Why do celebrities think they can paint? Here's our pick of the worst

Telegraph

17-06-2025

The double Oscar -winning actor Adrien Brody is rightly celebrated for his on-screen talents, even if there is some truth to the grumblings that he only really excels when he plays Holocaust victims. Yet before, during and after winning his second Oscar, for the magnificent drama The Brutalist, he seems to have been on a personal mission to behave in as obnoxious a fashion as possible.
At the Oscars, for example, he caused much revulsion by throwing a piece of used chewing gum at his partner Georgina Chapman so she could hold it while he made his rambling, arrogant acceptance speech
But Brody isn't just an actor; he is also an artist, or at least would like to be regarded as such. He is currently displaying a solo show, entitled Made in America, at New York's prestigious Eden Gallery that has been afforded all the accoutrements that a major art-world figure would merit. A lengthy profile piece in the New York Times, fawning news items about his selling one of his artworks, of Marilyn Monroe, for $425,000 at the amfAR gala in Cannes and an elevated degree of respect because of his existing fame.
Part of this art, we learn, once again involves chewing gum. Visitors to Made in America are invited to take a piece of gum from a pre-packaged pile, chew it, and then stick it onto a canvas that is festooned with the word 'Violence.' A sign on the wall declares 'Leave your mark—messy, visceral, and anonymous'.
This is one way of looking at it. Another way is to suggest that, in a contemporary art world that seems to have gone stark raving mad – Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian, in which a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for $6.2 million last year at Sotheby's, was quite literally bananas – the cachet brought in by an A-list celebrity makes apparently dreadful artworks seem both respectable and newsworthy.
Brody's exhibition poses as a deconstruction of much-loved pop icons such as the Simpsons and Mickey Mouse, appearing to homage such New York legends as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Unfortunately, Made in America has been panned in the American and international art press on the grounds that Brody isn't a talented artist, despite his beliefs otherwise.
'Why do great actors have so much trouble when they venture into visual art?' asked Artnet critic Annie Armstrong, who attended the opening. 'Can you name one who has been able to bridge the gap?' She concluded: 'It feels uncanny to see an artist who is so successful in one medium be so flat-footed in another.'
Still, it did not help that Brody approached this with maximum pomposity. At Cannes, while presenting his Monroe canvas, he indignantly shushed the audience during a lengthy introductory speech. 'I've painted and drawn most of my whole life,' he declared. 'Painting precedes acting for me.' In another interview in 2016 with the Huffington Post, he remarked: 'Maybe I am vain, to a certain extent, but the purpose of doing this is far from vanity.' Most would disagree with his summation.
Still, in the actor's defence, he is far from the only celebrity who has dabbled in the world of art to disastrous or embarrassing effect. Everyone from the late Val Kilmer to Jim Carrey has, at one time or another, decided that they were capable of producing artworks of lasting impact and effect, enabled by a crowd of sycophants and excitable fans. Almost inevitably, the result has been the same; well-known figures have produced mediocre art – at best – that looks like something that a middling GCSE student might come up with as coursework.
Whether it's Carrey's truly shameful pictures of 'Jesus Electric' and Melania Trump, Kilmer's self-aggrandising portrait of Jim Morrison (a homage to the man he played, to far greater effect, in Oliver Stone's biopic The Doors) or Sylvester Stallone's Rocky-inspired The Arena, the consistent impression that virtually anyone would have when seeing these 'artworks' is a profound wish that their creators don't give up the day job.
Actors who paint tend to take what they do so very seriously, and most actors who do see themselves as artists tend to be exactly the kind of characters you would expect – Johnny Depp, Viggo Mortensen, Marlon Brando, etc.
Sir Anthony Hopkins, however, is a refreshing exception to this rule. He may be one of the finest thespians that Britain has ever produced, but his bizarre, vaguely psychedelic paintings – George, for instance, depicts a vast purple elephant – seem like an elaborate joke. Which it probably is. 'Painting is something I really enjoy, like playing the piano,' Hopkins has said. 'I have a lot of fun with it. I just paint for the sheer enjoyment of it.'
This sense of fun is sorely lacking from the more po-faced practitioners. Sharon Stone's abstract, sub-Rothko works, entitled things like It's My Garden, Asshole, appear to exist less to sell for the $40,000 that she charges for some of her canvases, and more for feminist empowerment. As she put it, 'It's my job to open a window for other women and hold it open further.'
Likewise, if you look at the monochrome splodges that the actress Lucy Liu appears to specialise in, you will have been missing the point of how from the 'painterly, fleshy nudes to delicate depictions of the human spine in resin or embroidery, Lucy Liu's art lays bare themes of intimacy, belonging and memory.'
It makes the relatively accessible and pleasant-looking work of Tony Curtis – which was ridiculed during the actor's lifetime – all the more bearable, although even here, Curtis was not immune to delusions of pseudery. 'When I paint, I don't paint shapes, I paint colours,' he once said.
Yet is the desire to create art limited to actors. Musicians have also dabbled in the field, to mixed effect. Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood's paintings of him and his Rolling Stones bandmates have an appealing energy to them (let's ignore his 'nude studies', which have a different kind of energy) and there are many people who rate Bob Dylan's paintings and sculpture, which he was demonstrating as far back as the cover of 1970's Self Portrait album. Others have fared less well.
David Bowie and Paul McCartney may be the two greatest post-war British musicians, but neither of them managed to persuade the art world that their own work was of any special significance, whether it was Bowie's alternately haunting and embarrassing Francis Bacon-esque studies or Macca's dreadful daubs. The late Brian Sewell had it about right when he said of the latter that they were 'a self-indulgent impertinence so far from art that the art critic has no suitable words for them – they are, indeed, beneath criticism.'
Still, works on canvas are one kind of dreadfulness, but when celebrities veer into performance art, matters worsen inexorably. There are those who believe that Shia LaBeouf is an overlooked genius, others – especially post-Megalopolis – that he is simply a mediocre actor who is addicted to attention-seeking. Such actions as turning up at the premiere of Nymphomaniac in 2014 with a paper bag on his head saying 'I am not famous any more' and watching all his films in reverse order for the #ALLMYMOVIES project may have been original, but they also felt like the showily demonstrative actions of a bored has-been star.
And let's not even get onto James Franco, whose smug, self-congratulatory blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction came crashing down in 2021 when he admitted allegations of sexual coercion with students at his acting school. Few miss Franco's once-ubiquitous, forever-irritating presence in public life, during which art was just one of the means he used to torment us. He once commented that he had been painting longer than he had been acting, which sounded like a threat of some kind.
At least Robbie Williams, whose current solo show Radical Honesty ('expanding his visual language of sarcasm, self-deprecation, and playful irreverence), refuses to take this stuff seriously. Which is just as well, given that one critic described it as 'an Instagram self-help quote attacking your brain and eyes….incredibly bad art: so earnest, so superficial, it's barely even funny.'
There have been a few more successful celebrities involved in the world of art, including Edward G Robinson, a Hollywood tough guy star from the Thirties and Forties and the legendary horror star Vincent Price, although both of these men were more notable as enthusiastic and prodigious collectors than for their own painting. This willingness to step back and let other, more talented artists take the limelight reflected well on them. Today, the Brodys and Carreys and McCartneys produce their terrible, vainglorious work and expect someone impressed by their fame to pay vast sums of money for them.
The real tragedy is that, so far, they haven't been disappointed. Brody's exhibition may have been called Made in America, but this worship of celebrity excess is, alas, a global phenomenon, and it shows no signs of dissipating any time soon.
Perhaps the solution is to send in the hardy protesters of Just Stop Oil, armed with paint and knives, and see what happens then. If it resulted in a few irreparably damaged works of celebrity hubris, I doubt that too many people would be truly devastated.
The five worst celebrity artworks
1. Jim Carrey, Jesus Electric, 2017
The actor Jim Carrey recently claimed to have found God and Christianity, and stated that 'The energy that surrounds Jesus is electric. I don't know if Jesus is real, I don't know if he lived, I don't know what he means. But the paintings of Jesus are really my desire to convey Christ-consciousness.' This would be fine, if the Bruce Almighty star's representation of his idol's electric energy wasn't so embarrassingly redolent of the kind of paintings that you see for sale on a dodgy-looking stall in Camden Market. Such is Carrey's clout that he even made a short documentary about the painting's creation, called I Needed Colour; perhaps it should have been called I Needed A Better Agent, given how mired he is in Super Mario Bros films these days.
2. Adrien Brody, Hooked, 2016
Brody's most recent pictures and installations have been soundly and deservedly ridiculed, but some of his earlier work might be even worse – which, I suppose, is a back-handed way of saying he might be getting better. One Warhol-inspired display of fish in four different colours was embarrassing itself on his own terms, but worsened by Brody claiming, straight-faced, that 'If we look closely, we are the fish. We are the ones 'hooked' as we consume with abandon…the fragility and beauty and uniqueness of fish is much like our own spirit and spiritual state.' It makes Eric Cantona's discussion of fish and trawlers look like the last word in profundity.
3. Shia LaBeouf, #IAMSORRY, 2014
Describing Shia LaBeouf's performance artworks as 'good' or 'bad' is not really fair; 'embarrassing' and 'shameful' would be closer to the mark. Yet when he embarked on a five-day stint in a Los Angeles gallery of wearing his 'I am not famous any more' bag on his head, inviting members of the public to interact with him, one participant went rather too far.
As LaBeouf later recalled, 'One woman who came with her boyfriend, who was outside the door when this happened, whipped my legs for 10 minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me.' After LaBeouf's girlfriend learnt of this, 'she came in [and] asked for an explanation, and I couldn't speak, so we both sat with this unexplained trauma silently. It was painful.' LaBeouf never pressed any criminal charges, suggesting that this piece of suffering for his art was simply part of the job.
4. Paul McCartney, Unfinished Symphony, 1993
Paul McCartney has always chafed against the idea that he was the 'safe' or somehow predictable Beatle in comparison to John Lennon, frequently bigging up his avant-garde and experimental credentials. Musically, this might well be true, but when it comes to his art, it can be found wanting. This painting, which might kindly be described as his attempt to capture on canvas what A Day in the Life's crescendo did musically, will seem to most as an ugly, Pollock-lite splurge of horrible colours all jumbled together.
McCartney remarked of it that 'It is very spontaneous, I don't think there was a lot of thinking about that. But, you know, my composition generally is spontaneous. Some people I talk to will ask, 'Do you do sketches beforehand?' And I will say, 'No, it is alla prima.' You know, I just love to play around with the paint and let the paint show me the way, and I sense they are not as impressed if they think I did it spontaneously.' Perhaps a little less spontaneity may have been welcome here.
5. James Franco, Army Pants, 2011
It now seems incredible to think that James Franco – last seen popping up in French-language blockbusters as the villain – was once one of the hottest actors in Hollywood, an Oscar-nominated star who could (apparently) do no wrong. How else to explain the indulgence that he was offered when it came to producing such ugly, cluttered artworks as the frankly horrible Army Pants. It sold for just over $8000 when it was last offered for auction in 2023; a mere fraction of the work of other celebrity artists, and an indication of how steeply his reputation has fallen.