Wes Anderson At The Gagosian In Paris

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1:38Ingredients, one half pound butter, four ounces unsweetened chocolate, four eggs, two cups sugar, a half cup of flour, one teaspoon vanilla extract. Pretty simple. Simple. Directions, preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease and flour, a nine and a half inch baking pan. Gently melt the butter and chocolate in the top part of a double boiler. Set aside to cool to room temperature. Beat the eggs and sugar until thick and lemon-colored. Add vanilla. Six, fold the chocolate mixture into the eggs and sugar and mix thoroughly. Seven, sift the flour and fold gently into the batter mixing just until blended.

2:15Pour into the prepared pan. Bake for 25 minutes or until center is just set. When cool, cut into squares. Makes 28 large brownies. In 2021, when the idea of doing a podcast about food and memory, the first person I thought of interviewing was my friend Wes Anderson. He then described how to roast a pigeon with coda quino. Since then, we fried just-picked zucchini flowers in a Tuscan kitchen full of utensils, pots and pans, and pieces of papers with recipes. We perfected the art of making a peach bellini by peering through the glass of a large pitcher, deciding if the proportions were correct. Abundance, utensils, transparency, and a singular vision surround us as we meet at the house on Utopia Parkway, Joseph Cornell's studio recreated by Wes with Jasper Sharp at Gagosi in Paris.

3:11Wes Anderson is precious to me. He is my first guest and now my most recent. Life is good here in this house on Utopia Parkway together. So here we are. So what do you think about an artist who loved to travel, but he never traveled? The thing with him was he obviously had a fantasy of traveling the world. These boxes he made, they have a kind of worldly thing about them. They're grand hotels and they're very international. And it was all from his little place in Queens. Do you think he just was afraid to travel? I suppose so. Or do you think the effort of traveling? or economically. I think he was afraid because I think he had opportunity to travel.

3:55He became known and he didn't then suddenly set off on his journey around the world. I think he needed to stay home. And he was very attached to his brother. His brother did those. Pictures over there. Yes, he did those drawings over there. And I think he looked after him and I think the first boxes he made were gifts for his brother and supposedly the boxes were generally made as presents. That was the purpose of the boxes in the first place. So that he could give something in a box to somebody. Yes. They were just little, they were just gifts. There's this great story about somebody bringing him a cake and putting it in the oven and when they opened it, there's one of his boxes in there.

4:33Oh, really? That he would put the box in the oven to make it look older. I see. He was eating it. Yes. So not for food, for the box. Well, when we, I mean, this space we're in now is a recreation of his studio, kind of. Like these collages are his and many of these boxes are his supplies for making his artworks. Some things here we accumulated on our own simulating what we know he had and what we see in the photographs. And then some, there's a guy in Long Island who knew Cornell and he ended up preserving many of the contents of Cornell's house and studio. So all the stuff that isn't artworks, but it's his stuff that he was going to use, potential artworks, and he loaned us everything.

5:28So there's no official archive of... There is. If there's ever an artist who could be, say, there's an archive. There's a Joseph and Wilbur Cornell memorial, and they see to his legacy. Some of these are boxes that he prepared for making things that he never used. So, you know, you see the way that one is segmented like that. There's one here that's the dove coat. That's quite like that. It's one that's segmented. There's one that's a pharmacy further down. That's almost like a Damien. I was going to say the Damien. Yeah. And that's also in that kind of vein. So let's start at the beginning. Why?

6:06Did we do this? Yeah. Well, Jasper came to me and said, we have this space for a little period of time. and I would like you to do something Joseph Cornell when Jasper suggested this I did I had the thought I say well why don't we just recreate yeah his studio here and we'll show the real boxes with a background with a sort of theatrical backdrop of his world did you know that it would be his studio would be dramatic it wouldn't that I knew that was I'd seen pictures of this abundance abundance like you say. I knew the work this way because I grew up in Houston in Texas and there we have the Menil Collection Museum, the de Menil family, John and Dominique de Menil.

6:54They had boxes and there are boxes on display there always but in the 90s there was a great big retrospective. I think they probably had 50 or 60 boxes. And I'd seen some of them, but I hadn't really quite... How old were you? I guess I was probably 27 or something like that. I think it might have been when we were shooting Rushmore. Oh, really? Yeah. And anyway, I really loved them. And that's how I got to know them. So it was from Texas, but it was from that museum. So when Jasper came to you with the idea of somehow doing this in this space, then what happened? Well, then I said, well, do you think we could do this thing of just recreating the whole thing?

