Filmmaker, Emile de Antonio is a counterculture hero who helped to distribute the classic Beat film Pull My Daisy, shot the classic JFK assassination documentary Rush to Judgement and got smashed to the gills for his appearance in Andy Warhol’s experimental film Drink.

One of my favorite de Antonio flicks is a classic art documentary featuring candid interviews with a generation of painters, allowing them to illuminate the evolution of modern art in America in their own works and words.

Here’s Open Culture’s take on the film Painters Painting:

For his 1972 movie Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970, De Antonio managed to get artists like Warhol, Johns, and De Kooning along with Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler to talk about their craft. It is the definitive documentary portrait of the New York art world.

I was probably the only filmmaker in the world who could [have made Painters Painting] because I knew all those people, from the time that they were poor, and unsuccessful and had no money. I knew Warhol and Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Stella before they ever sold a painting, and so it was interesting to [do the film about them]. They appeared in the film along with De Kooning, whom I knew very well, and Barnett Newman, who is now dead. They talked to me in a way that they would never have talked to anybody else because they knew I knew the subject.

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Frank O’Hara would’ve turned 87 in March if he hadn’t been hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island in 1966. O’Hara was a category straddling artist who wouldn’t be boxed-in by the preconceived boundaries that separated – and continue to separate – artists and the people who organize and comment on their work.

O’Hara curated exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and he also wrote arts criticism. He was also one of the most-celebrated of the post-Beat poets and was the de facto face of the New York School of poetry. He denounced the company of the New York literati, preferring to hang out with painters like Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers. Like these artists, O’Hara thought of his individual poems as records of the process that created them, and of his poetry as a whole as a kind of creative diary of his life.

Here is a short film that stays focused on the man and his work, and features a number of readings of some of the poet’s better known pieces. “Having a Coke with You” is the slam-bang closer here, but the whole provides a nice primer on O’Hara. This short doc is one of twelve portraits of poets from Richard O. Moore’s USA: Poetry series from 1966. O’Hara died weeks after this footage was shot, making the following scenes read like both snapshots of a creative life and a too-soon memorial.

I can't talk any more.

Quite by accident we just stumbled across this gem by Paul McCarthy. Here’s what Frieze Magazine has to say about “The Painter”:

The Painter (1995) is a brilliant interrogation of the senility and late paintings of Willem de Kooning, complete with collectors and dealers puppet-mastering around him. It’s a video deploying, as so many of his videos do, the mise-en-scène of instructional television (from the Galloping Gourmet to Martha Stewart), but one in which the painter mumbles and cries: ‘You can’t do it anymore you can’t do it anymore.’ And later: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ He means painting, he means art-making, he may mean life. At the end of The Painter the artist gets up on a table, pulls down his pants and a collector with a protuberant fake nose sniffs at his bare arse, McCarthy’s own.

Next to David Lynch’s own words on the subject, I don’t know if I’ve seen a more compelling externalization of the artist’s interior process than McCarthy’s.

Enjoy!

Joe Nolan <3