal and his Dakota Group Ltd where he co-manages a portfolio of over 50 projects a year (75% docs and 25% fiction). Previously he was a partner and founder of Arthouse Films a boutique distribution imprint and ran Chris Blackwell's (founder of Island Records & Island Pictures) film label, Palm Pictures. He has worked as a Producer for artist Nam June Paik and worked in the curatorial departments of Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, Mfa Boston, and the Guggenheim Museum. David has recently served as a Curator for Microsoft and has curated an ongoing film series and salon with Andre Balazs Properties and serves as a Curator for the exclusive Core Club in NYC.
David recently launched with his partners Submarine Deluxe, a distribution imprint; Torpedo Pictures, a low budget high concept label; and Nfp Submarine Doks, a German distribution imprint with Nfp Films. Recently and upcoming projects include "Yayoi Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots", "Burden: a Portrait of Artist Chris Burden", "Dior and I", "20 Feet From Stardom", "Muscle Shoals", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Rats NYC", "Nas: Time Is Illmatic", "Blackfish", "Love Marilyn", "Chasing Ice", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Cutie and the Boxer"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Wolfpack, "Meru", and "Station to Station".
Dan Braun is a producer, writer, art director and musician/composer based in NYC. He is the Co-President of and Co-Founder of Submarine, a NYC film sales and production company specializing in independent feature and documentary films. Titles include "Blackfish", "Finding Vivian Maier", "Muscle Shoals", "The Case Against 8", "Keep On Keepin’ On", "Winter’s Bone", "Nas: Time is Illmatic", "Dior and I" and Oscar winning docs "Man on Wire", "Searching for Sugarman", "20 Ft From Stardom" and "Citizenfour". He was Executive Producer on documentaries "Kill Your Idols", (which won Best NY Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival 2004), "Blank City", "Sunshine Superman", the upcoming feature adaptations of "Batkid Begins" and "The Battered Bastards of Baseball" and the upcoming horror TV anthology "Creepy" to be directed by Chris Columbus.
He is a producer of the free jazz documentary "Fire Music", and the upcoming documentaries, "Burden" on artist Chris Burden and "Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots" on artist Yayoi Kusama. He is also a writer and consulting editor on Dark Horse Comic’s "Creepy" and "Eerie 9" comic book and archival series for which he won an Eisner Award for best archival comic book series in 2009.
He is a musician/composer whose compositions were featured in the films "I Melt With You" and "Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Radiant Child and is an award winning art director/creative director when he worked at Tbwa/Chiat/Day on the famous Absolut Vodka campaign.
John Northrup (Co-Producer) began his career in documentaries as a French translator for National Geographic: Explorer. He quickly moved into editing and producing, serving as the Associate Producer on "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012), and editing and co-producing "Wilson In Situ" (2014), which tells the story of theatre legend Robert Wilson and his Watermill Center. Most recently, he oversaw the post-production of Jim Chambers’ "Onward Christian Soldier", a documentary about Olympic Bomber Eric Rudolph, and is shooting on Susanne Rostock’s "Another Night in the Free World", the follow-up to her award-winning "Sing Your Song" (2011).
Submarine Entertainment (Production Company) Submarine Entertainment is a hybrid sales, production, and distribution company based in N.Y. Recent and upcoming titles include "Citizenfour", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Dog", "Visitors", "20 Feet from Stardom", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Muscle Shoals", "Blackfish", "Cutie and the Boxer", "The Summit", "The Unknown Known", "Love Marilyn", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Chasing Ice", "Downtown 81 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Wild Style 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Good Ol Freda", "Some Velvet Morning", among numerous others. Submarine principals also represent Creepy and Eerie comic book library and are developing properties across film & TV platforms.
Submarine has also recently launched a domestic distribution imprint and label called Submarine Deluxe; a genre label called Torpedo Pictures; and a German imprint and label called Nfp Submarine Doks.
Bernadine Colish has edited a number of award-winning documentaries. "Herb and Dorothy" (2008), won Audience Awards at Silverdocs, Philadelphia and Hamptons Film Festivals, and "Body of War" (2007), was named Best Documentary by the National Board of Review. "A Touch of Greatness" (2004) aired on PBS Independent Lens and was nominated for an Emmy Award. Her career began at Maysles Films, where she worked with Charlotte Zwerin on such projects as "Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser", "Toru Takemitsu: Music for the Movies" and the PBS American Masters documentary, "Ella Fitzgerald: Something To Live For". Additional credits include "Bringing Tibet Home", "Band of Sisters", "Rise and Dream", "The Tiger Next Door", "The Buffalo War" and "Absolute Wilson".
