Start the Week
20/12/2010
Andrew Marr talks to the sculptor Anthony Caro about the development of modern British sculpture. Caro once worked out of a small garage at home, creating his growing metal structures, and it's the artist's studio that interests the art critic, Michael Peppiatt. He's attempting to capture the unique atmosphere of the tiny ramshackle studio behind Montparnasse where Alberto Giacometti lived and worked for nearly 40 years. For the last decade Sir Mark Jones has worked out of one of the grandest buildings in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum. As he prepares to step down next year, he talks about the continuing relevance of a museum that showcases objects and design. While the V+A has regularly exhibited works of fashion, several haute couture shops now pretend to be art galleries, and the writer, Justine Picardie asks how far fashion can be considered art. Producer: Katy Hickman.
- Duration:
- 42m
- Broadcast on:
- 20 Dec 2010
- Audio Format:
- other
Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, form and fashion today with two very great sculptors, the head of one of our greatest museums and the biographer of perhaps the greatest figure in modern fashion. On this day, when London and Paris are divided by a jointly frozen transport system, we also reflect on the tales of art in two cities. If you parade through the shopping streets of either of them just now try not to fall over, you see glittering displays of fashion presented almost as art, and indeed London galleries seem to be full of exhibitions of clothes. Well, just in pickety, biographer of Coco Chanel is with us ahead of the London and Paris fashion seasons to ask if fashion is art. While Mark Jones, outgoing boss of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which has one of those shows on, looks back on a decade of design and display. First though are sculptors, Michael Peppiot spent much of his life in the odd intellectual pursuit of Giacometi, the Swiss sculptor, whose images of thin, attenuated people became famous around the world. He has a new book on Giacometi's hovel, or cave, of a studio in Paris. But we're going to open with a man very widely considered to be Britain's greatest living sculptor, Antony Caro, whose steel, bronze and wood forms starkly modern, sometimes huge, sometimes small, often playful, can be found around the world as well. Tony, there's a big exhibition opening early in the new year of modern British sculptor, a sculpture. Is there a school or schools of sculpture in Britain? It seems to me that painters very often move in schools like fish, but you sculptors are like kind of great sea beasts moving quietly and solitary around the oceans. But I think something strange has happened, which is that it's become natural for sculptors to exist in England. And when I look at sort of times in the world, there were the Mexicans, they just naturally made sculpture, West Africans naturally made sculpture, the Greeks, and so on. So there were sort of flourishing times, and I think it's our language now. It's wonderful. You spend a lot of your book a few early years working with Henry Moore, who I suppose is still seen as the sort of iconic English sculptor, I suppose. How important was were he and Barbara Hepworth and that group of sculptors in terms of popularizing and breaking through? Well, he was tremendously important, I think, to all sculptors. I don't think he broke through the public resistance, not until the very end of his life, but he was important to all of us because he gave us that confidence to feel we could hold our heads up and compete with Paris and with the serious sculptors who were working there and painters too. That was very important and he always paid tribute to Epstein, who he said broke through the resistance at the start. So it was a slow process this. And did it matter particularly that the middle of the 20th century was a period of lots of public commissioning of sculpture. It was the year of new towns and new schools and lots of new spaces being opened up and a sense that if you had a new park or a new space, you ought to have a new sculpture in the middle of it. Terrible mistake. I think really the advance of sculpture was not in the sort of commissioned world. It was in the rather private world where somebody was trying to make it better. Like one tries to make a better painting and there you're accepted but somehow in sculpture is treated as being a monumental subject, a bit like mural painting in painting. And we're going to be talking quite a lot about form and fashion and which follows which. But in your career, how important was it that large quantities of cold pressed steel were available at a crucial point? I mean were you searching around for the new materials that hadn't been exploited perhaps by earlier sculptors? No because steel was really using steel as an art material was 50 years old by the time I started I simply tried to reuse it a different way. I mean some of the people who worked alongside me and my contemporaries and martins and so on were using really quite new materials but mine was not new. It just looked a bit wacky. And you've always seemed to work, I don't know whether it is simultaneously. It felt simultaneously in lots of different materials. You used wood and you used pottery and paper quite a lot as well. Since those early days yes I'll try anything and I think that actually some of the things are