Abstract Artists in Their Own Words

Abstraction was one of the most significant developments

in the story of 20th-century art.

By breaking free from the direct representation

of the world around us, abstract artists created

a new visual language

and transformed the possibility of what art could be.

The story of abstraction in Western art

spans the radical geometric paintings of revolutionary Russia...

..to post-war America,

and the large-scale drips and splodges of Jackson Pollock

and New York's abstract expressionists.

While in Britain, artists responded to this visual revolution

with an astonishing variety of groundbreaking new art.

From Barbara Hepworth's naturally inspired forms

to Bridget Riley's hard-edged, geometric painting,

and Anthony Caro's industrial steel sculptures,

British artists created some of the most pioneering

and internationally-acclaimed abstract art of the 20th century.

And along the way, the BBC has been there to both capture them

at work and record their words.

I got more and more involved in this idea that

I wasn't making a human being but I was making

a place where you could go.

In this film, we'll delve into the archives to reveal

the passionate and dedicated personalities behind the art.

It's a life or death thing, you know.

I mean, there are good things in it,

it's just that I don't quite know... how to do it.

Rhythm and repetition are at the root of movement.

They create a situation within which the most simple, basic forms

start to become visually active.

And we'll see how abstract art sometimes confounded

and even angered those who encountered it.

To spend £15,000 on a sculpture that no-one really understands

is a complete, complete waste of money.

So how did the artists that created this challenging

new form of art explain their work to the world?

If abstract art doesn't describe the world around us - what IS it about?

It's a question that's often been asked of abstract artists -

and one which they've all tried to answer, in their own words...

MUSIC: "Suffragette City" by David Bowie

By the middle of the 20th century, British abstract artists

were among the most original working anywhere in the world.

Their art rewrote the rules...

..captured the public imagination...

..came to stand for the highest of ideals...

..and used a new language

of art that represented a dramatic break from what had gone before.

For centuries, people presumed that a painting or a sculpture

had to be OF something.

Whether that something was a person, or a landscape

or an event, but in the 20th century,

that idea was turned on its head.

Artists began to say -

"No, our artworks don't need to represent ANYTHING.

"They stand alone."

In the first decades of the 20th century, artists in Europe began

to create radical forms of abstract art,

from Malevich's Suprematist paintings

to Mondrian's simplified arrangements of line and colour.

But this wasn't just a new style of painting -

it was believed that this kind of art could change society.

Both Malevich and Mondrian speak about this desire to create

a dynamic kind of society

of equal value.

So, these non-human forms,

square, circles, triangles, lines,

seem to offer a kind of purity and, also, a universality.

It was something they felt could be legible to anyone,

regardless of

their language or their nationality, or their place in society.

But while Europe was going through one of the greatest

art upheavals in history, Britain had largely clung to a romantic,

figurative tradition.

There were, however, a few radical exceptions -

and leading them were Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.

At first artistic allies, they became lovers and married in 1938.

I mean, Barbara Hepworth

and Ben Nicholson came together in the early 1930s.

Together they moved towards abstraction.

And really pretty much exactly at the same time,

they both arrived at pure abstract art.

You know, Barbara - pure abstract sculpture, Ben Nicholson -

pure abstract painting and reliefs.

So, absolutely, they were intrinsically

linked in the 1930s and beyond in their journey into abstraction.

While much of British art looked back,

Ben Nicholson had forged many links with Continental avant-garde artists

and developed his own distinctive form of abstract art in response.

He was a consummate image-maker

and every picture was a new problem that required a new solution.

And by the mid 1930s, he has made the purest abstract works

you'll almost ever see - these white reliefs with just

a couple of circles and squares and rectangles.

And when I look at those reliefs, I think -

"Wow, those are audacious, those are beautiful."

Nicholson was extremely camera shy - in fact, this rare footage of him

with Hepworth and their three children is perhaps

the only in existence.

But it was Hepworth who, arguably, went on to make a greater impact

in the public imagination as an abstract artist.

And SHE was a far more willing participant in front of the camera.

In 1961, the BBC travelled to Hepworth's home

and studio in St Ives to film her at work.

The shapes of her sculptures may remind

one of the shapes of hills and trees.

Their contours flow in the rhythms of the sea, of the beach,

of sand dunes, of birds in flight, or of the human figure.

Her sculpture may call these things to mind, but it never describes them.

Their meaning is ambiguous.

'It took a long time for me to find

'my own personal way of making sculpture.

'A long time to discover the purest forms which would exactly

'evoke my own sensations and to visualise images which would express

'the timelessness of primitive forces which I felt and the constant

'urges towards survival and growth which I knew to be fundamental

'both to the human being and to the landscape in which we stand.'

