Blue A History of Art in Three Colours

This is the BBC Television Service.

We now present another programme

in our series of Experimental Transmissions In Colour.

We live in a kaleidoscopic world.

But colours are more than mere decoration.

Colours carry deep and significant meanings for us all.

In this series, I want to unravel the stories of three colours.

Three colours which, in the hands of artists,

have stirred our emotions,

changed the way we behave

and even altered the course of history.

Gold.

Its lustrous shine has made this the most intoxicating colour.

One we've used throughout history to revere the things

we hold most sacred.

White,

once the virtuous colour of ancient marbles,

came to embody our darkest instincts.

And, in this programme, a colour that, for artists,

has always been the most beguiling of all.

The unique thing about blue is that

it is all around us and yet somehow it feels for ever out of reach.

Because we can never touch the blueness of the sea

or blueness of the sky,

and we can never reach the blue horizon over there, in the distance.

And, for these reasons, blue has captured our imaginations,

offering us the tantalising prospect

of entirely new worlds beyond our own.

From the moment a mysterious cargo arrived from the across the seas,

artists have used blue to transport us to strange and exotic realms.

From Giotto's heavenly visions...

..to Titian's gardens of earthly delight.

From Picasso's melancholy yearnings

to Yves Klein's dreams of escape.

Throughout his whole life,

his goal was to leave this world behind him.

We'll reveal how these artists searched for the perfect blue

to capture the great beyond.

And, finally, how one powerful image showed us

that blue was not the colour of other worlds.

It was the colour of our own.

Our story of blue begins a thousand years ago

on the edge of Europe.

This is the Venetian Lagoon.

Across these waters sailed merchants from the East.

They were hungry for Venetian gold.

And, in exchange, they brought a mysterious cargo.

It was a rare, almost mythical substance

that could only be found in one tiny mine

on the far side of what is now Afghanistan.

And to get here, to Venice, it had travelled some 3,500 miles,

across mountain ranges, across deserts

and, finally, across the Mediterranean Sea.

What the Arab sailors had brought was a precious stone.

And it was called lapis lazuli.

And this stone possessed a colour so enchanting

that it would change art in dramatic ways.

So this is it.

Now, I must say, I have never seen

such a large chunk of lapis before.

And I'm quite surprised at how complex

and beautiful it is, actually.

You can see how rich and deep and amazing this blue is.

And the whole impression of this stone

is that it looks a bit like the sky.

It looks a bit like a fragment of the sky

has just fallen down to Earth and I've picked it.

So you can really understand why people loved this substance so much.

As strange as it may seem,

blue hardly existed in the history of Western art.

It's nowhere to be found among the earthy colours

of prehistoric cave paintings.

The Greeks didn't even have a word for it.

And the Romans had little time for blue in their wall paintings

at Pompeii.

Even in the Middle Ages, the blues they had were feeble and pallid.

And so the artists of medieval Venice

couldn't wait to get their hands on the wondrous blue of lapis lazuli.

-OK, here we go.

-So you probably need to be pretty strong, don't you?

Yeah, this is like sculpting marble.

I mean, this is a hard stone, I mean, it's physically hard, it's heavy.

And you have to be very patient

and you're talking about a process of one week to even two weeks.

Alan Pascuzzi is an Italian artist

who has studied the ingenious process

that took his medieval forebears centuries to perfect.

We're going to put it in the mortar

and, eventually, what we have to do is

begin to grind this up.

And the thing is, you don't want to waste one bit of this

because the lapis lazuli is exponentially more expensive

than any other pigment.

Lapis, you know, took how many months of travel to get there,

you don't want to lose even one piece of it.

Days would pass,

slowly grinding the rock until it was reduced to a fine, blue dust.

The blue dust was encased in beeswax,

pine resin and gum arabic to purge it of impurities.

And then placed into a mixture too caustic to touch.

It really brings home to you how important colour is to people,

-that they would go to this huge effort...

-Exactly.

-..just to make a colour. It's amazing.

