In Alan Rudolph’s “The Moderns,” which opens in mid-April, Keith Carradine plays a painter, one of the colony of American expatriates enjoying freedom and a shortage of money in the Paris of 1926. He pals around with a drunken and foolish Ernest Hemingway and does not impress Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
The poster for the film is one of several paintings Carradine did during the shooting and it is said to be selling briskly.
“I’d done some painting when I was younger and I wanted it to feel right in the film, so I asked David Blocker (the film’s co-producer) to send an easel and paints and canvases to my hotel room. After work I’d go back to the hotel and order room service and paint.”
The character’s own paintings don’t sell so he does the odd forgery to keep body and atelier together. Carradine did an adaptation of a Cezanne and Rudolph said, “Not bad.” The rest may not be art history but it has been a serendipitous pleasure for Carradine. Three of the paintings are glimpsed in the film.