Jed Parker (Editor) Jed Parker began his career in feature films before moving into documentaries through his work with the award-winning American Masters series. Credits include "Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart", "Annie Liebovitz: Life Through a Lens", and most recently "Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides".
Other work includes two episodes of the PBS series "Make ‘Em Laugh", hosted by Billy Crystal, as well as a documentary on Met Curator Henry Geldzahler entitled "Who Gets to Call it Art"?
Credits
Director, Writer, Producer: Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Produced by Stanley Buchthal, David Koh and Dan Braun Stanley Buchthal (producer)
Maja Hoffmann (executive producer)
Josh Braun (executive producer)
Bob Benton (executive producer)
John Northrup (co-producer)
Bernadine Colish (editor)
Jed Parker (editor)
Peter Trilling (director of photography)
Bonnie Greenberg (executive music producer)
Music by J. Ralph
Original Song "Once Again" Written and Performed By J. Ralph
Interviews Featuring Artist Marina Abramović Jean Arp Dore Ashton Samuel Beckett Stephanie Barron Constantin Brâncuși Diego Cortez Alexander Calder Susan Davidson Joseph Cornell Robert De Niro Salvador Dalí Simon de Pury Willem de Kooning Jeffrey Deitch Marcel Duchamp Polly Devlin Max Ernst Larry Gagosian Alberto Giacometti Arne Glimcher Vasily Kandinsky Michael Govan Fernand Léger Nicky Haslam Joan Miró Pepe Karmel Piet Mondrian Donald Kuspit Robert Motherwell Dominique Lévy Jackson Pollock Carlo McCormick Mark Rothko Hans Ulrich Obrist Yves Tanguy Lisa Phillips Lindsay Pollock Francine Prose John Richardson Sandy Rower Mercedes Ruehl Jane Rylands Philip Rylands Calvin Tomkins Karole Vail Jacqueline Bograd Weld Edmund White
Running time: 97 minutes
U.S. distribution by Submarine Deluxe
International sales by Hanway...
- 11/18/2015
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Some actors struggle their entire career to land that one iconic or important role—the role that ultimately defines their career and marks their legacy. For John Lithgow, his 42-year career has been filled a number of notable parts, including prominent TV characters on 3rd Rock from the Sun and Dexter and two Oscar-nominated supporting roles in Terms of Endearment and The World According to Garp. But it’s Love Is Strange that the 69-year-old says is his best film role he’s ever had.
In what Lithgow describes as a modest indie film, Love Is Strange tells the story of Ben and George, an older, recently married gay couple forced to live apart after losing their New York apartment. The Ira Sachs-directed film, while not a box office hit, became a favorite among critics and even earned Lithgow his first Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Male Lead. The film also...
In what Lithgow describes as a modest indie film, Love Is Strange tells the story of Ben and George, an older, recently married gay couple forced to live apart after losing their New York apartment. The Ira Sachs-directed film, while not a box office hit, became a favorite among critics and even earned Lithgow his first Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Male Lead. The film also...
- 1/21/2015
- Entertainment Tonight
Remembering the Artist Robert De Niro, Sr. was made not out of desire, but necessity. For most artists, recognition is what keeps them going, pushing them forward onto the next painting, film, book, etc. The story of Robert De Niro Sr., the subject of this HBO documentary short, is a painfully familiar one — an artist who flirted with fame only to fade into oblivion. We open with the 1950 and 1960s, where a coterie of artists, dubbed the New York School of Art, have become the sensation of the art world. Members of this School of Art include Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and most importantly, Robert De Niro Sr. He was a figurative artist known for still-life paintings, and as we’re shown throughout the movie, his work was straight forward and free of pretension, inspired by the French avant-garde artists like Pierre Bonnard and Icarus Matisse. To...
- 6/10/2014
- by Sam Fragoso
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
At 87, Mel Brooks has lost none of his edge.
The legendary comic provocateur has phoned me from his Los Angeles office to promote the just-released 40th anniversary Blu-ray of his magnum opus, "Blazing Saddles," but before he submits to an interview, he quizzes me about Moviefone's unique pageviews and other Web traffic statistics, about which he knows more than I do. Having concluded that Moviefone is well-trafficked enough for him to talk to, he says, "Ask away, Susman!"
"Blazing Saddles," which made serious satirical points about racism while also making cinema safe for fart jokes, is certainly one of the most influential comedies ever made. Brooks believes it's the funniest film of all time (followed closely by his own "Young Frankenstein"), and he's still upset with the American Film Institute for disagreeing with him. He's making his case for the film with the Blu-ray (which contains a new making-of documentary,...