-Exactly.

And I think that's the power of art.

And, by association, art is -

you know, you want to make it as beautiful as possible.

And finally...

..after weeks of tortuous labour,

every particle of the precious blue essence was released.

The hard stone of lapis lazuli

had been transformed.

And this is the finished product.

Ultramarine.

And they call it that because that's quite literally

from where it came, from across the seas.

Now, today, we're surrounded by bright blue things,

but to the people of the late Middle Ages, this colour was a revelation.

It was brighter and purer and stronger

than any blue they had ever seen.

'Within just a few decades of this remarkable discovery,

'blue began to seep into Western art.'

It crept across the pages of illuminated manuscripts.

It wrapped itself around their sacred words.

And it slipped into the backgrounds of Biblical scenes.

But blue would soon become more than a decorative flourish.

Our story now takes us to Padua.

Here, a pioneering artist would indulge in blue

like never before,

elevating this once lowly colour to divine status.

'In 1303, Giotto, often called the father of the Italian Renaissance,

'set to work at the Scrovegni Chapel.'

While it looks austere from the outside,

inside, Giotto had created a masterpiece.

This may just be

one of the two or three most important rooms in Western art.

And almost every square inch of it is covered in paintings by Giotto,

dealing with the life of Christ and the life of the Virgin Mary.

You can see, over there, that's the Last Supper.

Come through and you can see here, the washing of the feet.

But my favourite image in here, and probably the most famous of them,

is this one, Judas leaning in to kiss Christ.

Now, what amazes me is this was painted 700 years ago

and still the suspense is unbearable.

And that is the brilliance of Giotto.

He took religious art and he made it feel like

it was just something taking place on the streets in every day life.

'These paintings are dramatic and original.

'But I think Giotto's most striking invention here

'is not on the walls at all,

'it's on the ceiling.'

Above us, we have the most beautiful,

the most brilliant, deep, blue vault,

that's dusted with hundreds of golden stars.

And you may think that's the sky, but it's not the sky.

This blue ceiling is, actually, a depiction of Heaven.

This is how Giotto imagined Heaven.

For Giotto, Heaven is blue.

And, if you don't believe it, have a look up

and you'll see the Virgin Mary and Jesus

and various other prophets, peeking out of the blue Heaven

and looking down on us.

And, for me, this is just the most amazing thing

because, only a few years before this chapel was painted,

blue was a really minor colour in the history of Western art,

it really was, I mean, it didn't have much of a big role to play.

But here, only a few years after that recipe for ultramarine

had been mastered,

Giotto takes the colour blue

and he turns it into the colour that is the most beautiful,

the most powerful, the most sacred of them all.

The colour of paradise itself.

In the eyes of the Church,

blue was now the most sacrosanct of colours.

TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:

But blue was now so divine

that the Church greedily sought to control it.

They restricted its supply and inflated its price.

Before long, blue became even expensive than gold.

In the 1300s, laws were passed

that banned citizens from wearing the colour.

Only one person, it seemed, could always be robed in blue.

The Mother of God herself.

In this Madonna And Child, Italy, 1420.

The Visitation, Flemish,

1445.

And here,

German, 1490.

But it was in Venice, the spiritual home of blue,

that the colour would be liberated

from the suffocating grip of the Church.

And one painter who dared to do this was Titian.

Titian was born among the foothills of the Alps around 1490,

but, as a young man, he was soon drawn to Venice.

When Titian arrived here, Venice was the undisputed world leader

in colour.

It had the raw materials, it had the clientele

and it had the know-how.

So virtually every pigment known to man

was available along this canal.

Titian was a colour addict.

And when it came to blue, he wore his heart on his sleeve.

'For him, the Church's control of the colour

'must have been deeply frustrating.'

And in one of his first great commissions,

he made his feelings known in a most explicit way.

So this is the Pesaro Altarpiece

and Titian started it in 1519, when he was still a young man.

