Orson Welles’s formidable talents as an actor, director, producer and writer are well known through classic movies such as Citizen Kane and The Third Man. But more than three decades after his death, Welles’s flair for draughtsmanship is now increasingly being recognised.
Sketches of film and stage productions are among hundreds of drawings reproduced in a forthcoming book, which follows a documentary about his art and an exhibition in Edinburgh last summer.
The book also includes illustrations of set designs and costumes for unrealised projects, most of which have not been published before. There are unidentified storyboards that may relate to a film about Caesar that never got off the ground, but which was to have starred Richard Burton as Mark Antony. Designs for Marching Song, a play about the American abolitionist John Brown that Welles helped to write as a student but never staged, and humorous cards that he created for family and friends are included.
Simon Braund, author of The Orson Welles Portfolio: Sketches and Drawings from the Welles Estate, to be published by Titan Books on 19 February, estimates that 75% of the drawings are previously unpublished and that they reveal Welles as an “underrated artist”. “Some come from archives … But the majority come from the Welles estate. The custodian is his daughter Beatrice,” said Braund.
In an interview for the book, Beatrice Welles says of her father: “He was so much more than a great film-maker… He was a great artist as well. When you look at his art, you realise why … so many of the images he achieved on screen look like paintings. It takes your breath away, what he did with light and shadow.”
Noting that Welles began his career as a painter, she adds that so much has been written about him – and yet “so little” about his art. “He was always in the garden painting … He was a very messy painter … the paint and the colours were everywhere.”
The book includes personal items such as comic seasonal cards featuring bucolic Father Christmases. “They reveal the more human side,” said Braund. “He had a reputation [for being] difficult, a bit of a megalomaniac. [Here] you see the self-deprecation, the humour that he had, sentimental at some times.”
The drawings reflect the sheer amount of intricate work that Welles put into every production, and his brilliance. Braund said: “If he’d been able to, he would have wanted to do every job himself, and would have excelled at it.”
He pointed to detailed costume sketches for Welles’s 1937 staging of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. “Had he not been a genius in other areas – as director and so on – he would have made a name for himself as an absolutely first-class costume designer.
“Faustus was a landmark in American theatre, boasting revolutionary lighting, electronic amplification, a stage honeycombed with trapdoors and state-of-the-art special effects … Drawings for Cornelius, one of the two scholars who tutor Faustus in the art of magic, are awash with fascinating detail.”
Bold charcoal sketches for his 1948 movie Macbeth match his stark black-and-white photography, Braund said, adding that drawings for the castle set – “hulking stone structures against lowering dark skies” – show the “look” Welles wanted to achieve.
Armour-clad knights are among vibrant designs for his Shakespeare-inspired 1965 film Chimes at Midnight. Braund said: “Several of them on horseback, in the thick of battle, are particularly thrilling. Brandishing lances and clubs, their features hidden behind metal visors, they appear more menacing than noble – which was precisely the intention.”
Discussing Welles’s painting of an elongated Don Quixote, his daughter recalls the director’s unrealised movie project: “Don Quixote was one of the greatest sorrows of his life … The movie he tried to make would’ve been extraordinary. [The problem] was always lack of money. I don’t really know when he did the Don Quixote painting, but it must have been when he was depressed over wanting to get the film finished and not being able to. That melancholy really comes through.”