very difficult to work with. I'm just trying to do some stuff with glass and it's brutal. But you know I go on various workshops and things. People say well would you like to come and work with me? This paper chap said this to me and I had a wonderful time. So I go in and I say well tell me about paper what can it do and so he got a piece of wet paper and he said draw some lines on this, draw on this. So I drew some lines and he draped the paper across a chair and when I went in next morning it was hard because he put something in it and I didn't know that these things could happen with paper. So it opened up a whole new world to me and I found that happened with various materials that I've used. You go to a workshop and you see somebody who understands the language of that material and it's very releasing. But isn't that slightly different from working every day in the studio because there you do work in what you know well? Yes. It's hard to describe sculpture on air as it were but if we're talking about your sort of breakthrough sculptures of the 1960s those more abstract sculptures. How would you describe them to somebody who hadn't been able to see them? Well I think that they opened sculpture out. That was what I was trying to do because I thought really that cubism was a sculptural subject and it had never been treated as that. People like Lipschitz and Laurence had kind of broken into the solid object a bit but they hadn't really broken it open and I wanted to do that and for that reason my things tended to stretch out. Yes. So a table like jagged broken open looking inside a form as well as around it and in a way the way you look at it you didn't see it as a thing that you looked up to like a monument. It was really something you had to walk along to take in to grasp. So it took time and not about the human form so much. Well in those days I was very you know we were trying very hard to break into abstraction really and and the idea was you know that the sculpture of itself was worth looking at it didn't have to be of something it didn't have to have a subject matter like that. It was as abstract as a piece of music. We were talking actually on the show last week about the extent to which we are all trapped in a sense by the size we are the size of our own bodies in terms of perception. Now you've made small sculptures and very large sculptures but nonetheless everything does relate to the size of the human body eventually doesn't it. I think that's I think it's the most important thing I think sculpture is very physical it's very much to do with how high our eyes are how wide our stretch of our arms is and its weight is very important too so that somehow it's very real it's a very real thing I think sculpture not a not a not a not to do with illusion. Just in Piketty. I'm very interested in the the small scale the tiny sculptures that you've done that are used as jewelry where you're working it looks as if with your fingertips as opposed to the more monumental work. Well I don't see why it shouldn't be any size but it has become jewelry but really it was more like making very small sculpture and seeing what it would be like to when you did reduce something down in size but without changing the scale it's still to do with with people in in some way. Mark Jones here you've had an amazing and very long career do you think over that time we've seen advance in sculpture do you believe in the idea of progress in sculpture? I think it's back and forth I think that we we try to conquer a little bit of ground we try to push it a little further forward or a little further on we try to keep we try to keep culture alive that's what that's what it's about in a way it's it's sometimes one step forward and two steps back but it and it's weird ways too but it seems to me that there is a there is a sort of progress in a way. What do you think do you think so? I'm not at all sure I'm not at all sure so would you think you're closer to radar or closer to Jeff Coons? I hope I'm closer to a road down but then I'm getting older and I I don't um I don't like a lot of what's happened since I mean I I think the mistake that when I was teaching I used to say well sculpture doesn't have to be of the human figure a sculpture can be anything and people said it can be anything it is anything breathing is sculpture well it's not there's a difference between you know an art thing and a live thing. I mean I think Princess David Hockney would say that in the teaching of painting and drawing what's happened is people have stopped teaching what can be taught the techniques and and so forth and are now trying to teach sort of theory and spirit or temperament which can't be taught and that that's been one of the problems that and the sort of collapse of the modernist project sort of grand age of modernism has left us in a in a bit of a well I think you have to study the subject I don't think you can just um I would certainly not like to be operated on by a surgeon who hadn't studied his subject. Michael. Since there wasn't much of a tradition what do you feel you came out of Tony I mean what did you have great heroes and sculpture or great traditions that you look back to? I I love Donatello um but then I love all sorts of sculptures and suddenly I look at a book and I'm excited for the first time I'll see an exhibition and I'm excited for the first time by Eskimo sculpture or something that I didn't expect this is a long-going