Bonnie Lautenberg: Art Meets Hollywood at the Boca Raton Museum of Art

"1989: When Harry Met Sally/ Alex Katz Roof"

Here's the downside of any kind of tour -- there are inevitably things you want to see that aren't on the schedule. Case in point: "Bonnie Lautenberg: Art Meets Hollywood" and "The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop" at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. Our Algonquin adventure had us in the area, but without a planned stop at this Museum. I know, I know -- you can't do it all. But in this instance, the stars aligned. Our itinerary had us settling into our hotel in Boca at 5 pm, and the Museum just happened to be open late that night. My friends and I ordered Ubers and headed over to the Museum to check out the exhibits. We had a ridiculous amount of fun. 

Bonnie Lautenberg is the widow of Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. But she was more than just a political wife standing by her man. Long interested in photography, Lautenberg was in the room with her camera at the ready when Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and Chairman Yassir Arafat signed the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accord in 1993. Her creative spark was ignited, and she's never looked back. 

"1928 The Mysterious Lady/Rene Magritte The Lovers"

In her ARTISTICA! series, Lautenberg pairs images from movies and paintings created the same year. She's been at work on this series since 2017, and I can only imagine how satisfying it must be when she finds a match. Sometimes Lautenberg starts with a work of art and searches for a visually similar scene or costume from a movie. Other times the process is reversed. As she puts the two together, she thinks about the way the two images speak to one another. Perhaps the filmmaker influenced the artist or vice verse -- consciously or unconsciously. It's fun to consider. especially with pairings so in synch, like the shot from The Mysterious Lady and Magritte's "The Lovers."

A surprising (to me) amount has been written about the influence of paintings on movies. My favorite finds are three short videos by Vugar Efendi that show movie clips adjacent to the paintings that inspired the shot. Click here to watch them. They are seriously stunning. For static images of the pairings, click here. Efendi is a young Azerbaijani filmmaker who put together these videos in 2016. As long as we’re talking about possible influences, perhaps Lautenberg stumbled upon Efendi's work and decided to embark on her own project. 

"1932 Grand Hotel/Georgia O'Keeffe
Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1"

Whatever the impetus, Lautenberg's pairings are inspired. And limiting herself to paintings and movies made the same year makes the task infinitely more challenging than identifying the pairings shown in Efendi's wonderful videos and the articles to which I've provided links. This constraint -- combined with the fact that the digital age only dawned in the late 20th century -- would seem to make the conversation between the art and the film coincidental more often than not. And so Lautenberg's work is different from spotting a clearly deliberate reference to an iconic painting in a movie filmed many years after the artwork was created. (The homage Quentin Tarantino pays to Thomas Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy" in his costume for Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained is one example of an intentional reference. Click here for a link that shows that pairing and other direct nods to paintings in film.) 

And then there's the creativity Lautenberg employs in creating her pairings. For Lautenberg to watch this scene in Grand Hotel and summon O'Keeffe's "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1" is pretty amazing. It requires a whole different level of knowledge of art history, patience, and scrutiny. Kudos are definitely in order.

"Bonnie Lautenberg: Art Meets Hollywood" runs through August 21 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. For more info, click here. To see more of Lautenberg's pairings, click here for the ARTISTICA! section of her website. And for a couple more articles showing stills of movie scenes inspired by paintings, click here and here. Enjoy!

Next up: "Art of the Hollywood Backdrop" at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.