Love art but hate museums? Or just want to know more about great artists and their inspirations? In its Art on Screen series, which runs Aug. 9 – Sept. 20) Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour St.) is screening a number of documentaries about painters and their work.
Renoir, Hockney and Bosch are highlighted in respective docs. But there is also a film about the Group of Seven (of course) and one called Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. And the films are more than just still images on a big screen.
In Touched by the Devil, a team of Dutch art historians crisscross the globe to unravel the secrets of the art of Hieronymous Bosch. The late-medieval Dutch painter caused an uproar with his uniquely haunting images of hell, paintings that still have the power of shock 500 years after his death. .
Canada’s most famous artistic collective get its moment in Painted Land: In Search of the Group of Seven, in which three modern-day sleuths seek the precise locations the artists painted. The film “explores the rivers and lakes of Algoma and the land north of Superior, energized by breathtaking aerial and landscape cinematography, combining original photography, archival materials, paintings, and re-creations.”
Now in his seventies, David Hockney is one of the most accessible and successful figurative painters of the last half century. Hockney is a portrait of the British and California artist.
Renoir: Revered and Reviled looks at nearly 200 paintings from the Barnes Collection on display in Philadelphia. “There’s a lot of insight here and plenty of context, with Renoir’s enduring influence on the next generation – Picasso and Matisse – stressed,” writes The Guardian.
Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse is an Exhibition on Film doc based on a recent show mounted atboth London’s Royal Academy and Cleveland’s Museum of Art. Work by Claude Monet, Van Gogh, Sargent and Matisse is featured.’
For ticket and screening info, visit viff.org.
