itt: paintings that are plot-points in movies and TV that are terrible paintings (or excellent ones if there are any)

thread can include paintings that are just background provided they are created for the movie or have some link to the movie's being made

(viz the goodfellaspainting which is only just barely a plotpoint iirc) (and is also good not bad imo)

la belle noiseuse dorian gray blah

there was a good one recently actually let me remember

the only good painting, in or out of movies and tv

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/c/c5/Vigo.jpg/revision/latest/top-crop/width/360/height/450?cb=20190720000003

https://www.joshwhotv.com/v/1346?channelName=Sir+Mark+Frederick+McKinney

the one in Sopranos is purposely terrible, and wonderfully so

the Dorian Gray one had the virtue of being by Chicago painter Ivan Albright, who was singularly suited to the task.

the one from Ghostbusters is exactly the one I was thinking of when a plot point painting is wretched.

dorian gray is kind of terrific tbrr

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/49/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray-_Ivan_Albright.jpg

oh my first line was definitely 'canonical classics that are good not bad'

http://sensesofcinema.com/assets/uploads/2013/07/Deep-Red-6.jpg

http://paintingsinmovies.com/ir/5/1679.jpg
the cat painting in Eyes Wide Shut always gets me. Lots of wild ones in their apartment, all by Katharina Kubrick.

the other only good painting in or out of movies or tv

https://gazette-eu-west2.azureedge.net/media/35783/big-bobbies-2368nedi.jpg

which is of course van clomp’s masterwork, ‘fallen madonna with the big boobies’, from ’allo ‘allo

Was gonna say

https://paintingvalley.com/images/painting-from-the-royal-tenenbaums-10.jpg

but then I remembered you said 'terrible' not 'terrific'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-kcczAff40

what's on the other wall? an aztec sacrifice? now I'll have to go back and watch

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/06/17/article-0-0A0FA632000005DC-994_308x185.jpg

'Wetter.'

http://files.umwblogs.org/blogs.dir/8945/files/2014/04/10-ced6084d4e-2.jpg
Painter David Reed loved Vertigo so much he made a piece where he inserted his own work into the background

http://artoffice.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/tumblr_mia7irbhCN1qjp799o2_400.jpg

several more giallos come to mind immediately.

the red queen kills seven times
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMzk5ZDAxNmQtOTY1MC00NzYzLWI5ZGUtMmRhNzBhMzZhMjJhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_.jpg

https://live.staticflickr.com/207/494183489_95540624d5_z.jpg
the nadir- the plot point paintings of Heroes

dorian gray is kind of terrific tbrr

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/49/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray-_Ivan_Albright.jpg

whoa it looks like one of those google deep dream doohickeys

the bloodstained shadow
https://iv1.lisimg.com/image/8990957/720full-the-bloodstained-shadow-screenshot.jpg

I love this painting 'by' Edward G Robinson in Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street:

https://crackedrearviewer.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/kitty.jpg

might as well drop this here for the entire Night Galley series:

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/a_gallery_of_the_paintings_from_rod_serlings_night_gallery

All of Hancock's art in The Rebel is good not bad

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/8JEnblX2ZJQ48Fgct_yRppVvD6hHvZ1_4ojbLoetHlDzRtT4DIcboUlQWKygw7mfO9L73n4aQczEZkHjM6o

action sequence from same:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs73aPdYvnE

https://home2hollywood.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/gene-tierney-dana-andrews-painting-laura-1944.png?w=720

Gene Tierney portrait in Laura (and also Leave Her To Heaven?)

from queen of the damned (legit one of my favourite movies):

https://iv1.lisimg.com/image/13166142/720full-queen-of-the-damned-%282002%29-photo.jpg

I'm a longtime fan of both Altman and Pialat's Van Gogh movies without being able to find examples. I'm sure the painting was good in both though - just by not being terrible I think.

I would love to do like a 'shreds' variation on a painting biopic, played completely straight in every respect except that the paintings are fucking awful and are in no way representative of the actual artist's work.

The estates of Picasso, Pollock, and Francis Bacon all forbade filmmakers from using the respective artists' work in the films, so the producers had to make knock offs for them all.

