Boca Raton Museum of Art: Artist Bonnie Lautenberg’s “Art Meets Hollywood”
The new exhibition “Art Meets Hollywood” is the museum premiere of Bonnie Lautenberg’s new series of digital collages, twenty-eight diptychs pairing scenes from famous films alongside iconic works of art. Lautenberg’s only rule for her experimental process is that both the film and the artwork originated within the same year. On view now at Boca Raton Museum of Art, Lautenberg channels the creative zeitgeist between filmmakers and artists during each year that she intuitively chronicles, starting in 1928 up until 2020. Watch the video below featuring Lautenberg in conversation with Irvin Lippman, the Executive Director of the Museum.
Lautenberg plays matchmaker to the 1957 movie Funny Face by combining Audrey Hepburn’s bold pose with Clifford Still’s painting PH971 ‒ both majestic, and both glamorous. When viewed together this way in the museum gallery, the combination seems to make perfect sense, as if they were made for each other. In another work from this series, the terrifying scene she selects from the 1975 movie Jaws literally screams above a Willem De Koning painting that conjures blood spilling into the water below. Her pairings can also be surprising and intriguing: who would have imagined the 1963 scene of Paul Newman from the classic movie Hud would look so ideal next to Warhol’s seminal painting of Elvis from the same year?
“Lautenberg pulls together visuals she feels speak to each other, taking us along on her colorful trip to explore how these two art forms have amazing parallels and are beautifully paired,” says Irvin Lippman. “Through her careful considerations, she brings to life each moment in time and the spark of creativity these pairings might have shared. Lautenberg possesses a keen eye on the visual elements of humanity and culture that arise. The brilliance of these juxtapositions is how she illuminates the psychological connections between each film scene and artwork.”
During the past five years she has worked on this series, Lautenberg made a crucial discovery: the artist Lucio Fontana was so moved by the Antonioni film Red Desert that he created one of his largest red paintings, influenced by what he saw up on the big screen. “This solidified my belief,” says Bonnie Lautenberg.
“Throughout art history, artists have always been influenced by some force going on in the world around them. I started thinking about how artists who work in different art forms might have influenced each other. I decided to explore how one art form can influence another,” adds Lautenberg.
Lautenberg is an artist, photographer and writer based in New York and Palm Beach. During the past 30 years, her works have been featured in gallery shows, museums and art fairs throughout the United States. Lautenberg’s work is currently on view at the New York Historical Society’s Center for the Study of American Culture.
Some of Lautenberg’s pairings in this series featured at the Boca Raton Museum also stem from her own personal history. In the 1960s her father purchased the 1940s Stuart Davis painting Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors ‒ 7th Avenue Style. In this pairing, she juxtaposes the Davis painting with a scene from the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story. Lautenberg admired this painting at home during her childhood, and the family sold the painting some 25 years later. Ultimately, the work was donated to the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Years later, Lautenberg was reunited with the painting when she visited the museum and was heartened to see it was still in the same frame it had during the many years when it hung over their family fireplace.
This new exhibition in South Florida, Art Meets Hollywood, opened at the Boca Raton Museum of Art concurrently with another celebration of films and artmaking, Art of the Hollywood Backdrop: Cinema’s Creative Legacy. Both shows together at the Museum are a dream come true for cinephiles.
Lautenberg’s “1952,” part of her exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, combines a scene from Singin’ in the Rain with Yayoi Kusama’s painting titled The Sea (both from 1952). This year marks the 70th anniversary of Singin’ in the Rain, one of Hollywood’s most beloved films of all time. It was directed by Gene Kelly who also starred in this Hollywood classic. In honor of the film’s milestone anniversary, Warner Bros. Studio is releasing a new 4K Ultra HD version of the movie.
In keeping with Bonnie Lautenberg’s keen ability to tune in to the zeitgeist, this newly released high-resolution anniversary edition of the film is currently making headlines around the world with screenings across multiple cities and at major festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival.
At the opening reception for Lautenberg’s exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, one of the special guests of honor that evening was Patricia Ward Kelly (the widow of Gene Kelly). She is the Creative Director of the Gene Kelly Legacy Project in Los Angeles. Lautenberg and Kelly discuss the visual connections between the film and the painting in this excerpt video here, recorded at the Museum on the night of the exhibition opening. To watch the other, full-length video from the opening reception, click here.
