Alberto Giacometti: One Of The Most Important Sculptors Of The 20th Century | Perspective

[Music] my name is stanley tucci i've written and directed a film which just premiered at the berlin film festival [Music] final portrait has been a labor of love which i have researched for more than two decades okay let's go it tells the story of an artist and personal hero of mine alberto giacometti not so far i've been searching for the truth of this enigmatic and obsessive man and in this documentary i'm going to try to tell you why the more i learned about him the more i i wanted to see his work and i wanted to know more about him i remember i went to the pompadour museum and we're going through and they had all kinds of contemporary art and it was sort of chronological and from what i can remember and then suddenly in the middle of the museum is this room filled with giacomettis and it hit me and i was so moved by them overwhelmed by them and i saw that what he did was what everybody else i had just looked at for the last 45 minutes or so that's what they were trying to get to [Music] the human condition expressed through art pared it down to its absolute essence born in switzerland in 1901 giacometti is best known for his stick thin human figures which are now the most highly priced sculptures in the world but it's not just his works that fascinate me it's also the way he lived although rich and famous in his lifetime he lived in squalor in the same tiny paris studio keeping wads of cash under his bed frequenting prostitutes and getting into scrapes with the underworld he lived in this unorthodox way until his death in 1966 and yet maintained his pure artistic vision to the end i'm going to meet artists experts and old friends of giacomettis to find out how his life and work came together to make him a towering figure of 20th century art [Music] well i grew up in westchester county where my dad was an art teacher in a what what you would call a state school here and on the weekends or even after dinner at night my dad would sketch you and draw you maybe do a little painting or something but you know it's it's it's a really great and interesting unusual experience there's something fascinating about it and when you do draw somebody you know you know them you know them so well and yet you realize you don't know them at all you think i had no idea that that that her mouth was that like that or how that i mean you're just so you're constantly it's shifting like the reality is shifting from this person that you know to this person that you've never ever seen before what are you doing don't move there stay there that's good how much longer can it go like this almost all of giacometti's work whether sculpture or painting was focused on portraiture and the human form he was famous for restarting works again and again and even destroying them in his relentless pursuit of capturing the truth of the human condition tate modern and the giacometti foundation in paris are preparing for the biggest giacometti exhibition in britain for several decades some of the pieces show his obsessive reworking in action the director of tate modern and curator of the exhibition francis morris is going to show me some paintings i've never had the chance to see we've got two paintings from the collection to show you in here beginning with this little gem from 49. in some ways it's so unusual for jack committee and it isn't a portrait yeah and yet it's so telling because it reveals the center of his universe which was the studio you know he did this studio again and again and again over the years and that the elements in the studio change but the studio itself never heard know there's that stool that all the models sat on yeah i never like kind of psycho analyzing an artist's work but it's interesting that the first thing that happened to giacometti was he was sat as a model for his father yes so to be looked at and look back at the artist must have made an incredible impression on it right and he loved it there's something really comforting about it but i find that really um strange have you ever sat for an artist yeah oh yeah did you find it comfortable uh it doesn't no i didn't find an uncle my dad was an artist so i would sit for him sometimes when i was a kid i think i but most people would be very uncomfortable yeah i've been longing to see the second painting which is of caroline giacometti's muse and lover towards the end of his life let's look at the painting of catalin from 65 which is what must be one of uh jacomet's last work but it's also so typical because you get this concentration on a single figure this time a woman seated but really the painting is all about the face and all about the eyes so that obsession with the gaze is in a way the one line of continuity through all his work the thing about them is that they keep you know they move to me they keep moving but you're absolutely right the effect of that is not to create a fixed figure it's a figure who kind of dips in and out of space you feel everything that's going on inside that person emotionally you probably know more about caroline than i do she was a mistress lover close friend it seems the more late paintings of caroline than any other model yeah but he became completely obsessed with her yeah towards the end he wouldn't let her go he felt that she gave him so much yeah that's one actually one of the lines that we use in the in the film is that you know well i think it's interesting that giacometti often sustained work over a portrait over many many days and it doesn't feel as if he started with one thing and then gradually built up he returned kind of every morning to start again and he explained that every day he saw the model anew so that every stroke is like captures that moment in time and only that moment it's what an actor has to do so in a way when you're repeating something it has to be fresh every time and new every time but the difference between jacob and actors you're doing it in real time right exactly the challenge for giacometti was of course to capture yeah that movement at what point do you you do you miss the painting when you say it's finished but that's why he never said they were finished that's why he never said they were