0:00:04 > 0:00:08After almost a century of bloodshed and revolution,
0:00:08 > 0:00:12France was about to enter another great age of upheaval.
0:00:16 > 0:00:20This time, the greatest revolutions would take place in the mind
0:00:20 > 0:00:24and the eye. And Paris was at the centre of it all.
0:00:26 > 0:00:32Here, a group of truly extraordinary artists set about the business of
0:00:32 > 0:00:37reinventing the very language of art itself and the result was to be the
0:00:37 > 0:00:41greatest explosion of creative energy seen in the Western world
0:00:41 > 0:00:44since the age of the Renaissance.
0:00:45 > 0:00:51The art of modern France was to be exhilarating, radiant,
0:00:51 > 0:00:52adventurous.
0:00:53 > 0:00:57But above all, it was to be a conversation in which painters were
0:00:57 > 0:01:00constantly looking at each other's work,
0:01:00 > 0:01:03talking to each other, agreeing,
0:01:03 > 0:01:06disagreeing, but always forging ahead.
0:01:08 > 0:01:11Paris really was the capital city of the world,
0:01:11 > 0:01:14a place where everyone came to breathe in
0:01:14 > 0:01:19the atmosphere of the bohemian metropolis.
0:01:19 > 0:01:21Ooh, there's Picasso.
0:01:21 > 0:01:24And over there, a group of surrealists.
0:01:24 > 0:01:28Salvador Dali, twirling his waxed moustache.
0:01:28 > 0:01:30There's Monet, Degas,
0:01:30 > 0:01:32Matisse.
0:01:32 > 0:01:35The result of this conversation was a great lesson about what it looked
0:01:35 > 0:01:40like, what it meant to be alive in the modern world.
0:01:40 > 0:01:42# My pictures of you. #
0:01:47 > 0:01:51This was liberte, egalite, fraternite -
0:01:51 > 0:01:53not just for France, but the world.
0:02:16 > 0:02:19# This is the modern world that I've learnt about
0:02:22 > 0:02:25# This is the modern world We don't need no-one... #
0:02:25 > 0:02:29In the late 19th century, France, and Paris in particular, was modernising
0:02:29 > 0:02:32at a helter-skelter pace.
0:02:32 > 0:02:34# This is a modern world! #
0:02:34 > 0:02:37Paris was in the throes of a great change -
0:02:37 > 0:02:40a metropolis the like of which France had never seen before.
0:02:40 > 0:02:44New factories, new slums, new sprawling suburbs,
0:02:44 > 0:02:45new entertainments,
0:02:45 > 0:02:47new temptations, too,
0:02:47 > 0:02:51rivers of booze, an army of travelling prostitutes.
0:02:51 > 0:02:53Just one thing was missing -
0:02:53 > 0:02:59an art to record the seedy, strange wonder of it all.
0:03:00 > 0:03:04# Don't have to explain myself to you
0:03:04 > 0:03:07# I don't give two f... about your review... #
0:03:07 > 0:03:11A group of angry young artists set out to put this right.
0:03:11 > 0:03:15They met in their studios and local cafes to start the great
0:03:15 > 0:03:21conversation about art and its place in the modern metropolis.
0:03:21 > 0:03:24# No matter what this is, this is this is, this is
0:03:24 > 0:03:26# This is, this is, this is
0:03:26 > 0:03:27# Hey, we're done. #
0:03:28 > 0:03:31They were a motley group - different backgrounds, different temperaments,
0:03:31 > 0:03:35different styles, but they had one big thing in common.
0:03:35 > 0:03:40They were sick to the teeth of being excluded from the annual official exhibition -
0:03:40 > 0:03:41the Salon.
0:03:41 > 0:03:44And they were even sicker of Salon art
0:03:44 > 0:03:49with its built-in assumption that every subject had to be clothed in
0:03:49 > 0:03:51classical fancy dress.
0:03:51 > 0:03:55What this group of artists wanted to paint was not the classical past.
0:03:55 > 0:03:58What they wanted to paint was out there -
0:03:58 > 0:03:59modern Paris.
0:04:01 > 0:04:03Unable to show their work at the Salon,
0:04:03 > 0:04:06they formed an independent group and went it alone.
0:04:10 > 0:04:16I'm holding in my hands a facsimile of their very first exhibition held in 1874.
0:04:16 > 0:04:20There were 165 paintings on display.
0:04:20 > 0:04:24When you look through the names, some of them aren't that well known,
0:04:24 > 0:04:26it has to be admitted.
0:04:26 > 0:04:28Antoine Ferdinand -
0:04:28 > 0:04:30no relation to the footballer, I assume.
0:04:30 > 0:04:33Felix Bracquemond. Mulot-Durivage.
0:04:33 > 0:04:38But carry on flicking through and, suddenly - ah, Paul Cezanne,
0:04:38 > 0:04:41Edgar Degas, Claude Monet.
0:04:42 > 0:04:45Pissarro, Renoir.
0:04:45 > 0:04:51In fact, this little book is effectively a roll call of the great artists
0:04:51 > 0:04:55who were about to change the face of painting itself.
0:05:01 > 0:05:04The month-long exhibition in the Boulevard des Capucines
0:05:04 > 0:05:07was a critical and commercial flop.
0:05:07 > 0:05:10But it put the hotchpotch group of artists on the map and even gave
0:05:10 > 0:05:11them a name...
0:05:13 > 0:05:14..the Impressionists.
0:05:17 > 0:05:20That was all down to one painting.
0:05:23 > 0:05:29In 1872, Monet had come back to his hometown of Le Havre in search of inspiration.
0:05:34 > 0:05:39Monet hurried to get into position as the sun rose above the waves.
0:05:40 > 0:05:45But once there, he worked very quickly, just 46 minutes,
0:05:45 > 0:05:48to produce a really rather famous painting.
0:06:01 > 0:06:07Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise - the most celebrated,
0:06:07 > 0:06:13the most incendiary small painting of the entire 19th century.
0:06:14 > 0:06:16But why was this picture so shocking?
0:06:17 > 0:06:20He's taking a convention, an older form of painting.
0:06:20 > 0:06:24He's altering it by making it new, making it now.
0:06:24 > 0:06:30His model for this picture was the great seaport scenes of his namesake,
0:06:30 > 0:06:31Claude Lorrain,
0:06:31 > 0:06:34the great 17th-century classical depicter
0:06:34 > 0:06:37of seaport scenes in which, typically,
0:06:37 > 0:06:43we'd find a port with a beautiful sunset or sunrise at its centre.
0:06:43 > 0:06:45Monet has taken that
0:06:45 > 0:06:50and he's emptied it of all classical elements.
0:06:50 > 0:06:53So instead of classical architecture, we have gantries,
0:06:53 > 0:06:59we have factory chimneys, we have smog, we have a haze of shipping.
0:06:59 > 0:07:04The sea itself is depicted almost through the means of a cartoonist or
0:07:04 > 0:07:09a caricaturist in the form of dabs or dots to suggest its movements.
0:07:09 > 0:07:12The sun is just a... HE HISSES
0:07:12 > 0:07:16..buttery rub of pink-coloured paint.
0:07:16 > 0:07:18The sun's reflection is a sort of... HE HISSES
0:07:18 > 0:07:21..zigzag of colour.
0:07:21 > 0:07:25Impressionism was coined on the basis of the title of this picture.
0:07:25 > 0:07:26IN FRENCH: Impression.
0:07:26 > 0:07:28How can Monsieur Monet, the critics wrote,
0:07:28 > 0:07:32how can he dare to exhibit an impression, a sketch,
0:07:32 > 0:07:35as if it were a fully finished work of art?
0:07:44 > 0:07:49It's ironic now that Impressionist art is seen as so lovely and nice,
0:07:49 > 0:07:52perfect for a tea towel or a chocolate box.
0:07:52 > 0:07:56In their own time, they were after something raw and shocking.
0:07:58 > 0:08:01They didn't want to create pretty pictures.
0:08:01 > 0:08:08They wanted to plunge into the unsettling pandemonium of the modern city.
0:08:08 > 0:08:12The age of the avant-garde, with its manifestos, still lay in the future,
0:08:12 > 0:08:15but the Impressionists did have a manifesto of sorts.
0:08:15 > 0:08:19It was a text written by the great critic and poet Charles Baudelaire
0:08:19 > 0:08:23and it was called The Painter Of Modern Life.
0:08:23 > 0:08:28He's a flaneur, a wanderer, someone who walks the streets every day.
0:08:28 > 0:08:32"The crowd is his element as the air is that of birds
0:08:32 > 0:08:34"and water of fishes.
0:08:34 > 0:08:38"His passion and profession are to become one flesh with the crowd,
0:08:38 > 0:08:42"to be away from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home.
0:08:42 > 0:08:48"Amid the ebb and flow of movement in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.
0:08:50 > 0:08:54"The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an
0:08:54 > 0:08:57"immense reservoir of electrical energy.
0:08:57 > 0:09:02"Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself."
0:09:07 > 0:09:10What would the painter of modern life paint today?
0:09:11 > 0:09:14He'd probably seek out the rough edges of the city,
0:09:14 > 0:09:16the places that prick your conscience.
0:09:17 > 0:09:19And at what time would he do his work?
0:09:21 > 0:09:23"Now it is evening,
0:09:23 > 0:09:27"that strange equivocal hour when the curtains of heaven are drawn and
0:09:27 > 0:09:28"cities light up.
0:09:30 > 0:09:32"Honest men and rogues are all saying to themselves,
0:09:32 > 0:09:34"'The end of another day!'
0:09:34 > 0:09:37"And the thoughts of all, whether good men or knaves, turn to pleasure.
0:09:37 > 0:09:41"And each one hastens to drink the cup of his oblivion.
0:09:44 > 0:09:47"The painter of modern life will be the last
0:09:47 > 0:09:52"to linger wherever a passion can pose before him,
0:09:52 > 0:09:57"wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal."
0:09:57 > 0:09:59There you have it.
0:09:59 > 0:10:01That's what Impressionism is.
0:10:09 > 0:10:12The painter of modern life had to place himself at the
0:10:12 > 0:10:14heart of the modern city.
0:10:14 > 0:10:16And for Monet, in the 1870s,
0:10:16 > 0:10:21the very engine room of Paris was the Gare Saint-Lazare -
0:10:21 > 0:10:24the great new train station.
0:10:25 > 0:10:30Here's a locomotive, here's a blurred worker, here's a stop sign,
0:10:30 > 0:10:36flashing in the half gloom created by these great smokes of steam.
0:10:36 > 0:10:40And I think it's the steam that fascinates Monet above all,
0:10:40 > 0:10:41the steam that...
0:10:42 > 0:10:44..blocks half the things that we see,
0:10:44 > 0:10:49that suggests everything that Baudelaire had said about the modern city.
0:10:49 > 0:10:54It's transitory, it's fugitive, now we see it, now we don't.
0:10:54 > 0:10:56And the implication behind all this
0:10:56 > 0:11:02is that France itself is being transformed by all this motion and movement.
0:11:02 > 0:11:06He loves the way that everything in this world is changing,
0:11:06 > 0:11:08moving, altering, even as you look.
0:11:18 > 0:11:22This new technology of the train was the driving force behind
0:11:22 > 0:11:24Impressionism, even when it's not obvious.
0:11:25 > 0:11:29Renoir's movement-filled painting The Gust Of Wind
0:11:29 > 0:11:34encapsulates the experience of watching a landscape at speed through the
0:11:34 > 0:11:36window of a train carriage.
0:11:38 > 0:11:40And even Monet's Poppies,
0:11:40 > 0:11:43most chocolate-boxed of all Impressionist paintings, is also
0:11:43 > 0:11:45about an experience,
0:11:45 > 0:11:49namely city people going for a picnic in the countryside,
0:11:49 > 0:11:51that was only made possible by the railways.
0:11:57 > 0:12:01Back in the city itself, the toll taken on human lives
0:12:01 > 0:12:04by this new speeded-up jostling sense of
0:12:04 > 0:12:10existence was the great subject of the greatest urban Impressionist -
0:12:10 > 0:12:11Edgar Degas.
0:12:12 > 0:12:15Absinthe is his bitter masterpiece,
0:12:15 > 0:12:20a fly-on-the-wall depiction of a moment of urban desperation -
0:12:20 > 0:12:22two drunks together but quite alone.
0:12:23 > 0:12:27It's a picture that invites you to fill in the gaps.
0:12:27 > 0:12:29How did they come to this?
0:12:29 > 0:12:30How low will they go?
0:12:33 > 0:12:38This way of seeing and feeling the truth of ordinary lives would sow many seeds -
0:12:38 > 0:12:43documentary films, street photography, even reality television.
0:12:48 > 0:12:50Degas didn't just paint down and outs.
0:12:50 > 0:12:55He also depicted those struggling to rise up in the snakes and ladders
0:12:55 > 0:12:56game of Paris...
0:12:59 > 0:13:02..above all, ballet dancers, working-class girls,
0:13:02 > 0:13:04dreaming of bettering themselves.
0:13:06 > 0:13:10Ballet wasn't posh at the time and ballerinas were often called the rats
0:13:10 > 0:13:14of the opera. But Degas saw more to them than that.
0:13:22 > 0:13:27During the course of his life, Degas created more than 1,500 drawings,
0:13:27 > 0:13:31pastels, paintings and sculptures of ballet dancers.
0:13:31 > 0:13:36I think it's fair to say that his preoccupation with dance and dancers
0:13:36 > 0:13:38was really an obsession.
0:13:46 > 0:13:50What was he looking for? What did he see in their movements,
0:13:50 > 0:13:54in the gaslit spectacle of the ballet?
0:13:55 > 0:13:59A number of things, I think. It's sometimes said he was, um...
0:14:00 > 0:14:04..he was a voyeur but I don't have any sense of that
0:14:04 > 0:14:05in his depictions of the ballet.
0:14:05 > 0:14:09I think, if anything, he actually identified
0:14:09 > 0:14:14with the hard-working young women who spent their lives dancing.
0:14:14 > 0:14:18He saw them, in a sense, as images of himself.
0:14:18 > 0:14:20He was always...
0:14:20 > 0:14:24involved in repetition, rehearsal, endlessly sketching and drawing,
0:14:24 > 0:14:29trying to create some form of beauty in the modern world, and I think he
0:14:29 > 0:14:30saw that that's what they were doing, too.
0:14:32 > 0:14:36In the ballet and its spectacle, he found some sense of enchantment.
0:14:36 > 0:14:39It's almost as if the dancers were...
0:14:41 > 0:14:43..the only goddesses...
0:14:44 > 0:14:49..he could see to enchant the place that he knew as modern Paris.
0:15:13 > 0:15:16Arguments were also part of the Impressionists' conversation.
0:15:17 > 0:15:20Was the city the be-all and end-all?
0:15:21 > 0:15:23Not everyone thought so.
0:15:24 > 0:15:27Impressionism was never really a movement and
0:15:27 > 0:15:29its two greatest artists
0:15:29 > 0:15:34occupied, if you like, the opposite ends of its spectrum.
0:15:34 > 0:15:38On the one hand, Degas, the painter of modern life,
0:15:38 > 0:15:43the painter of the city - he hated flaneur painting.
0:15:43 > 0:15:48He said all flaneur artists should be shot. And at the other end of the
0:15:48 > 0:15:51spectrum, Claude Monet,
0:15:51 > 0:15:56who very rapidly departed from the idea of painting the modern city and
0:15:56 > 0:15:59plunged instead into nature.
0:15:59 > 0:16:03He was the very epitome of the flaneur artist,
0:16:03 > 0:16:08setting out to try and capture the transient effects of light on water,
0:16:08 > 0:16:09light on rock.
0:16:09 > 0:16:14He believed that it was the job of the artist to try somehow
0:16:14 > 0:16:18to encapsulate the grandeur, the majesty of nature itself.
0:16:24 > 0:16:27The natural beauty of Etretat in Normandy
0:16:27 > 0:16:30inspired more than 50 of Monet's paintings.
0:16:38 > 0:16:41His adventures en plein air were made possible
0:16:41 > 0:16:44by a revolution in 19th-century technology.
0:16:48 > 0:16:50Leo.
0:16:50 > 0:16:53Etretat - Monet's subject.
0:16:53 > 0:16:56Well, what I'm trying to do here is paint in the style of Monet,
0:16:56 > 0:16:59which is like trying to write a play in the style of Shakespeare.
0:16:59 > 0:17:03- Not easy.- Yeah, well, that's what I'm here to talk to you about, really,
0:17:03 > 0:17:05because this was all new, wasn't it?
0:17:05 > 0:17:09The sight of a painter working in oils outdoors.
0:17:09 > 0:17:12And what made it possible was this kind of equipment -
0:17:12 > 0:17:17a portable collapsible easel. Tube oil paint first came in, I suppose,
0:17:17 > 0:17:20in the 1850s and '60s and became sort of popular at that period,
0:17:20 > 0:17:22bang on Impressionism.
0:17:22 > 0:17:25- We've got them here, look. - Yep, yep.- That's a lovely one.
0:17:25 > 0:17:28- That's one of my... That's cobalt blue, isn't it?- Yeah.
0:17:28 > 0:17:29Can I squeeze a bit on there?
0:17:29 > 0:17:30Go for it, yeah.
0:17:32 > 0:17:36Tell me a little bit more about the science that actually made this possible.
0:17:36 > 0:17:39There was a huge explosion of invention and of synthesis of new
0:17:39 > 0:17:43pigments all through the 19th century, and so you have various pigments
0:17:43 > 0:17:48like cadmium yellow, lead white, magnesium violet.
0:17:48 > 0:17:51Yeah. The fact is, when you look at an Impressionist painting,
0:17:51 > 0:17:55the colours are much fresher than the colours of an Old Master painting,
0:17:55 > 0:17:58and that's not just cos of the passage of time.
0:17:58 > 0:18:00It's because the colours are more different and they're more stable
0:18:00 > 0:18:04because they're created through this new metallurgy, this new chemistry.
0:18:04 > 0:18:05Precisely.
0:18:07 > 0:18:10Now, you've just got the one canvas set up here.
0:18:10 > 0:18:13But Monet sometimes worked out of doors, I think,
0:18:13 > 0:18:17with as many as four or five canvases all on the go at the same time.
0:18:17 > 0:18:21He more or less invented the idea of series paintings, done outdoors,
0:18:21 > 0:18:25so, as the weather changed, the light changed, the time of day changes,
0:18:25 > 0:18:28he'd move onto another canvas and get that particular effect at that
0:18:28 > 0:18:31- particular moment.- Great, well, I will let you carry on.
0:18:31 > 0:18:33- Thank you.- And I'm sorry I've interrupted you.
0:18:33 > 0:18:36I hope I haven't lost your moment.
0:18:36 > 0:18:37- It's fine.- Cheers.- Cheers.
0:18:42 > 0:18:47From this point onwards, Monet's great obsession would be nature.
0:18:47 > 0:18:51And while he'd remain part of the French conversation,
0:18:51 > 0:18:55he would look at anything, from Turner to Japanese prints
0:18:55 > 0:18:58to Chinese scroll paintings,
0:18:58 > 0:19:02for the essence of sky, water, reflection.
0:19:12 > 0:19:17There was something else which made the Impressionists modern and different.
0:19:17 > 0:19:19The sniffy art critic Albert Wolff spotted it.
0:19:21 > 0:19:25There's also a woman in the group, as in most notorious gangs.
0:19:25 > 0:19:28She's called Berthe Morisot.
0:19:30 > 0:19:33The Musee Marmottan in Paris is the best place to see her work.
0:19:36 > 0:19:42Morisot was a founder member of Impressionism but she's been unfairly overlooked.
0:19:42 > 0:19:44From a well-to-do background,
0:19:44 > 0:19:47she combined being a wife and mother with painting.
0:19:47 > 0:19:53But she became just as authentic a painter of modern life as any of her contemporaries
0:19:53 > 0:19:55by focusing on her own bourgeois existence.
0:19:58 > 0:20:02Morisot celebrated the simplicity of ordinary life and her paintings turn
0:20:02 > 0:20:05home into a kind of dream -
0:20:05 > 0:20:09a lush, green idyll, a blissful state of innocence.
0:20:12 > 0:20:16But just as Degas found tragedy in Absinthe drinkers,
0:20:16 > 0:20:20Morisot saw that, even if you had money in 19th-century Paris,
0:20:20 > 0:20:22it didn't always buy you happiness.
0:20:27 > 0:20:30Now, this is when of Berthe Morisot's most tender pictures.
0:20:30 > 0:20:33It's called Au Bal - at the ball.
0:20:33 > 0:20:37The young woman is radiant but also vulnerable,
0:20:37 > 0:20:41her beauty shot through with a sense of self-deprecation and doubt.
0:20:41 > 0:20:44Look at the way she holds her fan.
0:20:44 > 0:20:45She's not cooling herself with it.
0:20:45 > 0:20:49She's using it almost as a guard or a shield against the eyes of those
0:20:49 > 0:20:51who would look at her.
0:20:51 > 0:20:55Going out can be an ordeal as well as an entertainment.
0:20:56 > 0:21:01Her dress, her glove, her hair, her face, her skin, the background -
0:21:01 > 0:21:06Morisot has painted it all with wonderfully subtle attention to texture
0:21:06 > 0:21:12and detail. But this is really a form of internalised Impressionism.
0:21:12 > 0:21:17What she sought to catch is not a glamorous apparition, a vision,
0:21:17 > 0:21:22but a mood, the texture of a thought or a feeling.
0:21:28 > 0:21:31What Morisot brought to the conversation was a portrayal of
0:21:31 > 0:21:35a woman that perhaps only a woman could have created.
0:21:42 > 0:21:47But the sad truth is that Paris was - sh, it still is! -
0:21:47 > 0:21:49a phallocentric society.
0:21:50 > 0:21:56And at its centre in 1889, the largest phallic symbol ever erected -
0:21:56 > 0:21:58the Eiffel Tower.
0:22:06 > 0:22:07In the very same year,
0:22:07 > 0:22:12the city's infamous cabaret, the Moulin Rouge, flung open its doors.
0:22:12 > 0:22:17This was a den of unbridled ogling, where women's bodies,
0:22:17 > 0:22:22high-kicking legs and all, became a form of mass entertainment.
0:22:26 > 0:22:29The only return for the dancers was the hope of fame.
0:22:30 > 0:22:34Enter the next artist to join the conversation -
0:22:34 > 0:22:39Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, painter to the stars of the Moulin Rouge.
0:22:41 > 0:22:46So Toulouse-Lautrec, like Degas, came backstage, he met the girls,
0:22:46 > 0:22:49he talked to the girls, but he never painted this part.
0:22:49 > 0:22:51He was never interested in repetition,
0:22:51 > 0:22:54the awkwardness of the backstage moment.
0:22:54 > 0:22:58The only thing that really caught his imagination was the show itself.
0:22:58 > 0:23:02It was the moment when the girls went on stage.
0:23:04 > 0:23:05And there they go.
0:23:06 > 0:23:11And it was that curtain-up excitement that Lautrec set out
0:23:11 > 0:23:14to capture - another kind of Impressionist moment,
0:23:14 > 0:23:19but with the flash of leg rather than the flash of sunlight on water.
0:23:19 > 0:23:21APPLAUSE
0:23:24 > 0:23:26It's the interval -
0:23:26 > 0:23:30a good opportunity to have a look at some of the posters they've got in
0:23:30 > 0:23:33the foyer of the Moulin Rouge.
0:23:33 > 0:23:39The Troupe of Mademoiselle Eglantine - famous depiction of the cancan,
0:23:39 > 0:23:42almost a cartoon of it.
0:23:42 > 0:23:43Jane Avril -
0:23:43 > 0:23:46look at this wonderful detail of the musical instrument in the foreground.
0:23:46 > 0:23:49Toulouse-Lautrec down here, seeing the scene obliquely,
0:23:49 > 0:23:50and here,
0:23:50 > 0:23:57one of his most famous posters, La Goulue, whose favourite trick, apparently,
0:23:57 > 0:24:00was kicking off the top hat of a gentleman
0:24:00 > 0:24:03who annoyed her in the front rows.
0:24:03 > 0:24:08Lautrec did make his own singular contribution to the culture
0:24:08 > 0:24:10of the modern world.
0:24:10 > 0:24:16He participated in the creation of a new phenomenon - the celebrity.
0:24:16 > 0:24:22He thrust them into the firmament of fame through the mass reproduction
0:24:22 > 0:24:24of the poster.
0:24:24 > 0:24:27He is one of the few artists who didn't just depict the world,
0:24:27 > 0:24:30they also literally changed it.
0:24:30 > 0:24:31CANCAN MUSIC
0:24:33 > 0:24:35AUDIENCE CLAPS ALONG
0:24:42 > 0:24:44CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
0:24:49 > 0:24:53After so much talk of the fleeting and the ephemeral,
0:24:53 > 0:24:58what had happened to the old ideals of art - the quest for truth,
0:24:58 > 0:25:00stability, permanence?
0:25:02 > 0:25:07Well, they made a return in the work of a group of artists now known as
0:25:07 > 0:25:09the postimpressionists.
0:25:12 > 0:25:13In 1889,
0:25:13 > 0:25:16George Seurat painted the Eiffel Tower
0:25:16 > 0:25:18using his pointillist technique,
0:25:18 > 0:25:23dots of paint that freeze the image and make the tower itself seem as
0:25:23 > 0:25:25eternal as the Great Pyramid.
0:25:29 > 0:25:34He painted workers on their Sunday off at a suburban bathing place,
0:25:34 > 0:25:37but made them look like figures being baptised
0:25:37 > 0:25:39in an early Renaissance fresco.
0:25:51 > 0:25:55The search for a truth beyond mere modern life also lay behind
0:25:55 > 0:25:57the journeys of Paul Gauguin,
0:25:57 > 0:26:02who travelled to Tahiti in search of primitive reality - true being.
0:26:05 > 0:26:07But the reality he found
0:26:07 > 0:26:09was a far cry from his fantasy.
0:26:11 > 0:26:13Although he went through the motions
0:26:13 > 0:26:14of living out his dreams,
0:26:14 > 0:26:18the art he created on Tahiti amounts, I think,
0:26:18 > 0:26:23to a long-drawn-out confession of the fraudulence of it all.
0:26:23 > 0:26:25Whether he meant to or not,
0:26:25 > 0:26:27what Gauguin painted was the distance
0:26:27 > 0:26:30between coloniser and colonised,
0:26:30 > 0:26:32between the tourist
0:26:32 > 0:26:34and a reality that he never truly grasps,
0:26:34 > 0:26:38and standing here, surrounded by these paintings,
0:26:38 > 0:26:43I'm struck by how unidyllic they actually are.
0:26:43 > 0:26:49The colours might be bright, but they're also livid and dyspeptic.
0:26:49 > 0:26:55And how sullen, how remote, how removed the women seem.
0:26:55 > 0:26:57I think, collectively,
0:26:57 > 0:27:02Gauguin's South Pacific paintings convey a profound sense of alienation.
0:27:18 > 0:27:23Another painter in search of timeless truths also abandoned Paris.
0:27:24 > 0:27:27He returned to his native Aix-en-Provence
0:27:27 > 0:27:29in the south of France - here,
0:27:29 > 0:27:32to his country house, the Jas de Bouffan.
0:27:40 > 0:27:44So many great French painters working at the cusp of the 20th century,
0:27:44 > 0:27:49but none would be more influential than Paul Cezanne.
0:27:49 > 0:27:50He was a difficult,
0:27:50 > 0:27:55volatile individual with a tremendous sense of ambition
0:27:55 > 0:27:59and his great subject was to be nature.
0:27:59 > 0:28:01However, he turned away
0:28:01 > 0:28:02from Impressionism.
0:28:02 > 0:28:06He felt Impressionism was too ephemeral, too mutable.
0:28:06 > 0:28:09He wanted to create a new language
0:28:09 > 0:28:12that would somehow possess the monumental ambitions
0:28:12 > 0:28:15of the art of the distant past, and said,
0:28:15 > 0:28:19"I want to redo nature after Poussin."
0:28:19 > 0:28:20But the great paradox is
0:28:20 > 0:28:25that he did so by inventing a new form of
0:28:25 > 0:28:28pictorial language, a new way of seeing
0:28:28 > 0:28:31completely rooted in instability,
0:28:31 > 0:28:32impermanence,
0:28:32 > 0:28:35a sense of nervous energy.
0:28:35 > 0:28:38What, in the end, did Cezanne bring to the great
0:28:38 > 0:28:40conversation of French painting?
0:28:40 > 0:28:44Well, I think Picasso said it best of all.
0:28:44 > 0:28:48"Why do we love Cezanne?" he said. "We love him for his anxiety."
0:28:51 > 0:28:53The paintings of the Jas de Bouffan reveal
0:28:53 > 0:28:56the conflicting energies in his work.
0:28:59 > 0:29:02He makes the house more honey-coloured than it is in reality.
0:29:02 > 0:29:05He makes it look almost like an ancient Roman monument
0:29:05 > 0:29:06in a painting by Poussin,
0:29:06 > 0:29:10something that's been there for ever and will be there for ever,
0:29:10 > 0:29:14and yet he can't help destabilising the picture at the same time.
0:29:14 > 0:29:18He tilts the house so that it might almost be falling over.
0:29:22 > 0:29:24Thankfully, it is still standing today.
0:29:32 > 0:29:36It's almost as if no-one has touched it
0:29:36 > 0:29:40since Cezanne himself moved out.
0:29:40 > 0:29:43It's melancholic,
0:29:43 > 0:29:48a bit strange, a bit eerie, but I think it's also a very good place
0:29:48 > 0:29:54to think about Cezanne's dark and murky origins as a painter.
0:29:56 > 0:30:01He'd begun as an artist of peculiar, dark sexual fantasies,
0:30:01 > 0:30:08in which he depicts subjects like murder, or rape,
0:30:08 > 0:30:12using paint almost as if it were a form of slime,
0:30:12 > 0:30:15modelling his figures from a kind of plasma -
0:30:15 > 0:30:18they almost look like dumplings.
0:30:18 > 0:30:20Very strange work.
0:30:20 > 0:30:22I think when you look at the later work,
0:30:22 > 0:30:28it's very important to remember the seething fantasies of the earlier paintings.
0:30:28 > 0:30:32It's as if Cezanne was trying to find a way to contain
0:30:32 > 0:30:35and discipline those unruly passions.
0:30:45 > 0:30:46When his parents had died,
0:30:46 > 0:30:48Jas de Bouffan was sold in 1889
0:30:48 > 0:30:52and Cezanne tried to focus these passions
0:30:52 > 0:30:53at his new studio.
0:30:54 > 0:30:58He worked here every day for the final four years of his life.
0:31:02 > 0:31:05I think Cezanne's studio preserved as it is,
0:31:05 > 0:31:09almost like a kind of shrine to his memory,
0:31:09 > 0:31:15does give us a wonderfully vivid museum of his preoccupations and
0:31:15 > 0:31:18obsessions, the things he loved to paint.
0:31:18 > 0:31:19I think it became
0:31:19 > 0:31:24a kind of laboratory of perceptual experiment.
0:31:24 > 0:31:27He once said - perhaps the most radical thing he ever said -
0:31:27 > 0:31:32that he wanted to stun Paris with an apple.
0:31:34 > 0:31:37For the first time in the history of Western art, a painter is declaring -
0:31:37 > 0:31:41quite literally - that what he paints doesn't matter,
0:31:41 > 0:31:44it's HOW he paints that counts.
0:31:45 > 0:31:50Cezanne was fascinated by the truancy of vision,
0:31:50 > 0:31:53the fugitive nature of the experiencing self
0:31:53 > 0:31:56and his great device for expressing this
0:31:56 > 0:31:58is the doubled outline.
0:31:58 > 0:32:02You see it again and again in his Provencal landscapes.
0:32:02 > 0:32:04The trunk of a tree has a doubled outline,
0:32:04 > 0:32:06the branch of a tree has a doubled outline.
0:32:06 > 0:32:08The Mont Sainte-Victoire has a doubled outline.
0:32:10 > 0:32:12What does it mean?
0:32:12 > 0:32:14Well, I think I can demonstrate it.
0:32:14 > 0:32:16If I hold up my finger to you,
0:32:16 > 0:32:21what you will see on your screen is a single, static finger.
0:32:21 > 0:32:26But if I look at it, with MY eyes, and I close one and then the other,
0:32:26 > 0:32:29then one, then the other - my finger -
0:32:29 > 0:32:31you can try it at home with your own finger -
0:32:31 > 0:32:35my finger is jumping from side to side,
0:32:35 > 0:32:37because my angle of perception is shifting.
0:32:37 > 0:32:39He's making the point
0:32:39 > 0:32:43that nothing, nothing we ever see is still,
0:32:43 > 0:32:46because WE are never still.
0:33:07 > 0:33:11While Cezanne was working on his last pictures in Aix-en-Provence,
0:33:11 > 0:33:15the pace of change continued to accelerate here in Paris.
0:33:15 > 0:33:20The great event of 1900 had been the Exposition Universelle,
0:33:20 > 0:33:26a triumphant celebration of Paris as the great city of the modern age.
0:33:26 > 0:33:28The Grand Palais and the Petit Palais,
0:33:28 > 0:33:30those huge structures of steel and glass,
0:33:30 > 0:33:35were created as temples to the achievements of French art.
0:33:35 > 0:33:39And drawn by all this, on his 19th birthday,
0:33:39 > 0:33:42a young Spaniard arrived in the city.
0:33:42 > 0:33:46His name was Pablo Picasso and this was a watershed moment.
0:33:47 > 0:33:52A new generation of artists was about to transform the conversation.
0:33:55 > 0:33:57As an ambitious young Spanish painter
0:33:57 > 0:33:58working in Paris in the early 1900s,
0:33:58 > 0:34:02Picasso asks himself one burning question.
0:34:06 > 0:34:11How can I, in the wake of so much originality, how can I make my mark?
0:34:11 > 0:34:15How can I be even more original than this great generation of French
0:34:15 > 0:34:17artists who preceded me?
0:34:17 > 0:34:20And I think he looks at Cezanne,
0:34:20 > 0:34:23he looks at his geometrically harsh,
0:34:23 > 0:34:25angular brushstrokes, and he creates
0:34:25 > 0:34:30something even harsher, even more dramatic, even more flattened.
0:34:30 > 0:34:31And, like Gauguin,
0:34:31 > 0:34:35he draws on the languages and cultures of societies
0:34:35 > 0:34:39that he presumes to be primitive, instinctive - not the South Pacific,
0:34:39 > 0:34:42but the culture of African art.
0:34:42 > 0:34:44Picasso started looking,
0:34:44 > 0:34:45buying, dealing -
0:34:45 > 0:34:49he was in the habit of going to the Museum of Ethnography in Paris -
0:34:49 > 0:34:52he used to say to his friends, "Can I pick something up for anybody?"
0:34:53 > 0:34:58Here, we've got one of the great masterpieces of this phase of his career.
0:34:58 > 0:35:01It's called Three Women and, yes,
0:35:01 > 0:35:05it draws on this neo-primitive language of African art
0:35:05 > 0:35:07but at the same time,
0:35:07 > 0:35:10Picasso is looking back to the ghosts of the French past.
0:35:10 > 0:35:13He's thinking of Delacroix's masterpiece Les Femmes d'Alger,
0:35:13 > 0:35:17a scene of women waiting outside a harem.
0:35:19 > 0:35:23But the culminating masterpiece of this phase of Picasso's career would
0:35:23 > 0:35:26not depict a harem, but something similar.
0:35:26 > 0:35:27It would depict a brothel.
0:35:31 > 0:35:35It's a disturbing vision of a corrupt modern Arcadia,
0:35:35 > 0:35:38showing angular, harridan-like whores.
0:35:38 > 0:35:41They inhabit a broken world.
0:35:41 > 0:35:45It's as if Picasso has thrown a stone and shattered the mirror-like
0:35:45 > 0:35:49reflection of traditional representational art
0:35:49 > 0:35:51into a thousand pieces.
0:35:52 > 0:35:55You have the sense they're looking at something you can't see -
0:35:55 > 0:35:59that their way of seeing is not like yours.
0:35:59 > 0:36:01What was that way of seeing?
0:36:01 > 0:36:04Well, that's what Picasso shows us next.
0:36:09 > 0:36:12Spring, 1912.
0:36:12 > 0:36:13He paints this picture.
0:36:13 > 0:36:15It's called Bottle Of Pernod.
0:36:15 > 0:36:21This is a mature example of what's come to be known as Cubism.
0:36:21 > 0:36:24He wants to convey the fact that
0:36:24 > 0:36:27when he experiences a bottle of Pernod,
0:36:27 > 0:36:32and an absinthe glass on a table, he wants to give you the sense -
0:36:32 > 0:36:33it's rather dizzying -
0:36:33 > 0:36:38of actually moving around the objects as you look at the painting.
0:36:38 > 0:36:43It's almost as if he's painted lots of little details of the objects,
0:36:43 > 0:36:46and placed them in a kaleidoscope, click, click, click.
0:36:46 > 0:36:49At each click, you get a different plane, a different angle,
0:36:49 > 0:36:52a different perspective on the object.
0:36:52 > 0:36:54It's profoundly destabilising.
0:36:55 > 0:36:59Into this, he then adds another layer -
0:36:59 > 0:37:03these words floating in space,
0:37:03 > 0:37:08which I think are Picasso's way of reminding his audience that urban
0:37:08 > 0:37:11experience itself is fundamentally fragmented.
0:37:11 > 0:37:17As we pass through the city, we see billboards, we see signs on buses,
0:37:17 > 0:37:20we see newspaper headlines.
0:37:20 > 0:37:24Ultimately, of course, Picasso is going back to Baudelaire,
0:37:24 > 0:37:28and he's thinking about the painting of modern life.
0:37:28 > 0:37:32Well, this is about as extreme as the painting of modern life gets.
0:37:37 > 0:37:41Cubism itself was a dialogue between Picasso and its other inventor,
0:37:41 > 0:37:44George Braque,
0:37:44 > 0:37:46who met each other every day for four years,
0:37:46 > 0:37:50taking the language of Western art to pieces,
0:37:50 > 0:37:51as if it were a jigsaw puzzle.
0:37:56 > 0:37:58At the same time, another great painter -
0:37:58 > 0:38:00yet another great painter -
0:38:00 > 0:38:03was taking art in an altogether different direction.
0:38:04 > 0:38:06His name - Henri Matisse.
0:38:08 > 0:38:13If Picasso worked with line, Matisse was the great colourist.
0:38:13 > 0:38:15Look at this picture!
0:38:16 > 0:38:18Colour has been set free -
0:38:18 > 0:38:20the result is the invention of
0:38:20 > 0:38:22a new language for painting.
0:38:22 > 0:38:27A language that expresses mood, a language that expresses idealism,
0:38:27 > 0:38:30a new sense of beauty.
0:38:30 > 0:38:33The critics of the early 20th century simply didn't know what to make of
0:38:33 > 0:38:35this painter, of this art.
0:38:35 > 0:38:38They called him a fauve, a wild beast.
0:38:39 > 0:38:41Here, I think Matisse is paying
0:38:41 > 0:38:47a kind of distant homage to Cezanne, but my goodness!
0:38:47 > 0:38:48If this is a Cezanne,
0:38:48 > 0:38:52it's a Cezanne, as it were, reimagined by a man taking opium.
0:38:55 > 0:38:57The subjects are never that much.
0:38:57 > 0:38:58Goldfish in a bowl -
0:38:58 > 0:39:01it's what Matisse makes of them.
0:39:01 > 0:39:05He weaves them into these beguiling textures.
0:39:09 > 0:39:14And this, for me, is the great masterpiece of this room.
0:39:14 > 0:39:18Matisse has just ripped up the rule book of representation and he's
0:39:18 > 0:39:21transfigured the colours altogether.
0:39:21 > 0:39:25It's like a kind of swimming pool of visual pleasure
0:39:25 > 0:39:27into which he invites you.
0:39:27 > 0:39:31I suppose that yellow carpet could almost be the diving board.
0:39:32 > 0:39:38And I think what he's saying in this work is that the old idea of
0:39:38 > 0:39:42Arcadia, the idea of a paradise that we can inhabit away from the troubles
0:39:42 > 0:39:45of this world, away from its violence, away from history,
0:39:45 > 0:39:48that old idea of paradise,
0:39:48 > 0:39:52has compressed and paradise now
0:39:52 > 0:39:55is the studio of the artist.
0:39:55 > 0:39:58It's not an image OF paradise - it IS paradise.
0:40:05 > 0:40:09But Matisse's vision of paradise came at a time when the world was
0:40:09 > 0:40:10descending into hell.
0:40:16 > 0:40:20The outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914 brought
0:40:20 > 0:40:22la belle epoque to a crashing end.
0:40:26 > 0:40:30The new technology behind the steam train and the impressionists' paint
0:40:30 > 0:40:34in tubes now gave opposing armies their mustard gas,
0:40:34 > 0:40:39their machine guns, and millions lost their lives on the battlefields.
0:40:52 > 0:40:57All the while, the most radiantly peaceful works of art were being
0:40:57 > 0:41:01created less than 100 miles from the front by Monet - still alive,
0:41:01 > 0:41:07believe it or not, and still painting at his home in the countryside at Giverny.
0:41:12 > 0:41:15There, he'd created a Japanese water garden,
0:41:15 > 0:41:18the muse for some of his most hypnotising work.
0:41:29 > 0:41:35The day after the war ended, on the 11th of November 1918, Monet,
0:41:35 > 0:41:37now in his late '70s,
0:41:37 > 0:41:41offered a series of his water lily paintings to France.
0:41:48 > 0:41:51Monet said that he wanted to give
0:41:51 > 0:41:53the French people,
0:41:53 > 0:41:58after the war, a space of tranquillity,
0:41:58 > 0:42:02a refuge from their wounds,
0:42:02 > 0:42:05somewhere they could heal their souls
0:42:05 > 0:42:11with the spectacle of nature and eternity.
0:42:11 > 0:42:13What wonderful pictures they are.
0:42:16 > 0:42:19How did he get to this
0:42:19 > 0:42:21from Impressionism?
0:42:23 > 0:42:29I think the answer lies once again in conversation, but this time,
0:42:29 > 0:42:34he was in conversation with a dead Englishman called JMW Turner.
0:42:35 > 0:42:37He was the only man, I think,
0:42:37 > 0:42:40of the entire 19th century who really understood what Turner was
0:42:40 > 0:42:45saying - namely, that the things we think
0:42:45 > 0:42:48are solid ourselves,
0:42:48 > 0:42:51the objects with which we surround ourselves - well, actually,
0:42:51 > 0:42:52they're not real.
0:42:53 > 0:43:00The only thing that's real, is the thing that seems most transitory,
0:43:00 > 0:43:04most fugitive - namely light itself.
0:43:04 > 0:43:08And that's what Monet had struggled with but now, at the end of his life,
0:43:08 > 0:43:13finally he has at last managed to go beyond Turner,
0:43:13 > 0:43:17to take Turner's message, if you like, to another level,
0:43:17 > 0:43:19to expand it to a new scale,
0:43:19 > 0:43:24because scale is the great key to these paintings.
0:43:24 > 0:43:26Look at their enormity.
0:43:26 > 0:43:28This great arc
0:43:28 > 0:43:32of a vision of the water lily pond, the trees,
0:43:32 > 0:43:36it's as if you become one with the subject,
0:43:36 > 0:43:41one with this extraordinary hypnotic, fluid,
0:43:41 > 0:43:44perpetually moving evanescence.
0:43:44 > 0:43:49You might BE staring into some idealised pool of water.
0:43:51 > 0:43:54It's as if you're in the presence
0:43:54 > 0:43:55of eternity itself.
0:44:10 > 0:44:15But those who'd actually experienced the First World War were beyond
0:44:15 > 0:44:17being consoled by water lily paintings.
0:44:18 > 0:44:21For them, the shock of the new
0:44:21 > 0:44:22was shellshock.
0:44:25 > 0:44:27The poet and writer Andre Breton,
0:44:27 > 0:44:31who'd worked with traumatised survivors of war,
0:44:31 > 0:44:34became spokesman for a new art movement
0:44:34 > 0:44:37of bad dreams and night terrors.
0:44:37 > 0:44:40He called it surrealism.
0:44:44 > 0:44:47Surrealism drew on a far-flung sense of outrage,
0:44:47 > 0:44:51hence its multicultural cast - Salvador Dali from Spain...
0:44:55 > 0:44:56..Man Ray from America...
0:44:59 > 0:45:01..Rene Magritte from Belgium.
0:45:03 > 0:45:08Now, artists weren't having a conversation so much as interpreting each other's dreams.
0:45:10 > 0:45:12And what dreams they were.
0:45:14 > 0:45:17Of a world turned upside down,
0:45:17 > 0:45:20where the only truth is nonsense.
0:45:23 > 0:45:27The surrealists blamed the middle-class establishment,
0:45:27 > 0:45:28not just for the horrors of war,
0:45:28 > 0:45:30but the hypocrisy that had caused it.
0:45:32 > 0:45:37But the greatest scourge of the bourgeoisie wasn't a surrealist
0:45:37 > 0:45:42but a Dadaist - Marcel Duchamp, Monsieur Shock himself.
0:45:45 > 0:45:48He presented a urinal as a work of art.
0:45:51 > 0:45:53He drew a moustache onto
0:45:53 > 0:45:58a reproduction of the most famous painting in the Louvre.
0:45:58 > 0:46:03And he carried out his first great assault on bourgeois taste while the
0:46:03 > 0:46:05Great War was still at its height.
0:46:07 > 0:46:08In 1916,
0:46:08 > 0:46:15he went to a department store in Paris and he purchased this object -
0:46:15 > 0:46:17it's a bottle rack.
0:46:17 > 0:46:21It's what you use to dispose of the wine bottles in
0:46:21 > 0:46:23your cellar once you've drunk them.
0:46:25 > 0:46:30But Duchamp had the gall to put this common thing of mass manufacture in
0:46:30 > 0:46:33an art gallery and to call it a work of art.
0:46:35 > 0:46:41I think he was trying to get rid of the idea of the artist as a creator.
0:46:41 > 0:46:46He said he wanted to destroy the notion of the artist as hero.
0:46:46 > 0:46:50From now on, the artist would just be someone who chooses a thing and
0:46:50 > 0:46:52places it in the world.
0:46:52 > 0:46:55He said that the object should be ordinary,
0:46:55 > 0:46:58because if I chose something,
0:46:58 > 0:47:01he said, if I choose something that I liked, well, then,
0:47:01 > 0:47:06my taste would enter in, and once taste enters in, well,
0:47:06 > 0:47:08art becomes bourgeois again.
0:47:08 > 0:47:11"Taste is the enemy of A-R-T."
0:47:13 > 0:47:18But I think Duchamp has been a little bit disingenuous and I do think that
0:47:18 > 0:47:21the things he chose, this thing in particular, were...
0:47:23 > 0:47:26..barbed, meaningful, significant.
0:47:27 > 0:47:33Duchamp was fascinated by the idea that man is the prisoner of his sexual impulses.
0:47:33 > 0:47:39Could this be Duchamp's way of suggesting that everyone alive -
0:47:39 > 0:47:41every man, at least -
0:47:41 > 0:47:48is...caught in a state of priapic longing, for ever suspended,
0:47:48 > 0:47:51waiting for the moment of sexual union,
0:47:51 > 0:47:54conjunction with a female bottle?
0:47:56 > 0:48:02Is this his way of saying that everyone - every man -
0:48:02 > 0:48:06in France, is really just a cock?
0:48:09 > 0:48:12Talk about a phallocentric world.
0:48:12 > 0:48:13And no-one did more to prove Duchamp right
0:48:13 > 0:48:17than his fellow avant-gardists - including Picasso.
0:48:19 > 0:48:23Now, I've brought you to the Picasso Museum because I think there is no
0:48:23 > 0:48:28better place to really feel and appreciate
0:48:28 > 0:48:31the extent to which surrealism
0:48:31 > 0:48:36explored the darker sides of human sexuality than here.
0:48:36 > 0:48:39This is the room that they call the sex and death room.
0:48:44 > 0:48:47This is one of his great masterpieces.
0:48:49 > 0:48:54It's sex envisaged as a kind of feral, seething encounter.
0:48:55 > 0:48:57Look at these biomorphic figures.
0:48:57 > 0:48:59They're almost eating each other.
0:48:59 > 0:49:01Sex as violence.
0:49:03 > 0:49:09And this is Alberto Giacometti's Woman With Her Throat Cut,
0:49:09 > 0:49:13possibly the most repellent sculpture of the entire surrealist movement.
0:49:13 > 0:49:15What does it show us?
0:49:15 > 0:49:17A woman who is half turned into a scorpion,
0:49:17 > 0:49:19the victim of a sex attack.
0:49:19 > 0:49:21It's a really horrible little thing.
0:49:21 > 0:49:26It seems to encapsulate the strain of misogyny and unpleasant male sexual fantasy
0:49:26 > 0:49:29that dominates the surreal movement.
0:49:29 > 0:49:33And I suppose the question for the artists of this generation would be
0:49:33 > 0:49:37- above all, I think, for Picasso - "How do I get away from this?
0:49:37 > 0:49:41"How do I escape my own personal fantasies and create an art
0:49:41 > 0:49:44"that addresses something greater than myself?"
0:49:52 > 0:49:55Picasso would find his own answer in 1937.
0:49:55 > 0:50:00The conversation about art was moving into an even darker realm
0:50:00 > 0:50:03and Paris was still at the crux of it all.
0:50:06 > 0:50:08This is the Place Trocadero,
0:50:08 > 0:50:13one of the most seething hubs of modern tourist Paris.
0:50:13 > 0:50:19Project yourself back to 1937 and it's an altogether more sinister place.
0:50:19 > 0:50:22Flanked by the two great wings of the Palais de Chaillot,
0:50:22 > 0:50:26this was the scene of the world's exposition,
0:50:26 > 0:50:31in which twin totalitarian regimes, that of Russia
0:50:31 > 0:50:36and Germany, flexed their muscles one against the other.
0:50:40 > 0:50:43Amidst all the posturing stood one of the most powerful artworks of
0:50:43 > 0:50:45the 20th century.
0:50:50 > 0:50:54A protest against the bombing of Guernica by Luftwaffe planes
0:50:54 > 0:50:56during the Spanish Civil War,
0:50:56 > 0:51:01a graphic, gut-wrenching, flashbulb vision of atrocity.
0:51:08 > 0:51:13Just two years later, World War II had broken out,
0:51:13 > 0:51:17and a victorious Adolf Hitler would soon be standing right here.
0:51:20 > 0:51:23Picasso remained in Paris during the German occupation.
0:51:24 > 0:51:28Towards the end of the War, he created another painting...
0:51:30 > 0:51:31..the Charnel House.
0:51:32 > 0:51:35The pile of corpses in the centre
0:51:35 > 0:51:39represents Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps.
0:51:41 > 0:51:46A German officer visiting Picasso's studio took it all in and asked,
0:51:46 > 0:51:48"Why did you do that?"
0:51:48 > 0:51:51Picasso replied, "I didn't.
0:51:51 > 0:51:52"You did."
0:52:07 > 0:52:11The Second World War had a devastating impact on France.
0:52:11 > 0:52:14From the chaos and destruction came one of the last great French
0:52:14 > 0:52:19contributions to the history of art and ideas -
0:52:19 > 0:52:20existentialism.
0:52:30 > 0:52:34It's a philosophy that defined all of us as solitary individuals in
0:52:34 > 0:52:39infinite space, living life as one single moment -
0:52:39 > 0:52:42one Impressionist moment, you might say - after another.
0:52:46 > 0:52:50Its bible was written by Jean-Paul Sartre and simply called
0:52:50 > 0:52:53Being And Nothingness.
0:52:55 > 0:52:57John-Paul Sartre finished Being And Nothingness
0:52:57 > 0:53:00during the very darkest days of the Second World War.
0:53:01 > 0:53:03What he does is he places...
0:53:05 > 0:53:09..absolute central importance on the moment.
0:53:10 > 0:53:11The instant.
0:53:12 > 0:53:15That's what he says existence is.
0:53:16 > 0:53:21We're only ever alive, we're only ever conscious of being alive, at this second,
0:53:21 > 0:53:25this fractional second of our existence.
0:53:25 > 0:53:31In that instant, we are - all of us - in the same predicament.
0:53:31 > 0:53:36We all bear responsibility within us, a terrible burden,
0:53:36 > 0:53:39for the whole history of the universe.
0:53:39 > 0:53:42It's doesn't matter if I'm a Frenchman,
0:53:42 > 0:53:44living under German tyranny.
0:53:44 > 0:53:47It does matter if I'm a victim of the death camps.
0:53:47 > 0:53:52It doesn't matter if I'm being lined up against the wall by a firing squad -
0:53:52 > 0:53:58in the moment that I die, I am as free as the man who is killing me.
0:54:00 > 0:54:01It's a great fist of defiance.
0:54:01 > 0:54:03It's almost a Picasso hand,
0:54:03 > 0:54:09raised up against the tyranny of those who would dominate the world
0:54:09 > 0:54:10with their cruelty, their terror.
0:54:13 > 0:54:16But it's a philosophy that bears within it...
0:54:18 > 0:54:23..a pretty terrible price, because what Sartre doesn't find room for
0:54:23 > 0:54:27is the idea that one moment might connect to another,
0:54:27 > 0:54:33that a life might be made up of one person mixing with another person,
0:54:33 > 0:54:38so, on the one hand, the instant,
0:54:38 > 0:54:43the totally free individual, but on the other hand, a terrible sense -
0:54:43 > 0:54:48a nauseating sense, in his phrase - of aloneness.
0:54:56 > 0:55:01Extentialism started out as a literary movement but it made its mark on
0:55:01 > 0:55:02the art of postwar France.
0:55:04 > 0:55:06I think it's most clearly expressed
0:55:06 > 0:55:08in the later work of Alberto Giacometti.
0:55:14 > 0:55:16What do they evoke,
0:55:16 > 0:55:21these strange, emaciated figures?
0:55:23 > 0:55:24Some sense of atrocity.
0:55:25 > 0:55:29Are they Giacometti's way of remembering
0:55:29 > 0:55:31the Jews,
0:55:31 > 0:55:35struggling from their concentration camps at the end of the war?
0:55:36 > 0:55:40I think ultimately what they express
0:55:40 > 0:55:45is this profound existential sense of aloneness.
0:55:45 > 0:55:51His work marks a huge change in the whole history of French art.
0:55:51 > 0:55:57Art is a person locked up in their own sense of being.
0:55:57 > 0:56:00This is the art of solipsism - it's the art of the monologue.
0:56:00 > 0:56:04No coincidence that Giacometti was friends with Samuel Beckett.
0:56:04 > 0:56:09Giacometti even designed the set for Beckett's Waiting For Godot.
0:56:09 > 0:56:13The theatre of the absurd, the art of the absurd,
0:56:13 > 0:56:15the end of the conversation.
0:56:31 > 0:56:33While it lasted, it was the most fertile,
0:56:33 > 0:56:36febrile conversation in the history of art.
0:56:36 > 0:56:41In just over half a century, France had given the world Impressionism,
0:56:41 > 0:56:46cubism, Fauvism, surrealism, conceptual art and existentialism.
0:56:50 > 0:56:52But when it comes to the last 50 or 60 years, well,
0:56:52 > 0:56:55I can think of plenty of French film-makers
0:56:55 > 0:56:59but very few artists and no true household names.
0:56:59 > 0:57:04Yves Klein, Pierre Soulages, Daniel Buren, anybody?
0:57:04 > 0:57:05So why the decline?
0:57:08 > 0:57:12Is it because France became culturally inward-looking?
0:57:12 > 0:57:16Or is it because the bourgeoisie, target of the avant-garde,
0:57:16 > 0:57:18has actually had the last laugh?
0:57:20 > 0:57:25The truth is, France today is ruled by a petite-France mentality.
0:57:28 > 0:57:31So, if you're black or Muslim, you'll struggle.
0:57:31 > 0:57:35Hard to imagine a Barack Obama elected here
0:57:35 > 0:57:38or a Picasso wanting to come, nowadays.
0:57:38 > 0:57:41But that's just my personal j'accuse.
0:57:44 > 0:57:46In the end, the whys don't matter.
0:57:46 > 0:57:50Cultural energies do shift from one place to another.
0:57:50 > 0:57:51It's always been that way.
0:57:51 > 0:57:53Plus ca change.
0:57:53 > 0:57:59And I think every great nation's story must eventually flow like a river
0:57:59 > 0:58:03into the greater sea of civilisation as a whole.
0:58:03 > 0:58:05Everything gets mixed up.
0:58:05 > 0:58:10We all take on a little bit of each other and I think that's particularly
0:58:10 > 0:58:15true of France, as its golden age of art came to a close.
0:58:15 > 0:58:21Artists here had invented and developed the visual language by
0:58:21 > 0:58:24which we frame and understand the modern world.
0:58:24 > 0:58:29And I don't think there's anyone alive whose way of seeing hasn't in
0:58:29 > 0:58:32some way been shaped by their ways of seeing.
0:58:32 > 0:58:36You might say, we're all French now.
0:58:36 > 0:58:37Nous sommes tous Francais.
0:58:37 > 0:58:39At least, a little bit.
0:58:42 > 0:58:47# Non, rien de rien
0:58:47 > 0:58:52# Non, je ne regrette rien
0:58:52 > 0:58:58# Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait
0:58:58 > 0:59:00# Ni le mal
0:59:00 > 0:59:04# Tout ca m'est bien egal
0:59:04 > 0:59:07# Non, rien de rien... #