White 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.

And 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.

Blue. The arrival of lapis lazuli from the East made blue

the colour of our dreams,

a colour that's transported us to worlds beyond our horizons.

And this is the story of white.

Today we see white as the colour of virtue, a colour

of cleanliness, of innocence, a colour as pure as the driven snow.

'But in the history of art, white isn't quite as pure as we think.'

Over the course of history, it's been loaded with ideologies

that have been both divisive and at times even dangerous.

So dangerous in fact that white may just be the darkest colour of them all.

This is the story of how

the purest colour became corrupted.

From the refined elegance of the Elgin Marbles to the pristine pots

of Josiah Wedgewood,

we'll reveal how white came to symbolise an enlightened world.

But we'll see how, in the modern age, this once virtuous colour

was used by artists, architects and sculptors to divide,

to control and finally to conquer.

It was Sunday 25th of September 1938.

The Director of the British Museum was on his evening rounds.

Everything seemed to be in order, but, unknown to him, a disturbing incident

had been taking place right beneath his feet.

In the basement, some of the museum's sculptures

were in the process of being cleaned.

But they were being cleaned with copper chisels and carborundum.

To make matters worse, the objects in question were some of the museum's most prize possessions -

the Elgin Marbles.

The Elgin Marbles were a set of ancient Greek sculptures

that had once adorned the Parthenon in Athens.

They were widely seen as the bedrock of Western art.

Like many ancient sculptures, the Elgin Marbles were once painted in rich colours

which, over the millennia, had washed away.

Yet, at one point, we became convinced

that these sculptures had always been white.

And now, they were being made whiter than they had ever been before.

The museum's director immediately put a stop to the cleaning and instituted an inquiry.

The culprit was one Joseph Duveen, a rich and powerful art dealer

who had donated money for a new gallery to house the marbles,

but had asked for something in return.

Joseph Duveen thought the Elgin Marbles were, quite frankly, the wrong colour.

They were too brown and, like the rest of antiquity, they were supposed to be white.

Duveen persuaded the museum staff to whiten the Elgin Marbles

and evidence of their handiwork can still be seen today.

This is Helios the Sun Chariot and it's one of the objects

the director saw being cleaned that night in 1938.

You can see very clearly the effect of that cleaning.

On the right, this is before the cleaning. It's dark, it's brown, it's sooty, it's shiny.

Here on the left, this is after the cleaning. It's matt in texture, it's colourless and it's white.

Back in the 1930s, Joseph Duveen's cleaning job caused a scandal.

It has been said that the British Museum trustees of the day

lost control of their museum.

In a sense, that's true.

The museum was unduly influenced

by the strength of personality of Duveen

and the practice of scraping the surface of the sculptures was not approved.

That's the important thing

to get across. It was not an approved action.

We must get this into proportion.

The surface removal, we're talking of a fraction of a millimetre

and of course it wasn't every sculpture that was cleaned.

It doesn't much affect the moral question

if we try to mitigate what was done.

I don't want to defend it. What would be the point?

It was 70 years ago.

I wasn't alive and everybody who was involved is dead.

But there was already a history to the surface of the sculptures

and it is part of that history that we add another chapter.

The debate over the cleaning will, no doubt, go on,

but in our story of white, there's a more intriguing issue at stake.

The big questions for me are these -

why was Duveen so desperate for these sculptures to be white?

To even go to the lengths to damage the sculptures to make them whiter

and why, when all the evidence points the other way, when we know

that the ancient Greeks covered their sculptures in colour,

do most of us still think, secretly, that they should be white?

In my mind, one man is above all responsible

for the whitewashing of antiquity and, in doing so,

he planted white at the centre of European culture for centuries to come.

And his name was Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

JJ Winckelmann was born in 1717 in a rural town

in what is now Eastern Germany.

His parents wanted him to follow the family profession

and embrace the noble trade of the cobbler.

But they should have known that young JJ

was not well suited to such a fate.

