Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the Popularizing of American Art [Paperback]

Biopics on artists influence the popular perception of artists' lives and work.Projected Art Historyhighlights the narrative structure and images created in the film genre of biopics, in which an artist's life is being dramatized and embodied by an actor. Concentrating on the two case studies,Basquiat(1996) andPollock(2000), the book also discusses larger issues at play, such as how postwar American art history is being mediated for mass consumption.

This book bridges a gap between art history, film studies and popular culture by investigating how the film genre of biopics adapts written biographies. It identifies the functionality of the biopic genre and explores its implication for a popular art history that is projected on the big screen for a mass audience.

Doris Bergeris the Exhibitions Curator at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, USA. She was formerly a curator at the Skirball Cultural Center, a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the director of the Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany. Her practice includes writing, teaching, curatorial and audiovisual work focusing on intersections of art and film in modern and contemporary American and European art.

There is a wide divide between the lives of artists and movies about those artist that can seem impossible to span. Ms. Berger lifts up all the rocks and shows us what's underneath - it's not always predictable or pretty but it's certainly revealing. Ed Ruscha, Artist

WithProjected Art History, Doris Berger brings critical attention to a film genre that powerfully shapes cultural attitudes about artistic production but has been largely unacknowledged in the disciplines of art history and film studies. Artist biopics reinforce myths about artistic creativity, elevating the typically male painter's struggle and genius. Berger skillfully analyses two paradigmatic examples,Pollock(2000, dir. Ed Harris) andBals