Even before he made his own films, Emile de Antonio knew practically everyone in the postwar art world in New York. In 1955, through musician John Cage, for whom he served as promoter, he befriended painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, helping them place their art with collectors. Later in the decade, through his friend Tina Fredericks, he met Andy Warhol and then Diane Arbus. He helped the young Frank Stella find representation with Leo Castelli's gallery. Even the perception that de Antonio knew everyone in the New York art world would lead to further introductions.

In 1971, when de Antonio started filming Painters Painting, a documentary about the postwar New York art world, he knew his artist friends so well that his individual intimate interviews with them adds up to a larger magnum opus about the role of modern art in society. In addition to Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol and Stella, interviews with painters Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Larry Poons, critic Clement Greenberg and Art News' Thomas Hess, among others, reveal small details as well as a collective larger mission to change art in America. But a question for de Antonio still hovers - to what end?

The occasion for the film was the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit, New York Painting and Sculpture 1940-1970, a blockbuster exhibit that coincided with the Met's 100th anniversary. Sprawling over thirty-five galleries, it was the first major exhibit of modern art in the museum's history. Henry Geldzahler served as curator (and is interviewed in the film), and he gave de Antonio exclusive rights to film in the museum after hours. Just as the exhibition opened, however, de Antonio, among others, believed that the era of America's artistic moment had come to a close.

The exhibit opened on October 16, 1969, and it's important to know the exact date. The Art Workers Coalition called for the city's museums to close their doors on October 15, the day the Met originally scheduled the opening, in support of a moratorium to protest the establishment's under-representation of artwork by women and by people of color. Anti-war protesters picketed the exhibit for its overt Americanism. The Met bowed under the pressure to move the opening date, but the exhibit itself, with 408 works by 43 artists, included only one woman, Helen Frankenthaler. Moreover, Emile de Antonio, a self-defined Marxist and radically engaged activist, struggled with his own thoughts about the purpose and forms of the art made by his friends. In addition to documenting a period in art that he believed had come to a close, he wanted to understand how a color field painting, for example, could possibly serve a revolutionary purpose.

I had the occasion to see the film again recently. Harvard Film Archive asked me to introduce the film as part of their series, Emile de Antonio's America, and seeing the interviews and looking at the individual artworks I was impressed with how the film continues to grow as an extraordinary document of postwar art culture. The recent passing of Robert Rauschenberg, for example, makes the film even more valuable for its insight into his artistic process. This film is also strikingly entertaining, with Rauschenberg, sitting on top of a ladder and holding forth on art, one of the main reasons. The interviews reveal much about the individual artists and their relationships with one another, but the way de Antonio stages, films, and edits the discussions provides hints of his keen understanding of the art world around him. When he sets up Warhol for his interview, he films the artist, accompanied by associate Brigid Berlin (aka Brigid Polk) through a mirror, with the cameras, lights, and microphone exposed in full view. The Warhol interview changes the entire film, in my opinion, but it's a quite literal reflection of celebrity art culture.

What follows is a list of Emile de Antonio films currently available on Reframe along with other films related to the postwar New York art world. Arthouse Films plans to release a newly remastered and restored Painters Painting on DVD this coming September.

Emile de Antonio: Radical Saint (1968)
Four disc set featuring In the Year of the Pig (1968), Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971), Underground (1976) and Mr. Hoover & I (1989).

In the Year of the Pig  (1969)
Emile de Antonio (3 films) 103 min

Point of Order! (1964)
Emile de Antonio (3 films) 97 min

Screening Room with Emile de Antonio (1973)
DIR: Robert Gardner 79 min
AVAILABLE SOON.

Who Gets to Call It Art? (2006)
DIR.:Peter Rosen 80 min
More about the first contemporary art curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Henry Geldzahler.

I Shot Andy Warhol  (1996)
DIR.: Mary Harron 103 min

Hans Hofmann: Artist/Teacher, Teacher/Artist (2003)
DIR.: Madeline Amgott 56 min
AVAILABLE SOON.

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