Why did Mrs Lowry hate her son’s paintings?

‘I often wonder what artists are for nowadays, what with photography and a thousand and one processes by which you can get representation,’ L.S. Lowry muses in Robert Tyrrell’s 1971 documentary. ‘They’re totally unuseful. Can’t see any use in one. Can you?’

I can: as fodder for biopics. Cinemato-graphers have always been inspired by painting, but the appeal of the artist’s biopic lies less in the representation than the lifestyle: mainly the sex. Kirk Douglas’s Vincent van Gogh demonstrates his ‘lust for life’ in the trailer for Vincente Minelli’s 1956 film with what would now be considered a sexual assault on Jeanette Sterke as his cousin Kay; Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo seals his assumed heterosexuality in Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) with a Hollywood kiss with Diane Cilento’s Contessina de’ Medici.

The artist’s biopic is a man’s world, but it ain’t nothing without a woman or a girl. The women pose, put out and put the kettle on. ‘Excellent tea,’ Lindsay Kemp’s Angus Corky compliments Dorothy Tutin’s Sophie Brzeska in Ken Russell’s Savage Messiah (1972). ‘It’s nice to be appreciated,’ comes the tart reply. It’s the same old story with Ed Harris’s Pollock (2000): Harris gets an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for playing Pollock, Marcia Gay Harden wins the award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Lee Krasner. Krasner now has a solo show at the Barbican, but the only woman artist so far honoured with a Hollywood biopic is Frida Kahlo. ‘Behind the romance, behind the glamour, behind the madness, lies the mystery of one of the most seductive and intriguing women of ours [sic] or any time!’ booms the trailer for Julie Taymor’s Frida (2002). Never mind the art, Salma Hayek’s heroine beats the men at swigging tequila and wins a snog with Saffron Burrows’s Gracie while dancing the tango.