7:42It might cost some money and so on. And Jasper said, we can figure it out. We borrowed all these things. We borrowed boxes. Jasper organized for loans of art. I guess he was already doing that before. From other collectors who had a box. From collectors. These all belong to different people. Yeah. Wow. So you then started going through the archive and finding what you could get. Yes. Then we gather stuff and then we sent people to buy things. And we also have our two French sign painters. Yeah, let's talk about them. Well, there's just two guys named Francois and Vincent who worked on the French dispatch for me.

8:20And then they also worked on Asteroid City and Phoenician Scheme. And they do anything with graphics. I mean, with text, really. So in French Dispatch, we had lots of French shop windows and signs on walls and they just painted everything. And they're very talented. And they looked at the photographs and then they you can see there's all these things that are written, that are painted in Cornell's hand. And they channel his handwriting or his painted handwriting. And they made all this stuff. And it looks just like it was his. As we started to do this, we realized we're creating one big Joseph Cornell box ourselves with this whole thing.

9:02We stand outside and look into it like it's a box. And all his way of gathering is kind of, which we're sort of simulating slash recreating, is kind of artful. I mean, his handwriting is like painting a picture. And we also have somebody else named Catherine Little, Katrine, who works on our movies even longer, who is a scenic artist. And that means she'll age things. All the stained ceilings and everything you see here that looks old only looks old because Katrine sat there with a brush and made it old. if something breaks on the set for instance yeah and it doesn't look right now she'll go in with a paintbrush and start making it and adapting it and go back to that so when you're making a movie and you have something a lamp or whatever you're saying that if it what do you mean it breaks well let's say you've got a piece of scenery yeah and some hunk of somebody bangs into it with a dolly or something and there's some hunk out of it now you can see that this is not some old stairwell in fact it's brand new wood and it looks terrible and she'll go in and start doing it and she'll age it and she'll make it she'll bring it back into the into the reality of the movie and or you say uh something's making weird reflections in the shot and it's and it's it's sticking out and it's distracting she'll blend it in or she'll do something like trompe Loi entirely, you know?

10:34So that's her department, scenic artists, they call it on movies. She came in and she scenic to everything. She was, I mean, the first people we said, Catherine and Vincent Francois, those were the people on, that we began with as essential movie people. What about the window? Can you talk about the window? Well, this one is actually a real window that goes into the office where Saba has spent many morning and afternoon. And it was... But we kind of tried to make it so it seemed like you were looking into part of Cornell's house. So it has a curtain and it has some stuff that we've put there to make shadows.

11:14And the one over there is more like a light box. That one's just a fake. And that one was meant to... That does have a picture of his garden. Oh yeah. You have the house. We did a Xerox of his garden to put there just to kind of suggest it. So yeah. So that's sort of the thrust of it all. And is it, Sabah was saying that you sort of saw this as Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3, that the windows, did you know that analysis, that you would look through the window. Can you describe what that means to look? Also, putting the boxes so close in the window. Well, tell us about the windows. Well, there's only, there's four windows, right?

11:51Four sections, let's say, because we've got columns. So we knew there's a series of installations and people are going to move along this like they're a camera on a dolly sliding from side to side. They're going to see one and then they're going to move to the other. And that was built into the space. And we put them really close to the window because we wanted to show, we wanted to just emphasize here are the actual artworks, which are lit. You know, as the sun goes down, the lights come up. It's natural light in the day, but you can see that lights just came on, did they? Yeah, they just did come on.

12:28And yeah, those are the artworks. And the rest is sort of an atmosphere for the artwork. But I do think it kind of is its own little piece of art itself. Did you meet people who could talk about the experience of meeting him? Well, no, you know, I mean, I always assumed he's shy. Yeah, me too. But I know he had friends like... Tony Curtis. Tony Curtis. Tony Curtis. Billy Wilder. This is Jasper from me. Who else was it? John Lennon? He must have been able to accommodate these people. Even though there's an aspect of him that seems like semi-recluse, in fact, I think he had visitors and hosted the people.

13:10And there's such charm in his work. There's probably charm in his personality in person, I bet. I bet. And also I think that it isn't just about people who want to visit an artist because you might not want to go visit Rauschenberg or visit some, you know, I don't know, de Kooning, but the idea that these people wanted to go to his life, you know, and seek him out. Yes, I think the key is whether you might not want to visit them if they don't want you to visit. Yeah, maybe because, yeah, exactly. And maybe Cornell really did want visitors. You know, maybe he was eager to have people come because he wasn't going to go out.

