The 25 Most Memorable Portrayals of Real Artists in Movie History

Let's face it, they're not usually good house guests, tend to have little or no money, they can be so passionate that they fly into fits of rage or despondency, and are often drunk (or worse). On the other hand, these often controversial gentlemen and ladies are full of insight, unable to tolerate simple people or tired sentiment, are overflowing with affection, and often churn out works of bottomless meaning.

However you feel about meeting them at a party, these artists play out their days on a screen for your enjoyment. From Andy Warhol to Michelangelo, these are the fictional portrayals of some of the greatest real artists ever put to film.

The 25 Most Memorable Portrayals of Real Artists in Movie History

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Character: Salvador Dali

Film: Midnight in Paris

Year Released: 2011

Though he makes only one appearance in Gil's dealings in 1920's Paris, the scene is squarely his. By only speaking out his name(in a hilarious mirroring of the audiences reaction), Adrien Brody's Dali shows you the ferocity in his eyes that is at once recognizable and a charming caricature. Sitting next to a very tight lipped Bunuel, presumably as they are about to film The Andalusian Dog, this larger than life painter is captured brilliantly if only for a the fleeting romantic look to the past the the whole film does so well.

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Character: Michelangelo

Film: The Agony and the Ecstacy

Year Released: 1965

As far as old guys playing old guys, it just doesn't get any better than Charlton Heston playing everyone's favorite ninja turtle inspiration, Michelangelo. With Rex Harrison as his better half, Pope Julius II, the pair work in storybook fashion on the Sistene Chapel, Heston deliciously covered in paint, grimacing at ceiling as if it were a gorgon, and Harrison nagging away like a parrot of a wife. One of a kind, and as ridiculous as it is good.

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Character: Gustav Klimt

Film: Flimt

Year Released: 2006

John Malkovich shines at the larger than life, snuggie wearing, art nouveau pioneer, and despite the films lack of direction, gives it a sufficient amount of life. The form obsessed painter runs around Vienna with a child-like curiosity, discovering the marvels of the times, in rapture with bits of gold flake, with fabric swings, and most of all with moving pictures. At the same time, he finds himself at odds with the very serious men and women of the times. Malkovich, is certainly the strong song on a sinking ship here.

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Character: Amedeo Modigliani

Film: Modigliani

Year Released: 2004

Andy Garcia's role as Modigliani certainly paints him as a passionate artist, if not a bit of a gluttonous party animal, but primarily focuses on his rivalry with Picasso, both for the attraction of women and the world in general. Garcia plays into his dark issues(bold choice) for some harrowing and occasionally cringe-worthy moments.

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Character: Johannes Vermeer

Film: Girl With a Pearl Earring

Year Released: 2003

Donning the long locks of a romance novel protagonist, Colin Firths plays a slightly more aggressive love interest than his garden variety fop. Based off the Tracy Chevalier novel after the famous painting, the story speculates on the life and love of the Dutch master of whom so little is known. One of Scarlett Johansson's early roles playing a totally normal girl of extenuating beauty.

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Character: Paul Gauguin

Film: Oviri

Year Released: 1986

Sutherland takes the reigns of a seemingly bored Gauguin, back from a long stay in Tahiti and dealing with his wife, children, and former mistress while in the grip of what we know to be one of his true passions (he will go back for the rest of his life). Sutherland excels in this mode, especially when with August Strindberg (Max von Sydow) who is no stranger to this kind of existential brooding, and who gives it a chemistry of souls that the movie is often missing.

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Character: Pablo Picasso

Film: Surviving Picasso

Year Released: 1996

Anthony Hopkins certainly loves playing men with big egos and in Surviving Picasso, he tackles one tall order. Hopkins dives into the role as it focuses on the important relationships in his life, and the damage that is at the heart of each of them. In Francoise Gilot, he finally finds a woman who is not beaten down by the barbs of the painter, and after ten happy years, she finds the strength to leave when their relationship ceases to be civil. Hopkins gives a nice roundness to a Picasso that could have turned into a monster in other hands.

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Character: Georgia O'Keeffe

Film: Georgia O'Keeffe

Year Released: 2009

It may be a Lifetime movie (and there's plenty of empowered shouting, don't worry), but with a cast this good you might not really even notice. Joan Allen plays Georgia pretty close to the chest, only letting the emotional bouts flow at key moments, in a similar fashion to her paintings. She plays Georgia as the head strong feminist that the world knew her as, with a more delicate private side, explored by the always strong Jeremy Irons as her talented husband, Arthur Stieglitz.