Winckelmann was not the typical 18th century cobbler's son.

He was gay, his dress sense was extravagant to say the least.

He had a penchant for skin-tight leather trousers

and he was a fiercely ambitious intellectual.

Naturally, he longed to set foot in more cosmopolitan surroundings.

In 1748, Winckelmann fetched up in Dresden.

It wasn't long before he made a discovery

that would change his life.

Winckelmann had stumbled on a vast storeroom

filled with ancient white statues.

And they came in all shapes and sizes.

There was plenty to, shall we say, feast his eyes on.

There were buttocks aplenty, there were ripped muscular torsos

and there was even the odd genital.

These white sculptures were the most wonderful objects

that Winckelmann had ever seen and he decided there and then

to dedicate his life to persuading the world of their beauty.

He knew that he had to begin in Rome.

Winckelmann arrived here in 1755.

He found it littered with white columns and marbles from antiquity.

He immediately set to work on a tome in which he celebrated

all the wonderful white marble that he found.

Words spill from his pen as he swooned over the Belvedere Torso.

And the writhing limbs of the Laocoon.

Winckelmann's scribbling eventually attracted the attention

of the Vatican who appointed him keeper of their antiquities,

a distinguished post once held by Raphael.

And it was in the Vatican that Winckelmann set eyes

on a sculpture that would inspire him like no other.

The Apollo Belvedere was thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek original

made around 300 BC.

Rosy beauty wantons all down the god-like figure.

Such organs human nature knows not.

The liquid hair, like tendrils kissed by zephyrs.

Winckelmann thought this was the most beautiful man he'd ever seen.

In fact, just the mere sight of him got Winckelmann hyperventilating

because Apollo seemed to have everything -

the hair, the attitude, the body.

But the thing that Winckelmann admired most about the sculpture

was its whiteness..

Look at it.

There are no garish colours, there are no vulgar patterns.

It's stripped back, it's restrained, it's intellectual.

This is art that's not there to flatter the eyes,

it's there to stimulate the brain, and this proved to Winckelmann

how sophisticated the Ancient Greeks really were.

I think for Winckelmann, whiteness symbolised all the great qualities

of Ancient Greek civilisation.

It symbolised beauty and health and simplicity

and restraint and reason.

These were the values that he wanted his age to take up

so his contemporaries could become as great as the Greeks

and as beautiful as Apollo.

Winckelmann's celebration of the whiteness of ancient art

may have been idiosyncratic, but it was hugely influential.

Winckelmann's legacy lives with us today.

It is one of the great things that accounts for the way in which

we venerate the ancient world.

The veneration for buildings like the Parthenon,

our admiration of antiquity, in its civilisation,

its architecture, its law, its government.

Everything must be indebted to Winckelmann.

Winckelmann had pointed the way to a new, white Utopia

based on antiquity, and in the years after his death,

classically inspired temples and sculptures came to adorn cities around the world.

And more than anything else, they were white.

There's a great deal of moralising

that lies behind the notion of whiteness and purity.

Winckelmann said that we should return to the purer style of the past

and that this would make ourselves pure.

Didn't perhaps work very much in his case.

But Winckelmann's dream of filling the world with the pure white

of antiquity would be realised not in Italy,

but in the north of England.

This elegant building and its grounds is known as Etruria,

and in the 18th century,

it was the home of Britain's most famous potter, Josiah Wedgwood.

Josiah Wedgwood was a giant of the Enlightenment,

the kind of citizen that Winckelmann dreamed of producing.

He was a philanthropist, an educator, an antiquarian.

He was a scientist and an inventor.

He supported the French Revolution, he supported American independence.

He campaigned for the abolition of slavery,

and happened to be the grandfather of a certain Charles Darwin.

It would be fair to say that Josiah Wedgwood was a pretty special man.

Wedgwood was also a disciple of Winckelmann,

and they shared a love of white antiquity.

From his factory near Stoke-on-Trent,

Wedgwood produced a series of white portrait medallions,

which conferred classical nobility on the heroes of the Enlightenment.

The philosopher Voltaire...

..the botanist Joseph Banks...

..and the explorer, Captain Cook.

But Wedgwood's true genius was pottery.

Wedgwood was determined to bring the white of antiquity

into homes across the land.

But there was a problem.

British pottery had traditionally been turned out

in the earthy colours of the native landscape.

The secret to perfect white pottery remained a mystery,

eluding almost everyone but the Chinese.

Yet Josiah Wedgwood was undeterred.

Here at Stoke-on-Trent, the greatest traditions of the pottery industry

are being maintained by craftsmen using, in many cases,

methods and knowledge passed down over generations.

Let's look now at a cross-section of the processes

that go into this lovely china.

Wedgwood slaved for years and conducted over 5,000 experiments

in his search for the perfect white glaze.

And all of them are recorded in an experiment book

written in his own hand.

So this is Josiah Wedgwood's private experiment book.

And it's filled with hundreds and hundreds of experiments,

as he tried to create a perfect white glaze.

And it therefore tells the kind of secret story behind that process.

And what he has got here in the book are numbers of all

the different experiments he's made.

406, for instance, when he says it has got a rather good colour

but is still a little greenish.

407, 408, 409 is rather better. 410, rather worse.

So you can see what a difficult job it was to really perfect

a very simple, clear, pure and smooth white glaze.

But then, in 1761, Wedgwood made his breakthrough.

Experiment 411, he cracks it, and he writes here,

"The best of all these trials.

"Uniform, transparent and nearly colourless"

And best of all, above it, he writes in really big text

with an exclamation mark at the end, "A good white glaze!"

That was written about 250 years ago, yet the excitement,

Wedgwood's excitement, is palpable still.

And I'm not surprised he was excited because what he had stumbled upon

was the first great white glaze in the history of European pottery.

And before long, Wedgwood was turning out a series of beautiful white pots.

He called his sparkling new range Queen's Ware.

So this is the fruit of Josiah Wedgwood's tireless labour,

an absolutely exquisite group of 18th century Queen's Ware objects.

And there is a huge variety.

We can go from these really rather wonderful grand vases,

to these terrific pot pourri pots.

There are salt dishes, there is a honey pot, wonderfully fluted

all the way around, but I think my favourite of them all

is this absolutely delightful covered egg-cup.

And, of course, they are all in some way neo-classical in design.

They have the fluting, the columns,

so there is this sense of reviving antiquity through tableware.

But for me perhaps the most important thing of all

when it comes to these objects is their colour,

their absolutely flawless, immaculate whiteness.

Wedgwood took this great Winckelmannian idea of simplicity,

taste, beauty and whiteness and he gave it to everyone.

Thanks to Wedgwood and Winckelmann before him,

white had conquered Europe.

By the end of the 18th century, it had become a symbol of good manners

and good taste that promised to unite the citizens of the Enlightenment.

But in the mid-19th century,

one man took it upon himself to transform the way we see white,

to make it not the colour of unity and equality,

but exclusivity and elitism.

In 1859, a young man arrived in London

hoping to make it as an artist.

He was an American by the name of James McNeill Whistler.

And Whistler was a snob.

From a wealthy Massachusetts family, he had been booted out

of the exclusive West Point military academy

and, like many a rich kid with more money than motivation,

he decided on a career in art.

Whistler would later be celebrated for the paintings he made from the Thames Embankment.

But when he first moved here,

Whistler was horrified by what he found.

He thought the people here wore ghastly clothes, ate ghastly food,

but, most unforgivable of all, they had a ghastly taste in art.

The Victorian public were hooked on paintings

that showed scenes from well-known stories.

Myths and legends of Britain's past.

Tales of courtly love.

And damsels in distress.

And Whistler was determined to set himself apart

from this repulsive art and the public who loved it so much.

His inspiration came from a novel published the very year

he arrived in London.

