Movies: Modern art

Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filme...

A hitman, his boss, an art dealer and a money-laundering scheme that accidentally turns the assassin into an overnight avant-garde sensation, one that forces her to play the art world against the underworld....

In this hybrid political thriller and verité portrait documentary, Sara Nodjoumi, working with co-director and husband, Till Schauder, makes her directorial debut with this personal film, diving into the mystery surrounding the disappearance of more ...

In 1919 an art school opened in Germany that would change the world forever. It was called the Bauhaus. A century later, its radical thinking still shapes our lives today. Bauhaus 100 is the story of Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauh...

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find...

The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes....

This 56-minute documentary on America's most controversial and unique composer manages to cover a great many aspects of Cage's work and thought. His love for mushrooms, his Zen beliefs and use of the I Ching, and basic bio details are all explained i...

Alan Yentob profiles the most successful female architect there has ever been, the late Zaha Hadid, who designed buildings around the globe from Austria to Azerbaijan....

Loïe Fuller, stage name of Marie Louise Fuller: the American actress and dancer trained in burlesque, circuses and variety shows who, in the 1890s, signed by the Folies Bergère of Paris, became a star. She was portrayed by Toulouse-Lautrec, loved by ...

CREMASTER 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the s...

Upon using a modern art museum as the setting for a role play game that goes hopelessly awry, a deaf couple desperate to rekindle their spark finds the reconnection they seek in their shared experience over an abstract sculpture....

A history of the work of Merce Cunningham....

A rural American town suffering economically from factory closures finds an unconventional route to recovery with the help of MASS MoCA....

Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the separation barrier on the Palestinian West Bank. Fiercely guarding his anonymity to avoid prosecution, Banksy has so far resis...

A collection of BBC archive material about painter Francis Bacon, including a previously unseen interview recorded in 1965....

A manufactured memory....

Corpus Peccati is an unconventional and experimental film with a 1 hour and 14 minutes duration, created by filmmaker, photographer and artist Aaron Klusmann. This avant-garde film is a controversial view of sex and liberty, in a deeper understanding...

Manet is one of the main candidates for the title of the most important artist there has been. As the reluctant father of Impressionism, and the painter of Dejeuner sur l'herbe, he can probably be accused of inventing modern art. But his story is fas...

Martin Creed has said that part of living is coming to terms with horrible feelings. 'The problem with horrible feelings is you can't paint them. But horrible vomit – you can film that.' And he has. It's a difficult piece to watch but highlights Cree...

No understanding of the modern movement in architecture is possible without knowledge of its master builder, Mies van der Rohe. Together with documentation of his life, this film shows all his major buildings, as well as rare film footage of Mies exp...