He's put virtually every colour,

virtually every single pigment he can find here in Venice,

on that painting.

There's something he's done here that no artist has done before.

He's put the Virgin Mary to the side of the painting.

Now, throughout history, the Virgin Mary had always been in the centre.

To move her up the steps and on the side

was tantamount to heresy, really.

And taking her place, at the heart of the picture,

is a rich swathe of ultramarine blue

with a very lucky Saint Peter underneath it.

But Titian's obsession with blue would only be fully understood

when one of his greatest paintings began to fall apart.

I've been looking at this picture now for over 20 years,

watching it deteriorate slowly.

Here I'm looking for minute blisters which are very difficult to see.

0.09, experiment begins.

In 1967, 450 years after it was painted,

Titian's Bacchus And Ariadne was in intensive care.

After I do this, of course, I have the whole picture X-rayed.

At London's National Gallery,

Mr Arthur Lucas was undertaking a daring experiment

in art restoration.

0.59, focus cleared.

With a surgical hand, he began to remove a thick skin of varnish

and dirt.

And as he did so, he made an astonishing discovery.

Patches of the most brilliant blues.

Blues applied by Titian's hand centuries before.

And when it's all finished,

do you think that this picture is going to look

like the picture Titian intended?

Well, it'll look very near, I think.

The picture will look very beautiful when it's finished.

And here it is, Bacchus And Ariadne,

a famous scene from Roman mythology.

Arthur Lucas's restoration of Bacchus And Ariadne

shocked all who saw it because no-one knew

just how colourful Titian's paintings could be.

But, for me, the most dramatic thing about this painting

is, of course, the blue.

Because this is an utter barnstormer.

And you know when you look at this painting, almost half of it,

if you look diagonally that way,

almost half of it is blue.

And it must have cost Titian an utter fortune.

But, my word, it was worth the money because it's so delicious

and he has used it all the way through the painting.

He's used it in Ariadne's cloak,

he's used it in this reveller's dress,

he's used it in the amazing mountains on the horizon

and, of course, he's used it in this sky,

this unforgettable sky.

As we've already seen, blue was incredibly powerfully controlled

by the Church, controlled by religious conventions,

how much you could use and where you could use it.

And in this painting, Titian has just blown that away

and said, "I'm going to use blue wherever I like."

And, you know, there's something,

there's something heretical about that as well.

Cos, as we have seen, blue was usually reserved for the cloak

of the Virgin Mary.

And, look, the purest ultramarine in this painting

is the cloak of this reveller here.

And she couldn't be further away from the Virgin Mary,

she hasn't even bothered to put her breast away.

And, for me, this is the moment when blue gets stripped of conventions,

stripped of received wisdom,

stripped of hierarchical meanings,

and it just gets used for fun.

After centuries under the strict control of the Church,

Titian seemed to liberate blue from the shackles of religion.

'But let's now travel to another time and place.

'A place where blue would be transformed once again,

'turned into the colour of our deepest emotions.'

We're no longer in Renaissance Italy,

but Germany, at the end of the 18th century.

It was the Romantic Age.

These were the days of delicate sensibilities

and wild imaginings,

of brooding heroes and wandering poets.

In 1799, a German Romantic writer by the name of Novalis

began work on an epic novel.

Its eponymous hero was a boy,

Heinrich von Ofterdingen,

whose lucid visions keep him from sleep.

"The young man lay uneasily on his couch.

"'It's like a dream, as if I had dozed off into another world',

"he said to himself."

His wild fantasies led him on a journey

across the landscape of his own imagination.

Heinrich was restless

because there was something he couldn't get out of his head.

It was the most powerful longing he'd ever experienced.

And it wasn't for money, it wasn't for power,

it wasn't even for a woman.

What Heinrich was yearning for was a small, blue flower.

"It's not material treasures

"which have awakened such a powerful longing in me,

"but I long to look on the blue flower.

"It feels my senses ceaselessly

"and I can think and breathe nothing else.

"All emotions rose within him to an unprecedented peak."

