In Wes Anderson's film The Phoenician Scheme, real masterpieces get a starring role
NEW YORK – At the end of Wes Anderson's new caper The Phoenician Scheme, there are some unusual credits.
In addition to the cast and crew, the artworks featured in the film are listed, complete with ownership details.
That is because the pieces on-screen are not reproductions. They are, in fact, the actual masterpieces from Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Rene Magritte and other well-known artists.
In the past, the 56-year-old American film-maker has faked a Kandinsky and a Klimt. Here, he went for the real thing.
'We have a character who's a collector, who's a possessor; he wants to own things. And we thought because it's sort of art and commerce mixed together this time, we should try to have the real thing,' Anderson said via a voice note.
What he ended up with was impressive. The fictional collection of businessperson Zsa-zsa Korda (played by Benicio del Toro) includes Renoir's Enfant Assis En Robe Bleue, which was once owned by Hollywood icon and screen legend Greta Garbo, and Magritte's The Equator.
There is also a selection of works from the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany that includes pieces from the 17th century.
Getting a collector or an art institution to hand over a painting worth millions of dollars to a film production is not an easy task. The negotiations fell mostly to Mr Jasper Sharp, a curator who had worked with Anderson and his wife, Juman Malouf, on their 2018 exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria, where Mr Sharp is based.
'A film set has vast amounts of light, heat, no climate control, very lax security and people running everywhere with booms, lights and props,' Mr Sharp said in a video interview. 'The walls that (the paintings) will be hung on are made of plywood sometimes. There are less desirable places to hang art, but this was certainly a challenging environment in terms of me trying to persuade (people) that they maybe want to lend an object.'
To offset concerns, the production hired a conservator and a registrar to be on set overseeing the paintings. There, in a darkened, fenced-off corner, a security guard watched over the pieces and made sure they would not be exposed to more light than necessary.
'I felt, to have any real conviction in being able to ask somebody to lend an object, we needed to have that sort of support network to assure them that the works would be handled exactly as if they were lending them to a museum,' said Mr Sharp, who explained that this network included insurers, art handlers and shipping services.
Still, even with his connections, some of his initial outreach was met with 'howls' of laughter and hang-ups.
His search was both creative and practical. After discussing with Anderson what would make sense for Zsa-zsa, a domineering man who prides himself on owning masterpieces, Mr Sharp contacted museums and collectors in the vicinity of the set at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany.
Mr Sharp considers the Old Master selections from the Kunsthalle more in the 'best supporting actor' category of the art in Zsa-zsa's abode compared with the Renoir or the Magritte, which draw your eye.
Anderson said he thought Juriaen Jacobsz's 1678 painting of dogs fighting over meat was 'an encapsulation of part of what our story is about'. (The film is very much Anderson's exploration of capitalism.)
But Zsa-zsa does not just collect classical still-life works and paintings of animals. Mr Sharp said he suggested to Anderson that perhaps the character owned some impressive art from the film's period setting – to show his keen sense of taste, specifically a work of surrealism.
Mr Sharp reached out to collector Ulla Pietzsch, who had never heard of Anderson but was interested in the project.
'I wasn't surprised when Wes settled on Magritte,' Mr Sharp said. 'If you think about where Wes grew up in Houston, The Menil Collection has, if not the greatest collection of Magrittes in the US, very close to that. So, he has been looking at Magritte for a long time.'
Mr Sharp noted that The Equator is not the most recognisable of Magrittes – there is no bowler hat – but it is enigmatic.
Anderson, meanwhile, envisioned that a Renoir would hang in the bedroom of Zsa-zsa's daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Mr Sharp found one in the collection of Mr David Nahmad.
'I think it was maybe even in the script,' he said. Knowing that the elder Renoir painted his son Jean as a small child, 'somehow I thought Renoir might have painted somebody in this family, maybe Zsa-zsa'.
The loans from Hamburger Kunsthalle remained on set for about a month, but the Magritte was in and out in a day, and the Renoir stayed just a night.
Production designer Adam Stockhausen said in an e-mail that he and set decorator Anna Pinnock had full-sized mock-up prints made to roughly place the art and try multiple positions.
'Once Wes finalised the placements, the conservators brought in the art and we swopped with the mock-ups,' he said.
Mr Sharp visited the set only once – the day the Renoir was present – but he said he felt the stars of the film were deferential to a portrait of Renoir's nephew that they were able to acquire on loan. This revealed itself in a conversation with Puerto Rican actor del Toro.
'He confessed it made him and everybody quite nervous to have this here, in a good way,' Mr Sharp said.
Observing the dynamic between the stars and the star artwork gave Mr Sharp insight into the reasons Anderson had pursued the actual paintings.
'It changed the energy and atmosphere on set as it would do if you lived with an object like that,' he said.
As soon as The Phoenician Scheme wrapped, Mr Sharp started to suspect that it would not be the last time he and Anderson embarked on a project of this nature. The film-maker, he said, agreed.
'It's really hard once you've done this for the first time to put it back in the bottle,' Mr Sharp said. NYTIMES
The Phoenician Scheme is showing in Singapore cinemas.
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