thing so it keeps on happening yes and I hope it does keep on happening I delayed going to Greece um until uh till the 80s um I could have gone as a student but I did not spoil it for myself and I had seen too many um terrible brown shellac castes in the uh base a little look at me yes absolutely and was it a revelation it was wonderful it was wonderful and it was very real I remember going to Naxos and seeing in a in a um an orchard a broken chorus a very big 14 foot long chorus and it had got a broken leg and I realized that they were taking this thing down the hill and somebody said watch out it's going and it had been left for 2,000 years and suddenly that became so much more real singing in the museum then of course of course well um your studio uh Tony I'm I'm told um it's an old piano factor of the forklift truck to help you move stuff around which takes us quite a long way from uh dear committee's uh famous studio in Paris Michael Pepe you've been writing about the studio in your new book and it was of all the the sort of artist studios in Paris including probably Picasso's studio during that great period for art the most notorious space of all yes because it was like a it clothed him uh completely and it became a total jacometty work uh he was there for 40 years when he moved and he was just looking for somewhere uh where he could move in and get get uh get started uh and he found this uh he said himself it's just a whole uh and he thought he'd stay there for a couple of years and then uh move on to something a bit more practical but um he then discovered that he could do everything there he could sculpt he could paint he could draw he could have models come in and sit to him that was all very very it was basically um four paces by five quite tall but very rickety and quite in salubrious there was no running water but he became accustomed to it and uh spent the rest of his uh his life there and sort of created out of bits of old latin plaster and timber that had been reclaimed from somewhere or other i mean it was it was a it was a sort of dirty sticky filthy earth floor to start with i think absolutely beaten earth almost completely unheated as well yes and uh not much in the way of a roof i mean he he dreaded waking up finding himself totally covered in snow uh i mean he was a very tough he came from the swiss mountain so he was a very tough kind of character so he could probably have uh he could probably have survived but it was uh i mean a daily uh battle to uh just to keep warm so yes a sort of grimly tough pretty dirty old swiss mountaineer son of a son of an impressionist pain to a swiss impressionist pain so part of the family but comes to paris and it's that moment in paris where people are flooding in from all over the world really to reinvent themselves and to reinvent art absolutely so uh he was a foreigner amongst foreigners and i think he found paris difficult to begin with um but by power of by his talent and by the by his personality he drew a lot of people to him quite quickly what i was very interested in looking at your reading your book was the extent to which the politics of the art world in paris were terribly important he sort of he teamed up he chummed up with the surrealists over who had their own boss and and sort of hung around together and we're the surrealists we hate everybody else and when he broke with them that was an incredibly socially difficult thing to do yes well they were the people with the fresh ideas it was all very attractive and uh i think jack and met a yes looked at these people and saw uh how successful they'd been and how interesting and fascinating they were and how well they talked and um you know he was drawn by the manifestos and all the sort of revolutionary ideas and he was sucked into surrealism and became one of the great surrealist sculptors and was very close to bradon um but after a while he felt that he was producing objects rather than sculptures because uh he got drawn into making quite a lot of design objects too his brother we should explain is working alongside him and is basically designing manufacturing designed objects he needed to find a job for his brother basically they uh the brother turned up and uh could have sort of gone to the bad and alberta thought well i better sort diego out and so diego showed a talent for actually making things and they made a lot of decorative objects together but after a while uh alberta thought this is taking me further and further away from what i really want to do which is to try and capture a human appearance in sculpture or painting and so he broke with the surrealist because they thought heads had already been done and uh alberta would say well i don't even know what a head is you know i need to find out and jumping ahead during the war he he he goes off and and is in exile most the time in switzerland and comes back and by the time he comes back he's making these famously tiny attenuated pin-like objects which is about scraping away what he regards as all the accretion around a human form until there's almost nothing there and in the sense it's completely mad and he knows it's mad and he knows it's strange so talk us through what he thinks he's trying to do at this point well this is where the jack-a-metty myth really begins uh he leaves for uh janeva he's able to get out he's a swiss citizen wants to be close to his mother who was the remained the most important person in his