Sunday, November 24

Bonnie Lautenberg series on view now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art

The new exhibition “Art Meets Hollywood” is the museum premiere of Bonnie Lautenberg’s new series of digital collages, 28 diptychs pairing scenes from famous films alongside iconic works of art. Lautenberg’s only rule for her experimental process is that both the film and the artwork originated within the same year.

On view now at Boca Raton Museum of Art (Boca Raton, Florida, US), Lautenberg channels the creative zeitgeist between filmmakers and artists during each year that she intuitively chronicles, starting in 1928 up until 2020. 

Lautenberg plays matchmaker to the 1957 movie Funny Face by combining Audrey Hepburn’s bold pose with Clifford Still’s painting PH971–both majestic, and both glamorous. When viewed together this way in the museum gallery, the combination seems to make perfect sense, as if they were made for each other.

In another work from this series, the terrifying scene she selects from the 1975 movie Jaws literally screams above a Willem De Kooning painting that conjures what could appear to be blood spilling into the water below . . .

Her pairings can also be surprising and intriguing: who would have imagined the 1963 scene of Paul Newman from the classic movie Hud would look so ideal next to Warhol’s seminal painting of Elvis from the same year?

During the past five years she has worked on this series, Lautenberg made a crucial discovery: the artist Lucio Fontana was so moved by the Antonioni film Red Desert that he created one of his largest red paintings, influenced by what he saw up on the big screen.

“This solidified my belief,” says Bonnie Lautenberg. “Throughout art history, artists have always been influenced by some force going on in the world around them.”

“I started thinking about how artists who work in different art forms might have influenced each other. I decided to explore how one art form can influence another,” adds Lautenberg.

Lautenberg is an artist, photographer and writer based in New York and Palm Beach. During the past 30 years, her works have been featured in gallery shows, museums and art fairs throughout the United States. Lautenberg’s work is currently on view at the New York Historical Society’s Center for the Study of American Culture.

Some of Lautenberg’s pairings in this series featured at the Boca Raton Museum also stem from her own personal history.

In the 1960s her father purchased the Stuart Davis painting Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors ‒ 7th Avenue Style. In this pairing, she juxtaposes the Davis painting that she admired as a child growing up in her family home, with a scene from the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story (pictured below, both from 1940).

The family eventually sold the painting some 25 years later. Ultimately, the painting was donated to the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Years later, Lautenberg was reunited with the painting when she visited the museum and was heartened to see it was still in the same frame it had during the many years when it hung over their family fireplace.

This new exhibition in South Florida, Art Meets Hollywood, opened at the Boca Raton Museum of Art concurrently with another celebration of films and artmaking, Art of the Hollywood Backdrop: Cinema’s Creative Legacy. Both shows together at the Museum are a dream come true for cinephiles. 

At the opening reception for Lautenberg’s exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, one of the special guests of honor that evening was Patricia Ward Kelly (the widow of Gene Kelly). She is the Creative Director of the Gene Kelly Legacy Project in Los Angeles (pictured above).

Lautenberg and Kelly discuss the visual connections between the film and the painting in this excerpt video here, recorded at the Museum on the night of the exhibition opening.

In keeping with Bonnie Lautenberg’s keen ability to tune into the zeitgeist, this newly released high-resolution anniversary edition of the film is currently making headlines around the world with screenings across multiple cities and at major festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival.

Lautenberg is the widow of the late Senator Frank Lautenberg, one of Washington’s longest-serving Senators. He served in the U.S. Senate from 1982 to 2001, and then again from 2003 until his death in 2013.

She has been described as “having enough Washington insider stories to fill a book.” (Lautenberg is working on her new book to be released by Rutgers University Press next year, with her co-writer Dick Olin, about her 25 years of political photography).

Lautenberg is co-producing a new Broadway musical about the life of Andy Warhol with her current partner Steve Leber. The show is in development, and is slated to be directed by Sir Trevor Nunn with book by Rupert Holmes. The new Broadway show has been approved by the Warhol Foundation. Her partner Steve Leber is a well-known entertainment agent who has worked with some of the biggest acts of the last half-century, including the Rolling Stones, Diana Ross, Aerosmith, Simon and Garfunkel, the Jackson Five, AC/DC, and Joan Jett, among others.

A film-still of Bette Davis from the movie Jezebel, next to the painting by Matisse titled Lady in Blue (both from 1938).

Lautenberg’s work is in several private collections, and in the permanent collections of museums and institutions, including: The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture; The Boca Raton Museum of Art; The New York Historical Society; The Broad Museum in Los Angeles; The Newark Museum of Art; Portland Museum of Art; and Stillman College Art Gallery in Alabama, among others.

Bonnie Lautenberg

Her series of portraits, How They Changed Our Lives: Senators As Working People, was exhibited at Mana Contemporary in New Jersey, and is now in the Library of Congress permanent collection.

Shows at galleries, art fairs and institutions include: the 92nd Street Y in New York; Jean Albano Gallery in Chicago; Monika Olko Gallery in Sag Harbor; Sponder Gallery; the Art Miami fair; the Palm Beach Modern and Contemporary fair; C. Parker Gallery in Greenwich; Vertu Fine Art; the Turkish Embassy at the United Nations; the U.S. Embassies in Madrid and Berlin; Art Market Hamptons; The White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton, NY; Art Southampton fair, and RH Gallery in New York.

In 1993, Lautenberg photographed the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accord. That day, Lautenberg realized she was capturing history through the lens of her camera, and she was forever hooked on photography.

Among her most recognized portraits of famous people is her 2008 photograph of Barack Obama, featured in a group show at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and in many private collections around the country.

It hung in the Chief Counsel’s office in the West Wing of the White House, and is in the collection of the Newark Museum, and in the collection of the Smithsonian’s new Museum of African American History and Culture.

In 2022, Lautenberg was appointed by the White House to the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts (PACA). Established in 1958 by President Eisenhower, PACA also sustains and guides the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Cultural Center of the United States.

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