The Swiss artist Alber­to Gia­comet­ti is most often remem­bered for his famous­ly thin, elon­gat­ed sculp­tures of the human form. But Gia­comet­ti was a sim­i­lar­ly bril­liant and orig­i­nal draughts­man who main­tained that draw­ing was the cen­tral skill of an artist. “One must stick exclu­sive­ly to draw­ing,” he once said. “If one dom­i­nates draw­ing even a lit­tle bit then every­thing else becomes pos­si­ble.”

Gia­comet­ti the draughts­man had a dis­tinc­tive way of rework­ing a line, of going over it again and again as if he were sculpt­ing in plas­ter. “When I make my draw­ings,” Gia­comet­ti said, “the path traced by my pen­cil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, anal­o­gous to the ges­ture of a man grop­ing his way in the dark­ness.” The result­ing tan­gle of lines give his draw­ings a spe­cial vibran­cy, a sense of motion and depth on the two-dimen­sion­al plane.

In this excerpt from the 1966 film Alber­to Gia­comet­ti by the Swiss pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ernst Schei­deg­ger, we watch as Gia­comet­ti paints the foun­da­tion­al lines of a por­trait at his stu­dio in Mont­par­nasse. The footage was prob­a­bly shot in 1965, the last year of Gia­comet­ti’s life. The artist report­ed­ly saw the film not long before his death on Jan­u­ary 11, 1966. Watch­ing the film, we get a sense of Gia­comet­ti’s care for geom­e­try as he draws orga­ni­za­tion­al lines to work out the pro­por­tions. Gia­comet­ti would often leave these inter­sect­ing ver­ti­cal, hor­i­zon­tal and diag­o­nal lines–which would emerge organ­i­cal­ly as he went along–in his fin­ished works.

In the Ger­man nar­ra­tion, the speak­er describes Gia­comet­ti’s almost mys­ti­cal sense of the process: A face appears on the can­vas which is his own face but also that of anoth­er, dis­tant per­son who will appear out of the depth if only you reach out for him. But as you do reach out the per­son recedes, remain­ing just beyond your grasp. “The appari­tion,” Gia­comet­ti once said: “Some­times I think I can trap it, but then I lose it again and must begin once more.”

Spe­cial thanks to Matthias Rasch­er for his lin­guis­tic help.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­tage Footage of Picas­so and Jack­son Pol­lock Paint­ing … Through Glass

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Caught in the Act of Cre­ation, 1926

The Ger­man painter Ger­hard Richter goes back and  forth between pho­to­re­al­ism and com­plete abstrac­tion. In this film we see the artist in his abstract mode, using a giant squeegee to apply and scrape off suc­ces­sive lay­ers of paint.

In 2008 and 2009 the reclu­sive Richter allowed film­mak­er Corin­na Belz into his stu­dio in Cologne to doc­u­ment the cre­ation of a series of large abstract paint­ings. Belz was ini­tial­ly sur­prised by the num­ber of lay­ers Richter used to cre­ate his decep­tive­ly sim­ple-look­ing works. “Some­times,” she said in an inter­view on her web site, “I looked at a paint­ing and thought: It’s good like this. But then came the next step in the process, and what I had per­ceived as a fin­ished pic­ture would be destroyed before my very eyes; just paint­ed over. It’s not easy when your ‘pro­tag­o­nists’ are con­stant­ly dis­ap­pear­ing.”

Even Richter often does­n’t know when one of his abstract paint­ings will be fin­ished. “It’s very sur­pris­ing often,” he told Tate Mod­ern Direc­tor Nicholas Sero­ta in a filmed inter­view last year, before the open­ing of a major ret­ro­spec­tive of his work. “I’m paint­ing again and again every day and so it seems you will nev­er come to an end, it will nev­er become a good paint­ing, and sud­den­ly it’s fin­ished: ‘Oh, good.’ ”

Belz’s film, Ger­hard Richter Paint­ing, was released in 2011 to crit­i­cal acclaim. Ear­li­er this month an abstract paint­ing by the 80-year-old Richter set a record for the most mon­ey ever paid for a work by a liv­ing artist, bring­ing $34.2 mil­lion at Sothe­by’s in Lon­don.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­tage Footage of Picas­so and Jack­son Pol­lock Paint­ing … Through Glass

Anselm Kiefer at Work, Cre­at­ing His “World of Ruina­tion”