finished you know he was a very modern figure and it was about life and capturing the essence of life which is a really positive thing i agree [Music] someone who's had first-hand experience of giacometti's creative process is the businessman and philanthropist lord sainsbury i was very excited to meet you because uh i know that you sat for giacometti right and you were yeah when you're about 15 years i was i was 15 yes my mother said um do you think david looks rather like a giacomettis or long and lanky and do you think it'd be nice to get some drawings and buy a better of him so the next afternoon my parents went off and then he just drew me uh for two hours took there was there was no break or anything it was just for two hours uh the only interruption is every so often he rather alarmingly put his head in his hands and and grown uh i didn't quite know what how you would should respond to this i just said originally there right um and then my parents came back after two hours and there were these five marvelous drawings my parents said uh we'd like to buy three of these and uh he said no now he said i can't sell them to you they're dreadful i couldn't draw this afternoon but at this point annette uh who was the girlfriend yes came in and it turned out what she really wanted was a macintosh from women's right so eventually a deal was done she would get the macintosh and my parents would get the three drawings um and we went off clutching clutching the drawings um and these are the drawings or these are these are copies of the outfit of the of the drawing yeah i mean that's a very typical sort of giacomet yeah um sort of pose pose yeah i love the idea that every sitter sat in the same place in the same chair is that right yeah yeah for years and years and years in basically the same pose right and staring directly at him the other thing that i do remember very much from sitting with him is this extraordinary studio um because it was really quite derelict and dilapidated and i think he slightly like francis bacon uh there was this kind of um very sparse life right and it was about we don't want any sort of creature comforts right to get in the way of this kind of search for perfectionism right uh and this kind of vision what do you think it was that drew your parents to to to giacometti people like giacometti and and henry moore and and francis bacon when they were sort of pariahs of the art world well i think i think this is the most extraordinary thing about my parents particularly my father which is he had no art education right so he would always say well i buy what i like [Music] as someone who paints myself i've always been fascinated by the scratchy restless quality of giacometti's painting style in researching the film i learned everything i could about his technique one of the people who helped me do that is rowan harris who painted the portraits of the film live on camera rowan rowan's agreed to paint my portrait giacometti style come in how's it going yeah very good thanks good good it's an incredible treat for me this is a torture that's the chai that's the chair yeah yeah giacometti's works are still protected by his copyright so for this experiment we were given special permission with one condition the painting had to be destroyed afterwards so rowan tell us about the experience of painting on the movie what was that like for you it's quite stressful doing that sort of thing you know i normally work here you know off camera and you know having time to work things out so definitely doing it on on camera is is a real challenge it's a very difficult way of painting to mimic and because it has such a sort of freeness and looseness to it um i'm always sort of trying to get the essence of the person but also because of the work that i do is for the purposes of film you're also trying to get the quality of that artist so you've sort of got several things going on in your mind it's not like being an artist painting his own work but i remember when you came in with the first versions and i said to you you're too good a painter so this is a terrible insult to giacometti but what i meant was that in a lot of ways his painting is it's almost like you're drawing with it's painting i think it's drawing with the brush there seems to be a real parallel between his sculpture and the way that he uses the clay and manipulates that in the way that he uses a brush as well i think the two are very interconnected how do you mean i feel that it's all linear the heads you know they're constructive linear marks right but they have a real sort of sculptural um intensity to them so real feel of form and structure and it feels like he's trying to sort of discover an essence of what he's doing i think that's what makes them so powerful so once he feels he's captured that essence it's it's over yeah you think about the palette that he chose and the very conscious choice of the lack of color it is stripping things away to sort of the bear essentials yeah with his stuff you have to be drawn into it don't you yeah i don't think it's it's accessible i think within the art world he's still held in a very high esteem but maybe it's why he's not had such a um an appeal to a wider audience yeah so where do you think giacometti stands as a painter i mean i see him as an artist and i don't really differentiate i suppose between his sculptures and his paintings well he's extraordinary i see him as an artist who worked in drawing painting and sculpture and they were all very closely linked yeah and i think fed off each other most probably as well right [Music] oh rowan that will never do that's fantastic it's so weird trying to make it feel spontaneous feel loose yeah make it look like giacometti and also try and get a representative right exactly yeah yeah it's difficult you did it oh that's really gorgeous wow thank you ron oh it's a pleasure thank you so much it's a pleasure thanks a lot thank you died a long time it was really interesting watching roan paint and how he was able to approximate giacometti's style was pretty impressive very impressive and it helps you see how singular and particular giacometti's style is giacometti's paintings are obsessive and distinctive but what really made me fall in love with