From Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, ARTISTS & LOVE delves into the tumultuous romantic and creative partnerships that shaped some of the towering figures of modern art. Over the course of two seasons, directors Stéphanie Colaux and Delphine Deloget chronicle a new romantic encounter between two artists, tracing the profound effects on their personal and artistic trajectories. While some of the romances lead to new periods of creative flourishing and collaboration, others result in standstill and heartbreak.
Extensive use of period-specific film footage, paintings, archival photographs and animation immerse viewers in the visual world of the artists. While each episode ARTISTS & LOVE comes to its own conclusion, they all attempt to answer the same questions: Is love compatible with creation? Can artists reveal themselves through romantic passion? Does love bring a renewed energy to art?
SEASON 1
He was a leading figurative artist and she was the famous face immortalized on his canvasses. But Jeanne was also an artist who sought to emerge from the shadow of her master. Amedeo and Jeanne lived three years of fierce passion and intense creativity, bound until death by love and art.
He was a pioneer of photo-journalism, who covered all the major conflicts of the 20th century, and she helped to create his legend. Capa and Taro were the coming together of two politically-committed people, united by photography and love.
He was a painter, filmmaker, and above all one of the greatest surrealist photographers of the 20th century. She was the femme fatale, a model who was featured on the front page of the world’s top fashion magazines. Man Ray and Lee Miller is the story of a passionate love affair which revealed the talents of an artist who was overlooked for too long.
She was all about portraits, faces, and the intensity of children’s stares. He was all about nature and the sweet subtlety of landscapes. Paula, a liberated, intuitive and visionary woman; Otto, a melancholy yet generous man. In 1900s Germany, Otto Modersohn helped his beloved become one of the greatest artists of modern painting.
She was one of the greatest painters in the United States, an icon of American culture. He was one of the founding fathers of modern photography. In the 1920s, they were one of the most high-profile and scandalous couples on New York’s avant-garde scene.
SEASON 2
He was a symbolist painter who reinterpreted patterns and eroticized his models. She was one of the greats in early 20th century fashion design. Under the painter's brushes, the fashion artist became an iconic figure in glowing colors. In Vienna, the two artists would shake up conventions and imagine an alliance stronger than the bonds of marriage.
Lucy Schwob was a writer, poet and photographer. She also went by the name of Claude Cahun and was a multifaceted activist and artist who defied traditional labels. Suzanne Malherbe was an illustrator, graphic designer and photographer, who went by the name of Marcel Moore. Two women with exceptional personalities: resistant, lesbian, surrealist. Their story was one of an ardent love between two women with heroic destinies.
She was a painter gripped by her pain, in constant search of her own Mexican identity through her self-portraits. He was an unfaithful ogre, a politically committed muralist who both painted and lived large. Frida and Diego, ever the beauty and the beast, lived a tumultuous love affair; two soulmates connected by their shared love for their country.
He was a painter of forms and figures, of abstraction, of the spiritual. She was one of the first recognized women painters and enjoyed wide renown during her lifetime. A free, instinctive, modern woman. Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky's idyll is the story of a romance between two artists linked to the avant-garde of modern German painting.