Like imagine a sweeping historical drama about Caravaggio and every one of his paintings featured in the film is a close-up of a butthole.

i've been trying to find more of the category i associate best of the badness with: where we encounter a portrait in which a strong rememblance between a living character and the painting implies some dark connection or creepiness or obsession

(vertigo is an example of this, indeed probably a major inspiration for copycat plots, and coppola's dracula is another -- i'm sure there's a bunch of hammer horrors with relevant portraits in them)

i was faintly appalled that this shit-ass painting featured prominently in an episode of watchmen wasn’t created for the show

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Comanche_Feats_of_Horsemanship-George_Catlin.jpg

lol, I kinda love how shit-ass that painting is.

The painting of the first wife in two mrs Carrolls is pretty dire:

https://www.thefilmsinmylife.com/2018/10/the-artwork-in-two-mrs-carrolls-1947.html?m=1

look i just think that if you’re gonna devote yourself to creating semi-racist to fully-racist depictions of the lives of native americans you should at least put a bit of effort in xp

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J0sip_yMWak/UI2PZWxoziI/AAAAAAAAE3M/pBWWP6f35lA/s320/tumblr_lin3euFMJ51qzr3ueo1_r2_500.gif

fake Inchbold

https://i2.wp.com/morseandlewisandendeavour.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/vlcsnap-2017-02-07-20h19m59s450.jpg?w=730&ssl=1

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tYmsVY1-6vM/T8L4fU3xqtI/AAAAAAAAABc/5fqbqCyQZcE/s1600/Chaos.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MQbyqoOWgZ8/T8L4f6md0YI/AAAAAAAAABk/m4FfNf4ym2Y/s1600/Control.jpg

Is...is that a unicorn in the top right of the Comanche painting?

controversial YBA Tom Baker in Vault of Horror

https://bigcomicpage.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/32714424_1691226590931862_2686949798283575296_n.jpg

Obviously this is awesome http://www.triplezed.com/blog/the-art-of-3-men-and-a-baby

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAU0BBG5-hw

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-gWP9Fck4C0/hqdefault.jpg

Fritz Lang's The Woman In The Window:

https://images.app.goo.gl/w7oD3RLbBgwuQgpx8

Must make a note not to hotlink from blogspot again, it looks like you've posted it successfully, but nope.

anyway, these

https://i.imgur.com/BArZRir.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/4Du2JsA.jpg

and this one

https://i.imgur.com/DCDLIEA.gif

i give you... raul julia as m bison in street fighter

https://cdn1us.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeekus/files/styles/article_width/public/street_fighter-1.jpg?itok=OyOrqnl2

christopher walken and christopher walken’s large adult son in batman returns

https://cdn1us.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeekus/files/styles/article_width/public/batman_returns_0.jpg?itok=o9Xn9NUu

The Witch painting spooked me as a kid. I think there’s an MR James story with a changing painting too?

rivendell painting very much in the data school

No plot to it but the ending of Andrei Rublev was great (as in wtf have been watching this for the last 2.5 hours)

https://youtu.be/0wvhOPX2DFw

https://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/images/4767e.jpg

odd man out & bonus production still

https://images.app.goo.gl/MDFWExuiAjwr54sx7

Herschell Gordon Lewis's Color Me Blood Red. Don't laugh, it's on the Criterion Channel.

trust me, it's bad

Russian Ark

https://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/11530394/960full-russian-ark-screenshot.jpg

http://www.fototime.com/%7BED791D92-68A3-45C7-843F-4AB22AB96489%7D/picture.JPG

Man, I love that movie.

Let’s not forget about Mel Chin’s quasi-conspiracy to put art out on Melrose Place: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.artnews.com/art-news/news/remembering-when-melrose-place-became-a-conceptual-art-project-mel-chins-gala-committee-returns-this-fall-6750/amp/

https://img.posterlounge.co.uk/img/products/480000/475576/475576_poster_l.jpg https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images1/360/1211/09/original-wings-love-print-1970s_360_caad92f9beeab032c66f8865a8e98e8b.jpg

^ name the tv production

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wsok3eSm0D0/U8s4xX5dCTI/AAAAAAAAGMw/8WYmVvY_6ng/s1600/Schiele.jpg

just reporting that the painting scenes in Portait of a Lady on Fire are probably quite as realistically formulaic and unremarkable as the work of an 18th century society portraitist would be, well with the caveat that I fell asleep halfway through and will catch up on "episode 2" tonight!