The novel proved to be a sensation.

Throughout Europe,

it captivated the hearts and minds of those who read it.

The Blue Flower quickly lodged itself in the Romantic imagination

and it profoundly transformed the meaning of the colour blue.

Because it was that story, more than perhaps anything else,

that made blue the great colour of our deepest feelings.

'Today, Novalis's book has been mostly forgotten,

'but its legacy permeated through the 1800s.'

So, when artists tapped into their deepest feelings,

they repeatedly called on blue.

It dances in the dreams of Gauguin's sleeping son.

It haunts the Starry Night of Van Gogh's troubled soul.

And it embraces the private passions of Edvard Munch's lovers.

But, as the 19th century drew to a close,

one artist would harness the emotional power of blue

like no other.

Today we remember Picasso as a macho playboy

and brave abstractionist.

But as a young man,

he made his debut with an astonishingly accomplished

series of paintings.

The works of Picasso's Blue Period are known across the world.

But few know the real story behind them.

A story of suicide, of despair

and the search for redemption.

Picasso was born in Spain in 1881.

'And, like many a young man, he felt the urge to leave home.'

In October 1900, when he was just 19 years old,

Picasso decided to leave Spain.

But he wouldn't make the journey alone.

Sitting next to him, the whole way,

was his best friend Carlos Casagemas.

And, together, they planned to make their names

on the international stage.

And as far as they were concerned, there was only one place to go.

Paris.

When Picasso and Casagemas arrived here,

they stepped off the train and into the very centre of the world.

All nations had converged at the Universal Exhibition

to showcase their new ideas, new architecture and new inventions.

Thomas Edison was there to capture the extravaganza

on his pioneering movie camera.

And I always wonder if, somewhere, lost in the crowd,

is a wide-eyed Picasso with his friend Casagemas.

But while they marvelled at the wonders of the exhibition by day,

when night fell, they indulged in more salacious pleasures.

Now, Picasso and Casagemas were all but penniless,

yet they took advantage of almost everything that Paris had to offer.

They went sightseeing, they networked,

they tried almost every drug going

and they seduced as many women as possible.

But their fun would not last for ever.

Paris was oblivious to two young artists trying to make their way.

And while Picasso kept the faith,

Casagemas was consumed with frustration.

He began to lose his grip on sanity

with disastrous consequences.

On the evening of 17 February 1901,

Carlos Casagemas washed up in a bar with his girlfriend.

But as the wine flowed,

an embarrassing scene developed.

People didn't know where to look.

And then things got ugly.

GUNSHOT, WOMAN SCREAMS

'Casagemas had pulled a gun on his lover.'

Fortunately, Casagemas missed his girlfriend.

She dived under the table the moment he fired the gun

and she escaped virtually unscathed.

But he thought she was dead,

so he turned the gun on himself.

He brought the revolver up to his right temple,

he pulled the trigger and he shot himself dead.

'Picasso was horrified when he heard the news

'of best friend's suicide.

'And he struggled to come to terms with the death.'

Picasso was so bereft that he started to behave rather strangely.

In fact, he set about taking over his best friend's identity.

He started sleeping with Casagemas's girlfriend,

he moved into Casagemas's apartment

and he started producing paintings

that compulsively - and, I think, self-destructively -

revisited the tragedy.

He repeatedly painted Casagemas, blue in his coffin,

the bullet wound still raw.

A mythical re-enactment of the funeral soon followed.

Where prostitutes and faceless mourners are engulfed

in a blue haze.

Such bizarre paintings couldn't escape the eyes of a man

who made it his business to probe the most intimate parts

of the human mind.

Carl Jung was one of the most celebrated psychoanalysts

of his day.

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:

Dr Christian Gaillard is a disciple of Jung.

And shares his master's interest in Picasso.

The infernal path that Picasso walked

was littered with harrowing figures veiled in blue.

A skeletal musician is hunched over his guitar.

A woman is lost in melancholy.

