`Not this modern stuff I hope. You know, turn a lampshade upside down to represent the soul in torment. Ha!" So says a character in Hitchcock's 1940 film Rebecca, on learning of the heroine's hobby.
When Walter Benjamin's milestone essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was published in 1936, he was more optimistic about art and the masses. "Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art," he wrote. "The reactionary attitude to a Picasso painting changes into the progressive attitude to a Chaplin movie."
Benjamin forged a connection between high and popular culture, between art, technology and the cinema. So how has art - particularly painting - fared in its more recent portrayals on screen? In one obvious manifestation - artists' biopics - painting acts as supportive visual wallpaper. The core narrative isn't really the paintings; it's the agony and ecstasy, the triumph/failure of The Creative Impulse.
In other genres, paintings enrich and inflect narrative moments. For example, Gustav Klimt's work provides visual footnotes in the recent adaptation of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. Or take Hitchcock's debt to Edward Hopper's House by the Railroad for the Bates house in Psycho.
Often, though, painting styles become a surrounding metaphor. Hopper's deserted night-time streets, diners and offices seem to envelop 1940s film noir, and enjoyed a reprise in Scorsese's After Hours diner. More recently, the colour registers of American Beauty owed something to Magritte, while the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair used more overt borrowings from Magritte's palette of signs. The film highlights art economics as Crown is advised by one of the museum's attendants that "everybody else heads straight for the Monet (money)".
Art-as-money motivates most art-robbery caper movies. The popular antagonism to high art in cinema's history invites a complicity with the criminals. They make off with the paintings as commodities, not as artworks. But the 1999 Thomas Crown Affair adds taste into the equation - in a dazzling play of illusion, fakery, replication and the real. While the earlier Thomas Crown Affair was about crime, kicks and money, by the late 1990s it was a matter of art, taste and style.
Two recent Irish films, John Boorman's The General (1998) and Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Ordinary Decent Criminal (1999) have an art robbery as a central narrative event. In some ways they mirror the two Thomas Crowns - Brendan Gleeson's characterisation in The General broadly echoes the kicks and capers of the 1960s, while Kevin Spacey's ordinary decent criminal (ODC) assumes the 1999 film's ironic address.
ODC identifies age-old anxieties to do with art, taste, class, value, market economy, originals and fakes. Yet it bypasses the conventional popular distrust of painting.
Looking at The Taking of Christ in the gallery, Spacey imagines himself in the painting. After the robbery, he hides the real Caravaggio in its original site of discovery, (a kitchen in a parochial house), switching it for the fake he leaves in the gang's den for their "Judas" to betray. The clergy remain oblivious to the value in their midst, and later the guards are represented as cultural vandals, riddling the fake canvas (which they still take to be the original) with bullets.
In The General, by contrast, the thief's attitude to painting is clearly rooted in the economic. Central to popular representations of unease in art galleries are issues of popular taste and access. Cinema's art thieves may have "access all areas", but it's limited, irregular and forbidden. Even with today's additional notions of virtual galleries, the popular unease remains. But Kevin Atherton's "Gallery Guide", in his current show at Dublin's Arthouse, is a witty take on the fictional and the virtual. Viewers take a virtual walk through a fictional show, "Four Rooms and a Toilet". His parodies and pastiches offer a refreshing scepticism about the utopian claims made for virtual access.
stephanie.mcbride@dcu.ie
