When a painter is inspired by a movie, something ephemeral can become monumental. But the painting by Walter Sickert, famous for his dark impressions of women in lonely London rooms, makes Robinson look evil, his narrow-eyed face monstrously dominating the canvas.
Cinema holds a fatal attraction for painting.
In the 20th century Hollywood created a new mythology, a new Olympus of gods and goddesses, and a new hell. Painters found the mythic narratives they had once taken from classical legends and the Bible remade, larger than life, in the dream world of cinema. At the same time Hollywood was the enemy, the Babylon of cheap popular entertainment - the kingdom of kitsch, according to critic Clement Greenberg, champion of high abstract art in the 1940s. Painting and cinema are still handcuffed together on a one-way ticket to the morgue. When artists appropriate images from film they always seem to be drawn to the melancholy underside of the tinsel factory.