A blind actress stares blankly out from the canvas.

For Jung, the blue in Picasso's work signalled his descent

into schizophrenia.

But I think blue did even more than that.

What we see here is this wonderfully beautiful, porcelain-like girl

in this white chemise,

surrounded by this huge, blue background,

almost as though she's drowning in a dirty ocean.

And yet she's got this wonderful evocative and mysterious,

wry smile on her face as she stares out into the distance.

Now, Picasso painted this picture in 1904, 1905,

so right at the very end of his Blue Period.

And it is still smothered in that dark, haunting colour.

And look at this passage on the right,

this is not the lush, rich blue of ultramarine,

these are the rancid tones of the new, synthetic blues

that had just been invented.

And they give this whole painting a really cheap, seedy,

cadaverous quality

and I don't think it would have that quality in any other colour.

I mean, imagine this painting in orange or in purple

or in red or in yellow,

it wouldn't be anywhere near as unsettling as it is now.

But look closer at this painting and you can see new colours,

new colours coming out of the blue smoke.

The colours of life, the flesh tones,

the incredibly fresh, white linens

and that absolutely stunning, luscious pink

that he's put on the girl's lips.

And that, I think, is a sign that, finally,

after three really difficult years,

Picasso is painting his way out of that ordeal.

And it's almost as though the very act of applying that blue paint

to the canvas is an act of catharsis,

getting it out of his system so, finally, he can move on.

Picasso finally left his trauma behind

and set off on the path to becoming the macho modernist

that we know today.

And the moment he did so, his Blue Period came to an end.

Tres bien, c'est fini.

But in just a few decades, a painter would emerge

who would never give up on blue.

He was a Frenchman called Yves Klein.

And in the years before his tragic, early death,

he would devote himself to making paintings

that were not only in blue...

..they were about blue.

Klein would even invent his very own blue.

And he believed it could change the world.

Fittingly, his story begins amid the dazzling blues of the Cote d'Azur.

'This was a place where affluent sun-seekers

'mixed with the glamorous celebrity set.

'But set apart from this superficial razzmatazz,

'there walked three young dreamers.

'One summer, they were strolling along the beach

'admiring the scenery.

'They lay down and, in a moment of youthful idealism,

'decided to divide the whole world between them.'

The first friend chose the Earth.

The second friend chose language,

but the third friend chose the sky.

On doing so, he reached up to the celestial dome above him

and signed his name across it, and the name he signed

was Yves Klein.

Yves Klein was born in Nice in 1928.

He was the son of two bohemian artists

and grew up indifferent to the gaudy glamour that surrounded him.

He tried almost everything to escape.

He became a jockey,

he danced the night away,

and even started on a path to becoming a judo master.

But Yves had another plan up his sleeve.

He decided to become an artist.

He lost himself making paintings, each just a single block of colour.

Red.

Slightly less red.

And yellow.

But the colour that captivated him most was the colour of the sky.

Now, Yves Klein never forgot

that blue sky of his childhood here in Nice

and I think for him, it was a great symbol of escape.

Escape from all the worldly concerns,

the consumerism, the materialism of the world around him,

and it was in his late 20s that he decided the best way to escape

from those concerns was to create a new colour.

A new blue that was as deep and rich and open

and liberating as the sky itself.

So, off to Paris he went.

He knew that here there lived a legendary colour maker.

A man so steeped in the mysteries and magic of colour

that Picasso, Bacon and countless others

had entrusted him with preparing their precious paints.

Now, Yves too made his pilgrimage to the atelier of Edouard Adam.

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:

Here at the studio, Yves explained the problem -

the traditional oil used to turn blue pigment into paint

always adulterated the colour.

So to achieve the pure luminous blue of the sky,

Edouard invented a secret ingredient and he called it, cryptically,

the medium.

And there, right before his eyes,

Yves's dream of a new blue was turning into reality.

Yves christened his new paint International Klein Blue.

He was so proud that he wanted to cast its spell

across the whole world.