Barbara Hepworth was born in 1903 in Wakefield in Yorkshire.

She studied with Henry Moore at Leeds College of Art in the mid 1920s

and the two remained friends and rivals throughout their lives.

Hepworth began by making figurative sculpture,

but in the first half of the 1930s, she made the move into abstraction.

In an interview recorded decades later,

she described the process she went through.

So they gradually became

more and more... abstract, in so far,

as anatomically that took great...

..latitude, you know...

and tried to get everything that was not necessary

to my idea until I got to 29,

when I did this torso, which I can't find...

called Ivory Wood.

And that was entirely...

a suggestion of a figure, it was a form which simply

had strange...

..undulations, nothing else.

And then I thought suddenly,

"I've got my own calligraphy now, I know what I have to do."

From that point on, Hepworth's art was almost exclusively abstract.

And yet her art always remained influenced by the human form

and the natural world.

She is seen as the maker of the most pure abstract forms

and yet...

a human presence or the idea of a human figure,

exists through almost all of her sculptures.

When you see in the 1930s, the later 1930s

when she makes these elegant, tapering wooden forms,

they still hark back...

they clearly have evolved from the standing figure.

When you see two forms together,

there is certainly a metaphorical reference

to the idea of two figures in, sort of,

harmonious composition, if you like.

And I think one of the things that runs through

most of Hepworth's art is the use of harmonious spatial arrangements

as a kind of metaphor or a symbol for a human harmony.

'Many people select a stone or a pebble to carry for the day.

'The weight and form and texture felt in our hands relates us

'to the past and gives us a sense of a universal force.'

She loved tactility, the touch of a pebble,

she wanted to try and capture

how the human form interacted with the wind,

with natural forces around it.

Perhaps its great strength

lies in the fact that it transcends those sources,

that she managed to evolve a purity of form which still resonates today.

I think, any generation, any society can look at those

and somehow find a pleasure and a recognition, in the textures,

the volumes, these very lyrical, rather poetic shapes that she's evolved.

Through the 1950s and '60s, Hepworth's reputation grew and grew,

and in 1968 she had a major retrospective of her work

at the Tate Gallery.

The BBC was there when a group of Yorkshire schoolchildren

visited the exhibition and met the artist.

GIRL: ..say it was like a spider's web

because the strings are much too thick.

Yes, the crossed effect is... looks wonderful - yes.

I agree with you there.

The first question the children asked her was,

"Why do your sculptures have holes in them?"

Well, I found out as I worked, and that's a long time ago now,

about 1931,

that, erm, by carving right through with a hole,

I was able to

see the landscape through the hole and see what was happening behind

-the sculpture.

-Right.

And be able to put my fingers and my hands around it...

In another room, you have a piece of sculpture called Square Form -

this reminds me of being on a jetty because the squares are climbing

on top of one another as if this was a race to try and reach the sky,

to see who became the highest.

-Am I right or am I wrong, please?

-You're quite right.

Absolutely right, yes!

I didn't realise I liked abstract art until when I was about 15

and I was on my own at the Edinburgh Festival

and I got up early one morning, a beautiful sunny morning

and went down to the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh.

And there's a huge exhibition of Barbara Hepworth there

and I was completely bowled over.

I don't think art has to be very complicated,

or has to be very difficult, and I think it was the purity of her ima...

her shapes in that lovely dappled green landscape.

It just completely entranced me.

And I spent hours and hours and hours just walking around and staring at the holes

and the shapes... those beautiful biomorphic forms

and the complex, little lattices inside them and so on.

But that was the moment I realised I loved abstract painting,

or abstract art, I should say, and it's never left me.

Barbara Hepworth has had a huge impact - I mean, she was a really

pioneering artist, making the first completely abstract sculptures.

She's pretty much as close to a household name

as a modern artist can be.

You know, Henry Moore, of course, was a hugely important figure

in the post-war years, but so too was Barbara Hepworth.

And together, I think

they did more than almost anyone to bring British art to the world.

But also to popularise abstraction.

And, I think, a perfect symbol of her importance in the post-war years

is if you look at, in the early 1960s,

the United Nations commissioned a huge 21-foot-high

abstract sculpture to stand in front of the United Nations.

And what's interesting about that is they chose Barbara Hepworth.

They choose a female artist,

from Britain, living in Cornwall, and they choose something abstract.

And I think that says a lot.

Barbara Hepworth was one of the first British artists to go abstract,

but she was soon joined by a very different kind of abstract artist.

