Emile de Antonio - Career

Career

After serving in the military during World War II as a bomber pilot, de Antonio returned to the United States where he frequented the art crowd, often associating with such Pop artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, in whose film Drink de Antonio appears. Warhol was famously quoted praising de Antonio with the words, “Everything I learned about painting, I learned from De.”

In 1959 de Antonio developed G-String Productions in order to distribute the Beat Generation film Pull My Daisy. It was at this time that de Antonio discovered filmmaking. His first film, Point of Order, a compilation film made in 1964, regards Joseph McCarthy and the Army-McCarthy hearings. In 1968, de Antonio signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

De Antonio chronicled this art scene in his documentary Painters Painting (1972). He did not actually begin creating films until the age of 43, after making significant contributions to the modern art world through his uncensored promotion of the work of his contemporaries. In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a water-stone exhibition titled New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, that included 408 works by 43 artists. Curator Henry Geldzahler granted de Antonio the unique opportunity of exclusive access to the works included in the show, and exclusive rights to filming it. Until this point, de Antonio noted, “I disliked films on painting that I knew. They were either arty, narrated in a gush of reverence, as if painting were among angelic orders, or filmed with violent, brainless zooms on Apollo’s navel, a celebration of the camera over the god. They revealed nothing at all about how or why a painting was made.”

The intimate opportunity of access to the show, and the similarly intimate relationships with many of the artists, led de Antonio to select thirteen painters to profile in his film, in addition to critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and other influential figures in the contemporary art world. Combining interviews with live footage of the artists at work in their studio, de Antonio and cinematographer Ed Emshwiller created a groundbreaking work that captured Abstract Expressionism and other major contemporary art movements in a way no film maker had ever before.

In an interview regarding his filmography, de Antonio spoke towards his relationship with the painters and his role in the creation of the film: “I was probably the only filmmaker in the world who could because I knew all those people, from the time that they were poor, and unsuccessful and had no money. I knew Warhol and Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Stella before they ever sold a painting, and so it was interesting to ."

De Antonio was the creator of many politically motivated films that attracted a substantial amount of controversy and was also known for aligning himself with Marxist thought. His films are critiques of various aspects of American culture or politics, on the whole reflecting a certain degree of political dissension.