We Are Making a New World British Masters

It was 1914, the First World War had just begun.

As Britain's boys enlisted to fight for "King and Country",

one young man was enjoying the attractions of his local fairground.

His name was Mark Gertler,

an impoverished, but precocious, painter.

Now, he'd come to the fair for some light relief, to escape the hardships of his everyday life

and all the incessant talk of the war, but on this visit he wouldn't find any relief.

He would actually be confronted with a dark and brutal vision of the future.

As Gertler stood watching the fairground's carousel,

he had a premonition... of Britain trapped in the insanity

of a never-ending war.

A war that would consume both soldiers and their families...

..that would transform their hope into horror,

and would then spin desperately out of control.

But the painting he made was much more than a vision of the Great War.

It was a prophecy of the entire 20th century.

The ride we couldn't get off.

And Mark Gertler was just one of a new breed of British artist

who would help us make sense of the catastrophic century that lay ahead.

In the early years, when new challenges, new technologies,

and new conflicts shattered all our certainties

they taught us how to survive in the modern world.

As our Empire collapsed and the nation itself was under threat

they created an image of Britain in which we could believe and for which we could fight.

And in the new nuclear age,

they renewed our faith in the human spirit

and gave us hope again for the future.

As the rest of the world was out exploring abstraction,

expressionism and all these other new "isms", our painters

were doing something far more interesting.

They took the best bits of modern art and infused them

with our own great painting traditions.

The result was a uniquely British take on modern art.

A glorious take on modern art

and I think it was one of the finest artistic movements in all of Western culture.

One's life really was

up in the morning and then for a ride in the park.

After that, tea somewhere,

scrumptious little iced cakes and strawberry ices.

For the privileged few, the Edwardian era was one long and lavish tea party.

The table always had a beautiful white tablecloth on it

and lovely silver and flowers.

The largest empire in history brought them luxuries from all corners of the globe

and high society frolicked in wealth, splendour and decadence.

Soup in silver plates, a fish of some beautiful sort, with a lovely sauce.

It was apt to get a little cold, by the time it came round.

Theirs was a fantasy life.

A fantasy that our painters were only too happy to endorse.

This is a typical example

of Edwardian art.

It was painted by Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema

and he became immensely rich pedalling lurid fantasies like this.

Now, you can see why it was so popular,

It's well painted, it's elegant,

it's vaguely intellectual, but not too intellectual, and, of course,

it's filled with naked women.

But don't be fooled by its charms,

because the truth is, this is really, really, really bad art.

It's reactionary, it's elitist, it's sexist, it's motivated by money

alone and, what's more, it was completely out of touch

with the realities of modern Britain.

The realities were not so pretty

and in a grubby corner of North London

British art would finally start to confront them.

And all because of a murder.

It was the morning of September 12th, 1907.

A railway man had finished his late shift

and was making his way through the back streets of Camden Town.

He arrived home to greet his wife...

..but on this morning

he was greeted with a shock.

This brutal killing became known

as the Camden Town Murder.

The killer was never found

but that night in September, 1907

was a seminal moment in the history of British art

and that's because one painter dared to shock the whole country and paint it.

That painter was Walter Sickert, a man dedicated to taking art

out of the Edwardian drawing room and into the real world.

For years, he'd been painting the insalubrious lives of Britain's underclass.

A drunkard heads off to the pub.

A singer plies her trade in a grubby music hall.

LAUGHTER

And the rowdy crowd heckle from the cheap seats.

But inspired by the Camden Town Murder

he would make his most audacious statement yet.

This isn't really a painting.

It's a crime scene.

Indeed, at first, it looks like a rather touching portrait

of a wife or a girlfriend dozing away in bed one morning,

but when you look closer

you begin to notice that Sickert has planted all these little clues throughout the painting

that gradually, and together, reveal something horrific.

Why, for instance,

is the woman wearing lipstick when she's asleep?

Why is she wearing jewellery

when she's asleep?

Why is she sleeping naked and why have the bed sheets been pulled down

And then you get revelation number one.

She's not a wife,

she's not a girlfriend,

she can only be a prostitute.

And then you begin to notice more things, strange things.

Her cold, yellow-green flesh,

the twisted neck.

And that's when you get revelation number two.

Maybe she's not sleeping at all,

maybe she's dead.

And then you've only got one question left,

who could have done this?

And that's when you discover

the final clue - this...

A man's overcoat is on the chair next to her bed

and that means only one thing,

the killer is still in the room.

And that's when the most awful and devastating revelation of them all strikes you -

you are the person in the room.

You are the client.

You are the killer.

And this painting is your viewpoint of a crime you've just committed.

You arrive at this painting innocent and you leave it guilty.

For Sickert, the entire Edwardian elite stood guilty,

guilty of neglecting the poverty and violence that simmered in Britain's streets.

But Sickert had one young devotee who wanted to go even further.

He didn't just want to accuse Edwardian society,

he planned to overthrow it.

It was a diabolical plot dreamed up by one of the most poisonous minds of the 20th century.

This is the brain of Percy Wyndham Lewis

and it only survives because of a very rare tumour

he developed in his pituitary gland that sent him blind and eventually caused his death.

But it's a suitably gruesome relic to a very gruesome man.

Wyndham Lewis was a misogynist, fascist and anti-Semite,

who had the dubious honour of writing the very first biography of Hitler,

and was described by Ernest Hemmingway, no less,

as having "the eyes of an unsuccessful rapist."

He was not a nice man,

but bad men can be great artists

and Wyndham Lewis' twisted mind was the secret of his genius.

Wyndham Lewis was born 1882,

on a yacht somewhere off the coast of Nova Scotia.

His mother was English, his father a bigamist,

and a veteran of the American Civil War.

As a young man, Wyndham Lewis lived an itinerant life

but in 1908, he made London his home.

He was entranced by the vitality of the city,

its dazzling, electric light...

...its roaring motorcars,

..and its towering buildings.

Together, they offered the possibility of a mechanical paradise

and Wyndham Lewis began to fantasise about how a new society,

governed by machines, could overthrow the stuffy world of the Edwardian elite.

In every way conceivable, he was the enemy, really,

of the existing status quo of the time.

He's attacking everything he thinks is complacent,

cant, hypocrisy, people who are idle and lazy in their thought

and were frightened of the modern world, frightened of modern ideas.

He considered himself to be extremely revolutionary, I suppose.

And in Wyndham Lewis' revolution the secret weapon would be art.

In 1912, he embarked on a blistering series of breakthrough works

that first announced his vision of the future.

At the heart of them all was the human figure,

but as never seen before.

Violent, robotic humanoids are trapped in an angular wilderness.

They look like nightmares,

but they were Wyndham Lewis' dream of a mechanical world order.

But Wyndham Lewis knew he couldn't realise that dream alone.

To succeed in revolutionising Britain, he needed to create a movement.

In July 1914, he published a manifesto.

It was a call to arms, a work of art in its own right,

and its name was Blast.

"Blast quack English drug for stupidity and sleepiness.

"Impossibility for Englishmen to be grave and keep his end up psychologically.

"Impossible... Blast... The years 1837 to 1900.

"An abysmal and inexcusable luxury sport... The famous English...

It was less a manifesto, more a vitriolic, incoherent rant.

"Incapable of anything.

"Bless the hairdresser, he attacks Mother Nature for a small fee.

"Bless England - industrial, island machine.

"Pyramidal workshop,

"its apex at Shetland."

It stinks of his personality.

The aggression, the violence, the megalomania,

all of that squeezes through every single page,

every single word is Wyndham Lewis taking up assault against Britain.

"Point one, we hear all sorts of disagreeable things about England.

"The unmusical, anti-artistic unphilosophic country. We quite agree."

Wyndham Lewis is not pulling his punches here,

he's really going for the jugular,

he's really attacking England.

And I think for me this is the most revealing image of them all.

It's a wrecking ball and that's precisely what

Blast was, the big, giant, angry, violent wrecking ball,

that was let loose on Britain and its cultural conventions.

A small group of artists rallied to Wyndham Lewis's cause

and they called themselves The Vorticists.

Edward Wadsworth imagined industrial Britain as seen from the air.

Cuthbert Hamilton saw steel girders rise up from a building site.

And Lawrence Atkinson plotted a cathedral for the machine age.

They remain some of the most radical artworks ever made.

The extraordinary thing about Vorticism is that

it's still looks revolutionary, avant-garde today.

Whereas most so-called avant-garde today is as stale as old mutton.

And the greatest Vorticist painting of them all

was made by the mastermind himself.

It is a bold and terrifying vision

of the mechanical metropolis of his dreams.

This is a very special picture because it's one of Wyndham Lewis's

only Vorticist paintings to have survived.

Most of them were burnt in fires or destroyed in explosions

or ruined in floods. Some just disappeared and were never seen again.

You've got this vast prison-like city of skyscrapers and streets.

But the most alarming thing, I think, of all

is his treatment of the figures,

because they're all dehumanised.

They're all turned into little soulless robots

and they're fighting each other.

They're waving flags and they're shouting on to their comrades.

You know, this painting now is almost 100 years old,

but I just can't believe how truly prophetic it is.

It really does prefigure a whole disastrous century

of wars and revolutions,

of fascism, of ideology, of class struggle.

It prefigures a whole century of ever-expanding cities

and unsustainable development.

And it prefigures a whole century

where individuals were isolated,

dehumanised and alienated.

And you know something?

If you think this painting doesn't have anything to do with you,

just look through the window

and you can see these little people working away at their desks.

Wyndham Lewis failed to turn Britain into his own mechanical dystopia,

it became one without him.

But a very different dream would come from a most unlikely place.

A hundred years ago the East End of London wasn't

just a different neighbourhood,

it was a different world,

London's very own badlands.

To get here you actually had to cross a river of blood

that surged down the road from the local slaughterhouses

and when you crossed that grizzly threshold you suddenly immerged

into a dangerous and exotic world of criminals and prostitutes

and Orthodox Jews and Eastern Europeans asylum seekers.

Now you might think that this kind of place was no kind of place for art

but as it turned out these slums produced one of the finest painters of the 20th Century.

His name was David Bomberg

and he was as tough as they come.

His family were Jewish refugees who fled brutal persecution in Tsarist Russia.

His father was a leatherworker and a gambler prone to violence.

Bomberg's early life was pretty much a daily fight for survival,

his brothers were actually street fighters and boxers

and by all accounts David could throw a mean punch himself.

But he had an even more powerful weapon up his sleeve.

Bomberg could draw and draw well

and he became convinced that art was his only way out of the ghetto.

His world was different from everybody else's

so domestic life went on around him but his focus was always on

to my experience always on his art.

Everybody else was going into some kind of trade and, and he wanted to be a painter for god's sake!

What use is a painter?

Bomberg was determined to break into the exclusive London art world in anyway he could.

And in 1911,

he finally won a place at art school.

But not as an artist,

as a model.

Bomberg found the job tremendously boring

and frustrating too.

He wanted to be an artist and not a model

so one day he brought some drawings in with him to the class

and when it was over he showed them to the teacher.

The teacher was staggered because his drawings were better than anything ever done by the students.

Bomberg was promptly offered a scholarship at the Slade,

London's most prestigious art school.

And here he is posturing proudly in his class photograph.

The Slade was a blessed relief from the hardships of the East End

and with new confidence Bomberg began to experiment.

But the Slade didn't like experiments

and soon he found himself in trouble.

On one occasion he actually smashed his professor with a pallet when he dared criticise his work.

So you'll not be surprised to hear that he was branded a troublemaker and eventually kicked out.

It seemed that Bomberg had thrown away his one chance to make something of himself.

Already he had that determination and I think that's probably a very Jewish thing.

That actually if you're a minority community you know,

especially then, you get to be tough. You have to be tough.

And Bomberg's fortunes were to change

during a visit to the local Jewish baths.

It was a spiritual place where the East End Jews

cleansed themselves before Synagogue.

And here during a moment of quite contemplation

Bomberg had an epiphany.

As Bomberg cleansed himself of a weeks worth of filth,

he realised he could do exactly the same thing with his art.

He could cleanse it of the past.

He could cleanse it of all those stultifying techniques that he'd been taught at the Slade

and he could cleanse it of all the boring old traditions that had held back so many British artists before.

And by doing so he believed he could make paintings

that were purer, cleaner, fresher and bolder than any ever made before.

Like Wyndham Lewis, Bomberg broke with centuries of tradition

producing fragmented paintings of psychedelic originality.

But his image was one of optimism.

Dockers unloading a cargo ship are transformed into

a colourful Kaleidoscope of energy.

And in Jujitsu he celebrates the dynamism of martial arts combat.

But for his greatest work he would turn to his beloved bathhouse.

This is Bomberg's first great masterpiece and he knew it too.

He was so proud of this picture that when he first exhibited it, in Chelsea

He hung it outside the gallery on the street and then proceeded to decorate the whole thing with flags.

And apparently it caused such a stir that it sent traffic jams all the way down the King's Road.

And that doesn't surprise me - it doesn't surprise me at all because when he made this in 1914,

this was as bold and radical as any painting in the world.

Now it's based on his own memories of the East End baths

and you may not be able to notice it immediately

but it is a picture of bathing.

This bright red rectangle that's the bathing pool

and these blue and white figures around these are the bathers.

These are the East End neighbours of Bomberg

and you can just about make them out doing their thing.

So for instance here's a form of someone diving into the pool,

you've got lot's of other figures climbing out of the pool over here

swimming around inside and over here with the bent legs

you can just make out these bent legs, here's a figure that

just climbed out of the pool drying himself off.

So this painting is all about the process of becoming clean

but this isn't just about modern Londoners cleansing themselves of dirt.

Bomberg saw this painting as a great manifesto for the modern world

and I think he's telling us that the modern world can cleanse and empower us all.

It can even transform the impoverished Jews of the East End

into these great muscular heroes of modernity.

It can render everyone pure,

it can make everyone equal

and it can set everyone free.

David Bomberg had found liberty in modern Britain

where Wyndham Lewis had seen only cruelty.

But together their pioneering paintings had completely transformed British art.

There was just one problem no-one understood them at all.

The British people didn't understand and certainly didn't like this new modern art

but something was about to change all that,

something that would force our artists to abandon modernism and return to tradition.

And that something was the First World War.

The declaration of war in 1914 was greeted with hysteria.

Many were convinced that it would finally unite Edwardian Britain.

That it would transform ordinary young men into heroes

and then it would finally confirm Britain's unrivalled supremacy over the world.

And one young artist was certain it would make him a star.

Like Bomberg and Wyndham Lewis, Richard Nevinson had trained at the Slade,

but unlike them he had little natural talent knocking out

second-rate paintings that aped the avant-garde.

Here he is posing proudly in front of a painting he called,

Tum Tiddly Um Tum Pom Pom.

The title says it all.

But Nevinson's mediocre prospects would change one evening

when he was lured to the theatre,

to witness an unorthodox performance by London's most infamous celebrity.

A maverick Italian by the name of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Marinetti was a poser, an adrenaline junkie and a veritable

grand master of the silly idea.

He had proposed burning down all the world's museums

sinking the whole city of Venice

and he thought that nothing was more fun than a good old fashioned car crash.

But in this performance Marinetti reached a new low.

HE IMITATES GUNFIRE & EXPLOSIONS

Marinetti loved war

and he declared his love in an experimental sound poem

that was supposed to give the public an authentic taste of the battlefield.

The public's reaction was divided -

divided between disgust, horror,

hatred, terror and outrage.

But Nevinson was entranced.

He too dreamed of battle, of glory, of heroism

and on a wave of patriotism Nevinson enlisted.

But he would be sorely disappointed.

In 1914, he arrived in France

but was immediately deemed too weak to fight.

So he spent his days as a medical orderly

pottering about on the lonely lanes of Flanders

far away from the frontline.

Though you wouldn't have thought it from his tales of daring do.

Nevinson told one story that in the middle of a Zeppelin raid

he got the wheels of his ambulance caught in a railway track as a train hurtled towards him

and flames bellowed around him and he only escaped at the very last second.

And on another occasion the Germans apparently fired a shell

directly at him but it miraculously passed through a little hole in his ambulance and he immerged unhurt.

And on another occasion he was for some reason up in

a hot air balloon and an enemy aeroplane shot the air balloon down.

The balloon was plummeted towards the ground but once again Nevinson escaped.

Now I don't know about you

but I don't believe a word of it.

After just ten uneventful weeks

Nevinson made his way quietly home.

But back in Britain he was greeted as a real war hero so he

busied himself making pictures that showed a hero's view of modern war.

Pictures that would guarantee him public acclaim.

And in the heart of the West End

Nevinson bagged his very own one-man show.

Nevinson's exhibition was a sensation.

Everyone who was anyone was there.

Royalty, aristocracy, army generals, famous painters, famous writers

and no less than four past, present and future prime ministers.

And when they were all assembled together inside the gallery

Nevinson made his entrance with a limp a walking stick and in full army uniform.

Nevinson revelled in his newfound glory

but the adulation was deserved

though he'd never seen a moment of combat

he had managed to capture the essence of modern war.

He'd discovered a formula.

Art that was geometrical and modern yet easy to understand.

Art that could be appreciated by the connoisseur and layman alike.

Here a battalion march in unison up to the frontline.

Troops rest after the rigours of battle.

And an aeroplane swoops down from the clouds.

But the public's favourite painting was called La Mitrailleuse.

Most viewers thought this was not just Nevinson's best work to date

it was the greatest painting of the whole conflict.

Walter Sickert even called it,

"The most authoritative utterance on war in the history of painting."

Now clearly it's a powerful and uncompromising image of war

and not just any war - this is modern war.

You can see a group of French machine gunners here their in a dugout,

they're surrounded by barbed wire.

One of them has been killed already.

This one's panicking over the dead body

and these two are firing blindly into the distance.

Now this isn't a war of cavalry charges and heroism and flying flags

this is a war in which scared men fight clumsily for their lives

and for no apparent reason.

And that's what people admired about this picture,

they admired it for telling them an inconvenient, an unpleasant truth

about what was happening across the Channel.

And they trusted it too because Nevinson was a soldier,

Nevinson had been there

and Nevinson had seen this first hand in the trenches.

But we know that wasn't true,

Nevinson had never stepped foot inside a trench

and Nevinson actually painted this on his honeymoon.

But the real truth about the war would come from a most unlikely place.

This Buckingham countryside was once home to a lonely young artist called Paul Nash.

A man whose intense emotional bond with nature

would make him the greatest war painter of the 20th Century.

On his long solitary walks, Paul developed the fanciful idea

that trees were like people with personalities all of their own.

And he painted them obsessively.

But not even a sensitive young man like Nash could avoid the war

and eventually he signed up.

It was February 1917,

when he disembarked at the port town of Le Havre.

He wondered what all the fuss was about.

This was a subdued time in the war as armies regrouped

and the Generals argued over strategy.

But after a few relaxed weeks Nash finally received orders to move up to the frontline.

But during the lull, nature had reclaimed the battlefields...

and the trenches were in bloom.

Where his comrades saw death and destruction,

Nash thought this place was actually quite nice.

What wasn't there to like?

There were trees, leaves, birds, sunrises.

Even the trenches were quite pretty.

In fact, the whole place reminded him of Sussex.

And he couldn't resist the temptation to paint it.

Two swallows swoop low past an orchard...

..and shrubs thrive amid the trenches.

But this pastoral idyll wasn't to last.

That spring, the British Army began preparing

for a massive new offensive...

..and it was then that an accident would

profoundly alter Nash's future.

One day, Nash, actually climbed out of the trench to make a sketch of

some rather delightful lights he saw shining away in the distance.

Anyway, as he stepped to the side to get a better look at them,

he lost his balance, tumbled back into the trench and broke a rib.

Now, he was immediately sent back to England to recover from the injury,

but it was probably the luckiest thing

that ever happened to him in his life,

because only a few days later, his whole company was slaughtered

in a disastrous offensive.

Passchendaele, the most brutal and inhumane battle of the whole war.

Hundreds of thousands of men disappeared into no man's land,

and many of them never returned.

After his recovery, Paul Nash returned to Passchendaele,

but the place that he had once found so beautiful

was now a desolate wasteland.

Nash was utterly horrified by what he saw here,

and to understand how he felt, you really have to hear what he wrote

in a letter to his wife after he saw it.

Because I think it is one of the most powerful things ever written

about the First World War, perhaps about any war.

And this, this is what he wrote.

"Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous. They are mockeries to man.

"It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless.

"I am no longer an artist, interested and curious.

"I'm a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting.

"To those who want the war to go on forever,

"feeble, inarticulate will be my message,

"but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls."

And it was that horror, that outrage,

that desire to tell the truth about the war that caused Nash to make

the greatest masterpieces of his career.

But Nash's greatest work is the bleakest of them all.

It's the morning after the battle.

The sun is rising.

And now, the sunrise is typically a symbol

of hope and rebirth and renewal, but not this sunrise,

because this sunrise doesn't reveal a twinkling new morning -

it reveals a truly appalling scene.

You can see here a sky that's blood red,

filled with all the blood that has been shed the night before.

You can see a forest all the way here of burnt and broken trees,

and underneath, this crazy, writhing ocean of mud.

And out of that mud, these trees become metaphors

for the dead buried beneath them.

With their sagging limbs, like the arms, these become like the bodies

who have fallen on the field of battle.

Parts of this tree here look like a hand, imploring the heavens,

but the heavens remain indifferent.

I think this is a truly brutal and incredibly powerful attack on war

and its consequences from Nash.

And I think it's more powerful than any book or any poem or any film,

precisely because it's so silent and so empty and so wordless.

But as war turned to peace, it wasn't horror that people wanted.

They wanted hope...

..and one artist was determined to provide it.

Stanley Spencer had given four years of his life to the war,

first as a medical orderly, and then as a frontline soldier in Macedonia.

And it was in a quiet corner of Hampshire that he set about

creating a masterpiece that would finally consign the war to history.

This is the Sandham Memorial Chapel.

Few come here today, but I believe this modest brick building

contains one of our most neglected treasures...

..and an artwork that completes

the great reawakening of British painting.

There are mornings when I open up, I say, "Good morning, chapel,"

and how well it's looking.

As custodian, you do everything,

so the gardens and the chapel and the buildings and the day-to-day cleaning

and maintenance, things like that.

You stand in the middle of the chapel and you look around,

and that's the closest you'll ever get to being inside Spencer's mind.

Just having all these images around you.

In his chapel, Spencer created an artwork

on a scale of the great fresco cycles of the Italian Renaissance.

But he did it in his own inimitable way.

This is Spencer's war...

..and Spencer's war began as an orderly in a Bristol hospital.

This is the first thing you see as you come in here,

and it shows the wounded returning from the Western Front

and arriving at the War Hospital in Bristol,

and the big iron gates are being opened for them.

Now you would think this scene would be a scene of horror and pain and suffering, but not for Stanley.

You see the soldiers, although they've got their slings and their bandages and their casts,

they almost seem to be having a good time

at the top of this open-topped bus

and there are these beautiful rhododendron flowers around them.

So the whole scene seems like some kind of bank-holiday outing

rather than some terrible traumatic scene of the First World War.

This is the case of all of these pictures in here.

This is probably my favourite

and it shows the beds being made in the hospital.

Now, the best thing about it is this figure on the left

because he's so cold as his bed's being made

that he's wrapped himself completely in his blanket

and he's keeping his feet warm by standing on a hot water bottle.

Now, I remember doing that as a child when it was particularly cold in the morning

and it's just amazing that a scene like this

could ever make its way into a war painting,

but that's the great thing about Spencer -

he's not painting the horror of war,

he's not painting the brutality of war,

he's painting, if anything, the banality of war.

And you can see the banality in this picture.

This shows tea in the ward

and you can see these enormous piles like Jenga of bread and butter,

and Spencer's favourite meal in the world was bread and butter.

This is called Ablutions,

and it shows the early morning washing up and cleaning,

so you can see one guy polishing the taps like he's sort of doing a rock and roll dance with the taps.

You can see another person having their back scrubbed

and this person in the foreground is washing their hair in a sink.

Now Spencer actually had an enormous amount of difficulty painting the soapsuds on the hair

so he did it himself and sketched himself in the mirror as he washed his hair.

Everywhere you find these domestic moments.

But his most memorable images

were drawn from his experiences of the frontline, in Macedonia.

The culmination of the whole project is this painting. 21 feet high,

it took Spencer almost a year to paint

and it shows a battlefield, an enormous battlefield in Macedonia

that's filled with all the soldiers that have died during the war,

Spencer's friends, Spencer's comrades.

But here they're all being resurrected,

they're all climbing out of the earth rubbing their eyes,

looking around and saying hello to their old friends,

the friends they thought they'd never see again.

Towards the end of his life Spencer returned to revisit this work

that meant so much to him.

'When I did this resurrection altarpiece,

'I wanted it to be in a particular place that I remembered

'and, um, I felt that all that I hoped for

'of all the coming back home and everything,

'could be celebrated there.'

These places the men were rising from,

as you see down below, just by the altar,

are their rising in a place which they would like to rise in.

It's a happy place and that I was very keen about,

that one makes this battlefield a happy place without altering anything.

I tried to get this feeling of the consciousness of the cross

getting more and more tense as it gets up

and when it gets to the man above those mules

who's reclining over a crucifix, and I get a feeling he's there forever.

I don't think anything, any bomb or anything dropping behind his head,

will make him take the least notice.

Immediately above him you see Christ as just a man among the men,

receiving the crosses and quietly talking to them.

Well, I feel in that way that all these things which were previously war scenes

are now having to behave as the bringers of the happy message of the resurrection.

Every single wound of war is being healed in this picture, in this whole chapel.

You can see here they're shaking hands.

I've got to say that I think that's one of the greatest passages

of 20th-century painting, that handshake,

because, you know, a handshake is something we do every day,

but Spencer found something epic in it, something momentous in it,

and you realise that that handshake

isn't just a handshake between old friends who thought they'd never see each other again.

It's a handshake between the past and the future.

With the Sandham Memorial Chapel, Stanley Spencer had reinvented tradition

to create a timeless sanctuary amid the chaos of the modern world.

MUSIC PLAYS

But Spencer had not been alone in responding to the challenges of his age.

The ten years or so between 1910 and 1919 must surely rank

as the most remarkable in the whole history of British art,

because in those years British artists turned themselves

into nothing less than the conscience of the entire nation.

They showed us the problems and possibilities of the modern world.

They told us the truth about the First World War

when hardly anyone else would and with a nation in trauma,

they gave us hope and strength for the future.

In the next episode

British painters lead the country through a period of national crisis.

Some find refuge in nostalgia,

some in fantasy,

while others search for the timeless spirit of the English countryside.

But in the darkest hour they come together

to create an image of Britain in which we can believe...

..and for which we can fight.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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