Peter Greenaway: BOOK / contents
Lilijana Stepančič
Going to the Pictures
The Stairs - Geneve, Site 5: Museum Staircase One (photography Fichar
Melloul)
Born in 1942 and formally educated as a painter,
Peter Greenaway first made a name for himself with his films and only
later with his fine art works. In an interview published in American Film
in 1991 he said that, despite this, he still considers painting to be
the highest form of visual communication. The jumping girl who gives names
to the first hundred stars at the beginning of Drowning by Numbers figuratively
expresses Greenaway’s admired painters: 47 - Kitaj, 65 - Bosch, 91 - Fabritius
(some think he is more important than Rembrant), and 48 - Knelle, whose
portrait of Nell Gwyn, mistress of the King Charles II, is the earliest
English nude "pin-up". The richness of meaning in Greenaway’s
films cannot be fully grasped without considering painting. For Greenaway
painting and film are essentially and inseparably connected. Some experts
on his work find explanations for this connection in the syntagma of "going
to the pictures", which was still used as an expression for going
to the cinema by members of the artist’s generation. This syntagma is
supposed to prove that film and painting are not as far apart as is claimed
by the theories of high modernism that prevailed when Greenaway was growing
up, going to school and making his first artistic appearances.
For Greenaway the connection between painting and film is multi-layered
and complex. A painting can represent an idea for a film, a key to its
content and meaning, part of the narrative, a guide to camera angle, or
an inspiration for lighting or costumes. The meanings of film scenes and
heroes are frequently taken out of the gallery of art-historical paintings,
sculptures, architecture, graphic works, drawings and applied art. Experts
in Greenaway’s work recognise his own early collages and canvases in the
experimental film A Walk Through H; George de La Toure and Januarius Zick
in The Draughtsman’s Contract; Vermeer in A Zed and Two Noughts; Bronzino
and Piero della Francesca in The Belly of an Architect; pre-Raphaelites
in Drowning by Numbers; Franz Hals and the Dutch masters of still life
in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; Titian, Giorione, Botticelli,
Bellini, and others in Prospero’s Books; Crevalcore, Desideri and Bellini
in The Baby of Macon; and Utamara and Hokusai in The Pillow Book.
Lilijana Stepančič
Art historian, sociologist and economist. Formerly a directress of the
Open Society Institute-Slovenia and the Soros Center for Contemporary
Arts-Ljubljana, she is currently a directress of the International Centre
of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana. She writes fine art criticism.