this artist was his sculpture [Music] [Music] alberto giacometti first came to the attention of the art world as part of the surrealist movement of 1930s paris but it's his later stripped-down strung out sculptures cast in bronze that really fascinate me and one of the best places in the world to see them is denmark we're here at the louisiana gallery outside of copenhagen a place i've always wanted to come and this has one of the most significant giacometti collections uh anywhere the director of the gallery paul eric tozner is going to show me how giacometti sculpture evolved from surrealism to the iconic figures we know today you know this one yeah this is this is the uh it's the walking woman it's from his surrealist period from 1932 yes 34. and it's a strange story i mean because it used to be another kind of sculpture it had long arms you know oh that's right and the head of a cello you know this typical surrealist way of dealing with yeah and then he reduced it it's gorgeous and it's interesting that it really is so figurative without all those sort of accoutrement of like the head of a cello or something and that was the reason that he was kicked out by the surrealist because he began again to be interested in the outer world and he couldn't help but get back to the figure and they and basically he was kicked out because he started to use model again yeah [Music] oh my oh my this is the venice women from 1956 so these are about you know a universal image of mankind or womankind they're stunning yeah there's a story about this you know normally we see this as a very noble presentation of female parties but there's a story that there might be another pretext that giacometti used to go to the brothels and in some of these brothels the women were like objects positioned along with the wall and he could select right and he would choose yeah yeah so it's another kind of a story underneath this very sort of yeah noble scenery yes yes i think so typical for the late 50s and onwards he works so strong with the gays then when you when you go here you see them as thing or yeah things or bodies or women that are very exposed to your gaze but you know if you really look at them they're looking at you yeah and the thing is they're dead and alive at the same time like no other sculpture i've i've ever seen no there's an incredible energy in them they almost vibrate they're not huge sculptures but they're something that they're saying they're incredible they're very demanding very powerful yeah yeah yeah i can't describe how i feel about them all i know is that okay i have to keep looking at them yeah i have to keep looking at them because if i could describe it i'd probably if i really knew i'd probably never look at them again [Music] so the big view is from here there you are wow that's so beautiful so walking men go to walking man guess so we think about this sculpture being an iconic work by giacometti almost like a trademark yeah yeah a key to his importance as an artist in the 20th century is there are links back to ancient times to some eternal thing or universal thing and then it's really modern it is and it's modern and ancient at the same time yeah you know i think you just love them because they're so human they're the essence of of humanity i think the word essence is good because i always thought it's just like when you make a really good source i mean you don't make it bigger and bigger you know you make it smaller and smaller until you have the essence of something yeah and you see in a lot of his sculptures when he he adds things and then he takes things away in a way in a way and he ends up with this condensed version of humanity or whatever yeah call it i think the more you look at giacometti particularly in different settings the more confirmation i have that that there is such significant genius here and i never i never tire of looking at them [Music] he really only did what he wanted i mean the surrealists booted him out of their little club because he wasn't following along with their sort of dogmatic ideas of what art is supposed to be well art isn't supposed to be anything art is supposed to be just what you want it to be that's all and he knew that and i think there came a purity eventually in his work that i i you see very very rarely very rarely [Music] giacometti's sculptures seldom come up for auction but when they do they fetch staggering prices in 2010 walking man sold for 104 million dollars and in 2015 man pointing broke world records for a sculpture at 140 million dollars [Music] anthony gormley is one of britain's most famous sculptors and like me a huge giacometti fan stanley [Music] thank you thank you thanks for having me so um this is a choir so this is where it happens yeah this is where all sorts of things happen and um a lot of work's just left for belgium we're gonna do a show oh really brussels which opens in about a month's time i think half of my work has been about trying to make an account of what it feels like to inhabit a body and the other half of the work is actually making instruments that make people aware of their bodies right in a way hopefully that amplifies their sense of being alive yeah but this is one of your attractions to giacometti isn't it i mean the figure itself but also the figure i think he's interested in space i think he he became obsessed in a way with recording his own visual perception of the world around him and i think in many ways the drawings do that yeah even more extraordinarily than the sculpture yeah that nervous anxious line that says i don't know what is a world i don't even really believe in my own existence the only way i can realize it is this constant almost like a like like a you know the graph of an uh a cardiogram you know yeah nervously notating his perception of the world outside him and all of jack and matty's work is full of accidents that are a byproduct of this anxiety really i think anxiety to capture the truth let's go let's go you thank you giacometti he's really known for his sculpture but his painting is extraordinary and like you say his drawings are extraordinary but people maybe in a way find it easier to relate to paintings than they do to sculpture that there's something about sculpture that's