Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies)

Book info: Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies) (Hardcover, 154 pages) – Routledge, 2019. Language: English.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, movie going became an established feature of everyday life across America. Movies constituted an enormous visual data bank and changed the way artist and public alike interpreted images. This book explores modern painting as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities pried open by cinema from its invention until the outbreak of World War II, when both the art world and the film industry changed substantially. Artists were watching movies, filmmakers studied fine arts; the membrane between media was porous, allowing for fluid exchange. Each chapter focuses on a suite of films and paintings, broken down into facets and then reassembled to elucidate the distinctive art–film nexus at successive historic moments.

"This lively study offers a fresh and provocative examination of the dialogue between art and the movies in the early modern era, a dialogue that, in catalysing new ways of looking, fundamentally transformed modern painting. Looking at many familiar subjects from fresh vantage points, Manthorne reveals how dramatically the new media shaped modern pictorial vision and the ways that painters both saw and represented the modern world and the American landscape."

- Sarah Burns, Indiana University, Bloomington

Katherine Manthorne is Professor of Art History at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, USA.