13:47Did you, the other thing, a parallel, we thought was his interest and your interest in children. So that apparently, you know, that even in this show, that it's at a level of lowness. So a child can see it at their level of having to stop. That's true. I think he had something to say about that, about his artwork being shown low. I know with the Menil in Houston, she always hung everything low. Not low, low like this, but this much lower than other places would do it. I like art low. Yeah, I do too. I don't like Emory LeCame. I like to get right up to it. But I think there's something quite childlike in his work because a lot of his work is almost like toys.

14:38And they're certainly like dioramas that someone would make. And I think probably an interesting, I mean, I would say if you wanted to do the ultimate Joseph Cornell exhibition and have it be all over it, you'd probably find an elementary school built in 1930 and you'd fill it with Joseph Cornell. And what about children with you? What do you feel when you're making a film? Well, I've made some movies that have children as characters, some movies that have a childhood setting. And I've also worked with a lot of kids on movies. Rushmore, that one, the second movie I made, that one is teenagers.

15:20And there's some younger people. There's one that one of the main characters is 11. His name, the actor was called Mason Gamble. And I and, you know, the thing I remember with him was he's somebody who was he was 11, but he'd been acting since he was six or something. He played Dennis the Menace in a big movie. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he. and I was just it was kind of an incredible thing to watch this person who for whom acting it was like you know when somebody starts playing the violin when they're four years old or something it was just very natural to him it happened that he had been doing this already so long because he was picked because somebody said this one can do it but he had so much skill and he had a real kind of aura about him.

16:13But if you ask him to do something, he would just say, okay, and then you would see it done really well. You know, he would take it and he'd be able to turn it into whatever it was, always. And he would be able to adjust one way or another. And I've seen that over the years. And a lot of really famous grown-up actors, old people now, they're child actors. I mean a lot of them. It helped. I mean it's an advantage. And Freya. And Freya. She was in the Phoenicians game. She played an angel. She was very good. And she was very conscientious. She had questions. She wanted to get it right. She was not nervous but she just put a lot of energy and focus into it and she didn't make mistakes.

17:04She wanted to get it right. Doing a movie and doing a show. Is it like me doing a meal and doing a cookbook? What's the dynamics there? In this case, these are not my work. This installation, we designed it, but that's more like being hired for a job to do it, even though I wasn't exactly hired. It was a wish to serve another artist. It's not like inventing something, like writing a script. It's more about, it's design work, I think. And also thinking about, which a movie is too, but how are we going to show these in a way that will make them most accessible and clear and make them the most entertaining just to walk through or, I don't know, something like that.

17:56You know, there is, I know that there's some things that you, you know, that he did, and some that you bought and some that you borrowed, but there is an authenticity to this that I think is very touching, you know, that you do feel, I know your sign painters may have done that, but walking through here, there's a kind of feeling, as I say, of kind of rigor. And I think it must be so interesting to just not be able to come in and to be these people walking past and to see it. Yeah, no, it's open. It's 24 hours a day. It never closes. We don't pull down the curtain. December 16, the curtains went up, and they've stayed up ever since until sometime in March when they're going to get closed.

18:36Now there's going to be a closing night party. Oh, good. So at the end of it, I guess we'll close the blinds, and that'll be it. But maybe it'll go somewhere else. Also, art is a shop front to so cause. When you go to Citi, I just love walking around and looking in the windows. And it is, unfortunately, maybe they're changing that now, When I was in New York, you know, the windows at Bergdorf. So you remember those windows at Barney's? I can remember windows, you know, that they had. And so to see art as a shop window is pretty democratic. Yeah, it's good. It's a kind of cool thing to do. It's a good viewing environment.

19:10And it's also a very good, it's also, when you talk about shop windows, this is the shop window right below the Place Vendome, underneath a colonel. And it's a pretty good way to have, it's a good shop window. Yeah, and it's accessible. So, and what are you having for dinner tonight? I think I'm coming over to your place. Oh, you are? Okay, good. We're all going to come and have a drink. Okay, good. We have a Japanese dinner. Okay, thank you, Wes. Thank you, Ruthie. Thank you. That was great. That was good.

19:44You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and If You Can Hear Me is where culture meets the soul. honest conversations about identity loss purpose peace faith and everything in between celebrities thinkers everyday people some have answers most are still figuring it out and if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story this show is for you listen to if you can hear me on my iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey i'm jay shetty host of the On Purpose podcast. On a recent episode, I sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar.

20:24I went blank. I hit a bad note, then I couldn't kind of recover. And I built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity. I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away. Who am I? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When segregation was a law, one mysterious Black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.

21:05Charlie's Place, from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.