― calzino, Friday, 7 February 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Lol oh no watching that next week

― xyzzzz__, Friday, 7 February 2020 bookmarkflaglink

I didn't mean it was boring or bad.. I was rather tired and it was late.

― calzino, Friday, 7 February 2020 bookmarkflaglink

I loved it

― wee jim o’conor (wins), Friday, 7 February 2020 bookmarkflaglink

I loved the film too but yes the ironing is how, in the end, this is an utterly unremarkable portrait. The film cleverly plays with the idea of either destroying it -- the one time my friend gasped was when the first effort was killed off -- or not fully displaying it to us the viewer. Looking back there is something astonishing about all of the training, skill, effort, study, love (and love and more love), aesthetics, art and yet...there is very little to show for it. Not that you mind at all, you lived through its creation, That was more than enough, but it may offer an insight or two in the puzzle with which this thread is concerned with.

looks one of my image links broke but it was 'wings of love' as featured in abigail's party, a terrible but also amazing painting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Love_(painting)

After the Second World War, shops such as Woolworths sold large numbers of colorful and sentimental or 'exotic' prints.[6] As a commercially reproduced picture, Wings of Love was sold ready-framed in many high street outlets, and became a best-selling image in the early 1970s. By 1992, 2.5 million copies of Wings of Love had been sold, many outside of the UK.[7][8]

The most notable appearance of Wings of Love was in a mural commissioned for a wall beside one of Saddam Hussein's many swimming pools in his palace.[9] The mural was recreated in the form of a projection on the wall of the Platform Arts Gallery, Belfast, in February 2009. In the exhibition ‘Taste: The New Religion’, at Manchester's Cornerhouse Arts Centre, Wings of Love finds a place beside pictures by Vladimir Tretchikoff, John Lynch and Peter Lightfoot as an example of the independent course of popular taste. Andrea Patrick Byrne, an award-winning London-based artist, references Wings of Love in her 2014 audiovisual self-portrait Girlhood.[10]
Popular culture

The print house Athena owed much of its resurgence in the 1980s to selling kitsch prints of a fantasy-world type, such as Unicorn Princess, Beach Lovers and A Dolphin Moon, that were inspired by Stephen Pearson's work.[11] Wings of Love was immortalized on the wall of Stan and Hilda Ogden's house in Coronation Street[12] and the painting also achieved cult status through its appearance in the 1977 film of Mike Leigh's play Abigail's Party,[13] In the film, the painting provokes a heated debate on the nature of "erotic art"; this culminates in Beverly Moss's husband Laurence dropping dead of a heart attack. The film Mona Lisa also features Wings of Love as part of recurring references to surrealism.[14]

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51cwKvvhYvL._SX425_.jpg

when i was clearing out mum and dad's attic i was startled to encounter a vast print of "wings of love" -- my absolutely stumped confusion makes me think i may never properly have watched abigail's party -- as i did not recognise it and it is a seriously unexpected image just to happen on (it was stored there by someone my sister know, who collects film memorabilia and had been temporarily embarrassed for storage space)

https://live.staticflickr.com/4480/24097904808_9ab1284082_b.jpg

(thread ends with ppl posting increasingly large embeds of wings of love)

it was stored there by someone my sister know, who collects film memorabilia and had been temporarily embarrassed for storage space

saddam hussein?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUA6SR3rZT8&feature=emb_title

Portait of a Lady on Fire is a really fine movie.. and the actual portrait is nuff shite! I was thinking the movie was working on themes of the discrepancy between memories, sensations and love and everything and the limits of artistic presentation or something, but then at the end you see music doing what the painting failed to do. Just sketchy thoughts here - i don't do coherent posts I'm afraid!

luckily the antiques auctions in shropshire are very flexible about the rules surrounding WMDs of unstated provenance

Scuds of Ludlow

never really noticed it before, and i know it has more obvious failings with regard to the laws of science, but the woman's shadow is really wrong in the wings of love

airbrush card revoked for that fucking arm on the bloke as well or was that a feature of the painting.. i can't remember tbh!

