The man should remain obscure

Cézanne: Portraits of a Life (Exhibition on Screen / DVD)

In a letter to Joachim Gasquet from 1896, the painter Cézanne expounded a manifesto of the hidden author that set the tone for modern recluses from Greta Garbo to J. D. Salinger:

All my life I have worked to earn my living, but I thought one could paint well without attracting attention to one’s private life. Certainly an artist wishes to improve himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man should remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the study (of the work).

Director Phil Grabsky takes advantage of the traveling exhibit Cézanne: Portraits of a Life (Washington's National Gallery, Paris's Musée D'Orsay and London's National Portrait Gallery), with its pictures of professional colleagues, friends and family members, and especially self-portraits, to push back against this dictum, all to excellent effect. The film has superb commentary by three countries' worth of experts, fascinating insights from the painter's grandson Philippe, and Grabsky's usual effective mix of locations (especially Le Jas de Bouffan in Aix, where Cézanne painted for many years, now empty and very, very sad) and high definition video of the paintings, filmed in his always un-hackneyed way.

Grabsky captures Cézanne

Like all great directors Phil Grabsky is a story-teller. There's one final piece to the story in this film, which I think might be Grabsky's best so far: the absolutely outstanding voice acting of Brian Cox. This fine actor fully inhabits Cézanne through his readings of the letters, from the excitement and frustration of his early years to the achingly sad final letters to his son Paul, just before his death. One doesn't expect this high level of tragedy from an art documentary, but that's what we get from these fine artists. Highly recommended for viewing in your local cinema. I'll link to the DVD when it's released (due June 15, 2018).

Style, wit and grace in man and art

Exhibition on Screen: David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts

The latest film in the Exhibition on Screen series, coming soon to a cinema near you, and now out on DVD, is another Phil Grabsky masterpiece, this time featuring one of the greatest living artists, David Hockney. I've been following Grabsky's blog for the past few months; in a recent post he talked about his upcoming film (the new Cezanne one, which I'm excited about), and his key question was "What is the story of our film?" That was I'm sure also a challenge for this Hockney project, because of the astounding range and sheer volume of the painter's last decade.

I've been immersing myself in Hockney since my first viewing of this film. There's an excellent book by Tim Barringer and Edith Devaney that came out of the most recent Royal Academy of Arts exhibition, David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life, from 2016.

And from the 2012 RAA landscape exhibition, the equally fine David Hockney: A Bigger Picture.

As well, I watched Bruno Wollheim's film of the same name, released in 2010, which I highly recommend. It's available to stream on various platforms, as well as DVD. Hockney had never before allowed video cameras to film him as he painted, but he's completely at ease in front of Wollheim (who had to manage his camera himself), and there's something completely charming about their interactions.

In the latest film we see that same charm and ease in front of Phil Grabsky's cameras, now at a more sophisticated and probing level. The window he opens on Hockney and his dedicated team shows all the hard work that goes into each canvas and print-out. I've spoken before about the perfection of HD video when it comes to opening up the visual arts, and Grabsky is one of the best at presenting art without falling into camera tricks or being stagey or overly reverential. He captures Hockney's flamboyance but also his subtlety, and in the interviews with both the artist and the various experts he shows how the man's style, wit and grace have their mirror in his art. I can't imagine a better way to spend an hour and a half than going to the cinema to see this film. 

Now on to Cezanne!

A stunningly beautiful presentation

Exhibition on Screen: I, Claude Monet

HD video and surround sound are proving to be a big boost for documentaries about painters; the latest Exhibition on Screen Blu-ray features Phil Grabsky's fine film about Claude Monet, and it looks and sounds stunning on the home screen. Grabsky pulls you in (no pun intended) to Monet's world through well chosen excerpts from Monet's own writings (beautifully narrated by Henry Goodman), combined with artful and originally presented montages of the stunningly beautiful paintings. 

One of the plusses in this disc is the soundtrack, improvisations by composer Stephen Baysted combined with period piano works by Satie, Poulenc, Ravel, Fauré and others. These are played with style and wit by pianist Susan Legg. Here's an interesting article about Baysted's compositional process; the soundtrack album on CD/MP3 is here.

Insights into Beethoven from a great musician

This fine documentary film on DVD by Phil Grabsky presents Leif Ove Andsnes's epic Beethoven obsession, spread over four years and 150 performances in many cities. As he says: "a multi-season project that will make the composer’s music the centerpiece of my life as a performer and recording artist." It began like this:

I was on tour in Sao Paulo a few years ago, and when I checked into the hotel I realised that in the lifts they were playing a CD of Beethoven’s first and second piano concertos in a loop, the whole week. I thought that after two days this would make me absolutely mad. But the opposite happened, and I realized that listening to 37 seconds of these pieces each time I entered the life was quite wonderful, because I could just hear *that* bit. I thought ‘Oh, how beautiful, how original and how strange that is, how fresh and how different from any other music.’ And I thought, ‘Now is the time for me to tackle that, now is the time for me to do Beethoven.’

Watching Andsnes playing the piano and conducting the superb Mahler Chamber Orchestra in this sublime music is a great experience, though it does leave one wishing for the entire performances on video. I hope they'll be issued on DVD and Blu-ray soon. There are many times when Andsnes presents an idea in a very simple and straight-forward way, but the results are incredibly insightful and beautiful. One example is when he explains the significance of the cadenza near the end of Concerto no. 3, and moves to the ethereal transition from solo piano to piano and orchestra. I was transfixed! Here, and in his entire Beethoven Journey, Andsnes' hard work and commitment join with his amazing natural talent as a musician, with outstanding results.

The audio version of the five concertos plus the Choral Fantasy is available on three individual CD, or packaged together as a box set. I have one issue with the DVD, and I'm afraid it's a bit more than a quibble. Everything Andsnes says is so astute and penetrating, and you don't want to miss a thing. But he's very soft-spoken, and his voice is mixed at such a low level that when the piano and orchestra from the recording sequences come in the neighbours are apt to pound on the walls or ceiling. This film was made for theatrical release, and in a theatre with the right acoustics it might have been fine, but even trying different equalization settings on my system I was still straining to hear Andsnes while the orchestra was at the very high end of the comfortable listening range. Luckily there's the option to add subtitles (in English or Norwegian), so I didn't end up missing too much. This is an inconvenience, but not enough to cost this superb film a star; it still gets all five!