life and he went with this obsession of trying to um fix a figure in space he'd seen uh his girlfriend dwarfed uh by the night uh along the uh bulavas amis shell in a big doorway and he was so sort of taken by this vision of this tiny figure which he felt was very present uh you know he was in love with her um their affair had been rather complicated uh and uh he desired her very much and he wanted to sort of capture all those uh sensations in in a single work and he kept pairing down pairing down to get the essence of this vision and every time he did it crumbled so um he thought it very sort of i think with you know commendable rhinus he thought this was all very funny but uh in fact he spent sort of four years just pairing things down into nothing and the story goes that at the end of that period he was able to put his complete sort of output into two big match boxes and bring it back to paris bring it back yes and we should say that the the girlfriend is one of the great great figures of that period of the 20th century great subject for justine pickety's next book i'm sure anyway she's she's fab um but uh isabel rawstone indeed indeed um who well anyway we won't go to isabel rawstone we could be talking about her she's she was quite a gal uh to say the least um co-cochenel actually was one of the people who we're going to be talking about co-cochenel and who knew geocometia i mean he seemed to know everybody um everybody came to this studio because it became a kind of phenomenon it was interesting that overlap between the art and fashion well there were no real boundaries between it so you've got jacometty designing jewellery for scaparelli and there's the jacometty and shanell's private apartment though i think it's by um Diego um but there was no sense really of boundary no i think it was one of those moments where um i don't think people were that self-conscious about what they they made you know it wasn't a question of high art and you know and fashion or decorative art um because i think there was just um such a current of excitement and people were born up uh by that so um jacometty's you know was very close to interior designers like john Michel Frang and made a lot of he and his brother made a lot of decorative lamps and things like that for them turdicara i was wondering how important you would say a studio is to understanding somebody's personalities and artists i mean if somebody went to your studio would they understand your art more fully and thus the project we're looking at jacometty through the room that he made his art in it's something that worries me i mean the idea i mean look at the legend that there is about fengoff um there's no legend about cesenne but the legend of fengoff is so strong i remember the first the first time i came up against it was when i as a school boy read last for life and i thought that's the way it should be for being an artist go into you know cut your ear off and shoot yourself in the in the field and so on um and i think it's spoiled it's spoiled vengoff for me for a long time so in a way i wonder whether the legend of the artist sometimes doesn't come away from looking you know reduce your capacity to see it as art i suppose with jacometty the studio was the work because uh you had so many sculptures in uh in varying forms of completion things wrapped up to keep them uh keep the uh the plaster or the the clay moist finished sculpture a lot of paintings a lot of scratchings and drawings on the wall so in jacometty's case i think the quickest way to uh you know kind of crash course in jacometty is just looking at the studio itself which uh you know uh which there are there are hundreds of photographs because it was so visually riveting so in this case i think the studio was the man was the artist does the crash course um stop you're looking hard at the one sculpture no i don't think so i think it's uh it's the the best uh introduction all right well let's move to a very different studio um co-co-shannel at work on her most iconic creations at just the same time as jacometty very very different background of course and um producing her art if it is art what we're going to talk about um for a rather different audience it's interesting i was saying at the beginning of the the program Royal Academy, Barbican, VNA have all gone exhibitions of clothes at the moment which leads straight to the question of whether somebody like co-co-shannel considers herself an artist there's a there's a wonderful quote i don't know if you've got it there i'll read it out if you don't but where she's addresses neither of tragedy addresses neither a tragedy nor a painting it is a charming and ephemeral creation not an everlasting work of art fashion should die and die quickly in order that commerce may survive so that was shanelle cold brutal self analysis isn't it yes but what shanelle also picked up on i think was those shared um the shared territory between the the artist that she worked alongside and she also said that there's an awareness of art in couture and that excites artists which was why so many artists were drawn towards shanelle and scaparelli jacometi picasso shanelle collaborated with picasso on the ballet ruse so i think that although she was scrupulous in saying i'm not an artist i think that some of her intentions were possibly the same as an artist which was to push at the the boundaries of convention and to give some um solid um expression to the moment