i suppose the shadow would actually make sense if the sun was on the left hand side of the painting, i always assumed that was the sun under the swan, but duh it's the moon isn't it? the moon of the giant night swan

that's best thing about athena surrealism-lite, you can just make it up as you go along!

yes it's not so clear in the version i posted, which has misleading glare in the top left corner -- in nick's there are clearly two lightsources, the moon and a redder source off to the left in what we can see, which reddens the pool of light the lady is sitting in as well as the outer wings of the bird (somewhat mysteriously in respect of the wing on the right side, unless there's a third light source off to the right, also red)

The mysteries of love

The painting of the woman on fire does the same thing as the music, though? It helps her remember and relive what happened. It's not Vivaldi, sure, but what is?

this old ep of "law and order" ("hands free") has some very schnabel-y art in it, but i can't find pictures on the internet :(

There was another Morse 🎨 last night, the lad knows what he likes

Have we talked about The Sandpiper yet?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/41/11/ef/4111efc1282e423f96a6436d46e1f609.png

Schalcken the painter (1979) incorporates a lot of his paintings, but the one the story centres around had to be created for the film. It’s described in the opening of LeFanu’s story:

There exists, at this moment, in good preservation a remarkable work of Schalken's. The curious management of its lights constitutes, as usual in his pieces, the chief apparent merit of the picture. I say apparent, for in its subject, and not in its handling, however exquisite, consists its real value. The picture represents the interior of what might be a chamber in some antique religious building; and its foreground is occupied by a female figure, in a species of white robe, part of which is arranged so as to form a veil. The dress, however, is not that of any religious order. In her hand the figure bears a lamp, by which alone her figure and face are illuminated; and her features wear such an arch smile, as well becomes a pretty woman when practicing some prankish roguery; in the background, and, excepting where the dim red light of an expiring fire serves to define the form, in total shadow, stands the figure of a man dressed in the old Flemish fashion, in an attitude of alarm, his hand being placed upon the hilt of his sword, which he appears to be in the act of drawing.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/61/Attempted_restoration_of_Ecce_Homo.jpg/170px-Attempted_restoration_of_Ecce_Homo.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d1/Smiling_girl_%28Fake_Vermeer%29.jpg/220px-Smiling_girl_%28Fake_Vermeer%29.jpg

Was about to post the goodfellas dog painting but then re-read the og post. Do you know the story behind that? I love it so much.

only that it's by nicholas pileggi's mom (he's the journalist who wrote the original book the film's based on) and it's inspired by a photo in (i think) national geographic

Since this thread was last active, I re-watched Corman's Fall of the House of Usher, which has some really quite effective portrait paintings by Majorie Cameron associate Burt Shonberg, as shown here:

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2013/04/13/burt-shonbergs-poe-paintings/

love this thread, might spend my evening re-living it

Another painter from Marjorie Cameron's circle is Renate Druks, a Viennese emigre who moved to the US. She was close to Anais Nin, and also involved in the film world through acting in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (one of her party events provided the inspiration for the film). She also had some role in providing art work for Curtis Harrington's film 'Games':

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uLIw2QJR2Es/UT-oof1c_JI/AAAAAAAABG4/6Zjc2KHnqhg/s640/games_21.png

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/usher6-big.jpg

Lemmy on the naughty step in hell for wearing a nazi hat!

Mr Turner

https://www.filmaffinity.com/us/filmimages.php?movie_id=324035

(dangit!)

truly cursed!

Try that again.

https://www.filmaffinity.com/us/filmimages.php?movie_id=324035

I say! Time to give up the ghost!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jQLgZLaEUo

rewatching goodfellas and just reached the painting :)

(its good not bad)

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f257383d68fbe07dae9c644/35d1e27e-2a4c-4cd7-8688-115a3a0ccd88/3f827875174021d97c4bd9f04a4fe85c.jpg

https://darkshadowseveryday.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/strange-paradise-portrait.jpg

just rewatched QUEEN OF THE DAMNED (2002) real title A SECRET HISTORY OF VERY BAD ART (ALSO SCULPTURE)

the only good movie btw

There’s that French tv series, The Art of Crime, where every episode has these … except the ones with sculptures.