Patterns of Splatter
L'uomo dal Pennello d'Oro (The Man With a Golden Brush) is a satirical Italian farce from 1969 directed by Franz Marischka, starring Willi Colombini as a struggling painter who nevertheless has one of the best-looking girlfriends on the planet, played by dark-haired, sultry, and often nude Edwige Fenech. He and his Bohemian hippie friends party, goof off, engage in anti-establishment antics. One day, bored, he starts throwing paint at a blank canvas. His best friend happens to bring along an art gallery owner, who sees the new "painting," and buys it. Willi hits on the idea of painting the bodies of his female friends and his girlfriend and pressing canvases against their tits and asses. He ends up with a show at his patron's art gallery. Willi shows up at the gallery wearing a heavy fur coat, which he drops in the middle of a speech, standing there naked. He keeps up with the speech, walking around naked. This creates a sensation, the press writes articles, the group put on performance street art, do what were then called "Happenings." The art gallery owner passes off his gorgeous blonde girlfriend (Marcella Michelangeli) to Willi, who now has two exceptionally beautiful women sharing his bed.
Willi looks like a cross between Bill Bixby and Christopher Plummer. It's a combination that works well, actually. It definitely attracts Edwige and Marcella. The film seems to go after pop art and the sometime ease with which some of that genre was produced, making what the filmmaker may regard as a shallow contribution to art history. Press a canvas against a woman's body and money results--it is an absurd reality of an aspect of modern art, exemplified for instance in the $25,000 per copy silk screens available from Andy Warhol's studio, works that Warhol himself signed but that weren't even made by him. He created the process, his subordinates made the silk screens. That Warhol's name is attached adds dollar value, just as Willi's character, once he becomes famous, lends credence to something that's artistically simple and stupid. His anti-establishment anarchistic personality perhaps gets off on the fact that straight society, including the upper classes, want to purchase his easily made crap. The joke's on them, he takes their money.
In the end, he's trying to paint a serious traditional portrait. He's gotten away from his hippie friends, from the two gorgeous women who shared his bed, he's returned to where he was at the beginning, taking himself seriously as an artist, but no one cares about his new work, based as it is on old traditional formulas. The filmmaker, perhaps, and I'm guessing here, gets the last laugh on his own protagonist, showing that this artist really isn't original, but had a brief spasm of very colorful fame, exploding "the new" onto a moribund artistic scene. When we think of Italian painters, we don't tend to send our minds to 1969--more like 1569, and other Renaissance years.
Vic Neptune
L'uomo dal Pennello d'Oro (The Man With a Golden Brush) is a satirical Italian farce from 1969 directed by Franz Marischka, starring Willi Colombini as a struggling painter who nevertheless has one of the best-looking girlfriends on the planet, played by dark-haired, sultry, and often nude Edwige Fenech. He and his Bohemian hippie friends party, goof off, engage in anti-establishment antics. One day, bored, he starts throwing paint at a blank canvas. His best friend happens to bring along an art gallery owner, who sees the new "painting," and buys it. Willi hits on the idea of painting the bodies of his female friends and his girlfriend and pressing canvases against their tits and asses. He ends up with a show at his patron's art gallery. Willi shows up at the gallery wearing a heavy fur coat, which he drops in the middle of a speech, standing there naked. He keeps up with the speech, walking around naked. This creates a sensation, the press writes articles, the group put on performance street art, do what were then called "Happenings." The art gallery owner passes off his gorgeous blonde girlfriend (Marcella Michelangeli) to Willi, who now has two exceptionally beautiful women sharing his bed.
Willi looks like a cross between Bill Bixby and Christopher Plummer. It's a combination that works well, actually. It definitely attracts Edwige and Marcella. The film seems to go after pop art and the sometime ease with which some of that genre was produced, making what the filmmaker may regard as a shallow contribution to art history. Press a canvas against a woman's body and money results--it is an absurd reality of an aspect of modern art, exemplified for instance in the $25,000 per copy silk screens available from Andy Warhol's studio, works that Warhol himself signed but that weren't even made by him. He created the process, his subordinates made the silk screens. That Warhol's name is attached adds dollar value, just as Willi's character, once he becomes famous, lends credence to something that's artistically simple and stupid. His anti-establishment anarchistic personality perhaps gets off on the fact that straight society, including the upper classes, want to purchase his easily made crap. The joke's on them, he takes their money.
In the end, he's trying to paint a serious traditional portrait. He's gotten away from his hippie friends, from the two gorgeous women who shared his bed, he's returned to where he was at the beginning, taking himself seriously as an artist, but no one cares about his new work, based as it is on old traditional formulas. The filmmaker, perhaps, and I'm guessing here, gets the last laugh on his own protagonist, showing that this artist really isn't original, but had a brief spasm of very colorful fame, exploding "the new" onto a moribund artistic scene. When we think of Italian painters, we don't tend to send our minds to 1969--more like 1569, and other Renaissance years.
Vic Neptune
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