The legendary comic provocateur has phoned me from his Los Angeles office to promote the just-released 40th anniversary Blu-ray of his magnum opus, "Blazing Saddles," but before he submits to an interview, he quizzes me about Moviefone's unique pageviews and other Web traffic statistics, about which he knows more than I do. Having concluded that Moviefone is well-trafficked enough for him to talk to, he says, "Ask away, Susman!"
"Blazing Saddles," which made serious satirical points about racism while also making cinema safe for fart jokes, is certainly one of the most influential comedies ever made. Brooks believes it's the funniest film of all time (followed closely by his own "Young Frankenstein"), and he's still upset with the American Film Institute for disagreeing with him. He's making his case for the film with the Blu-ray (which contains a new making-of documentary,...
- 5/20/2014
- by Gary Susman
- Moviefone
Peter Matthiessen, a rich man's son who spurned a life of leisure and embarked on extraordinary physical and spiritual quests while producing such acclaimed books as The Snow Leopard and At Play in the Fields of the Lord died Saturday. He was 86. His publisher Geoff Kloske of Riverhead Books said Matthiessen, who had been diagnosed with leukemia, was ill "for some months." He died at a hospital near his home on Long Island. "Peter was a force of nature, relentlessly curious, persistent, demanding - of himself and others," his literary agent, Neil Olson, said in a statement. "But he was also funny,...
- 4/6/2014
- by Associated Press
- PEOPLE.com
Odd List Ryan Lambie Simon Brew 28 Nov 2013 - 06:04
Our series of lists devoted to underappreciated films brings us to the year 2000, and another 25 overlooked gems...
The new millennium brought with it an eclectic range of hit films. Hong Kong action director John Woo brought us Mission: Impossible II, the most profitable film of the year at the box office. Ridley Scott enjoyed one of the biggest critical and financial successes of his career with Gladiator, while Robert Zemeckis created a memorable drama with Tom Hanks and a ball named Wilson in Cast Away.
From a comic book movie standpoint, 2000 was also a key year. X-Men not only established a successful film franchise which is still going, with X-Men: Days Of Future Past out next year, but also headed up a wave of big-budget Marvel adaptations which shows no sign of slowing down.
As ever, we've travelled far outside the...
Our series of lists devoted to underappreciated films brings us to the year 2000, and another 25 overlooked gems...
The new millennium brought with it an eclectic range of hit films. Hong Kong action director John Woo brought us Mission: Impossible II, the most profitable film of the year at the box office. Ridley Scott enjoyed one of the biggest critical and financial successes of his career with Gladiator, while Robert Zemeckis created a memorable drama with Tom Hanks and a ball named Wilson in Cast Away.
From a comic book movie standpoint, 2000 was also a key year. X-Men not only established a successful film franchise which is still going, with X-Men: Days Of Future Past out next year, but also headed up a wave of big-budget Marvel adaptations which shows no sign of slowing down.
As ever, we've travelled far outside the...
- 11/27/2013
- by ryanlambie
- Den of Geek
One of the reasons that I returned to the East Village so soon was that my previous August art stomp with David Carbone ran longer than expected and we did not get to visit The Sweet Life, a local candy store on Hester Street. So before David and I headed off to see what the art world had to offer, my sweet tooth had to be placated with chocolate cherries and licorice Scotty dogs. What we found after David slapped me out of my diabetic coma was much like the selection at The Sweet Life, extremely surprising and varied.
Speaking of treats, Marlboro Gallery on Broome Street (yeah, you heard me right) has its inaugural show up, entitled Pizza Time, September 8 - October 6, a show dedicated to one of New York’s unofficial edible staples. Beside some great wallpaper works by John Baldessari and a debatable work, "Untitled Circle"by Willem de Kooning,...
Speaking of treats, Marlboro Gallery on Broome Street (yeah, you heard me right) has its inaugural show up, entitled Pizza Time, September 8 - October 6, a show dedicated to one of New York’s unofficial edible staples. Beside some great wallpaper works by John Baldessari and a debatable work, "Untitled Circle"by Willem de Kooning,...
- 9/26/2013
- by Elizabeth Stevens
- www.culturecatch.com
Dakota Group and Submarine Entertainment will produce a documentary about influential art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim. The film will be directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who directed last year’s look at another cultural icon “Diana Vreeland: the Eye Has to Travel.” Principal photography began in June. The film will look at Guggenheim’s championship of a number of legendary modern artisits such as Marcel Duchamp, Vasil Kandinsky, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. It will include interviews with some of the men and women who knew her such as journalist Calvin Tomkins, novelist Edmund White, philanthropist Eli Broad,...
- 9/13/2013
- by Brent Lang
- The Wrap
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