The making of art is as mad and mysterious and messy as alchemy. But shuffling through the hushed spaces of some grand museum, it’s often hard to remember that exhibits were born amid a jumble of ideas and experiments and errors; that they come from a land of muddy lumps and stone blocks and scrap heaps; greasy oils, leaking waters and powdery chalks.
Imagine if you could actually watch Michelangelo working — and that doesn’t mean ogling Charlton Heston as he strikes poses on scaffolding. Imagine if you could see a half-blind Rembrandt feeling his way around curdling self-portraits, or observe a frenzied Van Gogh “working without being aware of working . . . the strokes coming with a sequence and coherence like words in a speech”. How much more intimate might our relationship with these artists feel after that? How much further and deeper might our understanding of their work be led?
The Artists on Film Trust gives us a chance to find out. This charitable trust was set up seven years ago by Hannah Rothschild, the producer and director of several documentaries about artists (including a prize-winning study of Frank Auerbach), and by Robert McNab who, after completing his MA at the Courtauld Institute, went on to make films first with Kenneth Clark and then Robert Hughes. Its aim is to gather together as comprehensive as possible a collection of film footage showing artists in their studios or talking about their work.
Nobody knows who the first painter ever to be filmed was, but Renoir must have been among the earliest. A piece of 1915 footage shows him, a septuagenarian and nearing the end of his life, hunched in a bath-chair in front of a canvas. His hands are clotted with arthritis. His beard flows to his chest. And as he dabs at the canvas and then leans back to check, he smiles almost impishly as if the effect pleases him. To see footage like this is to watch art history in the making.
Yet until now this, and the thousands of other films of artists that have since been made, have been difficult to get hold of. They have been scattered in archives and libraries the world over. Each of these is catalogued according to its own system and accessed by its own set of bureaucratic rules. And many of the films cost as much as £250 to view. An invaluable part of our cultural history has been, if not actually lost, then made extremely complicated and expensive to find.
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The Artists on Film Trust has changed all that — though the process has been far more difficult and longwinded than either Rothschild or McNab dreamt. Now, this week, as the trust officially announces its partnership with the newly formed University of the Arts London, its collection of film and videotape footage of artists will at last find a permanent home in a site right next to Tate Britain on Millbank. The library will not only be open to anyone, but films can also be watched free of charge.
A promotional DVD tempts with vignettes. Here is Picasso, stripped to the waist and with oiled torso glistening. The screen fills with a stare so ferocious and dark that it seems almost to dream images from mind to paper direct before eventually destroying them because they were not up to scratch. Here is Giacometti, his long face as malleable as the putty that he fidgets so rapidly into place with his fingertips. Here is Magritte, sober as a bank clerk in his suburban home. “He’s a secret agent,” the narrator tells us, “his object is to discredit bourgeois reality and like all saboteurs he avoids detection by dressing just like everybody else. Even his studio is just an ordinary room.”
Stanley Spencer, commissioned to depict Britain at war, records the contribution of the Glasgow shipyards. Standing on top of a crane, or balanced wet-shoed on a narrow breakwater, he sketches on lavatory paper sheets which cloth-capped workers later unroll like a papyrus scroll to admire. Len Tabner sets up his easel on the bow of a boat that rises and falls in the heavy sea swell. Lowry draws in the streets under the surveillance of local children. Louise Bourgeois finds first pleasure and then sadness in destruction as she smashes a plaster model. Hockney, initially frustrated by a photo processor’s error, turns disaster to his own advantage by making a letter of apology a part of his piece.
To see works like this makes you wonder what has been lost. “Where, for example, is Tristram Powell’s film of Lucian Freud, made for the BBC in the 1970s and never seen since?” asks Rothschild. “Rushes of films are dumped in skips because of lack of storage space,” she says. “And even when they are kept, conservation is still a problem. Poorly stored film soon turns into celluloid soup. And early nitrate stock is highly flammable. It can only take one bad can for a whole vault to go up in flames. It happened in Rome just a little while ago. Cans of 35mm film were Frisbeeing through the suburbs.”
The trust urges us all to take a look in our attics. “People have been tinkering with home 8mm cameras since the early 1920s,” says Rothschild. “Old stuff keeps surfacing. A little while ago, someone found a film of Sickert working, which their grandson had taken.”
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On a basic level, these films provide a record of artists’ techniques. You see the balletic grace of Kandinsky’s watercolour drawings, Otto Dix feathering a smoothly modelled limb, Henry Moore carving with hammer and chisel, Gerald Scarfe hurling great buckets of paint, and Gilbert and George finding a fresh opportunity in the fact that a bluebottle that came buzzing into their studio had eaten their slide samples of blood and sperm.
But they also inspire new conjectures and ideas. “By the time the film of Monet was shot, his eyesight was also shot,” says McNab. “He is shown working outside on a canvas set up under a white parasol. He’s wearing a white hat so that his pupils were shaded and so more dilated than if he was under direct sunlight. And his beard and suit and waistcoat are also white. And noticing this, I can’t help wondering if, just as a photographer uses a white surface to bounce the light back, Monet wore these reflective white clothes to help him see better.”
The films also form an important record of the history of the artist’s documentary itself. McNab is particularly fascinated with Hans Cürlis, a German academic who all but invented the medium in the interwar years.
These film-makers are our 20th-century Vasaris, which means, McNab explains, that their work must be treated with the same objectivity as any other source. “There is always a subtext,” he says. “Henri Clouzot’s film of Matisse is a piece of pure propaganda.” The caped national crusader strides like the star of some hammy melodrama across Côte d’Azur landscapes. He is cast as the living embodiment of artistic genius. “Un prestige extraordinaire,” rumbles the voiceover as Matisse draws a sketchbook from his pocket with all the aplomb of an action hero drawing his gun. It was, indeed, a powerful weapon for the French who, though politically bankrupt at the time, were still out to prove a creative pre-eminence.
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“This sort of material will spawn a Niagara of PhDs,” says McNab, who over the coming months will present lectures on it at the Courtauld. “We are opening a door and there is this huge horizon ahead full of thought. Art historians are riveted.”
Meanwhile, the trust will continue expanding its collection to incorporate the work of contemporary artists — many of whom themselves use film as a medium. You can already find Tracey Emin’s Turner prize night performance and Damien Hirst striking Tarantino-style poses. In a piece of footage tightly controlled by Marc Quinn, the documentary becomes almost an art work in its own right. As the artist’s “blood head” bobs about in a tankful of water, a tiny swimming baby paddles gently about it. Life and death meet symbolically amid bubbles.
“But it isn’t really a success game,” as Frank Auerbach says in Rothschild’s own documentary. “The fact is that of all the hard-working painters, 999 out of a thousand will be washed away in the stream of history and the rest will last one or two or three hundred years.” He continues, he says, simply because “this has seemed to me what life is for”.
And perhaps this points to the main importance of the trust’s collection. Art is explored as something living, as something that arises out of a life, out of that alchemical moment when mind and matter come together, when a stream of consciousness flows into a craft. The films offer an extraordinarily intimate, almost secretive insight — a secret we can now all share.
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Artists on Film Trust (020-7286 3636)