of the sort of terrible word but the zeitgeist well that's very interesting because there seems to be something about the the visual tone of paris at that time which is about seriousness uh sober colors arranged from sort of black through to kind of dirty cream and you know you look at you look at the picassos of the time you look at the way people were dressing there is something in the water as it were which she definitely is part of was shanelle's great and most iconic creation is the little black dress and that um she was tremendously important in in changing the um the iconography of black so she wore black as did you know many women in the aftermath of the first world war as the color of mourning and then what shanelle did in the 20s which is so intriguing was to turn the color of mourning into um the color of sort of strength freedom independence the jazz age something much wilder and and looser and and freer and it became a symbol of power rather than despair and depression and she was at the heart of of that movement and cut down um clothing which shows the body and and and doesn't hide the body it's it is the opposite of the decorative I suppose yes and and like um jacometty she paired and paired and paired she took away she stripped away the embellishments of the bellow park that she took away the corsets that stopped women from breathing and she would cut and recut a garment so there are descriptions of her redesigning um a sleeve or an armhole maybe 30 40 50 times and then destroying it and saying it's not perfect enough that's very jacometty of course absolutely but but also this paradox of austere consumerism if I could put it that way everything everything is playing very serious and by god they want to sell a lot of it as well I mean particularly when she comes to her perfume yes and interestingly you know Chanel number five which became the kind of engine of her great fortune that bottle is in the museum of modern art in in New York so it it's partly a matter of perception she she was undoubtedly a brilliant business woman a self-promoter just as focused as you know some of the contemporary young British artists are today in that kind of self-projection um but she was also recognized although perhaps she despised that by others as being somehow beyond fashion that it somehow her creations had more worth than they're totally ephemeral do you think that she would regard the sort of the fashion now for clothes and fashion shows in big art galleries and museums with amusement surprise contempt delight what I think all of those um I mean I think that her fashion shows really were happenings in the same way that some you know conceptual art installations are but she would always see it as a practical means but I was interested in the description of Jacometti and you know his bearers studio in the lack of of um heating well Chanel had a similar background as an outsider she came from a peasant family she was brought up in a very very austere convent orphanage in the middle of nowhere in France and it's a play a monastery I've been to and there really are bare earth floors and no electricity and it's incredibly cold and then she comes to Paris and creates almost the inverse opposite of the Jacometti studio where everything is mirrored everything is self-reflecting and I think that there is a knowingness about the creation of her salon her studio that there is a reflection of the knowingness of what Jacometti was doing toughness of where they all came from I have to say one of the things that you know hits you when you go back and you read about this subject is in the middle of the 20th century northern europeans were very cold everything is very cold it's very appropriate at the start of the at the moment but nonetheless and do you think that um Coco Chanel's um sort of materialist ambitions have perhaps been sort of supercharged now I'm just thinking you know we're about to see the London and Paris fashion season starts and it's very much it's it's a big celebrity moment like and you know lots of the top artists will be there sitting on the watching the catwalk as will the sort of the Hollywood stars and all the rest of it it's got a bit bonkers it has gone a bit bonkers I mean art has never been so fashionable and fashion has never seen itself with quite such seriousness before and if I remember going to the Venice Biennale and literally you know if you wanted to find anybody any of the artists or curators all you had to do was go to the Prada store because they would all be gathered there um and of course and some of the great fashion designers are also the biggest patrons so you've got mutual Prada awarding the Turner Prize earlier this month and the Prada Foundation is a great patron and commissioner of of many contemporary artists Louis Vuitton the new store on Bond Street has commissioned people like Michael Landy and Damian Hearst I mean I think in retrospect we might look back and see the absurdity as well as the tuck pretentious yes as as well as the the ambitions of this period Mark Jones this is absolutely into your field of course because the VNA was was established on the edge the borderline between art and fashion and that's been art and design I don't know I think the VNA was founded with a very serious purpose which was to improve the quality of design in Britain in the early 19th century when people were very worried about it as they should always be but I don't think