sort of off-putting or that they don't really know how to relate to it do you do you find that at all i am i'm obviously committed to sculpture yes i know and why am i committed to sculpture it is not a picture of something right it is something it is something right and as a result the world has to change yeah you're making something that wasn't there before and you put it out there in the world and the world has to give it space and i think there is a real difficulty with sculpture because in in in a sense it exists in the space that perhaps we want to live in this space and this and this time and this time yeah i think that is one of the most powerful effects of sculpture if it works is that you become intensely aware reflexively of your own being in time your position in space what makes giacometti so important to you there is no greater example of what the life of an artist should be the continual pursuit of the impossible the the obsessive compulsive need to realize experience and the continual skepticism the continual re kind of examination of what well what that job is right right and he never stopped and and i mean in a way you could say he got he got caught by his own obsession because you could say you know though those that would like to believe in a progressive story of modernity would like to think that we move through periods and giacometti in some senses turned his back on that idea and said no actually the cave painters did it better than any of us there is no progress we what we have to do is like they did bear witness to the existence of other creatures at a distance or else right again and again again it was fascinating he was fascinating he summed up so clearly why giacometti is such a great artist but also being able to articulate sculptures place in the world as a whole but also as it relates to us individually in us and as a society um and its importance and it's and how we deal with it or can't deal with it offense fantastic [Music] [Music] by the late 1950s alberto giacometti's artworks were selling for huge figures but the man himself lived modestly even squalidly with his wife annette and brother diego in the same decrepit studio he'd moved into in 1927. it's a paradox i've long been fascinated by and now i'm excited as i'm about to meet someone who sat for giacometti ike sapone lives in nice but as a girl she visited the paris studio many times with her father how did your father meet giacometti um [Music] entire collection of picasso the book of artists rob [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] it was very exciting to meet eika she's one of the only people around who knew giacometti who's spent time with him again and again uh and uh it was it was lovely to have a sort of more personal insight into him [Music] in the 1960s giacometti studio became almost as famous as he was a symbol of parisian artistic integrity to understand why i've come to meet the writer and art historian michael pepiat we know giacometti studio was this really small smaller than this than this room his studio and he stayed there for 40 years can you talk about that well it's strange isn't it possibly he found uh in the studio in the ipolit a place that was almost i think of it almost like a um like a shell um that it it was his sort of carapace yeah that protected him not so much it protected him from the world but i think he found he had everything he needed there yeah and this is rather i mean it is a rather marvelous thing that he could have had any kind of palatial space with sort of you know rooms to draw rooms to paint rooms to make sculpture but he had everything this complete sort of essence in that single room and it was a complete giacometti universe yeah it was its own work of art but everything was like you say reductive distilled distilled almost to to its purest sense and then the studio itself becomes that i think it probably helped him get to the essence i mean there wasn't a shred not a suggestion of luxury yeah all that came from this search for the truth yeah and i think that's why we're very moved by giacomettis art not just that it's reduced to the bone so that you've got this essence you can't you know you can't reduce it anymore you've that's it uh but it's because it's the essence of the truth that he's looking always to reproduce life which of course is an impossible thing right what was happening in the art scene in the 50s 50s and 60s up until giacometti's death things were changing pretty distinctly yes by that time i think um giacometti had partly become famous not not just for the work his way of life uh but for this studio in the studio although he led a um a a kind of monk-like existence there uh the whole world came to him um didn't marlena dietrich come to him yes she did she did picasso visited them obviously all those photographers visited a lot of artists visited huge numbers of poets and writers um and i think they liked sort of seeing him in his lair yeah and so uh although it was terribly broken down it was a sort of magical space that drew people he only did what he wanted to do the way he wanted to do it yes and that's what makes him so so pure yes you could say if you manage to capture the essence of you know of mankind it's going to be universal and it's going to be um it's going to be beyond uh any any particular period it's going to be for all time yeah yeah yes [Music] he's so interesting because of the way he worked the intensity with which he worked and the intensity with which he lived his life which was bizarre and those two things it's like his life and his art became the same kind of thing [Music] michael confirmed what i felt when making the film that the studio was the center of giacometti's world we had to build a detailed replica of it for the film but at the time we couldn't look inside as it's now a private residence enclosed to visitors [Music] in recreating the studio we wanted to be as specific as possible of course we weren't allowed to get in there but we did have uh so much to draw from um because it was very well documented um but this here is the these externals for the most part the roof line certainly remains the same as it did during giacometti's time it felt very humbling to be recreating his world