Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Derivative Art

I love to compare derivative art to its source. Here we see a movie background production painting compared to the original source — changing a god into an angel and showing the difference in wings and clothing, or lack thereof.

Dante's Inferno, starring Spencer Tracy —1935

Willy Pogany is credited on the technical staff for this film. I would think it's possible he had a major hand in painting this adaptive art.

William Bouguereau — Psyche et L'Amour — 1889

4 comments:

Bob said...

Just an FYI -- the movie is Dante's Inferno with Spencer Tracey. (That's Robert Benchley with him.)

Thomas Haller Buchanan said...

Hi Bob. First of all, you evidently didn't see that I already had that image captioned. And second, I know that really resembles Benchley, but I see no evidence that he had anything to do with the film, and looking closer, it doesn't completely look like him. Perhaps he was just visiting the set, or perhaps that's someone else.

Bob said...

Hello Tom -- Sorry, I did miss the attribution under the photo. My bad.

That is Benchley; he was making a series of shorts for MGM at the time, and was a frequent 'guest' on the sets of other films. (This sort of cross-pollination was fairly common on the Metro lot.)

Great blog -- I check it every day! Thanks!

Thomas Haller Buchanan said...

Thanks Bob!