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Character: Francis Bacon

Film: Love is the Devil

Year Released: 1998

In this tantalizingly dark film, Derek Jacobi plays a self-assured Francis Bacon, at the height of his acclaim and influence, who takes on a new model and subsequently overwhelms him with a very peculiar and dark worldview. Through some truly lovely shots that echo the angles and energy of the artist's work, Jacobi injects some real fun into the master of abstracted figure.

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Character: Vincent Van Gogh

Film: Lust for Life

Year Released: 1956

This biopic of high aspirations features Kirk Douglas in fine form and Anthony Quin as his swagger-filled, lady-loving companion, Paul Gauguin. They drink, dine, paint, and womanize side by side, in a buddy picture of artistic geniuses that ends tempestuously. Douglas takes a spitting image to Van Gogh's famous self portrait, and the many locales serve the novel of the same name, quite well.

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Character: Dora Carrington

Film: Carrington

Year Released: 1996

The film follows the platonic but powerful relationship of painter Dora Carrington and writer Lytton Strachey during WWI in England. This saga of cottage love affairs is held firmly together by the performances of Thompson and a delightfully weird Jonathon Pryce as the two leads. The young Thompson proves the apple to the many eyes of this unique bedchamber drama, with an infectious energy and integrity that showed reach well beyond her years.

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Character: Francisco Goya

Film: Goya's Ghosts

Year Released: 2006

Though he doesn't imbue it with the rakish sensuality that Javier Bardem lends to the Spanish Inquisition priest(who proves that even Orthodoxy can be sexy), Stellen Skarsgard gives depth to the controversial painter in troubled times. The legendary Milosz Forman (Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) favors the dramatic, focusing on a particular painting of a forsaken soul and the girl whose portrait will haunt Goya until death, a slightly hispanic Natalie Portman.

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Character: Camille Claudel

Film: Camille Claudel

Year Released: 1988

In this blustery French movie of high passions, Isabel Adjani is Camille Claudel, sculptor and love interest of Auguste Rodin. The lovely Adjani, imbues so much underlying sadness into her relationship with the talented sculptor, that the turn from passion to obsession becomes all the more harrowing(she destroys a sculpture almost solely with her tears). The strong-nosed Gerard Depardieu plays Rodin, but all eyes are on Adjani in one of her finest roles.

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Character: Andy Warhol

Film: Factory Girl

Year Released: 2006

He threatens to be the most over worked artistic persona on film, there are more than a handful of reasons. For one, he was a director himself, creating dozens of films, with varying degrees of plot(mostly optional), but mostly he was an artist who celebrated image and therefore a self imposed forefather of our culture. Guy Pearce's Warhol is one of the few to capture the inner hurt and loneliness of the controversial figurehead, and still nail the whimsy and dry wit. Anyone who has seen a lengthy interview with Warhol knows, that his wit often came from a fear of deep examination, a contradiction Pearce plays with strength.

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Character: Harvey Pekar

Film: American Splendor

Year Released: 2003

Though not the first name that springs to mind when thinking of inspirational artists, Harvey Pekar comes vibrantly to life (in all it's gory details) in American Splendor. A twice-divorced file clerk, who after making friends with the inimitable R. Crumb, becomes a comic book hero for writing his life and all it's neurotic minutiae into his comics. Pekar's story captivates and his take on art and his own life play out in truly unique and hilarious fashion by Giamatti.

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Character: Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec

Film: Moulin Rouge

Year Released: 1952

Not to be confused with Baz Luhrmun's epic extravaganza, John Huston's Moulin Rouge, focuses on the celebrated artist and printmaker's relationship with his favorite club. Despite finding success in his art and friends to fill his nights, the suffering artist(due to a congenital defect, Luatrec did not grow or develop properly) finds love in a lady of the night who asks for his help. Just as full of joy and music as it's 2003 counterpart, Jose Ferrer takes the role of a lifetime in one of Huston's underrated masterpieces.