He inaugurated a blue revolution

so that everyone could share in the joy of his new colour.

He released 1,001 blue balloons into the sky above Paris.

He planned to turn Cleopatra's Needle blue.

In this revolution, anything that took his fancy

was treated to his new blue.

And he even wrote a letter to President Eisenhower

asking him to join in.

Dwight thought about it,

and decided it would be better not to respond.

Undeterred, Yves continued to fill the world with his blue art.

But my favourite part of Yves's blue revolution

was a series of paintings, all identical,

and each a devotion to nothing but International Klein Blue.

This is one of Yves Klein's blue monochromes

and, believe it or not, a huge amount of time and effort

went into making this look exactly the way it looks.

First of all,

Yves Klein was meticulous about his choice of canvas,

so here, he has selected a very thin-weaved cotton scrim.

Then, he has coated that cotton scrim with a kind of milk

and then he painstakingly rolled the paint as evenly as possible

onto this picture so it could be as uniform as possible.

It's amazing - when you look closely,

the textures are just fantastic on this painting.

What it actually looks like

is looking down at a very blue sea from a plane

and you can see just those little waves

and the ripples in the light.

I must say, this is pretty much the best blue I have ever seen.

Even better than Titian's, because it's just perfect.

It's not too dark, it's not too light

and it does this amazing thing. It almost seems to be moving.

One second it recedes into the distance like the sky

and the next second it comes towards you and drowns you like the ocean.

But what does it mean?

I don't think Yves wants us to try to work out what it means.

I think he simply wants us to stand in front of it,

to experience it and to enjoy it.

He called these pictures "open windows to freedom."

I think that's all he's asking of us.

Just to set aside our everyday lives for a few minutes,

to open our eyes, to open our minds

and to follow him just briefly into the great blue beyond.

But Yves would go one step further

in escaping into the great blue beyond.

'In 1960, he travelled out to the most mundane suburb

'of Paris he could find.

'And it was there that he would perform his most audacious feat

'of escapology.'

'On one quiet Sunday morning, here on the Rue Gentil Bernard,

'he slipped into an apartment building and made his way upstairs.'

When he reached a first-floor room at almost exactly this point,

Yves Klein opened the windows and leapt out.

In the distance, a train rushes through the station

while a cyclist is oblivious to the drama unfolding behind him.

Yves's artwork became known as the Leap Into The Void.

And I think the black and white photograph he took that day

reveals more about Yves Klein's ambitions

than any of his other works.

Throughout his whole life,

his goal was to leave this world behind him

and to voyage into this utopian world above.

You can see here, his eyes are locked onto the blue sky above him.

I also think it's a rather desperate image, too,

because Yves never really leapt into the void.

In fact, he fell down to Earth

and fortunately had a group of judo friends there to catch him

on the pavement. They've been erased by the photo-montage

so we can't see them any longer.

I think this proves in some ways that the laws of physics

finally defeated the laws of Yves's imagination.

'By the early 1960s, Yves was on the verge

'of becoming the most exciting artist of his generation.

'But then disaster struck.'

In 1962, he returned home to the South of France

to attend the Cannes Film Festival.

During the premiere of a film in which he starred,

Yves suffered multiple heart attacks.

He was dead at the age of 34.

Yves Klein's blue revolution

was one of the most beautiful moments in modern art,

but it was really fragile, too, and when he died,

it seemed that his great dream of this fantastic blue adventure

that could liberate humanity from all its earthly concerns

would only die with him.

But here in America, of all places,

a new adventure was just beginning

and I think it would transform our relationship to blue

in one astounding way.

For centuries, blue had been used by artists to capture

the great beyond, the forever unattainable.

But, as the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union

reached its zenith,

'one man created a single powerful image

'that brings our story to a close.'

His image would change the way that artists, and all of us,

think about blue for good.

But he wasn't an artist, he was an astronaut.

It was 1967 when America was launching

its most daring space flight yet.

In five days' time, these three men will fly to the Moon.

