The Artist and the Model

The Artist and the Model (El artista y la modelo) is a 2012 Spanish black-and-white drama directed by Fernando Trueba, his first feature film made in French. Set in occupied France in the summer of 1943, it follows an aging, celebrated sculptor who recovers the will to work when a young Spanish refugee becomes the model for his final sculpture.^{1 • 2} The film won the Silver Shell (Concha de Plata) for Best Director at the 2012 San Sebastián International Film Festival and received 13 Goya Award nominations.^{3 • 4}

Origins and production

Trueba carried the subject for decades. He traced the idea to his childhood love of Picasso and to the first real painting he saw in person, at age 13, Picasso's The Artist and the Model, a recurring theme in that painter's work.⁸ According to an IMDb production note, he had the project in hand since 1990 and initially planned to make it with his brother Máximo, a sculptor.⁹ Máximo died in 1996, and the finished film is dedicated to him; Trueba said he wanted the film to speak about the making of art, the craft hidden inside creation.¹⁰

Writing and shooting. In 2005 Trueba began working on the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière, the French screenwriter known for his work with Luis Buñuel, after a first version of the story.⁵ The film was shot in French, in the Pyrenees, with filming locations at Perpignan in the Pyrénées-Orientales of France.^{8 • 9} It was produced by Fernando Trueba P.C. with the participation of Televisión Española, produced by Cristina Huete with Anne Deluz as associate producer, photographed by Daniel Vilar, edited by Marta Velasco, with art direction by Pilar Revuelta and costumes by Lala Huete.^{5 • 11} A sculpture professor from the Complutense University of Madrid's Faculty of Fine Arts created a team that drew and sculpted all the works seen in the film.¹²

Style and themes

The film is a deliberate variation on the artist-and-model theme that Trueba described as frequent in modern art, frequented by Picasso and Matisse, and he framed his film as a cinematic variation on it rather than a narcissistic exercise.⁵ Trueba said he chose black and white as the adequate way to treat the drawings, sculptures, materials, and the interior of the studio, the volumes of bodies and of the sculptures alike.¹³ Critics noted the studied framing and black-and-white photography, with one Spanish review describing how Trueba cares for each frame as if it were a painting.¹⁴

The film embeds art-historical references. A scene examines a Rembrandt drawing of a young child taking his first steps, which Trueba connected to an explanation David Hockney gave of that drawing; the closing credits also point to Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Nude in the Sun (1876) and, above all, to Aristide Maillol's sculpture La Méditerranée (1905).^{6 • 15} Trueba also described the film as a defense of the artist who works with matter, hands and clay in a studio, against the contemporary artist who seems to work only with ideas.¹⁶

Release and reception

The film premiered in the official competition of the 60th San Sebastián Festival in September 2012, where Trueba won the Silver Shell for Best Director, and opened in Spain on 28 September 2012.^{3 • 1} It later opened in France on 13 March 2013, the United Kingdom and Ireland on 13 September 2013, and Germany on 25 December 2013.³ In the United States, Cohen Media Group released it in limited theaters on 2 August 2013, grossing $43.0K.¹⁷

Critical response was mixed. On Metacritic the film scored 53 out of 100 based on 18 critic reviews, categorized as mixed or average, with 6 positive, 10 mixed, and 2 negative reviews; on Rotten Tomatoes it held a 71% Tomatometer from 42 reviews.^{4 • 17} Positive reviews praised the black-and-white cinematography, Empire calling it "magisterial" and the Los Angeles Times describing a drama that presents art, life and death as one tangled trio.⁴ Critics who were cooler noted the familiarity of the plot and its resemblance to Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse (1991), a much longer film about a painter and his model.^{4 • 7} At the 2013 Goya Awards the film received 13 nominations.⁴ In Spain it earned 523,553.46 € from 80,920 admissions, a modest commercial result that El País placed within 2012's strong critical but weak box-office reception of Spanish black-and-white films such as Blancanieves.^{1 • 18}

References

1. ICAA Film Data, El artista y la modelo, Spanish Ministry of Culture film database
2. Informe Semanal: El artista y la modelo, según Trueba, RTVE Play
3. El artista y la modelo, Cineuropa
4. The Artist and the Model, Metacritic
5. El artista y la modelo pressbook, Fernando Trueba Producciones
6. El artista y la modelo, la más lúcida y personal película de Fernando Trueba, Revista Atticus
7. Review: The Artist and the Model, Slant Magazine
8. Entrevista exclusiva a Fernando Trueba, El Universal
9. El artista y la modelo (2012), IMDb
10. El artista y la modelo, Trueba y el cine, El País
11. EL ARTISTA Y LA MODELO, Fernando Trueba Producciones
12. Noticias del Campus, Tribuna Complutense, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
13. Hablamos con el equipo de El artista y la modelo, Culturamas
14. El artista y la modelo. Sinopsis y crítica, Aceprensa
15. A Sculptor Struggles, But The Art Is Frustratingly Hollow, KQED
16. Entrevista exclusiva a Fernando Trueba, Los Andes
17. The Artist and the Model, Rotten Tomatoes
18. El genio recortado, El País

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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