Bonnie Lautenberg
Rave Reviews for Bonnie Lautenberg: Art Meets Hollywood
“The connections are often witty but are invariably imaginative” . . . “Lautenberg’s series is beyond clever; it also captures a synergistic zeitgeist — conscious or unconscious — between artists and filmmakers. If we’re lucky, we’ll be gifted with a Lautenberg mash-up for every year motion pictures have existed.”
― John Thomason, Boca Raton Magazine
“Lautenberg gets top marks for detecting connections we can only see in hindsight” . . . “Ms. Lautenberg has an intuitive process involving images that talk to each other. She plays matchmaker to the symbiotic relationships” . . . “The power of each frame remains in the connection shared by both.”
― Gretel Sarmiento, Palm Beach Florida Weekly
“Visual codes of emotion that transcend and unite these two disparate visual worlds of film and art, capturing their shared feeling” . . . “wonderful wit and sense of humor, surprising connections that disrupt the way you think about the paintings and films that speak to each other within the work” . . .
“Through Lautenberg’s juxtapositions, abstraction’s high-keyed color becomes Technicolor; painting’s genres become comedy, drama, musical and thriller.”
― Levi Prombaum, Curatorial Assistant, Collections Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
“This series by Lautenberg is extremely original, and I love the idea of what she is doing with the two art forms,” said Jean Albano, whose gallery in Chicago has showcased Lautenberg’s different series of works, mostly photography, for the past eight years.
“They’re visually striking, but you can also engage with them intellectually. They’re beautifully put together artistically but very clever and appealing to look at,” adds Albano.
About the Artist
Bonnie Lautenberg is an esteemed artist, photographer and writer. Her work was recently shown at the Jean Albano Gallery in Chicago, and at David Benrimon Fine Art in New York, in the show Rethinking America alongside works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Longo, Kass, and Ed Ruscha. To view her artworks and photography, visit BonnieLautenberg.com where the artist showcases images she has taken in Israel, Antarctica, Cuba, and around the world for the past 25 years.
She is the widow of the late Senator Frank Lautenberg, one of Washington’s longest-serving Senators. He served in the U.S. Senate from 1982 to 2001, and then again from 2003 until his death in 2013. She has been described as “having enough Washington insider stories to fill a book” (to be released by Rutgers University Press next year, which she is currently working on with co-writer Dick Olin, about her 25 years of political photography). She is co-producing a new Broadway musical about the life of Andy Warhol with her current partner Steve Leber. The show is in development, and is slated to be directed by Sir Trevor Nunn with book by Rupert Holmes. The show has been approved by the Warhol Foundation. Her partner Steve Leber is a well-known entertainment agent who has worked with some of the biggest acts of the last half-century, including the Rolling Stones, Diana Ross, Aerosmith, Simon and Garfunkel, the Jackson Five, AC/DC, and Joan Jett, among others.
Lautenberg’s work is in several private collections, and in the permanent collections of museums and institutions, including: The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture; The Boca Raton Museum of Art; The New York Historical Society; The Broad Museum in Los Angeles; The Newark Museum of Art; Portland Museum of Art; and Stillman College Art Gallery in Alabama, among others. Her series of portraits, How They Changed Our Lives: Senators As Working People, was exhibited at Mana Contemporary in New Jersey, and is now in the Library of Congress permanent collection, viewable online at www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/Lautenberg.html. Shows at galleries, art fairs and institutions include: the 92nd Street Y in New York; Jean Albano Gallery in Chicago; Monika Olko Gallery in Sag Harbor; Sponder Gallery; the Art Miami fair; the Palm Beach Modern and Contemporary fair; C. Parker Gallery in Greenwich; Vertu Fine Art; the Turkish Embassy at the United Nations; the U.S. Embassies in Madrid and Berlin; Art Market Hamptons; The White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton, NY; Art Southampton fair, and RH Gallery in New York.
In 1993, Lautenberg photographed the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accord with President Clinton, Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and Chairman Yassir Arafat. That day, Lautenberg realized she was capturing history through the lens of her camera, and she was forever hooked on photography. Among her most recognized portraits of famous people is her 2008 photograph of Barack Obama, featured in a group show at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and in many private collections around the country. It hung in the Chief Counsel’s office in the West Wing of the White House, and is in the collection of the Newark Museum, and in the collection of the Smithsonian’s new Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2022, Lautenberg was appointed by the White House to the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts (PACA). Established in 1958 by President Eisenhower, PACA also sustains and guides the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Cultural Center of the United States, see more at www.kennedy-center.org/Support/donor-listings/PACA/
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