Ourweekly columnStaff Pickstakes you back to a time when video stores reigned supreme andthe "Staff Picks" section was the placetofind outwhat films were worthy of one's time.Of course, our version ofStaff Pickshas a decidedly skintillating angle, as we suss outwhich films from a particular subgenre are the best to find great nudity. This week, we paint, sculpt, and get naked with a bunch of well-known artists whose biopics didn't shy away from the randy side of life!
Artists are a horny bunch of folks, be they musicians, writers, painters, sculptors, no matter the medium, sex runs through the lives of many great artists. The four-plus painters we're covering this week came to the big screen with a story to tell and skin to bare, combining comedy and tragedy with copious amounts of nudity! By now, we're all familiar with the biopic formula, it's been around forever and films hew so closely to it that it's hardly worth rehashing the blueprints here. The artist is born, they're destined for greatness, get bogged down in sex, drugs, money problems, or some combination of the three, just to overcome their obstacles and succeed in the end.
Few artist biopics truly succeed in a way that is both entertaining and honors the true memory of the subject. Typically concessions have to be made within the life story of the person in order to keep the audience on the subject's side. Ed Harris' 2000 biopic Pollockis one of the more successful in regard to presenting a notoriously difficult man as he really was. That doesn't necessarily make it good cinema, but at least it's honest about the moral dubiousness of its subject at least. Many of the films we're going to discuss today strike this balance quite nicely.
They reveal artists to be difficult people but also multi-faceted. They don't necessarily linger on the more challenging aspects of their personalities, but they don't sanctify them either. These films aren't hagiography, but must gild the lily to some extent to stay on the entertainment end of the spectrum. Really, you can't go wrong in this subgenre, it's rife with horny protagonists, creating classic art and laying tons of pipe. There's a wealth of options out there, just google your favorite artist and watch their biopic, guaranteed it's a good time.
Vincent Theo (1990)
Robert Altman's wilderness years—post-Popeye and pre-The Player—saw the always prolific director churn out a bunch of smaller scale films than he had been doing. Cutting back on ensemble pieces to deal more intensely with one or two characters, Altman's unconventional biopic of the Van Gogh brothers saw him cast Tim Roth as Vincent and Paul Rhys as his art dealing younger brother Theo. Interestingly, Rhys wouldcontinue his streak of playing brothers to geniusartists byportraying Charlie Chaplin's brother Sidney in Chaplin two years later.
Jip Wijngaarden co-stars asSien Hoornik, Vincent's mistress and the subject of many ofhis paintings. We get to see her breasts as she poses for him, as well as a quick peek at her cheeks as she goes to use a chamber pot...
For his part, Theo's been getting down with Marie, played by Anne Canovas, who bares her left breast when she and Theo are interrupted just before having sex...
**Available to rent or own via Amazon Prime Video
Surviving Picasso (1996)
**Portions of the following text are excerpted from our SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of James Ivory's Films...
Ivory re-teams with Anthony Hopkins, who earned his second Oscar nom two years earlier forThe Remains of the Day, here playing an aging Pablo Picasso in Nazi-occupied France. Loosely based on the novel "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer" by future political pundit Ariana Huffington, the film tells Picasso's story from theperspective of his long-time loverFrançoise Gilot(Natascha McElhone). The artist is depicted as anuncaring womanizer, keeping with Merchant Ivory's theme of demystifyinglarger than life figures and bringing them down to a morehumanscale.
Perhaps the mostnotable thing about the film from a cultural standpoint is that, due to the exact reasons cited in that last sentence, Picasso's estate denied the filmmakers request toshow Picasso's art in the film. This made screenwriter Prawer Jhabvala switch the focus more intensely to his personal life, almost never showing his canvas while he works, most famously as he creates his epic workGuernica. Though the film explores Picasso's dalliances with a litany of women—played by such actresses asJulianne Moore,Diane Venora, andSusannah Harker—in the end it's only McElhone who goes nude in the film. 21 minutes in, she disrobes for the artist, who is clearly as impressed as the rest of us by what he sees...
**Available to rent or own via Amazon Prime Video
Frida (2002)
Almost inarguably director Julie Taymor's best film is this biopic of artist Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) and her relationship with fellow artist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). Right away, we learn that Diego is a philanderer who can't keep his hands off of his models, like Lucia Bravo and Ivana Sejenovich...
Frida is exploring her own art, however, as well as her own lesbianism, which proves to be a boon for her self esteem...
SoonFrida's sister Cristina (Mía Maestro) moves in with them, but it isn't long before Diego's banging her too...
Of course, the highlight of the film is when Salma's Frida hooks up with Karine Plantadit-Bageot playing real life exotic dancer Josephine Baker, in one of the most legendary lesbian love scenes in cinema history...
**Available to stream for members via Netflix, or to rent or own via Amazon Prime Video
Renoir (2013)
Okay, I'll be honest with you, I thought this one wouldn't be for me. I heard about this, it was actually recommended to me by a film critic friend who wouldn't stop raving about it, so I bit the bullet and watched it. If the content here at Mr. Skin weren't proof enough, I discovered it actually was worth my time! Set four years prior to his death, the film tells of Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet) immediately following the death of his wife. In mourning alongside his son and future French filmmaking legend Jean (Vincent Rottiers), Renoir finds his world turned upside down when they meet AndreeHeuschling (Christa Théret).
The film paints Andree as the woman who not only gave a legendary painter one last muse but also gave his son the strength he needed to step out of his father's shadow and become a great artist in his own right. Thankfully the film dwells in that period when she was posing for the painter, meaning we get lots of shots of Christa Théret in various states of undress in very lush settings—even showing some backburger...
She even poses nude alongside the beautifully big breasted Solène Rigot...
Andree will go on to some acclaim in the years following the events of the film, marrying Jean in 1920 (they divorced in 1930), and acting in over a dozen silent films asCatherine Hessling.
**Available to rent, own, or stream free for members via Amazon Prime Video