Victor Pasmore, filmed here at his house in Malta by the BBC in 1979,

gave up making figurative art midway through his career

and went on to become

one of the most influential figures in post-war British abstraction.

Few artists let you watch the creation of a big work from start to finish.

Pasmore said he wouldn't and couldn't, then he relented.

'The style is dependent on what you start with.

'If you start with a blob that will dictate a certain style -

'if I start with a line it will dictate another line.

'I refuse to operate or function on any absolute line.

'I start with the physical painting

'and the process will determine the style

'and the form of the picture, to some extent,

'not the whole extent, but to some...

'and so it depends what I choose to start with.'

For naturalist painters, there are often time constraints

which pressure them - sunsets fade, flowers droop

and models charge by the hour.

Does Pasmore have similar pressures in his abstract work?

I usually like to have... something...like the BBC

coming along and saying, "Will you...paint a picture?"!

Something objective like that, but I like painting when I'm relaxed...

because I like the picture to paint itself,

and if you are very... tense while you're painting and...

you concentrate on the wrong thing.

Pasmore started out as one of Britain's foremost figurative painters.

But from 1947, his art changed radically,

and he decided to follow a completely abstract path.

Over the next few decades, Pasmore became a passionate advocate

for abstraction, as revealed in this BBC profile from the 1960s.

In England, Victor Pasmore was one of the first artists

to adopt a professional approach after the war.

A change in the 1950s from a limpid post-impressionist style,

via abstract paintings to three-dimensional constructions.

Pasmore has been very influential in disseminating this approach

through his own example and also as a teacher.

-PASMORE:

-Perhaps the most significant factor about this

new approach to painting and sculpture,

completely free from natural representation,

is the fact that it provides a completely new and more dynamic

relationship between the work of art, the artist and the spectator.

For Pasmore, painting alone wasn't enough, he wanted to take

the universal language of abstraction to a wider world.

He was drawn to the kind of ideas developed before the war -

that through the fusing of art, architecture and design,

artists could bring about social improvement.

Pasmore very much takes on many of the ideals of the 1930s.

So the idea of an art that is integrated with architecture and design

is central to his development of a new constructivism,

"constructionism" as he calls it.

Because of his commitment to those ideas, he's employed by

Peterlee New Town in the north-east of England

to design a section of that town...

which has pretty much completely disappeared now...

but the one residue of his contribution

is this extraordinary pavilion that bridges part of the estate there.

To add a touch of class to one of his estates,

Pasmore had built a precast concrete pavilion above an artificial pond.

The tenants call it adding insult to injury.

The Apollo Pavilion embodied Pasmore's ideal of what abstraction

could stand for.

But the residents were less than impressed.

Over the years, it hasn't weathered well,

and the local children have made it their own.

DISCORDANT INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

The people who live around the pavilion want it taken down

because of the unmentionable things that local youths get up to inside,

underneath and on top of it.

And so in 1982, Pasmore travelled to Peterlee to defend it -

the BBC's Nationwide programme was there to record the encounter.

Now, can you not, sort of, sympathise with these people?

And back our plea to have this thing demolished?

So that these tenants can live in peace and quiet.

It's your... If you want the thing demolished, get it demolished.

There are few people here... How many? 25?

Well, actually, there's a lot more...

This doesn't represent... this doesn't represent Peterlee.

This little lot here doesn't represent...

Of all the new towns in Britain, Peterlee is the one

that started off with the greatest support and the highest ambitions.

But, for many, it's a dream that went badly wrong.

Not for lack of ideas, perhaps for too many of them.

Today, the pavilion is a listed monument

and it remains an imposing symbol of Pasmore's ideals.

JAUNTY MUSIC

Anyone who thinks abstract artists are too abstract

should drop in at the Whitechapel Art Gallery where there's an exhibition

devoted to collaboration between architects, painters and sculptors.

They point out that yesterday's tomorrow is not today,

so maybe today's tomorrow won't be quite what you expected.

By the mid '50s, abstract art was a familiar part of the British art scene.

But a new generation of artists had different ideas about

what abstract art was for.

In 1958, the BBC's Monitor programme interviewed one upcoming painter...

The young artists of today, like Gillian Ayres,

are more interested in abstracts than in people.

The post-war generation of painters don't feel that social

and political issues come directly into painting.

They put their energy directly into their painting.

Painters paint their environment and their times,

but they don't illustrate it.

If they do, it becomes literary and sentimental.

I want to paint something that says something visually in paint.

Gillian Ayres had studied at Camberwell under Victor Pasmore,

but had developed a more lyrical style that did away with

the more ordered abstract forms of the previous generation.

