Welles art exhibit this August in Edinburgh

[Wellesnet]

First major Orson Welles art exhibit set for Edinburgh this summer:
http://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-a ... edinburgh/

[Terry]

Guardian pans Edinburgh exhibit of Welles drawings:

"Orson Welles’s boot slumps in a heap of soft black leather in the oddest and saddest art exhibition in Edinburgh this summer. It is an object of great melancholy, a charity-shop image of failure and waste. The same entropic aura clings to his drawings, paintings and doodles.

The visual art of Orson Welles has never been exhibited before, and that’s because it isn’t really art. Welles did caricatures of himself, landscape sketches of the many places his film-making adventures took him, and made his own Christmas cards. These disparate daubs and jokes communicate the titanic personality of the man but also the frustration of his creative life. You get the impression he had too much doodling time. The exhibition smells of dead cigars and lonely hotel rooms."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... son-welles
https://festival18.summerhall.co.uk/exh ... -sketches/

[Le Chiffre]

Hmmm, that's a nasty little beating.

[RayKelly]

These disparate daubs and jokes communicate the titanic personality of the man but also the frustration of his creative life. You get the impression he had too much doodling time. The exhibition smells of dead cigars and lonely hotel rooms.

That was as brutal as it gets.
Some of Welles work consists of doodles, but there are some beautiful items too.

[Le Chiffre]

Yes, both of those paintings are wonderful, and I think clearly convey Welles's passionate enthusiasm for the subjects. As for the doodles, Simon Callow, in his afterword to the published version of LAS BRAVADES, points out that, although painting, drawing and drafting was the talent of his "that Welles prized least highly, it was one that he practiced as long as he lived, from the drawings and sketches of Everybody's Shakespeare when he was sixteen...to the annual Christmas cards sent to friends and family, and the lavishly and brilliantly executed drawing for the issue of Vogue's Paris edition that he supervised in 1982. His painting and drawing is consistently witty, well-observed, evocative, and quite remarkably assured. Whenever he wished to make an affectionate personal gesture, this was the medium he chose. In LAS BRAVADES, Rebecca Welles was the recipient of one of the largest and most bountiful of these gestures."

[Wellesnet]

Gallery of nice Welles pictures in this page by the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/galler ... son-welles

[tadao]

I was able to see the exhibition in Edinburgh last week. Very grateful for the announcement on this site, without it I might not have become aware of the exhibition.

The show is made up of approximately 120 artworks of various sizes and formats, divided into the subheadings 'Joker', 'Costumes', 'Romance', 'Christmas', 'Alcohol' and 'Despair'.

The Quixote and toraedor images shown upthread look much more impressive in real life than they do on the computer screen. The smaller pictures and sketches elsewhere reproduce well onto screen. Curious that in that 2nd Guardian article, only the last 3 images are actually part of the exhibition.

The other Guardian article is pretty weird. The thesis that the Edinburgh Art Festival is dwarfed by the scale, diversity and excitement of the Fringe is reasonable. Not sure what the author is arguing; visual arts shouldn't be exhibited during the Fringe? Or should be shown only if they compare in magnitude and scope to 4000+ stage performances from every viewpoint and corner of the globe? That the Welles pictures don't merit an exhibition at all because they're 'pathetic' (by which I'd like to think the author means 'evoking pathos'), although 'the most memorable' of the summer's art exhibitions?

The groupings work fairly well and the large collection of Christmas cards spread over several cases are the highlight of the show for me. Rather than giving me the impression of 'too much doodling time' and 'dead cigars', the best of the images have a freshness, immediacy and sense of fun that makes a contrast with the more tortuous process of scripting, funding, shooting and editing a film. I'd agree with the Guardian reviewer that it 'isn't really art'; and I'd argue that it's not intended to be treated as such, but instead as immediate, and affectionate means of self expression and communication. There are also images included that are not, and have no pretension to be 'artworks', including rough, functional scenic sketches and descriptions of camera movements. I can see how they contribute to the jumble sale feeling of the exhibition. Welles's boot appears in the first cabinet in the gallery, a repurposed gas cabinet from the Summerhall building's past existence as a medical college, complete with warning about hazardous gasses!

I spent over an hour in the modestly sized exhibition room and feel that Mark Cousins has done us a sterling service in getting these pictures seen and made widely available through his documentary, which I am quite excited to see. It feels like a previously untapped thread of insight and a fresh perspective on Welles.

There is a small room at the end of the exhibition with a video screen showing the work of the video artist for the 'Eyes of Orson Welles' film who has animated the illustrations as if being sketched at speed by an unseen hand. The animations are very impressive and yet seemed to me somehow to reduce the impact of the images, perhaps due to the apparent speed and effortlessness with which they are depicted coming into being. It will be interesting to see how effectively these incorporate into the film.

While in Edinburgh I was pleased to find that my accomodation had Netflix available, but was thwarted by the fact that 'The Other Side of the Wind' and its accompanying documentary haven't launched yet. I might not have any further Netflix access until next year!

[Wellesnet]

Thanks for the report, tadao!

[Roger Ryan]

Given that this item by Jean-Michel Basquiat...

https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/jean ... ane-9/4198

...sold for close to $4,000 and I saw it framed on the wall of a prestigious Detroit-area art museum last year, I'm thinking Welles' doodles can definitely be considered "art" and presented as such!