that we in the VNA think of showing fashion as art we show fashion as fashion and we believe that all the arts are one applied and fine hmm um Tony Caro you you actually you're a fashion designer but you certainly made jewelry well I don't know anything about fashion at all and making jewelry was a little a little side thing so I don't take it too seriously but I suppose because of your association with St Martin's you've seen a new generation of artists and fashion designers coming out of the same colleges so people like Damian Hearst and Alexander McQueen there is perhaps some overlap between the two I mean I sometimes wonder if Damian Hearst sort of spin paintings are like a diffusion line in the same way that um you know fashion will will make a distinction between couture and prete porté well I think that the art schools I think I think that fashion has owed quite a lot to art there's no doubt of it but I don't um I think that the purpose is totally different really because there's art with art one is trying to make something significant and I think that it's too ephemeral the idea of fashion it has to keep changing so it can't be a thing which is for the long haul but there's almost as if you know there's a fear of contamination which I think art is perfectly able to you know to come in contact with fashion fashion with art and possibly take something that's useful without being sort of you know they kiss they embrace briefly and they go there a different way probably you know without sort of lasting necessarily lasting consequences like art and ballet or something like that is of course the character generation of artists really are whether or not you like them or admire them really are admired it's sort of coming very close to fashion so you've got people like Jake and Dinos Chapman have shot two front covers for Harper's Bazaar this year yeah it might say more about art than fashion in a sense I think possibly yeah well let's let's move directly to to one of the the great open temples of art and fashion the Victorian Albert Museum Mark Jones who's the director there you you've been there for ten years you're about to to push off to Oxford and I mentioned it was it was it was founded to make British design better it was founded originally as a sort of adjunct of the South Kensington college wasn't it it was it was where we designed as we're going to go and learn their trade by looking at stuff yeah it started as the teaching collection of the school of design so the Royal College of Art and the V&A if you like are two halves of the same institution and the early collections certainly descriptions of the V&A in the relatively early days it's quite a jumble I mean you know all human life is there kind of piled up in in glass cases and so on it's it's there's a lot of fabric there's a lot of design there's a lot of pottery there's a slight sense of there's a bit of this and that no they had a really they had an idea they wanted to make people's lives better through design they wanted to make better designers and then they wanted to make better consumers who would appreciate the good design that was coming out of the school of design so this will lead us to sort of towards the arts and craft era those kind of people those sort of high mindy and very much part of it of course absolutely central figure I mean Jones they're all the great designers of the period Christopher Dresser but it's interesting people think that a purpose for museums they call it instrumentality is a late 20th century perversion but actually instrumentality was very much at the heart of the foundation of the V&A which was intended by the government to improve the quality of design in Britain and it was very important then and I believe it's very important now and when you took over this great institution did you have a sort of big picture of visually ahead of what you wanted to do with it and have you done it it's then that I haven't done whatever's happened but I think that the the V&A is probably more closely in touch with its founding purpose now than it has been at some times in the past and I think you know that's very much a tribute to my predecessors like Roy Strong and I think that people understand what it's doing much better than they sometimes having the past and the kind of question that we've been asked which is why are you showing fashion is fashion art is one which we would reply to by saying well actually we're interested in all the arts and in that sense fashion is one of them but fashion is certainly the point at which most people make design decisions for themselves there are very few people who say well I actually don't care what I wear and it says nothing about me and there are very few people who buy a sculpture so it's sort of in between yeah um during your period have been a lot of reorganization though of the of the collections and um some some fairly spectacular new ways of showing I mean it starts with the British galleries I suppose I think our guiding idea has been to um to share the collections as as well as we can and to um to have faith in the original intentions of the design of the building so what we've been doing is going back to and restoring the original decorative schemes opening up vistas and showing the collections beautifully and in context so that people can understand the significance of what they're seeing and I think the recent opening of the menu of Renaissance galleries has