Aged 84, Ayres is still working today at her studio in Cornwall.

I've been painting abstracts... I suppose, really most of my life.

I wanted to be a painter

since I was about 13...but it doesn't mean one's achieved it,

it means it was one's ambition.

I mean, there was abstraction, but there was also painting and, erm...

I used to go over to France whenever I had any money, which wasn't that often,

and look at whatever painting was around,

but I can remember...

..a whole crowd of French art students.

And they didn't say a woman couldn't paint, they said the English

can't paint, erm, which was pretty screwy when you, sort of, think of Turner.

I think most of her painting is celebration of life -

it's not particularly dark.

So there isn't a wide range of emotional expression

in Gillian's paintings.

She is about the extraordinary luck

and the fact of being alive on this

multicoloured, extraordinary planet at any time.

It is pure celebration of life and the life force.

In 1988, Ayres was filmed in her studio,

describing the process and thinking behind her work.

There is this awful thing where you can really love a bit in a painting.

I don't save it, I'm afraid.

And, erm...

..the bit often has to go.

I would love the idea of keeping - you could actually like a bit

of a painting and mean to keep it and that doesn't always work.

Sometimes they can just be changed a bit,

but sometimes the whole damn painting goes,

but some of it's regrettable.

You know...you try and keep it and then, in the end,

you've changed so much round it, it can't stay there,

it simply doesn't mean anything any more.

With her, I always get that sense that...

she knew that dot was needed there, because it was needed there.

Not because she needed to represent something with the dot,

but there was something needed there and she knew.

And that must be an extraordinary thing to know.

Because I don't know it.

All I know is that when I look, I get enough from that to keep me

going imaginatively... and that, that's very satisfying.

I feel that...

..there's a sort of now truth, probably,

somewhere out there...

..of shapes.

And...I suppose there's a visual language of one's time.

And I think all my life

I've felt it's...

in abstraction, but it can't...you know,

it's not as simple as that.

Through the 1950s,

Gillian Ayers had developed her own distinctive visual language,

but the scale and ambition of her painting derived in part from a new

and irresistible force in abstract art - one from across the Atlantic.

UPBEAT JAZZ MUSIC

The glamorous and spectacular story of abstraction in the 20th century,

there is no doubt that

it's New York in the late '40s, early '50s, where abstraction is taken

to a new level, metaphorically, and in terms of monumentality and scale.

And, of course, we all know the impulses for that,

the European avant-garde is forced during the

Second World War to migrate from Paris to New York

and New York becomes this, kind of, cultural as well as economic and political centre of the West.

And, in a sense, abstraction and American abstract expressionism -

"the triumph of American painting" as one writer described it,

is there.

In the late '50s, a serious of exhibitions

of American abstract expressionist art opened in London.

The first showcased the work of Jackson Pollock.

He had his first exhibition, I think in a small...

in the Arts Club in Dover Street,

but the major public show was at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958.

And that show was transformative on many levels.

He worked with an architect who redesigned

the whole gallery to present this new spirit in painting.

And, out of this...one exhibition, tremendous excitement,

shock, even outrage, that something which was so formless

and almost aggressively anti-form could be regarded as art.

The drips and splodges of the abstract expressionists

were a controversial next step in the story of abstraction -

which was turning out to be a revolution in many stages.

Through the 1940s and '50s, America had been cooking up its own

abstract movement, which was, in many ways, more audacious that

anything that had happened in Europe and this was, of course, the abstract expressionist movement,

with those titanic figures like Jackson Pollock

and Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman - people who were painting

on a huge scale, but also people who were thinking on a huge scale.

I mean, these artists had colossal American-sized ambitions.

Gone were ideas of universal truth, favoured by early abstract artists -

here was a more personal, almost unconscious form of self expression.

One British artist that took up

the challenge of abstract expressionism was John Hoyland.

Hoyland was born in Sheffield in 1934,

and by the time he had finished at art school in London in 1960,

he was already a committed abstract artist.

Hoyland's style ranged throughout his career from more rigid

geometric work to freer, more expressive painting,

in which large fields of colour dominate.

In 1979, the BBC's Arena team filmed Hoyland in his studio

and documented the making of a single work.

The resulting film, Six Days In September, is a fascinating insight

into the process of creating an abstract painting.

'Just making a painting, I mean... seems such a ridiculous...

'..a ridiculous activity in a way.

'I mean...

'I mean...nobody wants it particularly.

'And, er...

'you don't know if you can do it, if you're strong enough to do it.

'Erm...

'It's just you...on your own in a room.'