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Character: Diane Arbus

Film: Fur

Year Released: 2006

Nicole Kidman plays the incredibly interesting Diane Arbus, a housewife and assistant to her photographer husband, who discovers her own calling and takes a camera to it. Her call towards the fringe of society where people go unseen, created some of the best portrait photography of the 20th century. And in Steven Shainburg's hands(Secretary), Arbus is involved in a very touching and bizarre romance. Kidman's transformation from scared housewife to assured artist is an immense pleasure to watch in this delightfully weird film.

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Character: Andy Warhol

Film: Basquiat

Year Released: 1996

The real knockout of Schnabel's 1998 love letter to contemporary Jean-Michel Basquiat isn't the lead role, but David Bowie's endearingly odd take on Andy Warhol. Watching one pop culture icon take on another, so many years after Warhol's death feels a bit campy at first(his hair makes it hard to not expect him to sing "Magic Dance"), but the combination is too magical to resist. A magic that is only adds the the undying celebrity of both talented men.

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Character: Seraphine Louis

Film: Seraphine

Year Released: 2008

The story of Seraphine centers around an unbecoming house maid in the town of Senlis, who paints every night before bed while singing the hymns of the convent in which she was raised. The famous art collector Wilhelm Uhde(who discovered Picasso and Rousseau) happens upon one of her paintings while visiting the house in which she works and is amazed to discover who the artist is. A story equally inspiring and devastating, Seraphine lives a life of hardship and has been given no advantages, and yet she sees beauty in so much of the world and adds still a bit more. The film won seven Cesars(the French Oscars) upon release, including Best Actress.

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Character: Jackson Pollock

Film: Pollock

Year Released: 2000

Ed Harris directs and stars in the 2000 troubled-artist biopic. Whatever you feel about his art, it is a pleasure watching Harris--covered in more paint than clothes, smoking a cigarette, and with wild eyes--dripping paint like candle wax over the room-sized canvas on the floor. Wether or not Pollock lived his life like Marlon Brando, brimming with emotion and about to boil over is up for debate, but the control of Harris in front of and behind the camera shows.

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Character: Christy Brown

Film: My Left Foot

Year Released: 1989

The difficult and celebrated film focuses around one of the most harrowing biographies of an artist imaginable. Christy Brown(Day-Lewis) is a man born with cerebral palsy in Ireland in the 30's, a time when people had a poor and limiting understanding of disabilities. His mom saw in him an intelligence and sensitivity that no one else could even imagine and over time Brown learns to paint and write using only the digits of his left foot. In doing so, he reveals to the world a truly brilliant mind. Day-Lewis won his first of two (will it soon be three?) Academy Awards for playing one of the most difficult roles imaginable and nailing it.

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Character: Andrei Rublev

Film: Andrei Rublev

Year Released: 1966

One of the most difficult art house films, especially due to it's length, (between 180 and 200 minutes, depending), Andrei Rublev centers on the famous icon painter of the 15th Century during times of incredible violence between Princes and Tartars. This doesn't keep the movie from portraying a heart-wrenching artist as he captures rare moments of uplifting beauty. This black and white testament to identity and redemption is perhaps more beautiful than the art it represents.

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Character:Rembrant van Rijn

Film: Nightwatching

Year Released: 2007

In the great film from the great art director Peter Greenaway, Martin Freeman stars as a young and cocksure Rembrandt. With some strong and signature wit, the film probes the levels of privilege surrounding his contemporaries and focuses on the sinister detail of one of his most famous works, wherein he supposedly painted the evidence of a murder. This truly beautiful and moody picture is a one of a kind blend of contemporary film and dialogue on classic images and themes.

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Character: Frida Kahlo

Film: Frida

Year Released: 2002

Perhaps it's no surprise that Salma Hayek's transformation into Frida Kahlo is second nature on the screen. In Julie Taymor's hands, Frida's life is treated with the energy and mystique of celebrity(Vogue covers and all). Frida was after all, as interested in sexual exploration and politics as she was in her art. There is nothing quite like seeing Hayek sitting in a moving version of one of her famous works, in this joy of a film. Vintage Taymor, before she went off the deep end.

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Character: Jean-Michel Basquiat

Film: Basquiat

Year Released: 1998

Julian Schnabel really struck the right chord with his love letter to genius street artist and contemporary, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Though the film itself can feel a bit bloated and occasionally even heavy handed, it shines through casting. Jeffrey Wright takes the complexity and intrigue of Basquiat on full force, turning the charm and the anger on in equal measure, challenging the perception of an already challenging artist.

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