Projected Art History

Doris Berger is a curator at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, USA. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the director of the Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany. Her practice includes writing, teaching, curatorial and audiovisual work focusing on intersections of art and film in modern and contemporary American and European art.

At a time when the “high” and “low’ of culture seems reoriented to “digital” and “analogue”, Berger’s Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the Popularizing of American Art points directly to the center of why, and how, the history of art matters to our culture. With a popular lens onto big-budget films, like Pollock, she grounds the intersection of real art and artists with film; the medium through which many are brought into the discipline. Exhaustively researched and engagingly written, Berger thoughtfully reminds the academy (art and film historians alike) to pay attention to its viewing public.

• Acknowledgments List of Figures Chapter 1: Artists’ biographies in film as popular art history Chapter 2: Pollock: A popular historiography Chapter 3: Basquiat and celebrity culture Chapter 4: Hollywood’s art histories: A web of artists’ myths and star legendsFilmographyBibliography Index