The Apollo 8 mission aimed to send three men out of the Earth's orbit

and to circle the Moon for the very first time.

As we depart the Earth and head on out towards the Moon

and the Earth becomes smaller and smaller,

not only will the continents blend together,

but I think man's problems will hopefully blend together,

and maybe we can start things off generating a spirit of co-operation

and good will towards men with this flight.

All the talk was of world peace, but that fooled no-one.

This was the era of the Cold War, and I was a Cold Warrior.

We were really intent on beating those dirty Commies.

Bill Anders was one of the chosen men on the Apollo 8 space rocket.

It was Christmas Eve, 1968, when he and his two fellow astronauts

boarded the aircraft.

We've now passed the 10-minute mark on our countdown.

Nine minutes, 51 seconds and counting.

All aspects of the mission go at this time...

You're on Saturn V, you were strapped in on Saturn V,

how did you feel?

Sitting on top of the Saturn V,

which was a mini nuclear bomb itself, caught your attention,

but eventually I fell asleep briefly, while we sat there.

But again, this was the Cold War.

We were going to show those dirty Commies that we were better.

So the danger of that I had erased out of my mind.

Now, when the rockets lit off, that was a different matter.

We have lift-off.

It was violent. There was nobody on it beforehand to tell us.

It was like being shaken sideways as these giant engines

were steering to keep this broomstick straight up.

And so it was a violent and surprising event.

Thrust is OK.

Apollo 8 pierced through every hue of the big blue sky

and the whole world watched on.

Those watching most intently were, of course, the NASA technicians

here at Mission Control in Houston.

'We have you go for orbit, go for orbit.

'Welcome to the Moon, Houston.'

The mission was going better than anyone could have expected. In fact,

almost without a single glitch.

For three whole orbits, Anders and his team

gazed down on the surface of the Moon

and photographed the terrain beneath them.

It was exactly what they'd been asked to do.

On the fourth orbit, as they came out from the dark side of the Moon,

the team saw something truly breathtaking.

I was shooting pictures out the side of the spacecraft

when, I don't know who said it, maybe all of us at once,

"My God, look at that." Up came the Earth

and that caught me by surprise. We hadn't expected it.

I had the long lens Hasselblad camera.

No light meter, no instructions, but as an engineer, I thought,

well, if I take enough pictures,

maybe one of them will come out,

so I used what I refer to as the machine-gun approach,

and I just clicked away and just kept turning.

Took at least a dozen, maybe 50, pictures,

one of which was selected by others to be Earthrise.

'This is phenomenal.'

This is the shot that Anders took.

Speaking as an art historian,

I think that this image almost on its own

made the Apollo missions worthwhile.

I also think that it's the one image perhaps of the 20th century

that humans will keep coming back to again and again and again.

Even though we were hard-bitten test and fighter pilots,

this thing was beautiful.

We'd been staring at this relatively ugly Moon

and suddenly, out of the lunar horizon,

came this beautiful blue.

I must say, the hair went up on the back of my neck a little bit.

Earthrise showed our planet as a beautiful, colourful jewel

suspended in the blackness of space.

Published around the globe,

it caught the imagination of everyone.

It was the first time we had seen the Earth from another world,

and it dawned on us that ours was, more than anything,

a blue planet.

Seeing this image really brings home a great irony to me.

For most of history, blue was this great colour of the beyond.

It was the colour of the horizon,

the colour of the thing that so many of us were aspiring to

and hoping to escape to.

But when in 1968 that dream finally came true,

when in 1968 we finally went beyond the horizon,

we discovered that blue was actually the colour of home.

'I don't know if you're reading, but we're right over Houston!'

In the next episode, the most virtuous colour of all

becomes tainted.

From the grandeur of ancient marbles and Wedgwood's pristine porcelain,

to the wiles of Whistler's women, Le Corbusier's sterile walls,

and Mussolini's towers of tyranny.

It's a colour that reveals our darkest instincts.

It's the story of white.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd