In addition to the Hockney, Hanawalt’s favorite art reference is the painting in the bedroom of Sarah Lynn, Bojack’s now grown-up child costar from Horsin’ Around, as seen in season three. “The colors, um … this one, they don’t even have a name for it, that’s how exclusive it is.” “You can see from the teeny-tiny brushstrokes that this is very expensive,” he says. “Bojack often felt the need to impress me with materials items,” a voiceover of Diane says, leading into Bojack explaining the painting. Towards the end of season one, Bojack and his then-memoirist Diane Nguyen have an exchange - one of the few that directly acknowledges an artwork - that underlines the running theme of vanity. “It’s so L.A., and it’s so wistful for Bojack to be watching a version of himself swimming, trying to understand himself,” Hanawalt says of her version of Hockney. In their blinding brightness, the pools tapped into a melancholy side of Hollywood, in the same way they do in the series, like the intro where Bojack sinks into the waters of his own pool, channeling a listless Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. The British painter captured the elite zeitgeist of Los Angeles in his images of private swimming holes in all their pristine, luxurious, vapid, and lonesome glory. With his crystalline blue pools, Hockney created an iconography for a city like few artists have. “That was one of the very first things I drew for the show when we were doing the pilot,” she says. “He’s also an artist who really liked to paint animals.”Īs for Bojack Horseman, the commitment to art references really did all begin with the Hockney painting. I grew up with Keith Haring everywhere,” she says. As a kid, it made a great impression on her. Several outlets, like The AV Club and Cultura Colectiva, followed suit.Įarly inspiration was the Gary Larson Far Side collection of wiener dog art, where pups were painted into canvases from Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (1893) to Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” (1931). Redditors started taking note shortly after the first season aired in 2014, and by 2015 the online art publication Sartle had blogged about it, creating a very useful list of featured art - “ Bojack Horseman : All the Art References!”. This parade of art has fans of art history buzzing. By the end of first season, viewers are treated to the work of Henri Matisse (“La Danse” 1909), Rothko (take your pick), and Keith Haring (“Dancing Dogs” and others), as well as a Bojack version of the 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold photo of a nude Burt Reynolds lounging on a bear skin rug. The title sequence itself shows a Warholian horseshoe canvas above Bojack’s bed. Two minutes later, Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece “The Birth of Venus” (1485) makes its first cameo at the Elefante restaurant, in which context Venus is played by a coy elephant. The Hockney painting, for example, appears five minutes into the first episode of the series, in Bojack’s home office, cementing itself as a visual and cultural touchstone for the show. That show has used Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” (1942) and Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1490–1500) to name a few instances, but perhaps no series has ever done it quite as consistently and lovingly as Bojack Horseman. “ The Simpsons Did It” meme is relevant here. Netflix will release the new season September 14, and it is no exception to the previous ones - with the likes of Georgia O’Keefe, Claude Monet, Thomas Kinkade, Wassily Kandinsky, and many more adding to the rich visual fabric of the show.Īnimated and live-action series alike have paid homage to famous artworks before. He seeks to recapture that fame while also navigating his web of equally narcissistic self-destructive friends and frenemies, humans and anthropomorphized animals alike.Īnd all the while in the background, like a low-grade art fever, the show plants iconic paintings, photography, and sculpture. The series - about to release its fifth season -follows the trials and tribulations of the titular character, a fifty-something pill-popping, bottle-hitting actor whose heydey was the schmaltzy ‘90s sitcom Horsin’ Around. This is the experience of an art-history nerd watching Bojack Horseman, the critically acclaimed animated comedy series and cult hit on Netflix that brutally satirizes Hollywood, or rather, Hollywoo. Is that a Lichtenstein? you wonder out loud. You find yourself excitedly pointing out Warhols and O’Keefes to no one in particular.
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