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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallSusan Bee’s 2013 painting Pickpocket begins with a single image from Robert Bresson’s 1959 film, but it does not simply reproduce that frame. By replacing black-and-white cinematography with oil color, geometric bars and a more open composition, Bee turns a cinematic moment of reunion into an image that can feel simultaneously isolating, protective and unresolved.
What Susan Bee changes in Bresson’s image
Leonard Schwartz identifies Bee’s Pickpocket (2013) as one of five paintings in her Pickpocket series. Its source is a film still from the end of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), where the two protagonists finally find one another. In the frame, a woman stands in front of a man. Bars separate them, both lean against those bars, and the visible eyes of each figure are closed.
Bee keeps the basic arrangement recognizable while changing nearly everything that controls its emotional temperature. Bresson’s film is black and white and belongs to a narrative moving toward connection. Bee’s oil painting is in color, and the bars become a grid of orange, blue and other geometric forms. The result is not a freeze-frame in the ordinary sense. It is a new visual event in which the source’s darkness, spacing and gestures are reorganized by paint.
Schwartz’s central claim is that this transformation opens possibilities that remain less visible in the film frame. The painting can still suggest a barrier, but its colored geometry also permits other readings: the grid might hold the woman, the man, or both; it might be a prison, a screen, a structure of attention or a field from which light and color emerge.
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The source scene: a reunion seen as separation
The ending of Pickpocket matters because the still carries two kinds of information at once. Seen as a photograph, it presents bodies arranged behind and in front of bars. Closed eyes and the physical division make the figures appear withdrawn from one another. Seen within Bresson’s moving film, however, the same image arrives after a story in which the protagonists have been moving toward recognition. The frame therefore holds separation and connection together.
Bresson’s film follows Michel, a pickpocket whose criminal practice and emotional detachment organize most of the narrative. The woman in the final image is Jeanne, whose presence gives the ending its possibility of human contact. The film’s restraint is important: Bresson avoids melodramatic declarations and relies on gesture, silence and implication. The final still does not explain the reunion; it lets the viewer register it through the arrangement of bodies and the pause of the image.
Bee’s painting removes the frame from that temporal sequence. A viewer who has never seen the film encounters the bars, the two figures and their closed eyes without the preceding plot. The image can therefore feel like a scene of confinement before it becomes a scene of arrival. The film’s narrative knowledge remains relevant, but it is no longer the only way the picture works.
Three image forms, three kinds of meaning
Schwartz distinguishes among a photographic image, a cinematic image and a painted image. The distinction clarifies why Bee’s work is more than a reproduction.
| Image form | What the viewer receives | How it operates in this case |
|---|---|---|
| Photographic image | A single frame isolated from time | The figures, bars and closed eyes can be read immediately, without the film’s preceding or following action. |
| Cinematic image | The same frame placed within moving images and a story | Bresson’s ending makes the apparent separation part of a moment when Michel and Jeanne find one another. |
| Painted image | A hand-and-oil rendering that reworks both the still and the remembered movement | Bee’s color, geometry and altered emphasis make the source available to interpretations beyond the film’s original narrative flow. |
This is a comparison of the forms at issue in Schwartz’s essay, not a universal hierarchy. The painting does not become more authentic because it is handmade, nor does the film cease to matter once its frame is painted. Each form supplies a different relationship between looking, time and memory.
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Color turns the bars into an active structure
Bresson’s black-and-white image makes the bars legible as a stark separator. Bee’s orange, blue and other colored forms make them less purely descriptive. Their grid can still be read as an obstacle, but it also behaves like an abstract composition laid over the figures. The bars no longer only divide two people; they organize the whole surface.
Schwartz reads this geometry as ambiguous. The grid may hold either figure or both, so the painting does not assign confinement to one character alone. Color appears to emerge from the film’s darkness, yet it also interrupts the source’s austere mood. Orange can feel warm or warning; blue can suggest distance or cool illumination. Those associations are possibilities produced by the painting’s surface, not fixed symbols that Bee has publicly defined for this work.
The change from monochrome to color also alters the viewer’s sense of time. Bresson’s frame feels like a pause inside an ongoing film. Bee’s colored blocks and bars ask the eye to move across a surface, back and forth among figure, grid and gaps. The painting creates duration through looking rather than through projected motion.
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Schwartz argues that Bee’s version gives greater attention to Jeanne, while Bresson’s film is primarily organized around Michel. This is an interpretation of emphasis, not a documented statement that Bee set out to correct the film or to announce a particular feminist program.
In the source narrative, Michel’s choices, voice and criminal education determine the film’s trajectory. The final image arrives as a change in his relation to another person. Bee’s painting, by contrast, gives no sustained access to Michel’s interior story. The two bodies become formal partners inside the grid, and Jeanne’s position in the foreground can command the viewer’s first look. Her presence is not merely the destination of Michel’s arc; it becomes one of the painting’s primary visual facts.
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Schwartz reports asking Bee about the recurring role of woman as an agent of salvation. He says she was comfortable with that role when it appears alongside other forms of feminine agency. This reported answer should not be treated as a direct explanation of Pickpocket specifically. It does, however, help explain why the painting can be discussed in terms of Jeanne’s agency without reducing her to a reward for Michel’s transformation.
Confinement versus connection
The most productive way to compare film and painting is to keep both readings in view. The bars indicate confinement, and the closed eyes can suggest withdrawal or vulnerability. At the same time, the scene occurs at the point of reunion. The painting does not resolve that contradiction; its colored grid makes it more visible.
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- In the film’s narrative: separation is part of a movement toward contact. The ending gains force from what the viewer knows about Michel and Jeanne.
- In the isolated frame: the figures appear divided, and the absence of movement makes the barrier feel definitive.
- In Bee’s painting: the grid can imprison, connect, shelter or simply structure the composition. Color keeps the image open to more than one emotional direction.
Schwartz describes Bresson’s method as austere and reliant on intimation and silence. He reads Bee’s pluralism as an expansion toward multiple forms of illumination. Those are critical judgments, so they belong to Schwartz’s reading rather than to an objective account of what every viewer must see.
Barthes’s punctum and studium in Schwartz’s reading
Schwartz uses Roland Barthes’s terms punctum and studium to separate the painting’s immediate shock from the understanding supplied by context. The punctum is the detail or sensation that catches a viewer before explanation: in this case, the divided bodies, the closed eyes, the force of the bars or the unexpected color. The studium develops when the viewer learns that the image comes from the end of Bresson’s film, where the protagonists find one another.
That framework explains why film knowledge changes the painting without exhausting it. A viewer unfamiliar with Pickpocket can experience the image as a compelling representation of distance. A viewer who knows the film recognizes an additional tension: what looks like an impasse is also the visual residue of connection. Neither response cancels the other.
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Bresson’s advice about looking
Schwartz connects the painting to Bresson’s reflections in Notes on the Cinematograph, the NYRB Classics edition cited in the essay. Two statements are especially relevant:
“Have a painter’s eye. The painter creates by looking.”
The essay cites this sentence on page 83. Bee’s work makes the act of looking visible: she looks at a film frame, isolates it from its original flow and rebuilds it through oil, color and decisions about emphasis.
“Mark out clearly the limits with which you seek to let yourself be surprised by your model. Infinite surprises within a finite frame.”
This passage appears on page 66 of the cited edition. It offers a precise description of the tension in Bee’s method. The source frame supplies a finite arrangement—two figures, bars and a narrow moment—while the painting discovers surprises inside those limits. The recognizable scene remains present, but its possible meanings multiply.
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How to compare the painting with the film still
A careful comparison does not require treating either work as an illustration of the other. Use the following sequence when viewing them together:
- Start with the painted surface. Note where orange, blue and other geometric forms interrupt or surround the figures. Describe what your eye encounters before naming the film.
- Map the bodies and the barrier. Identify the woman in front, the man behind, the bars and the closed eyes. Ask whether the grid seems to separate one person, both people or the entire picture.
- Look at the film frame in isolation. Observe how black-and-white contrast, stillness and the bars shape your first response without the rest of the plot.
- Restore the cinematic context. Remember that the image appears at the end of Bresson’s 1959 film, when Michel and Jeanne find one another. Notice how that knowledge changes the apparent meaning of the barrier.
- Compare narrative emphasis. Consider how much of your attention goes to Michel in the film and how the painted composition may redirect it toward Jeanne or toward the shared space between them.
- Separate evidence from interpretation. The dates, source frame and visual changes are established facts. Claims about salvation, illumination or Jeanne’s priority are critical readings, most directly associated here with Schwartz.
What is established, and what remains open
| Question | What can be stated securely | What should remain qualified |
|---|---|---|
| When was Bee’s painting made? | 2013. | No additional production history is provided. |
| How many works are in the series? | Schwartz identifies five paintings in Bee’s Pickpocket series. | No titles, dates or locations for all five works are specified in Schwartz’s essay. |
| What is the source? | A still from Bresson’s Pickpocket, specifically the ending image described above. | No particular home-video edition, frame number or current screening source is named. |
| What did Bee intend? | The painting demonstrably changes the source through color, oil paint and geometry. | Schwartz’s interpretations of Jeanne, salvation and illumination should not be presented as Bee’s confirmed intention for this painting. |
| Where can readers find broader context? | The essay cites Eye of the Storm: Selected Works 1981–2023, a 2024 catalog from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum; Bee’s University of Pennsylvania artist page links to it. | Its current availability and whether the catalog reproduces Pickpocket are not specified. |
Further reading and viewing
Schwartz’s essay, “Bee and Bresson: Pickpocket and its Painting,” appeared in Senses of Cinema, Issue 118, in July 2026. It is the direct source for the comparison and for the interpretations discussed here. Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph is the most directly supported reading companion because the essay quotes and cites it, including pages 66 and 83 in the NYRB Classics edition identified in its endnotes.
The 2024 catalog Eye of the Storm: Selected Works 1981–2023 offers a route into Bee’s broader practice through the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Its stock status and whether it includes this particular painting are not specified. Likewise, no specific film-media edition is named, and current availability for Pickpocket is not given; readers should verify those details for their region and preferred format.
Why the painting matters
Bee’s Pickpocket demonstrates how a borrowed film image can become independent without losing its origin. The painting preserves the recognizable encounter of woman, man and bars, yet its colored geometry changes the terms of attention. Bresson’s frame belongs to a story in which Michel’s path leads toward Jeanne. Bee’s surface lets the viewer remain with the barrier itself, with Jeanne’s foreground presence and with the unresolved possibility that a structure can confine and connect at once.
That is the lasting distinction between the two works. The film gives the image a place in time; the painting gives it another way to occupy a viewer’s attention. Looking from one to the other reveals not a choice between cinematic truth and painterly invention, but the new meanings that appear when a finite frame is seen again through a different medium.
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