John Hoyland is an artist who emerges in the 1960s

and is...you know, would acknowledge the importance to him

of American abstract expressionism...

and I think that idea of a painting

which can be environmental and completely envelop the viewer,

is what really, kind of, excites Hoyland,

and you see him in the later '60s producing these

enormous canvases in which sort of large, almost like huge slabs

of paint, float on a sort of thinner veils of colour on the canvas...

and they become, something which, sort of...

you can get lost in as a viewer.

I mean, it's all...panic, panic at this point.

I'm trying to coax a painting along,

but I'm not trying to...impose on it, you know?

I'm not trying to force a...a rigid idea on it.

So I think it's just happening.

I'm letting the paint...trying to let the paint work for me,

trying to let the paint do things for me.

'It always amuses me when they...people say

'they've been having problems,

'nervous problems or suicidal problems

'and they get them into painting as a form of therapy.

-LAUGHING:

-'And it always amuses me

'because I think if you want to drive someone crazy,

'the thing to do is to get them painting.'

I think John Hoyland would admit

that by the time he came to abstraction in the early '60s,

it was a familiar and well-worn territory,

but he would, quite rightly, have refused to believe

that it was a territory that was closed down.

I think he saw all sorts of possibilities.

HOYLAND LAUGHS

I don't know if I should do this, but I'm going to just do it anyway,

cos I'm not satisfied with what's there.

So...see what happens.

You always have to walk that tightrope between,

on the one hand, fussing with a painting,

on the other hand, just leaving it so that it's not really...

..you know, it's not really come together.

You've got to exercise some control, but if you have too much control,

then nothing's going to happen.

I don't quite know what to do next.

I keep seeing John Hoyland paintings,

and I think, "Why isn't this man one of the best-known figures

"of the English 20th century?

"Why isn't there a John Hoyland Room?"

You just keep wondering about a figure like John Hoyland,

that if only he'd been in New York,

he would be recognised as being a great painter.

It's a life-or-death thing - I'd hate to lose this painting.

Maybe we won't lose it.

Maybe we'll manage to do something with it,

turn it around.

There are good things in it -

it's just that I don't quite know how to do it.

But I may hit on it.

I may come in here one morning -

unfortunately, I may come in here one morning when you're not here -

and just suddenly think, "Maybe I'll just do something."

That's very often how it happens, actually.

You think, "I'm not painting today -

"forget this painting, I'm not going to do it."

Then you go in and say,

"Maybe I'll just put this on here", you know?

And then maybe in five minutes, ten minutes,

you've just found the key to lock in the whole idea.

But it's finding the key

and then just hitting the right spot, you know?

And I can't guarantee it -

I can't guarantee I can do it on the camera, you know?

That's the way it is.

The Responsive Eye is the title of an exhibition on view

at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City

between February 23rd and April 25th, 1965.

As this 1965 CBS documentary entertainingly reveals,

abstract art continued to both intrigue and provoke the public.

How do people respond to The Responsive Eye?

We talked to some of them as they came out of the exhibit.

Did you find it as disturbing as you'd heard?

Physically, yes, it was disturbing to my eyes -

I felt like I was going around in circles after a while.

But artistically, I thought it was excellent.

Among the artists on show at this exhibition

was a young British painter.

Here is Current by the British artist, Bridget Riley.

It is black on white, no colour.

But look carefully - many viewers notice blues and yellows,

darting around the ripples.

You don't find it disturbing?

I don't mind being disturbed.

Art is something you live with and appreciate and enjoy.

And you couldn't live with this.

You can't appreciate it for more than five minutes.

Throughout the early 1960s,

Riley had developed a form of hard-edged monochrome painting

that played with visual perception.

It became known as op art.

The paintings captured the public imagination

and they went on to spark a craze

that took the fashion world by storm.

But Riley's ambitions as an artist

were a world away from designs for mini skirts and hats,

and she moved away from purely black and white works

and began experimenting with colour.

In 1979, Riley participated in a film made by The Arts Council

that explored the theory behind her striking abstract works.

Bridget Riley's art is an exploration of the possibilities of vision.

It is the result of continual trials and testing and experiment

to find out what the eye can see,

to experience what looking feels like.

Rhythm and repetition are at the root of movement.

They create a situation

within which the most simple, basic forms

start to become visually active.

By massing them and repeating them, they become more fully present.

Repetition acts as a sort of amplifier for visual events which,

seen singly, would hardly be visible.

But to make these basic forms

release the full visual energy within them,

they have to breathe, as it were -

to open and close, or to tighten up and then relax.

A rhythm that's alive has to do with changing speed

and feeling how the visual speed can expand and contract -

sometimes go slower and sometimes go faster.

