Experience Exhibition on Screen as part of CMA After Hours, a weekly program from October 2024 to May 2025.
Exhibition on Screen is offering access to the world’s greatest institutions and leading international art experts, each film is a cinematic journey into the personal and creative lives of history’s best-loved artists.
This series of Exhibition on Screen is presented in partnership with McConnell Arts Center and Columbus Museum of Art. We are excited to present art documentaries at each location with this partnership.
Tickets are $12 for members and $15 for nonmembers at the Museum.
Directed by David Bickerstaff
October 17, 7:00–8:30 PM
John Singer Sargent is known as the greatest portrait artist of his era. What made his ‘swagger’ portraits remarkable was his power over his sitters, what they wore and how they were presented to the audience. Through interviews with curators, contemporary fashionistas and style influencers, Exhibition on Screen’s film will examine how Sargent’s unique practice has influenced modern art, culture and fashion.
Filmed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Tate Britain, London, the exhibition reveals Sargent’s power to express distinctive personalities, power dynamics and gender identities during this fascinating period of cultural reinvention. Alongside 50 paintings by Sargent sit stunning items of clothing and accessories worn by his subjects, drawing the audience into the artist’s studio.
Sargent’s sitters were often wealthy, their clothes costly, but what happens when you turn yourself over to the hands of a great artist? The manufacture of public identity is as controversial and contested today as it was at the turn of the 20th century, but somehow Sargent’s work transcends the social noise and captures an alluring truth with each brush stroke.
Step into the glittering world of fashion, scandal and shameless self-promotion that made John Singer Sargent the painter who defined an era.
Explore the unique creative process of the late 19th century’s favorite portrait artist and the way in which his portraits captured the spirit of a vibrant and rapidly changing age.
Other Showings:
McConnell Arts Center: October 4, 7:00 PM
Based on the landmark Goya exhibition at the National Gallery, London
Directed by David Bickerstaff, produced by Phil Grabsky
November 21, 7:00–8:30 PM
Francisco Goya is Spain’s most celebrated artist and considered the father of modern art. Not only a brilliant observer of everyday life and Spain’s troubled past, he is a gifted portrait painter and social commentator par excellence. Goya takes the genre of portraiture to new heights and his genius is reappraised in a much-anticipated landmark exhibition at The National Gallery, London. The film uses this exhibition to look in depth at Goya’s eventful life.
Through extensive location footage, Goya’s revealing letters and a unique exhibition of masterpieces from great collections across the world, this film builds a fascinating portrait of the painter and the colorful world he painted. Influenced by Rembrandt and Velázquez, Goya explored a new realism where he did not flatter and was not afraid to reveal what he saw physically and psychologically. Yet this did not stop him securing major commissions from powerful individuals seeking the prestige of being painted by the best artist of the day. Royalty, aristocrats, politicians and close friends were subjected to his highly modern approach that captured rapid changes of expression, gesture and emotion. Goya’s powerful vision and technical brilliance makes him one of the most admired and revered artists in the world today and indeed among the greatest painters to have lived.
Other Showings:
McConnell Arts Center: November 15, 7:00 PM
Based on the sell-out show at the Royal Academy of Arts, London
Filmed and directed by David Bickerstaff, produced by Phil Grabsky
January 16, 7:00–8:30 PM
Claude Monet was an avid horticulturist and arguably the most important painter of gardens in the history of art, but he was not alone. Great artists like Van Gogh, Bonnard, Sorolla, Sargent, Pissarro and Matisse all saw the garden as a powerful subject for their art. These great artists, along with many other famous names, feature in an innovative and extensive exhibition from the Royal Academy of Art, London.
From the exhibition walls to the wonder and beauty of artists’ gardens like Giverny and Seebüll, the film takes a magical and widely travelled journey to discover how different contemporaries of Monet built and cultivated modern gardens to explore expressive motifs, abstract color, decorative design and utopian ideas. Guided by passionate curators, artists and garden enthusiasts, this remarkable collection of Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century will reveal the rise of the modern garden in popular culture and the public’s enduring fascination with gardens today. Long considered spaces for expressing color, light and atmosphere, the garden has occupied the creative minds of some of the worlds greatest artists. As Monet said, “Apart from painting and gardening, I’m no good at anything.” For lovers of art or lovers of gardens, this is an ideal film.
Other Showings:
McConnell Arts Center: January 31, 7:00 PM
Directed by David Bickerstaff, produced by Phil Grabsky
February 27, 7:00–8:30 PM
200 years after its opening and a century after acquiring its first Van Gogh works, the National Gallery, London is hosting the UK’s biggest ever Van Gogh exhibition. Van Gogh is not only one of the most beloved artists of all time, but perhaps the most misunderstood.
This film is a chance to reexamine and better understand this iconic artist. Focusing on his unique creative process, Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers explores the artist’s years in the south of France, where he revolutionized his style. Van Gogh became consumed with a passion for storytelling in his art, turning the world around him into vibrant, idealized spaces and symbolic characters.
Poets and lovers filled his imagination; everything he did in the south of France served this new obsession. In part, this is what caused his notorious breakdown, but it didn’t hold back his creativity as he created masterpiece after masterpiece. Explore one of art history’s most pivotal periods in this once-in-a-century show.
Made in close collaboration with the National Gallery.
Other Showings:
McConnell Arts Center: February 28, 7:00 PM
Directed by Ali Ray, produced by Phil Grabsky
March 20, 7:00–8:30 PM
The Impressionists are the most popular group in art history – millions flock every year to marvel at their masterpieces. But, to begin with, they were scorned, penniless outsiders. 1874 was the year that changed everything; the first Impressionists, “hungry for independence”, broke the mold by holding their own exhibition outside official channels. Impressionism was born and the art world was changed forever.
What led to that first groundbreaking show 150 years ago? Who were the maverick personalities that wielded their brushes in such a radical and provocative way? The spectacular Musée d’Orsay exhibition brings fresh eyes to this extraordinary tale of passion and rebellion. The story is told not by historians and curators but in the words of those who witnessed the dawn of Impressionism: the artists, press and people of Paris, 1874. See the show that changed everything on the big screen.
Made in close collaboration with the Musee d’Orsay and National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Other Showings:
McConnell Arts Center: March 28, 7:00 PM