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In 1955, French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot came up with a novel way of documenting the process of creation of his friend, this artist guy called Pablo Picasso, of whom you may have heard. The resultant film, The Mystery of Picasso , is one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen. I watched it three times yesterday (or rather, during the second two viewings I was mostly listening to the two different audio commentaries, glancing up from time to time (I was drawing) to check out a particular drawing).
Over the course of the filming, Picasso created 20 new artworks, ranging from simple pen sketches to full-on oil paintings, some of which I daresay were museum-quality (and some of which, as you'll see when you watch the film, are not) (there's a legend surrounding the film that all the artwork created for it was destroyed, but an historian who recorded one of the commentary tracks asserts that she has personally seen at least one of the oils, and has good reason to believe a few of the others are in private collections*).
Clouzot developed an ingenious way to show the process of creation. A translucent board was placed in an easel, on which Picasso would draw with a magic-marker or felt-tip pen. The ink would bleed through the back, which was being filmed by the camera. Thus, without seeing the hand of the artist, marks appear onscreen, as if created on the etch-a-sketch of a perverse and precocious child. Picasso runs down the list of his themes - the bullfight, artist and model, still-life, etc. during these quick sketches. Matisse, who has recently died, is present explicitly or implicitly in many of the drawings.
The titular mystery is twofold - at the beginning, Clouzot's narration posits that of all the arts, the process of creating a painting is perhaps the easiest to document (as opposed to the composition of a song, poem, etc.) because we can see the hand of the artist in action - Picasso being particularly well-suited to this project because of the spontaneous way he was working at this time. The spontaneity provides the second mystery - the suspense element - what will Picasso do next?
Of course, while the mystery of what will Picasso draw (there's an anecdote that Clouzot and his cinematographer would, on the beginning of a new sketch, bet what it would be) is more or less solved (though several of the works go through extreme metamorphoses), and there's even a great (probably staged) race against the clock (or, more accurately, Picasso trying to finish before they run out of film), the film of course cannot explain or even illustrate the creative process. In the extensive oil painting sequences, the real meat of the film, we see Picasso, mostly inexplicably, rework, over and over, parts of paintings that the viewer would consider marvelous. Indeed, it's hard to keep from yelling "stop, Picasso, stop!" at the screen when he goes and covers up something great. Plenty of the paintings and drawings looked best in the middle of the work, rather than at the end, and there's even one that goes, very, very wrong - probably the most interesting sequence to watch.
So, has anybody seen this?
(* Of course, maybe the one she saw was a fake - I mean, could you think of an easier painting to fake than one for which you can witness the process of creation?) |
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