The whole thing must live.

Riley was herself revolutionary

in pioneering this idea of using the stripe,

and using the way it's potentially so kinetic as eye-catching.

She would arrest us.

And I've seen, even today, people walking past

and literally stop in their tracks

because of the, kind of, dazzling effect of her work.

It has this extraordinary power.

It's a very simple but refined technique.

Of course, colour as light and colour as paint

behave in quite different ways.

It was artists like Monet and Seurat

who taught us to make paint behave as light does -

by dividing up the colour on the canvas

so that it works optically,

only mixing in the actual process of seeing it.

Seeing it is when the painting starts to live.

That is when it begins.

And we say that painters shouldn't think -

that, more than anything, they must stop thinking.

But Bridget Riley thinks,

and when she puts two colours beside each other,

using thought and using perhaps some mathematical system, even,

something very deep can happen to the viewer,

to the eye, as the colours hit against each other.

Something quite spiritual, something quite satisfying,

comes from her mind.

March back...

Riley had always been fascinated

by the paintings of the 19th century French artist Georges Seurat

and the dynamic possibilities of placing one colour against another.

In this BBC documentary about his work,

she details his use of colour.

I once painted out this colour wheel of Seurat's

which he used for... to identify contrasts.

I added to the pure pigmentary centre

the two outer rings with each colour lightened with white.

And you can see in the red group and in the yellow-green group,

on the edges, throws up an illusion of the adjacent colour.

It is the surrounding influences of everything

which are interacting the whole time,

which make a, um...generalisation about colour

quite impossible to maintain.

I think one of the things we have to be careful about

when we talk about abstract art

is we need to avoid thinking of it as a single thing.

It's a bit like talking about...I don't know,

blue art or something.

They may be...

Artists are using non-figuration

for very different reasons, with different ends,

and you see, in the 1960s, Bridget Riley developing an art

which is really about visual perception and illusion.

And, in a way, it's almost sort of coincidental that to do that,

the painting needs to be abstract, because of course,

as soon as you had anything which looked like a thing,

then other mental processes would go on.

So, you know, it's just a clear demonstration

that...what makes her an abstract artist

is quite different to what makes John Hoyland or Gillian Ayres

an abstract artist.

Looking is a pleasure, a continual surprise.

Sight, the activity of looking,

helps us to be more truthfully aware of the condition of being alive.

Riley wasn't the only artist to push colour to extremes

in pursuit of underlying human experiences.

Howard Hodgkin had begun as a figurative painter.

But as his style developed,

he turned increasingly to the language of abstraction

to represent intimate emotional experiences.

Hodgkin is one of those smack-you-in-the-eye,

knock-you-over painters.

If you're not impressed,

not bowled over by Hodgkin, there's something wrong with you -

you probably just don't like painting at all.

Now 82, Hodgkin has never considered himself an abstract artist.

I've always had trouble with being described as an abstract artist,

because I don't really believe I am one.

I think that an abstract artist is much more pure.

What I've always said - it sounds horribly pompous -

that I'm a figurative painter of emotional situations is true.

But whether that makes me an abstract artist or not,

I'm not quite clear.

Hodgkin is normally closely guarded

about the way his painted forms describe his subjects.

But in 1984, he gave this uncharacteristically frank account

of his painting Tea to the BBC's Arena programme.

I was asked round to some friends for tea.

And this very ordinary-looking person appeared

who was a friend of theirs,

though apparently, they didn't know him very well.

And he said, "What do you do?" And I said, "Oh, I'm a painter."

And I said, "What do you do?"

He said, "Oh, I'm a prostitute."

And so he started telling me

about what it was like to be a prostitute.

And I sort of sat there listening to what he had to say,

which was fascinating.

And he'd clearly never, ever before told anybody what he was doing

and what it was like and so on.

The picture is an attempt

at containing this extraordinary situation.

I hate saying that this brush stroke,

this colour stands for this thing.

But this particular picture is one of the few

that I have ever described the subject of

in any detail in public,

because I think describing the subject of a picture

tends to come between you, as the spectator, and the picture.

And you start looking for things which perhaps you won't find.

But I would say about this,

that I think the overall rhythm of the picture,

the way it's like an interior which is spattered with blood,

is, in some way, an equivalent

to the fact one's hearing this extraordinary narrative

which is like a descant going on across what one had to look at,

the sort of, "Pass me a cup of tea" or, "Pass me a drink"

or, "Give me a light" sort of conversation

that was going on at the same time.

I think that Howard Hodgkin is a, sort of, poetic abstractionist.

He's called himself a figurative abstractionist.