In sitting rooms up and down the land,

Victorians revelled in a melodrama written by Wilkie Collins...

..The Woman In White.

"I wound my way down slowly over the heath when, in one moment,

"every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop

"by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder.

"There as if it had at that moment sprung out of the Earth

"or dropped from the heaven stood the figure of a solitary woman,

"dressed from head to foot in white."

Did you hear someone calling after us?

No, no, no.

The Woman In White was a sensation in every way.

It gripped the Victorian public like a modern-day soap opera, and it

became a hugely successful franchise as well, spawning spin-off musicals,

plays, fashion ranges and even two Woman In White-themed perfumes.

The success of The Woman In White gave Whistler a crafty idea.

He would use white to mock crass Victorian taste.

He set to work on a strange series of paintings all of women in white.

The Victorian public turned up to see them,

expecting to find their favourite story told in paint.

But Whistler had them completely baffled.

Who is this woman? Is she the woman in white?

Why is she standing on a bear?

What on earth is this girl thinking?

Is she happily married or soon to be alone?

But the most baffling painting of all was Whistler's third.

And here it is, and it depicts two beautiful young women.

The one on the left, the redhead,

she was the woman who was depicted

in Whistler's two previous white paintings

and she's even wearing the same white dress.

And she is reclining, ever so elegantly on a sofa,

which is, of course, also white.

Now some thought it must be about a wedding.

Was this woman about to get married? Had she just got married?

If she had just got married, where was her husband?

Or was there no wedding at all?

Was the white dress and the little white flower underneath it

simply a symbol that she was a kind of a Virgin Mary?

Or were the two girls ancient Greek goddesses

in their beautiful pale drapery?

Or were they simply two prostitutes in their nightdresses?

Well, the public was desperate to know the answer,

but Whistler wouldn't give it them.

All he gave them was this infuriatingly vague title,

Symphony In White, Number Three.

So what was the subject of this painting?

Well, it wasn't about a bride, it wasn't about a virgin,

it wasn't about a whore, it wasn't even about a Wilkie Collins novel.

The subject of this painting was white itself, nothing more.

This picture was simply about different kinds of whiteness

being put together and mixed together on a canvas.

It was a symphony in white.

For that reason it's a really elitist painting,

because what this painting sets out to do

is to divide the Victorian public,

to divide them between those who don't understand the painting

and those who do, and those who didn't understand

the painting were pretty much everyone, the working classes,

the middle classes, the Establishment,

and those who did understand the painting were Whistler

and his tiny intellectual elite based in Chelsea.

Whistler basked in the controversy.

In fact he enjoyed it so much

that white became something of a signature.

Whistler wore white trousers, white waistcoats and white jackets.

He cultivated a big curly lock of white hair

right here at the front of his head.

He took to walking white Pomeranian dogs through the streets,

and when he finally built his own home, he called it, unsurprisingly,

the White House.

But Whistler wasn't finished.

He despised the public's taste so much

that confusing them was not enough.

He wanted to banish them from the art world altogether.

In 1883, Whistler opened an exhibition of new pictures

he'd made on a trip to Venice.

But it wasn't the paintings that caused the sensation this time.

It was the way he displayed them.

The walls were white,

the picture frames, which Whistler himself designed, were white.

The art works themselves were monochrome, and he hung them

so far apart that the gallery felt almost empty.

But it didn't stop there.

Whistler was so determined to control the look of his exhibition

that he even kitted out his gallery attendant in the same colour scheme,

and the unfortunate individual became known as the poached egg man.

For those people who came to Whistler's exhibition

it must have been a really strange, alien and discomforting experience.

But I think that's precisely what Whistler wanted.

Why do arty people make me feel inferior?

Bloody great club, and I can't get into it!

Whistler called his exhibition a masterpiece of mischief.

And it proved to be his lasting legacy,

a defining moment in the story of modern art.

Try and be more careful, sir, and not allow your clothing to drip upon the floor.

