With movies like Tim’s Vermeer, the upcoming Born to Fly, and this month’s Big Eyes (a Tim Burton film about painter Margaret Keane), theaters this year have had plenty of films about art.
There are also lots of art movies, both documentary and dramatized, that you can watch online right now with Netflix streaming or for free on Youtube! (Also included: a few that you can stream on Hulu, with Amazon Prime, or that you’ll have to track down elsewhere.)
We asked around The Art League’s offices for everyone’s favorite streaming art movies, and these are the results!
Ranging from serious to lighthearted, documentary to fictional, and art-centric to art-adjacent, the 25 films are organized in this list by the year of their release, starting with the older films — mostly dramatized biopics of famous masters — and ending with the most recent films, which include more documentaries about lesser-known artists.
“ …Beginning when Rembrandt’s reputation was at its height, the film then tracks his quiet descent into loneliness and isolated self-expression, following the death of his wife to the unveiling of Night Watch to the ecclesiastical excommunication of his late-in-life lover and maid, Hendrickje Stoffels. Though black and white, Rembrandt is shot by cinematographer Georges Périnal with an attention to light that’s particularly Rembrandtesque.”
— pick by George
Moulin Rouge (1952)
YouTube, 119 minutes
Starring José Ferrer as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Zsa Zsa Gábor as the dancer Jane Avril, this film tells the story of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life and, in particular, how his artwork helped him cope with an unhappy personal life. It was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and won for Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design.
(Toulouse-Lautrec has a supporting role in the more recent movie titled Moulin Rouge!, but that film isn’t streaming anywhere at the moment.)
— pick by George
How to Steal a Million (1966)
Netflix, 123 minutes
A classic with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, about an art collector and forger who needs to steal his forged sculpture back from a museum before it’s discovered.
— pick by Vida
F is for Fake (1974)
YouTube, 88 minutes
“If they hang long enough … they become real.” Orson Welles’ final movie was about the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory, who fooled many reputable art-world personalities with his fakes. It’s told as a sort of meta-documentary starring Welles himself.
— pick by George
Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time (2001)
YouTube, 94 minutes
See the celebrated environmental artist at work on time-based pieces that, thanks to the film, live on. We first heard about this documentary over the summer, when Art Campers watched a clip of it while working on their own environmental sculptures.
— pick by Rose
In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)
YouTube, 80 minutes
This film profiles janitor, novelist, and outsider artist Henry Darger. Like other outsider artists, Darger had a strong personal vision and a prolific output that wasn’t known until after his death. He wrote thousands of pages of his fantasy story with hundreds of accompanying paintings, based on imagery he copied or photocopied from magazines and other printed materials.
— pick by George
Bomb It (2007)
YouTube, 93 minutes
“I was, after the fashion of humanity, in love with my name, and, as young educated people commonly do, I wrote it everywhere.” — Goethe
A graffiti documentary that follows artists across the world, and the people who work to eradicate it.
— pick by Whitney
Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies (2008)
Hulu, 60 minutes
This film started as an exhibit at Pace Gallery in New York in 2007. Martin Scorsese, Julian Schnabel, and others make the case for early cinema’s influence on the Cubist movement, in particular the two titular artists.
— pick by George
Herb and Dorothy (2008)
Hulu, 87 minutes
The documentary story of the famous art collector couple who have gathered a huge collection of well-known artists, despite their low-income jobs. (For another, less happy, art couple, check out Cutie and the Boxer below.)
— pick by Rose
Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2008)
YouTube, 86 minutes
A documentary by Peter Greenaway, Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is a companion piece to the dramatic film Nightwatching with the same director and cast. Both are about the famous painting The Night Watch, with the documentary exploring theories about the painting, artistic illiteracy, and the sad state of critical thinking skills. Rembrandt is played by Martin Freeman, of Hobbit and Sherlock fame!
— pick by Suzanne
The Art of the Steal (2009)
Netflix, 101 minutes
This made a lot of our lists! It’s about the fight for the Barnes Foundation collection. From a user review on Netflix: “Like all good documentaries, The Art of the Steal is about much more than its central subject. It raises big questions about who owns culture, whether it should be public or private and whether or not it should be a for profit enterprise.”
— pick by Ariane, Rose, and Nancy
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)
YouTube, 90 minutes
Documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog got to take a small camera crew into the heavily protected Chauvet Cave in France, the site of the earliest representational cave paintings in the world. The crew was confined to a tiny catwalk to preserve the cave, but the film itself is an expansive look at human creativity.
— pick by George
Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)
YouTube, 86 minutes
Another documentary that made a lot of lists at The Art League. It’s a documentary by and about Banksy, with interviews with other famous graffiti artists including Shepard Fairey.
— pick by Joann, Ariane, and Erica
A documentary about the largest landfill in the world (in Brazil), the trash-pickers who work there, and an artist who has made it a kind of muse with recycled art and other work.
— pick by George
First Position (2011)
Netflix, 94 minutes
A fantastic ballet documentary that all artists can relate to, whether or not you’re interested in dance. It follows young dancers preparing for the Youth America Grand Prix.
— pick by Erica
Gerhard Richter Painting (2011)
Netflix, 97 minutes
Exactly what the title says — there’s a lot of Gerhard Richter painting and not a lot of him talking, which makes for some very Zen sequences with only the sounds of brushes, squeegees, and the painter’s footsteps. A great chance to see a famous artist at work inside the studio, in a film that’s more about the artist’s process than his personality, in contrast to other documentaries.
— pick by Rose and Nancy
Michael Palin in Wyeth’s World (2013)
YouTube, 59 minutes
Michael Palin visits the places and people that were Andrew Wyeth’s famous subjects. This BBC documentary is the perfect follow-up if your imagination was sparked by the recent exhibit at the National Gallery of Art!
— pick by George
Cutie and the Boxer (2013)
Netflix
What happens when two artists get married? If you answered “it’s complicated,” you’re right. Ushio and Noriko Shinohara are Japanese artists in New York who have their relationship and their artwork explored in this recent documentary.
It was nominated for the Best Documentary category at last year’s Oscars.
— pick by George
Other favorites
not currently streaming:
Wait, did you make it this far without finding something to watch? Scroll back up!
Sign up for our weekly blog newsletter, subscribe to our RSS feed, or like us on Facebook for the latest Art League news. Visit our homepage for more information about our classes, exhibits, and events in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia.
You can support The Art League every time you shop through AmazonSmile!
Simply set The Art League as your chosen charity, and every time you shop at smile.amazon.com, a portion of your purchase will be donated to support our mission to share the experience of visual arts with the community.
