TAKING VENICE uncovers the true story behind rumors that the U.S. government and a team of high-placed insiders rigged the 1964 Venice Biennale – the Olympics of art – so their chosen artist, Robert Rauschenberg, could win the Grand Prize.
SYNOPSIS
At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government is determined to fight Communism with culture. The Venice Biennale, the world’s most influential art exhibition, becomes a proving ground in 1964. Alice Denney, Washington insider and friend of the Kennedys, recommends Alan Solomon, an ambitious curator making waves with trailblazing art, to organize the U.S. entry. Together with Leo Castelli, a powerful New York art dealer, they embark on a daring plan to make Robert Rauschenberg the winner of the Grand Prize. The artist is yet to be taken seriously with his combinations of junk off the street and images from pop culture, but he has the potential to dazzle. Deftly pulling off maneuvers that could have come from a Hollywood thriller, the American team leaves the international press crying foul and Rauschenberg questioning the politics of nationalism that sent him there.
Director Statement
I grew up during the Cold War when the world seemed as dangerous as it does today. But it also seemed to be filled with possibility, with the actions of people who dreamed big and took big chances. This was especially true of artists, always looking to build something new. I became an art critic, then an author, and now a filmmaker. My goal is to make films about art that leap out of the art world and into a reckoning with what’s relevant in our lives through the stories that they tell.
This film tells the story of the 1964 Venice Biennale, at a time when State Department officials and a team of unlikely conspirators were joined in their conviction that American democracy was worth the fight. They were determined to harness the audacity of American art to promote what was best about democracy. The artist they chose to represent the U.S. in their race to win the Biennale Grand Prize was Robert Rauschenberg, who was by no means a political artist, then. By the time I met him more than a decade later, he had come to believe that art had a more global responsibility. The film builds on a tradition of telling the story of America then through the eyes of now because I want it to reflect how much the world and art have changed. I want there to be moments that sting with what we have lost, and moments that encapsulate what we have gained.
Supporter Statement
"Your intriguing project . . . will be of strong interest to many diverse viewers – those interested in the arts, but also those for whom history, culture, and controversy present an intellectual and emotional experience.
We are clearly in agreement that the timeliness, immediacy, and scope of this project is a unique opportunity to tell a story that is as important now as it was at the time."
Stephen Segaller,
Vice President, Programming
WNET
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Director Amei Wallach
Amei Wallach is an award-winning art critic, filmmaker, and television commentator. Her critically acclaimed films, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine, and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here, remain in international demand. In her articles, books, media appearances – and more recently in her films – Wallach has chronicled, and known, artists from Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner to Jasper Johns and Shirin Neshat. As an art writer, she watched Robert Rauschenberg make prints in New York and paintings in Captiva, Florida. She is uniquely able to tell this story. Wallach has written or contributed to more than a dozen books and was an on-air arts commentator for the PBS MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. Her articles have appeared in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Art in America, and ARTnews.
Andrea Miller is a producer known for feature documentaries such as Particle Fever (2013), which screened at the Telluride and Sheffield film festivals and received the National Academy of Science Prize and a Columbia Dupont award; Take My Nose . . . Please! (2017); and Joseph Pulitzer Voice of the People (2018), which aired on the PBS series American Masters. Other documentary projects include Thank You for Your Service, Letters from Baghdad, Four Winters, The New Public, and Colliding Dreams. Andrea also produces fictional features. She was Executive Producer of the feature film Savage Youth, which premiered at Slamdance in 2018, and was the primary producer of Dark Matter, starring Meryl Streep, Aiden Quinn and Liu Yeh, which won the Sloan Prize at Sundance in 2007. She recently produced the film Three Birthdays with Josh Radnor, Annie Parisse and Nuala Cleary and directed by Jane Weinstock. Formerly, Andrea worked in television, producing such shows as Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Shining Time Station and Indecision ’92 (hosted by Al Franken and Roger Ailes) after many years as a television executive and in the trenches on documentary and news features.
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Women Make Movies (WMM), Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization registered with the New York Charities Bureau of New York State and accepts charitable donations on behalf of this project. Your donation will be spent by the filmmaker(s) toward the production and completion of this media project. No services or goods are provided by Women Make Movies, the filmmaker(s) or anyone else associated with this project in exchange for your charitable donation.
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