ARTE Distribution

In each episode, an artist creates his own documentary on someone he or she admires, or talks about art or something completely different.

The artist is in the driving seat!

This documentary series tells the story of intimate and tumultuous love stories in the context of art history. With Amedao Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne, Lee Miller and Man Ray or Gerda Taro and Robert Capa.

Love story is an excuse to narrate the lives of artists, their neuroses and narcissism, and to confront them to their alter ego, the other, their double.
Each of the couples of this collection answers the same questions: is love compatible with creation? Can artists reveal themselves through romantic passion? Does love bring a renewed energy to Art?

As part of a Louvre Museum initiative, the worlds' leading experts on Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Watteau, Raphael and Poussin joined forces to rediscover and study the masters' works that were de-hung and de-framed for the occasion.

The masterpieces at the Louvre are real survivors!
Throughout the centuries, they have managed to escape pillaging, fire, woodworm, pigment degradation, changing tastes, overpaints, heavy-handed restorations, mutilation by saw, attacks, ageing and oblivion. Some works have lived a clandestine life, under false identity, others, believed to be lost, have suddenly reappeared centuries later.

An exceptional event, even for experts. In these collective investigations, each participant tries to shed light on the enigmas surrounding the works. A unique encounter between man and works of art.

Rosa Bonheur, the animal painter adulated in France in the XIXth century, often forgotten in her country, is nevertheless a major figure of women's emancipation and of the animal cause.

Rosa Bonheur was a major figure of female emancipation: she was the first woman artist to receive the Legion of Honour, from the hands of another woman, the Empress Eugenie, who said on this occasion: “Genius has no sex”. She was also the first woman officially authorized to wear pants; the first to buy property with the fruit of her labor, thanks to the sale of a single painting; she settled in this property with several friends: living between women, sharing their fortunes between them, becoming heirs of each other, they founded a sisterhood that would leave a lasting impression on the French society of the time.

Official selection - 24th Luchon Television Creation Festival

Katsushika Hokusai was probably the most famous and most outstanding Japanese painter and printmaker of his generation, and was the artist whose fame was the quickest to cross the seas (his name has been popular in Europe for a long time).

A multi-faceted and all-round artist, his work is labyrinthine, probably comprising some 30,000 prints, not counting his oil paintings and the books he illustrated. The painter’s life was rich, his work was prolific, and both were imbued with a multitude of signs most of which are unknown to us. Let’s embark upon a journey and pay a “visit to Hokusai”, in the company of his enlightened admirers - Japanese connoisseurs, who are familiar with all these signs.
 

Joan Mitchell was one of the greatest painters of the American Abstract Expressionist movement. Acclaimed by critics and the public, her stance allowed her to be among one of the only women to make her mark in the then male-dominated world of abstract art. She was the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1982.

In 1940s New York, alongside Pollock, De Kooning and Franz Kline, and then in France where she lived from 1959, Joan Mitchell developed a unique body of work at the crossroads between abstraction and impressionism, between France and the United States. The writer Paul Auster, the composer Gisèle Barreau and personalities from the art world talk of the Joan they knew personally, and of her outstanding work drawn from her deep-seated emotions and sensations.
Using archives seen for the first time, this documentary explores the artist’s vibrant work, full of bursts of color, as well as the darker, more vulnerable side of her character hidden behind a mask of toughness. The writer Paul Auster and the composer Gisèle Barreau talk of the Joan they knew personally, and guide us in the discovery of her work. Katy Siegel and Sarah Roberts, the curators of the largest-ever exhibition devoted to the artist in the United States and in France, give us the keys to her painting filled with emotions and memories, her love for poetry, music and nature.

A multicultural magician, an aesthetic perfectionist, and an engineer of the impossible, sculptor Anish Kapoor thrives on new artistic and technical challenges, such as his enormous inflatable structure with which he took over the Grand Palais in Paris at the Monumenta 2011 exhibition.

Kapoor, who was born in India but has lived in England since the 1970s, is an enchanting artist - his enormous mirrors capture the clouds, his pigment miniatures are sculptures of monochrome colour, and his wall hangings pull us into a sublime void.

This documentary recounts the world according to Kapoor, via a journey, from his London studios to the permanent installations of Chicago and Naples, to exhibitions in Bilbao, Mumbai and Dehli.
The artist is given the opportunity to talk personally about his perpetual quest for new forms, which are always deeply moving.

How the self-taught painter and sculptor left his wife, children and livelihood to devote his life to his art then lived in destitution before exiling himself in Tahiti. An animated documentary illuminated by his “barbaric” art.

Post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin ranks alongside Cézanne and Van Gogh in the pantheon of modern art. He was also the driving force behind the School of Pont-Aven and the main inspiration for the Nabis. Discover how his personal twist on impressionism marked art history forever.
 
* Etoile de la Scam (The civil society of multimedia authors) 2018

The 19th century is like no other: an aesthetic, scientific and political bubbling is changing the face of the world. Paris is a genuine cultural hub. An intellectual and artistic elite was formed including Auguste Rodin. Bold and gifted, he and others altered this era forever.

Rodin’s destiny is both singular and closely context related. Fed by a public and private correspondence, this film will draw the strands of his life and reminds the background when required. However, it will be anything but a commemoration : Rodin is still alive because eternal. In Paris, his sculptures are an integral part of the urban decor : The Penseur and Balzac at Varenne subway station, the D’Alembert at the town Hall… Through constant back and forth between past and present, this film is about Rodin’s spirit, forever among us.
 
 

The artist's memories and places he visited are evoked in this film, which provides an overview of the life of the artist and the man. 

An exceptional painter of mental images, Magritte explores the relationship between objects and their representation, with a view to giving new meanings to familiar objects.The contradictions and mystery surrounding his work are presented here and illustrated by the peregrinations of an actor who dreams of one day playing Magritte.
 
This is THE documentary for Hundred Anniversary of Magritte's death in 2017! 

The Gates of Hell is Auguste Rodin’s artistic triumph. For which he created such masterpieces as The Kiss and The Thinker. The one that occupied him for 20 years of his life... and that he never saw completed. The one that was his heaven and hell...

Through the thrilling story of this door’s creation, visual artist, photographer and filmmaker Bruno Aveillan draws a fascinating portrait of the sculptor’s unrivaled esthetic quality — a sculptor who was probably the first modernist and certainly the one who gave sculpture its credibility.

BANFF World Media Festival : Rockie Award in the section Best Music, Performance, Arts & Variety Program 

China has been the biggest art seller in the entire world since 2012. Yet they remain relatively unknown compared to these numbers. Who are these artists? What drives them and how do they circumvent censorship?

Contemporary Chinese art took off spectacularly after Mao’s death. Artists have revisited Western art and some have hijacked Communist propaganda, supplementing it with a vitriolic critic of Western consumerism currently sweeping the country. Art is well placed to observe the excesses of Chinese society and it has become the flag bearer for aspirations to freedom. These contemporary works symbolize people’s wounds and hardships, as well as state violence.
Although two artists – Basquiat and Koons – account for 50% of the American market, China has placed 47 artists in the top 100 – nearly half of them are newcomers.
Through personal encounters with the most original and avant-garde artists – in their workshops or during performances – this film sets out to understand their work and what motivates them as well as their fight against censorship.