Most studies of cinema and the visual arts tend to privilege questions
of medium specificity and intermediality. Philip Hayward’s edited volume
Picture This: Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists (1988) was one of
the first scholarly attempts to illuminate the ways in which films mediate the
visual arts, specifically painting, photography, sculpture, and architecture.
In Art and Artists on Screen (1993) John A. Walker analyzed representations of
artists in a selection of films made between the 1930s and the 1980s, focusing
on artist biopics in relation to issues of historical accuracy. Angela dalle
Vacche’s Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film (1996) reframed the
question of cinema’s relation to art by approaching the work of filmmakers like
Minnelli, Antonioni, Rohmer, Goddard, Tarkovsky, Murnau and Mizoguchi as a kind
of ‘meta-cinema’ that stages an encounter between cinema and painting.
Along
similar lines, in Art in the Cinematic Imagination (2006) art historian Susan
Felleman underscored the self-reflexivity that the presence of art in cinema
often gives rise to. Felleman’s later book, Real Objects in Unreal Situations:
Modern Art in Fiction Films (2014), continued her preoccupation with art
objects in fiction films and the ways in which their historical and political
significance exceeds their narrative function. When art objects are screened,
Felleman suggested, it is never as mere props. Kimberly Louagie, Jennifer
Fisher, and Steven Jacobs have written short pieces on museums and art
galleries in film.
