Dogged by painting: a recent animated film from Spanish director Luis Eduardo Aute offers a highly imaginative treatment of the lives and works of eight painters, from Goya to Frida Kahlo. .
Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Terry Berne

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Such playfulness, of course, belies more serious meanings. In "Striptease," the wonderfully sensual Andalusian painter Julio Romero de Torres (1874-1930) watches helplessly as his beautiful gypsy model metamorphoses into a cold Cubist mannequin, and then the artist himself turns into a Cubist figure. Picasso's Cubism here seems to stand halfway between the classical vision of Romero de Torres--the realist tradition of painting that has dominated Western art history since the Renaissance--and the highly conceptual, parodic world of Duchamp, which looks toward the future.

And what of the dog of the title? Hounds accompany all these artists or appear in the paintings scrutinized, from Goya's mutt howling at the dark witches of the collective unconscious, to the spoiled cur of Velazquez's Venus, or the Andalusian dog discovered beneath the lip of the sea by Dali. The dog is there throughout the ages, as innocent witness, as passive chorus or, for Kahlo, who calls out in the only dialogue in the entire film, "Come Pain, come here! ," as our unrealized desire, the blank animal slate upon which we write our dreams.

Luis Eduardo Aute's film A Dog Named Pain was included in the Tribeca Film Festival [May 8-12]. More information about the film can be found at the bilingual Web site www.unperrollamadodolor.com.

Terry Berne is a writer based in Madrid.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

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