The series will also be shown at the cinematheques in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Herzliya, Holon, Sderot and Rosh Pina, as well as in Savyon and Kibbutz Mizra.
Working with top international museums and galleries, Exhibition on Screen presents films which offer a cinematic immersion into art, accompanied by insights from leading historians and art critics. The series will include films about Picasso, Michelangelo, Cezanne, van Gogh, Degas, David Hockney and Matisse.
The Exhibition on Screen program was created by executive producer and director Phil Grabsky, who has been making documentaries for 30 years. For the past 15 years, he and director David Bickerstaff, both of whom have won many awards for their work, have been collaborating with several colleagues to produce art films for television and the movies. They have created this project in collaboration with galleries and museums around the world, including the National Gallery in London, Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum, Tate, MoMA, Hermitage, National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Royal Academy of Arts and many more.
The series opens with Cézanne: Portraits of a Life, a look at the artist who has been called the father of modern art and the single most influential artist of all time, which will be shown on February 11, 16 and 21. The film features portraits from several recent exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery of London, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Cézanne is better known for his still life paintings and landscapes than for his portraits, which makes this film intriguing. It illuminates these works by featuring excerpts from Cézanne’s letters and journals, which show his obsessive devotion to his work and his perfectionism, as well as his humor.
Degas: Passion for Perfection, which will be playing in March, examines the works of Edgar Degas, best known for his paintings and sculptures of dancers as well as life at the race track and on the seamier side of society. The film is based around a recent exhibit at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, with his letters read by James Faulkner, who appeared on Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey. As beautiful and innovative as Degas’s works were, his life was marked by antisemitism that was extreme even for his time, and he opposed Alfred Dreyfus in the Dreyfus Affair and the movie does not shy away from these inconvenient truths.
Young Picasso looks at the early years of this most brilliant and celebrated of all modern artists, up to 1907 and his seminal painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It explores how three cities where he lived when he was young shaped his life: Malaga, Barcelona and Paris. It will be shown in April.
Leonardo highlights a recent show of some rarely seen Da Vinci paintings at the National Gallery of London, with insights from curators, artists and actors who visited or were involved in the show. It will be shown here in May.
Several other films will be shown as part of Exhibition on Screen at the Jerusalem Cinematheque but have not been scheduled yet. These include Rembrandt, which features exhibits at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Gallery in London;Michelangelo – Love and Death, which looks at the artist’s life and tries to trace the development of his genius; I, Claude Monet, which was shot in the spots where the artist painted; David Hockney, which focuses on two landmark exhibitions in New York and London; Vincent van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing, a look at the man behind the masterpieces; and Matisse, featuring works from Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Since launching in 2011, Exhibition on Screen has released 16 films which have been shown in more than 50 countries across the world.