When the pandemic forced much of the United States to go into lockdown in mid-March, many were forced to remain indoors for extended periods of time. Although they couldn’t visit their beloved museums and galleries, art lovers could delight in the fact that there were a number of documentaries worth watching this year Below a look at the 10 best art-related documentaries that were released for streaming this year.
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Lifeline: Clyfford Still
Image Credit: Sandra Still/Courtesy Clyfford Still Archives Clyfford Still was infamously controlling of his legacy, and that has made it difficult for institutions to mount major surveys of the Abstract Expressionist’s work. Although a trip to the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver may still offer the fullest view of the artist’s work, Dennis Scholl’s Lifeline provides a good starting point for the uninitiated. It traces the full of Still’s career, explaining why he left behind figuration and looking at how he worked to rescue his art from market stardom. Alongside museum experts and critics, Scholl smartly also enlists major artists to address Still’s work. Among them is Julie Mehretu, who praises Still’s ability to capture the “slowed-down experience that goes past life.” (Read the full review here.)
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Pat Steir: Artist
Image Credit: Molly Davies Now in her 80s, Pat Steir remains one of the most imaginative abstract painters working today. Her presence is vibrant, and her mind is wide open, willing to absorb just about everything from Buddhist philosophy to new theories about conceptual art—all of which makes her a valuable subject for a documentary. Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s memorable cinematic portrait of the artist is a worthy one, filled with funny asides about the art world and the feminist movement of the 1970s. But more than anything, it is memorable for its sequences featuring Steir at work, with the octogenarian splashing paint across gigantic canvases. “I was born strong,” Steir tells Gonzalez Peña at one point. Based on those sequences, who could argue with that? (Read the full review here.)
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Aggie
Image Credit: ©Aubin Pictures/Courtesy Strand Releasing There are few art patrons in the world who are as beloved as Agnes Gund, the former president of the Museum of Modern Art who made headlines in 2017 when she sold a priced Roy Lichtenstein Pop art masterpiece to establish the Art for Justice Fund. That sale gave the fund $100 million in seed money to distribute to organizations and artists helping to bring an end to the prison-industrial complex. Directed by her daughter, Catherine Gund, Aggie gives us access in the way that few documentaries can. The documentary is a touching portrait of one of the world’s most generous collectors, who has made it her life’s mission to be a bearer of change—first in the art world advocating for MoMA to support the work of artists of color and now in the world at large with the Art for Justice Fund. (Read the full review here.)
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Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own
Image Credit: ©Itinerant Pictures The joy of a documentary about a living artist is that you often to get see them at work, crafting their masterpieces. Daniel Traub’s Into Her Own provides just that for Ursula von Rydingsvard, giving viewers a look into the sculptor’s studio as she creates towering wood sculptures with cuboidal shapes that jut outward. The works, in their final form, often seem effortless, but Traub’s documentary reveals that von Rydingsvard’s art is indeed a labor of love. (Read the full review here.)
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Cockroach
Image Credit: Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio Even a pandemic couldn’t keep Ai Weiwei from remaining prolific. In 2020, he produced three documentaries—Vivos, an investigation into violence in Mexico that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; Coronation, a gripping portrayal of the coronavirus lockdown in Wuhan, China; and Cockroach, a survey of the pro-democracy movement that swept Hong Kong in 2019. Cockroach doesn’t delve deeply into the specific factors that preceded the ongoing uprising, but it does present galvanizing images of the protests, with Ai’s deft cinematographers in the throngs of the action, at times forced to dodge tear gas canisters in order to capture this footage. At a time when activist movements are sweeping the world, Cockroach offers a valuable picture of what resistance looks like. (Read the full review here.)
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Museum Town
Image Credit: Courtesy Kino Lorber MASS MoCA, a gigantic museum in North Adams, Massachusetts, is going through a period of change, with its founding director Joe Thompson leaving after more than three decades at the helm. That makes right now the perfect moment for a documentary about the venerated museum, and sure enough, Jennifer Trainer, a former director of development and public relations there, delivered. This concise documentary charts MASS MoCA’s unlikely success and its difficult road to being, along with insights into some of its most famous presentations, including a notoriously botched Christoph Büchel exhibition. Mostly, it offers a case study in how a museum outside a major city can become an art-world destination. As one MASS MoCA curator puts it in the film, “You could never have a MASS MoCA in a major city.” (Read the full review here.)
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Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art
Image Credit: ©CBC Gem This year brought forth two documentaries about the infamous Knoedler forgery scandal which rocked the art world almost 10 years ago. Barry Avrich’s Made You Look is the better of the two, expertly retelling the complex tale about how fake artworks attributed to some of the postwar era’s greatest artists brought down one of the country’s oldest and most well-respected galleries. But perhaps the film’s greatest triumph is that the director gets Ann Freedman, the Knoedler director who peddled the fakes, to address the situation head-on. The Knoedler scandal resulted in numerous lawsuits, and one even made it to trial. On the day that Freedman was to take the stand, the parties settled for an undisclosed sum and the art world never got to hear Freedman’s side of the story—which, at long last, she offers up here. (Read the full review here.)
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Beyond the Visible – Hilma af Klint
Image Credit: Courtesy Kino Lorber The reasons Hilma af Klint’s art continues to fascinate barely need explications. Her paintings—packed with mysterious animal imagery and cosmological patterns—became ways for the 20th century artist to commune with unseen spirits; they very well may have been the first abstractions in Europe. Yet her work has rarely been brought to life as it was in Halina Dyrschka’s documentary about her, which is focused primarily on how an artist formerly relegated to the margins of art history is now getting reappraised as a master. Many got a glimpse of af Klint’s tantalizing work in knockout retrospectives at the Moderna Museet in Sweden and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Those shows were relatively short-lived, however. Thankfully, this documentary will last forever. (Read the full review here.)
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Marcel Duchamp: The Art of the Possible
Image Credit: Courtesy Cargo Films Marcel Duchamp is a towering figure in 20th century art, right up there alongside Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. Matthew Taylor’s The Art of the Possible boldly endeavors to tell his full life story, from his family background to his groundbreaking experiments in Cubism to his creation of the readymade, which shocked the art world and forever changed the course of art history, all the while providing exceptional analysis of the complex scientific theories that undergird the work. For Duchamp, anything and everything could be art, and this smart documentary makes the mind keep churning about the limitless possibilities of artistic expressions. (Read the full review here.)
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Carlos Almaraz: Playing with Fire
Image Credit: Courtesy Netflix Artist documentaries are exceptionally hard to get right—directors must strike a balance between exploring an artist’s biography (with enough interesting tidbits for those who already are familiar with their work) and offering an enlightening discussion of the artist’s practice and contributions to art history. It’s easy to fall short on either of those demands, but Carlos Almaraz: Playing with Fire, directed by Elsa Flores Almaraz and Richard J. Montoya and released by Netflix, delivers on both fronts. The film explores Almaraz’s motivations to begin making art, his involvement with the Chicano Movement, his radical manifestos denouncing the commodification of art, and ultimately his success as a painter. Most importantly, Playing with Fire includes a frank discussion of Almaraz’s bisexuality and his death from AIDS-related complications, a fact which was not openly spoken about until recently. That honesty ensures that Playing with Fire will be key in any future studies devoted to Almaraz. (Read the full review here.)