He draws on his world, his recollections,

his relationships and his immediate surroundings.

I think he's more like Marcel Proust -

he's someone that draws on those recollections

and tries to find...

Rather than finding language or words to describe it,

he finds colours and marks to describe it.

So we may look at his work and see dots and dashes,

but we look at the title and it's the name of somebody -

it's apparently a portrait.

It's taking abstraction into a whole other area

which is emotional and descriptive

of a feeling and a relationship and maybe a dialogue.

The Green Chateau, 1976-1980.

Still Life In A Restaurant, 1976-79.

Red Bermudas, 1978-80.

Mr and Mrs EJP, 1972-73.

Really, if you look at the story of his painting, it is of simplicity,

like a lot of painters, who become...who don't have to put in

all the other bits by the end, because they know exactly what to do.

They don't have to fill in the dots, they just do the basic work

and that's true of painters like Titian,

it's true of painters like Matisse

and it's true of Howard Hodgkin.

His early pictures are very, very elaborate.

Lots and lots of washes, lots of changes of colour,

colour obliterated by colour, lots of splodges,

lots of zigzag designs, lots of lines.

And bit by bit by bit, he realises, "I don't need all that stuff.

"I just need that extraordinary smokey-green emerald

"with some bright light shining through it

"and I need a little scarlet there," and so forth.

So it's radical simplification.

Over the decades, Hodgkin has routinely turned down requests

from the BBC to filmed at work.

But then, in 2006,

to the complete surprise of Imagine presenter Alan Yentob,

Hodgkin picked up his paintbrush in front of the camera.

'It was our last day of filming,

'and just when it seemed that Howard had typically contrived

'to have the last word, something extraordinary happened.

'He did exactly what he said he never would.

'He picked up a paintbrush and prepared to paint.'

Breaking all the rules.

HODGKIN CLEARS HIS THROAT

Broken all the rules.

'I wonder what will become of that.'

People say, "How do you do it?"

Cos I don't know.

I really don't.

When I...go to sleep at night,

I...work...

..which causes all sorts of problems.

HE LAUGHS

I can't say what's going on in my head,

because I don't know.

What I do know about is what I can do with the results.

But as Hodgkin was exploring his emotional life through colour,

other artists were grappling with more physical realities.

First time I came here, I don't know how many years ago,

five years ago, probably, I was looking for propellers

and those, sort of, twisting shapes to use in my sculpture.

From the time he became an abstract artist,

Anthony Caro used the industrial materials of the modern world

to make his sculpture.

But Caro's relationship with abstraction

was never straightforward,

as he explained to the BBC in 1984.

I think abstraction is difficult.

There is a difficulty of response to any sort of thing

which doesn't give you the handle of saying, what's it of?

I swore that I'd never make an abstract sculpture -

the one thing I said I'd never do is make an abstract sculpture.

What I'd meant was I hope I'll never make an empty sculpture.

You know? I want to make sculptures which had to do with...

..with life, not to be an exercise,

I never wanted to make an exercise.

And it was really - in order to make them more to do with life,

that I found myself having to eventually turn to abstraction,

reluctantly, reluctantly.

More than a decade before, Caro was interviewed by the BBC

as he prepared to open an early retrospective

at the Hayward Gallery in London.

It's very difficult analysing what goes on in your mind

when you're in the studio, because...

..I don't think it's very good to be too self-conscious

about the actual process.

Anthony Caro was born in 1924 in London.

After training at the Royal Academy Schools,

he went on to work in the studio of Henry Moore.

Moore opened his eyes up to broader possibilities for sculpture,

but not fully abstract at all.

It's more the expressionistic power,

the expressive power of sculpture that he learns from Moore.

And, in a way, Moore's particular approach to abstraction,

which is a melding of figure and landscape,

is something that Caro can only push so far.

I wanted my people to be more real. I wanted...

In fact, I made this figure of a woman,

um...that was very big,

and I wanted it to be as real in a room as me talking to you.

And I found that...I couldn't, cos it was just clay.

It was a model.

And I think that I had come to the end of making models.

Caro's move into abstraction came suddenly.

In 1959, on a trip to America,

he saw sculpture made with industrial materials.

Soon after, he began making

large-scale bolted and welded steel forms,

painted with brightly coloured paint.

Nothing like it had been seen before in Britain.

People want a lot of art to be made in some way that can be written down

or can be explained,

and I don't think it can be.

I think art has to be in its own language.

And obviously, my language is the language of shape and interval

and hollowness and convexity.

These are the sort of things one thinks about.

Hopefully, what comes out

is something to do with my response to the world,

my response to being alive.