his life in this uh set uh that we built which of course was as near as damage a reincarnation of the exact space that he frequented every day of his life for numerous years the model is to scale so as you can see it at the studio the bedroom and then the outside courtyard here with a mezzanine area up here these walls lived and breathed the artist you know he used the walls as his canvas and then here really sort of back to basics he had his toilet his pissoir the truth was that he used to put a plank of wood over the pisswah stand on it and pull the chain but this time not the toilet chain the chain that turned the shower on and he'd shower over the piswah that's how gruesomely base his life was insane really it's not like you know a starving artist who was only successful only made money after death money's like toilet paper to him since we've been filming the owner of the studio has come home he's agreed to let me see inside that almost sacred space for the very first time hello hello how are you hello fine are you good good good good good welcome to the giacometti studio i can't believe it i've been living here for 20 years now the transformation of the studio has been made after the under the committee death yes right and the walls the is this the this is the space right was this this is a little bit bigger or no the dimensions have not changed but um he used the courtyard to make his sculpture the bigger yeah yeah yeah and this was the door this is the original yeah it was the the whale of the well this movie we made recreating the studio it was a huge effort and very exciting to do and i never ever thought that i would walk into the actual space thank you senor thanks a lot okay i never expected to to be in this space ever [Music] [Music] by the late 1950s alberto giacometti was one of the most celebrated artists in the world but what fascinates me is his secretive inner life and the person who i think holds the key is caroline the mysterious other woman in giacometti's life you know his relationships with women were very very complicated he got married sort of begrudgingly in the late 40s to annette who lived with him in this sort of of a of a place in paris eventually he bought her an apartment that she lived in but he never wanted to go there he wanted to live in this hovel he frequented prostitutes all the time that never changed after he got married she put up with it for whatever reason and he ended up towards the end of his life having a long-term relationship with this woman caroline at that point in his life she was ever present [Music] caroline died in 2015. unfortunately i never got to meet her but i've come to meet a man who did [Music] former art critic frank mober was as fascinated by her relationship with giacometti as i am so fascinated that he wrote a book about it [Music] [Music] [Music] on although giacometti remained married to annette caroline was his muse and lover and he painted her right up until his death in 1966. [Music] the painting i saw at tate modern is just one of at least 28 portraits of caroline giacometti was obsessed with her and these paintings declare it to the world giacometti's life was a paradox he'd become one of the most famous artists in the world yet unlike his contemporaries he continued to live in squalor and chaos until the very end i'm going to talk to one of the last people alive who knew giacometti and might be able to tell me why i'm at the maest gallery near nice to meet adrian maste his father amy was gallerist to several of the leading artists of the century including matisse and miro and was one of the first people to see the importance of giacometti's work your father really made a significant difference in giacometti's career when did that relationship begin um my father opened the gallery in paris in 1945. my father used to say the best way to to to help an artist to be to become known is to make prints because print is just expensive it is original right and i'm further as to alberto to make the theory of lithograph the morning i go to alberto he gave me a few dollars on the lithographic paper i go to the printer we make the the proof i go back to to show to alberto he met girl he corrected i did this for one month on that that month where you were running back and forth we were you see were you also watching him work and we're too he liked to make portrait and he speak when he made portraits he continued to speak he made some drawing of me but he found that i do i move too much you got to stay and he liked you to stay still yeah i have a beautiful itching there if you want to see i will show you i have the only copy of the chin of the object visible yeah that's beautiful and you don't like it so it destroys uh the cooper you played you are very poor place yeah and don't try to to chill ask a few times to alberto well better you don't buy a nice apartment and he say i don't want to be the prisoner of the coffer yeah i think he's one of the most important artists yeah he made the is just a middle before the the 19th century and the 21 century it was a center yeah i know also this great artist matisse black and giacometti was i feel that it was the most important [Music] being on this journey it hasn't changed my opinion of document it's only enhanced it it's enriched it and it's confirmed my belief that he really was the consummate artist the sort of perfect artist in a way and these sculptures those paintings the drawings each one is a search for the truth and you see it and it's undeniable and that and i don't i have to say i don't know any other artist in which we see that so clearly he is a timeless timeless artist i'm sad to to leave it but you can always go look at them someplace um

Channel: Perspective

Views: 28,245

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, alberto giacometti documentary, alberto giacometti drawing, alberto giacometti animation, alberto giacometti sculptures, alberto giacometti most famous work, alberto giacometti death, art, giacometti, sculpture, artist, alberto giacometti (visual artist), sculpture (visual art form), Alberto Giacometti documentary, Alberto Giacometti, Stanley Tucci

Id: N05Ox0Lkkj0

Length: 46min 44sec (2804 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021