done that for a lot of people they see what was always a great collection but they see it afresh which is it's a beautiful beautiful space and how important has it been you came in um just when the controversy about whether free admission to galleries would survive would would you know be reintroduced or not was at its height we have had free admission being how important does that mean for your gallery and for London and for the the culture generally I think it's been very important I mean we've seen our uh visit numbers more than double over that period and I think that the the sense that um museums and galleries belong to everyone is funded on the idea that you can go that whenever you like without paying it works terrifically well and I'm very glad that the present government is as committed to it as the last one christmas is coming up you're off next year so you're allowed to take one object as a present out of the vna with you what would you choose I think I'll take a piece of blotting paper it's a piece of blotting paper you're so austere you're so decent no no it's the piece of blotting paper on which Joseph Paxton sketched his designs for the crystal palace and it's the most wonderful object that does sound wonderful um just you know I suspect as a as a fashionista you you you haunt the vna I do and it's one of the actually as a small child I think it's what gave me my initial interest in seeing fashion as as something more than simply what to wear um I would go to the vna and stare into those glass cases the vitrines and and feel almost so absorbed in the other world that lay beyond the glass but I think what's been terribly successful is of course some of your most successful news shows people have paid for like the the ballet ruse the diagileve exhibition and certainly when I I've been to see it several times and there were a lot of people paying to come in and see it but what I liked about that or the golden age of couture is the way you brought together different elements within the collections so the ballet ruse exhibition does include some fashion and it's got some Chanel designs in there it's also got the the Picasso um famous curtain um and it it came alive for me it showed that the the cross fertilization between the disciplines well I think what it shows is that diagileve was an amazing man and that he had the ability um to bring together all the great talents of the avant-garde um in europe in in the early 20th century and it's a fantastic show from that point of view michael peppe do you think the british have become more visual it I mean tony was talking about the fact that there was no sculptural tradition but it seems to me that more and more uh whether it's clothes whether it's art whether it's design the british have become much more acutely visual they suddenly woken up to this whole world of sight almost yes and there's a kind of marvellous sense of renewal in that I think that's very perceptive I think that um uh that the english and maybe more broadly the british have considered themselves to be a literary nation sometimes a musical nation but seldom a visual nation but what the 20th century saw was suddenly them falling in love with the visual and I think now uh the visual is enormously important to all of them they've been very shy tardy if you were nodding I'm glad to say it that only how I think is so true and I hadn't told it before it's a it's a wonderful thing that 30 years ago you couldn't have believed there will be this much popularity to look at at art and um and of course we've all enjoyed the vna all the time the only problem with the vna is why are the councils and the vna and the turners are in the um tain britain and all that sort of thing it's it's very confusing the whole thing is a bit of a mishmash it's called history it's called history. Well I hope we've brought a little bit of color and and and and brightness to our listeners this morning thank you to all my guests mark jones the outgoing director of the vna justine pickety whose biography of chenelle is out now as is michael peppiards in jacometis studio and if you happen to be new york michael's curated an exhibition of his sketches details on the start of the week website antony karo's work will be part of the royal academy's modern british sculpture show in the new year next week we're in celebratory mood as we look back at 40 years of start the week with fellow presenters richard baker and melvin braggon yes idya mean really did play the accordion on start the week but for now thank you and goodbye
Andrew Marr talks to the sculptor Anthony Caro about the development of modern British sculpture. Caro once worked out of a small garage at home, creating his growing metal structures, and it's the artist's studio that interests the art critic, Michael Peppiatt. He's attempting to capture the unique atmosphere of the tiny ramshackle studio behind Montparnasse where Alberto Giacometti lived and worked for nearly 40 years. For the last decade Sir Mark Jones has worked out of one of the grandest buildings in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum. As he prepares to step down next year, he talks about the continuing relevance of a museum that showcases objects and design. While the V+A has regularly exhibited works of fashion, several haute couture shops now pretend to be art galleries, and the writer, Justine Picardie asks how far fashion can be considered art. Producer: Katy Hickman.