In Wes Anderson's New Movie, Real Masterpieces Get a Starring Role
At the end of Wes Anderson's new caper, 'The Phoenician Scheme,' there are some unusual credits. In addition to the cast and crew, the artworks featured in the film are listed, complete with ownership details. That's because the pieces onscreen are not reproductions. They are in fact the actual masterpieces from Pierre-Auguste Renoir, René Magritte and other well-known artists.
In the past, Anderson has faked a Kandinsky and a Klimt. Here he went for the real thing.
'We have a character who's a collector, who's a possessor; he wants to own things, and we thought because it's sort of art and commerce mixed together this time we should try to have the real thing,' Anderson said via a voice note.
What he ended up with was impressive. The fictional collection of the businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, played by Benicio Del Toro, includes Renoir's 'Enfant Assis en Robe Bleue,' which was once owned by Greta Garbo, and Magritte's 'The Equator.' There is also a selection of works from the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany that includes pieces from the 17th century.
Getting a collector or an art institution to hand over a painting worth millions of dollars to a film production isn't an easy task, and the negotiations fell mostly to Jasper Sharp, a curator who had worked with Anderson and his wife, Juman Malouf, on their 2018 exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where Sharp is based.
'A film set has vast amounts of light, heat, no climate control, very lax security, people running everywhere with booms and lights and props,' Sharp said in a video interview. 'The walls that it will be hung on are made of plywood sometimes. There are less desirable places to hang art, but this was certainly a challenging environment in terms of me trying to persuade someone that they maybe want to lend an object.'
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