Sean Scully: Art Comes from Need

La Garoupe, a beach in Antibes, in 1937. For one summer, the painter and photographer Man Ray films his friends Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, as well as Lee Miller. During these few weeks, love, friendship, poetry, photography and painting are still mixed in the carefree and the creativity specific to the artistic movements of the interwar period.

The evolution of Picasso's painting up to his “pink phase.”

Director Francois Levy-Kuentz's film uses previously unreleased archival material, such as Klein's personal films, to capture the artist's astonishing career, from its beginning in 1954 to his death in 1962. In those eight short years, Klein turned the modern art world upside down.

Described in Art Review as the world’s most influential and expensive living artist, the German painter Gerhard Richter was enjoying enormous success in London with his retrospective show at Tate Modern entitled Panorama in 2011. This particular film was made some years ago at the time of his equally successful American retrospective at MOMA entitled “40 Years of Painting” and charts his entire artistic career. Born in Dresden in 1932, the year before Hitler came to power, Richter later grew up in communist East Germany, before escaping to the West just before the Wall went up in Berlin. Since then he has produced a large diverse body of work from his blurred photobased paintings to his gigantic abstractions, from his Baader Meinhof pictures to his perceptual installations using sheets of glass. Gerald Fox’s film caught up with the artist at his home in Cologne where he was undergoing a period of quiet reflection and preparation before beginning a new series of paintings.

Francis Bacon: Fragments of a Portrait explores the recurring themes in Bacon’s work, his influences and his life. The documentary is accompanied by a haunting score specially composed by Edwin Astley for the production.

The Art of Antony Gormley features the documentary Antony Gormley and the 4th Plinth, produced for Sky Arts, which reveals the background to this living monument and explores its origins in the sculptor's beautiful and mysterious art. Works created across more than two decades were filmed in HD for this visually sumptuous and thought-provoking documentary.

THE STORY WON’T DIE, from Award-winning filmmaker David Henry Gerson, is an inspiring, timely look at a young generation of Syrian artists who use their work to protest and process what is currently the world’s largest and longest ongoing displacement of people since WWII. The film is produced by Sundance Award-winner Odessa Rae (Navalny). Rapper Abu Hajar, together with other creative personalities of the Syrian uprising, a post-Rock musician (Anas Maghrebi), members of the first all-female Syrian rock band (Bahila Hijazi + Lynn Mayya), break-dancer (Bboy Shadow), choreographer (Medhat Aldaabal), and visual artists (Tammam Azzam, Omar Imam + Diala Brisly), use their art to rise in revolution and endure in exile in this new documentary reflecting on a battle for peace, justice and freedom of expression. It is an uplifting and humanizing look at what it means to be a refugee in today’s world and offers inspiring and hopeful vantages on a creative response to the chaos of war.

Alma W. Thomas lived a life of firsts: the first Fine Arts graduate of Howard University (1924), the first Black woman to mount a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1972), and the first Black woman to have her paintings exhibited in the White House (2009). Yet she did not receive national attention until she was 80.

Documentary about filmmakers of the New German Cinema who were members of the legendary Filmverlag für Autoren (Film Publishing House for Authors). Among them are Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders.

Emil Nolde was a Nazi – and so what, asks contemporary German artist Daniel Richter. “It’s a moralistic debate. A debate, that mirrors the moralism and bigottery of a generation that seems to think, that the world is a moral playground.” Emil Nolde’s relationship to the Nazi-regime in the Third Reich has given rise to immense discussions within the last months. For decades the broader public had a picture of Nolde being one of the “entartete” artists as well as being prohibited painting by the Nazi-regime. Though this on the surface is true, it was the result of a great disappointment to Nolde. For years, he had strived to become “the” artist of the Thrid Reich, praising his own art as true, German, anti-French and anti-Jewish. Possible competitors within the German art world like Max Pechstein he actively denounced to the Nazi authorities.

“Pat Pasloff is a strong artist within a strong tradition…She has transcended some of the angst of Abstract Expressionism, without descending into something that is bland or formulaic or potentially conceptual” – David Cohen Pat Pasloff (1928 – 2011) was an ambitious abstract expressionist painter who produced large scale, fresh, and vital bodies of work. Studying under pioneering artist William de Kooning, she was able to find her own path and grow from his influence. Her patterns and grids come alive with the materiality and physicality of her paintings. Watch as Pasloff describes her experiences painting, gaining an education in art, and as her visual language of emotion comes alive.

One of Britain’s greatest landscape artists, Eric Ravilious, is killed in a plane crash while on commission as Official War Artist in Iceland in 1942. His life is as compelling and enigmatic as his art, set against the dramatic wartime locations that inspire him. This film brings to life this unique and still grossly undervalued British artist caught in the crossfire of war 80 years ago, whose legacy largely sank without trace, until now…

Never before has the extraordinary life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo been framed in relation to the full spectrum of the historical and cultural influences that shaped her. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FRIDA KAHLO explores the 20th century icon who became an international sensation in the worlds of modern art and radical politics.

A film about and with Max Ernst.

The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky claimed, or has been credited with, the 'creation' of abstract art. At the core of this film is a dramatic recreation of Kandinsky's account of returning to his studio one dark evening, and being astonished by an unknown masterpiece of abstract art leaning against the easel - a picture which turned out to be one of his own landscapes fallen on its side. 'Now I knew for certain that the object spoiled my pictures.' While this film's narration does indeed emphasize the notion of an inspired breakthrough to Abstraction, the picture it conveys in more purely filmic ways is a rich and complex one.

Mark Rothko, a master of abstract expressionism, created 835 paintings during his five-decade career.

George Segal constructs a type of human form and vulnerability that feels rare in the world of sculpture. As we follow his process at the isolated New Jersey farmhouse that serves as his studio, the intimacy between Segal and his art is contagious. He casts people who he knows, respects and admires, making the final outcome of the piece seep with personality and humanity. Segal is focused on creating a mold that does not necessarily subscribe to society’s notion of beauty. Originally released in 1979.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir is known and loved for his impressionist paintings of Paris. These paintings count among the world’s favourites. Renoir, however, grew tired of this style and changed course. This film, based on the collection of 181 Renoirs at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia,– examines the direction he then took and why it provokes such extreme reactions right up to today. Some claim they are repulsed by Renoir’s later works and some claim they are seduced. What may surprise many is that among the many artists who sought Renoir’s new works out and were clearly highly influenced by them were the two giants of the 20th century – Picasso and Matisse.

Curator Robert Storr takes us through the 2002 MoMA Gerhard Richter retrospective.

Legendary underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez and his friends -- cartoonists Robert Crumb and Jay Kinney and cultural critic Susie Bright -- discuss Spain's art and his life as an outlaw biker, '60s figure and social satirist.