NEW YORK, NY.- Film Forum will present Pieter van Huystee’s new documentary, Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil, for its US theatrical premiere on Wednesday, July 27. This year marks the 500th anniversary of the Dutch master painter’s death. Whether you’re aware of it or not, his wildly bizarre imaginings of hell are permanently etched upon your psyche. Pieter van Huystee tracks down Bosch’s 25 or so surviving paintings, recording the meticulous work of archivists to definitively attribute the work to the artist (10 family members painted) as well as the jousting by Dutch and Spanish curators over granting access to the masterpieces. (The Garden of Earthly Delights, the Prado’s Mona Lisa, has not left Spain in 400 years and it’s not about to anytime soon.) The discovery of a “new” Bosch in a small Kansas City museum (“It’s like your child just won the Nobel Prize” – Julian Zugazagoitia, Director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), and the controversial decision by experts that two of the Prado’s Bosch works are more correctly attributed to “the workshop of H. Bosch,” all figure into the action.
The artist’s vivid imagination spawned precise, grotesque, salacious juxtapositions: “a bird-headed monster wearing a cooking pot as a helmet while devouring a man whose backside emits fire, smoke and a flock of blackbirds.”- Tom Rachman, The New York Times. Tantalizing, repulsive, hilarious, and sexually perverse: his hell is our hell, even after half a millennium. Pieter van Huystee makes his directing debut, having been a longtime producer of critically acclaimed documentaries by Johan van der Keuken, Heddy Honigmann and Oeke Hoogendijk.
Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil will have a two-week engagement, July 27 – August 9, at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street (West of 6th Avenue), with screenings daily at 12:30, 2:30, 4:45, 7:00, and 9:10.
“Bosch’s paintings take us into a ‘state of emergency, in which hellish forces both worldly and otherworldly are let loose. There’s a level of cruelty, violence and horror’… says Joseph Koerner, a Harvard University art historian… Fascination with Bosch has long filtered into pop culture in outlandish mashups of the medieval and the modern. In ‘The Simpsons’…Bart hallucinates a cartoon version of ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights.’ Musicians from Michael Jackson to Deep Purple and Pearls Before Swine have used Bosch’s demonic renderings as album cover art. Fashion designer Alexander McQueen had them imprinted on silk bodices…”
– Anna Russell, The Wall Street Journal
