Spoleto USA: A Festival Discovers America / Philip Guston: A Life Lived

Free admission

at 11:00

Spoleto USA: to Festival Discovers America

1977

(58 min.)

When Gian Carlo Menotti created the Spoleto festival in 1958, he envisioned it in "two worlds," Europe and America. After years of debate about where the beloved festival should be held in the United States, the city of Charleston was chosen, which, just like Spoleto, is a place rooted in history. It was Charleston's great cultural appeal - home to many late 18th-century churches, houses and theaters - that favored it as an ideal candidate to become a Spoleto USA. Menotti envisioned the festival as a celebration of music that would connect the old world with the new. Paving the way for both emerging talent and longtime masters, Menotti succeeded to merging past and future in cities that continue this tradition.

at 12:00

Philip Guston: to Life Lived

1981

(58 min.)

One of Michael Blackwood's most sincere artist portraits, that of Philip Guston, is set against the backdrop of his retrospective exhibition that would be one of the last before his death in 1980. We are taken into Guston's studio and can observe him at work on his canvases. The film captures the artist at the most introspective and reflective time of his life. With lightness and humor, he recounts his thoughts on a wide range of topics, from describing his inspirations and failures to dwelling on his experience with illness and his fear of death. "Nothing is ever resolved in painting," said Guston referring to the heterogeneity of his works, "it is a continuous chain that to sometimes does not go in a straight line, but in bumpy paths, detours, that must be investigated."

Italian subtitles