EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Woody Allen’s a Great Master

I've just seen Woody Allen's latest film, Midnight in Paris. Spot on. Exactly as we explain great masterpieces. It's about an American writer, clearly Woody's alter ego, who gets lost in his own imagination. A car from the 1910's picks him up in 2011 and takes him to dinner with Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald or Gertrude Stein. He meets Picasso, Salvador Dali and other great names, asks them to review his new novel, gets tips on how to write well...etc. etc. I want to see it again - with a notebook this time to write down some quotes - because while many Hollywood films are constructed around the theme we explain on the site, none has ever quite so explicitly stated it in exactly the same manner. Time and again we have shown here how great masters fuse the creation of the painting in the studio with the subject of the painting itself. Manet's Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe is our prime example: the foreground figures are the artist(s) and model in the studio while the background is their painting. That's why the bather's figure is famously out-of-scale and why Manet called it The Bath. In Woody's film we see a modern writer mix with famous artists out of his own novel while writing the script, no doubt, that we are looking at. The poster, a fusion of Owen Wilson and a Van Gogh painting, suggests as much as well.

Gertrude Stein also explains the reason for art the same way we do but, in order not to mis-quote  Ms. Gertrude Stein/Allen, I'll go see the film again. And, if you haven't seen it, I strongly recommend you do.