Faculty Publication: Katherine Manthorne’s “Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting”

Congratulations to Professor Katherine Manthorne, whose book, Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting, is now out from Routledge! Dr. Manthorne is Professor of Art History at the Graduate Center, where she focuses on the art of the United States, Latin America, and their Cross-Currents from 1750 to 1950.Between the 1890s and the 1930s, movie going became an established feature of everyday life across America. Movies constituted an enormous visual data bank and changed the way artist and public alike interpreted images. This book explores modern painting as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities pried open by cinema from its invention until the outbreak of World War II, when both the art world and the film industry changed substantially. Artists were watching movies, filmmakers studied fine arts; the membrane between media was porous, allowing for fluid exchange.Â