Mixed Media

In 20th Century Fox’s upcoming drama “Great Expectations,” Ethan Hawke plays a young artist whose obsession--and favorite model--is Gwyneth Paltrow. Paintings of the radiant actress, featured throughout the movie, are so arresting that it’s no surprise when Hawke’s character is offered a show at a swank New York gallery.

The art in Sony’s soon-to-be-released “As Good as It Gets” is equally eye-catching. Greg Kinnear plays a successful painter who is doing a life-size portrait of a young hustler (Skeet Ulrich). The huge canvas so captures Ulrich’s vulnerable manner that many moviegoers will think Kinnear actually knows his way around an easel.

He doesn’t, of course, and neither does Hawke. Billy Sullivan and Francesco Clemente, both acclaimed New York-based painters, created the artwork used in “As Good as It Gets” and “Great Expectations,” respectively. They also helped bring the movies’ characters to life. The internationally respected Clemente spent hours with director Alfonso Cuaron. Sullivan, who recently had a show in Los Angeles, worked one-on-one with Kinnear.

“Greg was very formal. I said, ‘You’ve got to be more relaxed. . . . Move your hands more,’ ” said Sullivan, who also offered wardrobe suggestions. “I kept telling them: More black clothes.”

Hollywood has a continuing fascination with the world of serious art. Since Hitchcock’s 1945 classic “Spellbound,” which featured a dream sequence with imagery designed by Salvador Dali, numerous artists have been commissioned to create real art for the fake world of the movies. More than mere props, these artworks can make or break a film’s credibility.

“If you have a character who is a painter, nothing is going to reflect more about the inner life of that character than his art,” said Cuaron, who said that the 200 paintings Clemente did for “Great Expectations” were “part of the essence of the film. In a way, they’re what the movie is about.”

Cuaron’s movie is also about divisions of social class--Paltrow plays a sophisticated rich girl, Hawke her naive, penniless suitor--and in one key scene, Cuaron uses art to illustrate the chasm that separates the lovers’ worlds.

Hawke, newly arrived in New York, visits the gallery where he will eventually have a show and encounters high-concept art for the first time: 12 human-sized white boxes, each featuring an egg-shaped opening out of which pokes an actual pregnant belly.

The installation, designed by conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco, is intended to be ironic, Cuaron said--many moviegoers will find it downright hilarious. But it makes a point: The untutored Hawke is out of his depth.

Art and the men and women who make it have been the focus of several films over the years, with real artists playing behind-the-scenes roles both credited and uncredited. Below, a partial listing:

* In “Titanic,” the three-hour romantic epic due Dec. 19 from Paramount, Leonardo DiCaprio plays an artist who is returning to America from Europe. He falls for Kate Winslet, a wealthy Philadelphian who is about to be married, and woos her by sketching her portrait. Not only did James Cameron write and direct the film, he did the sketches of Winslet as well as several other drawings in DiCaprio’s sketch book.

* Ivan Albright, a Chicago painter of macabre images, created the art in the 1945 movie version of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The movie focused on a handsome, morally corrupt young man who has his portrait painted, then stops growing older. In that film, the portrait itself was an evolving character: It grew uglier with each of Gray’s transgressions.

* “Vertigo,” Hitchcock’s 1958 classic, is seen by some artists as the best example of why it pays not to skimp on artwork. In it, Madeleine (Kim Novak) is obsessed by, among other things, a portrait that hangs in a museum. When the portrait is revealed, viewers are supposed to be aghast to see that the woman in it is a dead ringer for Madeleine. Art aficionados, however, are aghast at the painting itself, which looks amateurish and far from museum quality.

* Peter Alexander, the Venice-based Romantic landscape painter, created the flame-filled images in John Schlesinger’s 1975 film of Nathanael West’s 1939 novel “Day of the Locust.”

* Paul Mazursky’s 1978 film “An Unmarried Woman” features Jill Clayburgh as a wife and mother who comes into her own after her husband leaves her for another woman. On the road to inner peace, she works in an art gallery and has flings with two artists, one played by Alan Bates, whose technique consists of dumping buckets of paint onto huge canvases. Twenty-two “art collaborators” are listed in the film’s credits, including Andy Warhol.

* “New York Stories,” the 1989 film, wedded three short works by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. In Scorsese’s film, “Life Lessons,” Nick Nolte played a painter named Lionel Dobie whose work evoked Jackson Pollock. The paintings were done by Chuck Connelly, an Expressionist artist from Pittsburgh.

* Robert Altman commissioned Don Bachardy, a portrait painter of note and longtime companion of the late Christopher Isherwood, to do a collection of color drawings for his 1993 film “Short Cuts.”

* For the 1996 film “Surviving Picasso,” the artist’s estate refused to allow genuine Picassos to be included. So the art, from paintings to pottery, were modern pastiches done in the great man’s style by nine craftsmen who are credited as art “providers.” If you spot what looks like a collage, painting or drawing by Henri Matisse, however, it’s the real thing (Matisse’s estate cooperated with the film).

The same year, the painter Julian Schnabel made his directorial debut with “Basquiat,” the story of the meteoric rise of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was discovered by Andy Warhol. Schnabel himself did the paintings that were featured in the film.