In the 1940s and 1950s, hundreds of art documentaries were produced, many of them being highly personal, poetic, reflexive and experimental films that offer a thrilling cinematic experience. With the exception of Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso (1956) and a few others, most of them have received only scant scholarly attention. This book aims to rectify this situation by discussing the most lyrical, experimental and influential post-war art documentaries, connecting them to contemporaneous museological developments and Euro-American cultural and political relationships. With contributors with expertise across art history and film studies, Art in the Cinema draws attention to film projects by André Bazin, Ilya Bolotowsky, Paul Haesaerts, Carlo Ragghianti, John Read, Dudley Shaw Aston, Henri Storck and Willard Van Dyke among others.

Table of Contents:
Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction: The Mid-Century Celluloid Museum, Steven Jacobs (Ghent University & Antwerp University, Belgium) & Dimitrios Latsis (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada) 1. The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Postwar Film on Art, Birgit Cleppe (Ghent University, Belgium) 2. American Art Comes of Age: Documentaries and the Nation at the Dawn of the Cold War, Dimitrios Latsis (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada) 3. Art History with a Camera: Rubens (1948) and Paul Haesaerts’s Concept of Cinéma Critique, Steven Jacobs (Ghent University & Antwerp University, Belgium) & Joséphine-Charlotte Vandekerckhove (Ghent University, Belgium & Verona University, Italy) 4. Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critolfims and Beyond: From Cinema to Information Technology, Emanuele Pellegrini (IMT School for Advanced Studies, Italy) 5. André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge, Angela Dalle Vacche (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) 6. Projecting Cultural Diplomacy: Cold War Politics, Films on Art, and Willard Van Dyke’s The Photographer, Natasha Ritsma (Loyola University Museum of Art, USA) 7. Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape: Modernity, the Land and the Bomb in Two Television Films by John Read, John Wyver (University of Westminster, UK) 8. Creative Process, Material Inscription and Dudley Shaw Ashton’s Figures in a Landscape (1953), Lucy Reynolds (University of Westminster, UK) 9. Neoplasticism and Cinema: Ilya Bolotowsky’s Experimental Films on Art, Henning Engelke (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) Mid-Twentieth-Century Art Documentaries: A Selected Bibliography About the Authors Index