Caro makes sculpture which sits directly on the floor,

so he's making a new relationship with us -

we're almost part of the work.

We move around it in a different way.

We're not looking up at a statue in a frontal way,

or at a reclining figure,

where the relationship would be as one would be with a human presence.

No, we're actually being asked to see this work

from many different vantage points.

Where is the front? We don't know.

And that's another really exciting thing about his work.

He opens up all of these different dimensions

to understanding the work - it changes as we move around it.

Through the 1960s, Caro taught at the highly influential

St Martins School of Art.

-Well, have you tried to sell any?

-Yes - I'm trying to at the moment.

-Have you succeeded?

-I'm going to find out.

Well, good luck. If you succeed, well, good luck.

But it seems to me that, uh...

You're going to be in a lot more trouble trying to sell your art

before you're really ready

than if you were digging roads.

He was a very generous-spirited man, he was a very great teacher.

Gilbert and George were students of his for a time

and, um, they...they loved...

They told me a story that he'd said to them

when they'd left St Martins School of Art,

"I rather hope you don't succeed,

"but I have a strong feeling you will - good luck."

And they liked the politeness, they said, of that.

But he then asked me later, "How are Gilbert and George?"

I said, "Very well."

He said, "Do you think they're great artists?"

I said, "I do, Tony." And he went, "Good for you!"

And left it at that.

Caro always faced any criticism with good humour.

In 1980, it fell again to the BBC's teatime Nationwide programme

to take abstract artists to task

when it brought Caro to meet students at a West London college

who were using one of his public sculptures as a bike rack.

This isn't like any bicycle rack you've ever seen

because this is a sculpture.

It was constructed by world-famous sculptor Anthony Caro.

It cost £15,000,

but as far as the students of this college are concerned,

it makes a far better bicycle rack than it does a work of art.

But the subtleties of Caro's work is lost on the students,

and back in Hammersmith, the temperature is rising.

The great man himself has bravely agreed to face his critics.

We think that because of all these education cut backs,

to spend £15,000 on a sculpture that nobody really understands

is a complete waste of money.

The main thing is whether...whether you get some pleasure

or whether it lifts your heart a little bit

as you walk out of that building there.

-Does it lift anybody's hearts?

-Not really, no.

Do you object to it having a use? I mean, people putting bikes on it?

- Do you object to that? - I think as you get more used to it,

you'll respect it more and you won't put bicycles on it!

Do you not think, though,

even if you don't appreciate or understand modern art,

it's certainly made you think again about this?

I think it ought to be in a place where more people can see it -

just outside the college so the public can see it

-as well as the students.

-Well said.

Who would like to see this sculpture taken away?

-ALL: No!

-Why not?

It's part of the college - it was here when we started.

That's the nicest thing I've heard!

You see? You are actually getting used to it.

You are getting accustomed to it.

One day, come in before the bicycles come in and have a good look at it

and see whether you like it or not - that's all!

Anthony Caro was one of the last of a generation of British artists

that made the decisive move from figurative art to abstraction.

In the last few decades,

artists have continued to make abstract art,

but they've used abstraction in quite different ways

and for different ends.

Abstraction is fully integrated into the language of visual art

to the extent where it's just one element in the artist's armoury.

Artists like the sculptor Anish Kapoor

have used the language of abstraction

to create new forms of expression.

Damien Hirst made his spot paintings

that are now among the most famous abstract art of recent years.

And more recently, the Turner Prize was awarded to Richard Wright,

who creates elaborate abstract designs

that he paints directly onto the walls of the gallery.

But the old opposition between figurative and abstract art

seems to be over.

We live in an art world that has this bewildering variety of things

that we call art.

And in that bewildering variety of activity,

abstraction, which was once such a powerful word,

now, I suppose, seems rather quaint.

And you know, looking back through the 20th century,

abstract art was something

that people worked their whole careers for.

It seemed like the be all and end all.

People fought over it like it was a cold war.

It was the most important thing in art in the 20th century.

The pioneering artists featured in these films

represent a remarkable period in British art.

It tool a long time to discover the purest forms

which would exactly evoke my own sensations.

You always have to walk that tightrope between,

on the one hand, fussing with a painting,

on the other hand, just leaving it.

British abstract artists were not a single movement -

instead, they responded

to the radical possibilities of abstraction

with a dazzling variety of styles and ideas,

from sculpture evoking our relationship with the natural world

to painting that contains profound self-expression...

..and art that asks questions of the very basis

of visual perception itself.

Looking is a pleasure.

Sight, the activity of looking, helps us to be more truthfully aware

of the condition of being alive.