Whistler's exhibition was hugely influential.

Because what it did was basically pioneer the white gallery space,

the white cube that now seems all-but compulsory

in today's art world.

No whistling, no babies in prams or in arms.

It was a powerful legacy.

It was also a divisive legacy,

because white gallery spaces like this may be beautiful and elegant

but the whiteness here is also cold and sterile.

And austere.

Do not touch the exhibits. The gallery will close promptly.

Do not wear your hat in the gallery.

The gallery cannot be held...

And, quite frankly, completely unwelcoming.

Do not come here again! The gallery does not welcome visitors.

In Whistler's hands, white had become

the cold and exclusive colour of the artistic elite.

Keep out! Go away! Do not come back!

And the modern artists of the early 20th century continued the trend.

# Blank Frank is the messenger of your doom and your destruction... #

Making impenetrable white works of art

that few but themselves could understand.

# ..And he is the one who will set you up as nothing... #

And of these modern artists, no-one was more perplexing

than Marcel Duchamp.

A man determined to confuse the punters at every turn.

# ..And he is the one who will look at you sideways. #

Duchamp calls these objects readymades.

Were they a comment on the ridiculous price

paid for a painter's signature?

Were they drawing attention to objects which are just as much

works of art as accepted works of art?

Or were they a joke?

But one of Duchamp's readymades

is more notorious than all the rest.

So this is Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal,

which he called, somewhat euphemistically, Fountain.

Now, when he first exhibited this work in 1917,

it was hugely scandalous.

And it remains the subject of intense debate today.

But there's one thing that people don't talk about

when they discuss this work and that's its colour, its whiteness.

And I think its whiteness is absolutely central to its meaning,

because I think it is supposed to remind us

of all of those elegant white artworks of the past.

So it reminds me of the great marble sculptures of the past,

the idea of a great white almost-nude

on top of a plinth in a museum.

It reminds me of the great neo-classical busts

and you almost have that head and shoulder shape.

And it reminds me, in its elegant surfaces,

of the great Wedgwood porcelains.

But it reminds us of those things precisely in order to ridicule them.

Because what this object is doing

is mocking the great white history of art.

And you know, it's almost as though Marcel Duchamp is urinating

over the corpse of JJ Winckelmann.

But in the hands of one of Duchamp's contemporaries,

white would be tainted further.

And it would become central to a dark plot

to cleanse and control the citizens of the world.

This dream that originated in the mind of a painter-turned-architect.

His name was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret

but he had an alias, Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier grew up in the clean Alpine air of rural Switzerland.

His father was a watchmaker

and Le Corbusier ran his own life like clockwork.

Every day he woke to a regime of rigorous exercise,

striving to cleanse both body and soul.

But, for him, exercise was not enough.

In 1925, Le Corbusier wrote a manifesto

that sought to show how architecture could cleanse the world.

And in that manifesto was a secret weapon.

A white emulsion paint called Ripolin.

Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks,

his wallpapers with a plain coat of white Ripolin.

"When you put Ripolin on your walls then comes inner cleanness.

"Without the law of Ripolin we lie to ourselves every day,

"we lie to others."

The law of Ripolin would bring the joy of life -

the joy of action give us the law of Ripolin.

IN FRENCH:

In 1928, Le Corbusier was given a chance to

put his Law of Ripolin into action.

He was commissioned by the wealthy Savoye family to build them

a summer house on the outskirts of Paris.

And they gave Le Corbusier carte blanche.

After three years in the making

Le Corbusier believed he'd created a masterpiece.

"As you enter on the ground floor you are involved in a magnificent

"symphony of pure forms and shapes."

This is the entrance hall to the Villa Savoye

and it's a beautiful white, modernist space.

But there's one thing that's very peculiar about it.

This - a wash basin.

Now what in heaven's name is this doing here right in the centre of the entrance hall?

Almost the first thing you see when you come inside.

I think it's Le Corbusier telling us that this house is about

the act of cleansing, the act of purification,

the act of becoming cleaner, better people.

Running through the heart of this house like a great zigzagging spine

is this ramp, which must have been a very strange thing to see

in a house of the 1930s

and I must say it is surprisingly steep.

That reveals a lot I think. It reveals that Corbusier

designed this building for the healthy body and this house

is not only about relaxation, it was also about exercise.

"Demand bare walls in your bedroom, your living room,

"and your dining room."

The culmination of this entire building, I think, is up here.

It's where all these ramps have been leading us

like we're on some kind of spiritual pilgrimage,

and the destination is the solarium.

It captures the sun as it moves throughout the day.

And these white concrete walls,

these only serve to bounce the sunlight back in again.

Le Corbusier thought the Villa Savoye was a work of genius.

But his client, Madame Savoye, wasn't so sure.

The white wall may be fantastic on the drawing board,

because it's pure and it's precise and it's simple and it's clear.

But white walls are also cold and somehow sterile

and I don't think they make much room for the individual.

But Le Corbusier had lost interest in individuals.

He wanted to impose his white walls on something much bigger.

"The design of cities", Le Corbusier wrote,

"is too important to be left to the citizens".

In fact, he believed that only one person

was important enough to design cities - Le Corbusier himself.

And he felt that by doing so, he could reform

not just the lives of a few, but the lives of millions.

Le Corbusier reeled off designs for city after city.

Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, even Algiers.

In virtually all of them, his monolithic white walls overwhelm

and often destroy the historic cities beneath them.

Thankfully most of his plans were dismissed.

"Some men have original ideas", he said, "and are kicked in the arse for their pains".

But as the 1930s progressed,

Le Corbusier's dream of whitewashing the world was not yet over.

Across Europe, new political leaders wanted to cleanse their own countries.

MUSIC: "Kicker Conspiracy" by The Fall

There was Hitler in Germany.

Franco in Spain.

And in Italy, Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini and his Blackshirts had marched on Rome in 1922

and then set about transforming Italy into a fascist state.

In 1934, Mussolini invited Le Corbusier to Rome to discuss architecture.

Le Corbusier was deeply impressed by Mussolini's Italy.

"The present spectacle," he wrote,

"announces the dawn of the modern spirit.

"Her purity and form illuminate the paths which have been

"obscured by the cowardly".

But for all Le Corbusier's hopes,

for all his sycophantic rhetoric, Mussolini never employed him,

because Mussolini had other plans.

Benito Mussolini was born in 1883 near Ravenna.

He started out as a stonemason, then a schoolteacher,

before transforming himself into a thug philosopher

advocating the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

But, on taking control of Italy, he cultivated a new image.

"Stop thinking and believe in me, Mussolini,

"and I will restore the glory that was Rome."

Mussolini saw himself as a modern day Roman emperor.

And his goal was to make modern Italy as imperious as it had been in the past.

I think it was when he looked out over the great Roman ruins

that surrounded him that he realised that one of the best ways to do this

was to do what the Romans had done before him

and that was to transform the city of Rome itself.

Over the course of his dictatorship, Mussolini embarked

on a series of grand projects, each one bigger than the last.

All of them in white.

And white would come to symbolise Mussolini's

maniacal plans for a new Italy.

And there was only one place that offered the whiteness

that Mussolini craved.

It lay high up in the mountains, 250 miles north of Rome.

I'm driving along these winding roads to Carrara.

In the mountains above me are perhaps the most famous

marble quarries in the world.

IN ITALIAN:

For centuries the pure natural whiteness of Carraran marble

had drawn artists and architects from around the globe.

Now Mussolini too had been seduced.

And when his agents came here they were looking for

one piece of marble in particular.

Mussolini was planning an obelisk.

The ancient Roman emperors had had them so he felt he needed one too.

It was going to be his signature piece, his towering statement

to the world that he was bringing Rome back to its former glory.

Mussolini ordered the largest single block of marble

ever to be quarried here.

Getting the marble to Rome was like a biblical epic

and Mussolini had it captured on film for posterity.

30 pairs of oxen worked day and night

to pull the stone down from the quarry.

70,000 litres of liquid soap lubricated its movement,

and a ceremonial flotilla greeted the monolith when it arrived in Rome.

MARCHING FOOTSTEPS

Finally, in 1932,

Mussolini's towering white obelisk was raised to the sky.

So this is Mussolini's obelisk and it is huge

and on it there's his name

in huge Latin letters,

"Mussolini Dux",

it means "Mussolini Leader".

So this is his big phallic attempt

to make his mark as a modern Roman emperor.

The thing that really surprises me about this is the fact that

it's still here.

We're decades on, Mussolini's been completely discredited,

and his monument is still here.

They haven't even chipped his name off it.

With his obelisk, Mussolini had carved his name

into the history of white in the most monumental and enduring way.

But this was just the beginning.

Mussolini would go on to build an even larger white monument

to his fascist regime.

This sports ground was built for the youth of Mussolini's new Rome

and is known as the Stadium of the Marbles.

The base was built out of white travertine,

but on top of the base there are 60 monumental statues

that were carved out of pure white Carraran marble.

Each of those statues came from and represented

a different city in Italy.

It's therefore a deeply symbolic space.

This space symbolises a strong, healthy Italy being united

under the fascist state

and under Mussolini.

These statues remind me of the ancient Greek figures

that Winckelmann had admired centuries before.

But here their white forms are tainted with much darker connotations.

This statue represents a runner from the town of Novara.

He's a huge, monumental, muscular figure who is striding

quite forcefully, almost into the stadium itself.

I must say I think this is utterly, utterly ghastly,

because this is Mussolini's poisonous fantasy

of an ideal Italian citizen...

..because in the 1930s, Mussolini, very much inspired by Hitler,

decided that the Italians were Aryans in origin.

They were white people.

And what better to represent white Italian people than white Italian marble?

In the white of these sculptures I can no longer see grace

or purity or reason.

This is a white of fear, of racism

and of tyranny.

And, in his most ambitious project, Mussolini planned to impose

that tyrannical colour on yet more of his people.

Though the Second World War was still raging,

Mussolini continued to remake Rome.

He dreamed of a vast white metropolis,

the nerve centre of his fascist regime.

Mussolini chose a malarial swamp on the outskirts of Rome

as the site for his new city.

Spread over 1,000 acres, it became known as EUR

and it still stands today.

All around are the white marble monuments of Mussolini's urban fantasy.

But the focal point is this building -

the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana.

We are right smack bang in the centre of EUR

and this really does embody

Mussolini's grand ideas of rebuilding

a new, brilliant, purer, whiter Italy.

Le Corbusier would have loved to have done this -

to remake the world and to remake it as white as possible.

The Palazzo was conceived as a giant white display case

celebrating all the ideals of Mussolini's fascist regime.

It's flanked by two marble statues of mythological heroes

and around the base are 30 more sculptures.

Each one represents a different industry, art or science.

But what's most striking

is its unwavering oppressive whiteness.

What you see here is whiteness as a totalitarian colour.

A colour that brooks no disagreement,

brooks no dissent and brooks no disorder.

It is the enemy of individuality and it is the enemy of anyone

or anything that threatens to corrupt its purity.

And that, I think, is the reason why fascists like Mussolini

loved it so much.

Mussolini was ousted in 1943 and was lynched by his own people

shortly before the end of World War Two.

And it is he who brings our story to a close.

From the 18th century we believed white could enlighten us all.

It could inspire us, improve us and delight us.

But, in the modern age, it became a tool to divide, to exclude,

and ultimately, to control.

The purest colour had become the darkest colour of them all.

Today we remain blind to white's darker side.

We still think of it as a clean, blank canvas.

But look closer and that canvas is for ever tainted

with our own flaws and failings.

White is the immaculate reflection of an impure world.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd