A New Jerusalem British Masters

NEWSREEL: 'I wish with all my heart that everyone fighting in this war

'and above all those...'

Sunday the 15th of April, 1945,

the last days of the Second World War.

'..barbed wire fence that leads to the inner compound of the camp...'

The British Army were advancing towards Berlin,

and as they picked their way through the remnants of the Nazi regime,

they made an appalling discovery.

'I drove slowly above the Belsen concentration camp

'and found myself in the world of a nightmare.

'As we went deeper, we saw more of the horror of the place

'and I realised that what...'

These horrific images

sent shock waves through the western world.

They seemed to challenge all of our basic assumptions,

that civilisation was civilised,

and that deep down human nature was good, not wicked.

But how could you possibly believe those things after this?

These scenes forced an entire generation

to look deep within itself

and confront the biggest questions of them all.

What does it mean to be human

and how, after this tragedy,

how could we build a more humane world?

I believe that in Britain,

some of the most resonant answers to those questions

came from our painters.

The inheritors of a powerful and uniquely British tradition.

They used their art to go where few others dared.

They explored our capacity for cruelty

and violence.

They exposed the delusions of the consumer age.

And they led us away from fear and anxiety,

teaching us to relish the pleasures of life once again.

But as the world finally recognised

the importance of these British masters,

we turned against them.

And today, our great painting tradition

is in peril.

The horrific events of the Second World War,

left scars on the human consciousness.

Never before had people seen evil on such a vast scale.

Never before was man capable of his total annihilation.

Never before did the future of humanity

seem so fragile.

And it was one of our most penetrating painters,

who would capture the anxiety of his age.

Until his death, Lucian Freud lived and worked in Britain,

but he had originally come here as a refugee from Nazi Germany

and the horrors he had escaped, haunted much of his early painting.

This is a portrait of Freud's first wife, Kitty, from 1947.

It's so delicate and so much love and care has gone into making it

and she is like a little Virgin Mary of the twentieth century.

But the closer you look, you begin to realise

this is a deeply disturbing modern picture

that's poised on a knife edge between beauty and horror,

between perfection and catastrophe.

Every part of it is quietly unsettling.

Kitty's big beautiful green eyes are glazed over

like those of the dead.

Her hair is electrified

into this thatch of agitated energy,

and even the little kitten stares out at us

like some kind of implacable enemy.

But it's the way she holds it that's most disturbing of all,

because where one expects to find tenderness,

all you get is her throttling the poor animal's neck.

And you get this feeling

that something truly awful is about to happen.

Freud had articulated the anxiety of post-war Britain,

though he offered no salvation.

But alone in the wild landscape of Wales, one painter was to try.

Graham Sutherland was a kind of gentleman artist

and a romantic at heart.

In the 1930s, he'd explored the coast of Pembrokeshire obsessively,

and he found in it a seductive and mysterious beauty

that he lovingly expressed in his art.

Every time he came to Pembrokeshire,

which he did about three times a year, I'd go down and meet him.

What fascinated me was the fact

that he was so well dressed for these walks.

He did have quite smart gum boots.

He had checked trousers, nice covert coat,

discussing nonstop, all the time, every little facet,

organic, stones, rocks, lichen etc.

See, this is what I can paint, you know.

We sort of discussed everything, all facets of life.

GRAHAM SUTHERLAND: If I go for a walk in the country,

there are millions of things around me.

But one reacts to certain things only.

One notices just those things which happen to move one's senses.

One has the idea.

But after the Second World War,

Sutherland's work would undergo a radical shift.

Sutherland had been walking this landscape for years.

To him, it seemed to be a beautiful and peaceful paradise,

a kind of haven from the modern world,

and a place that always seemed to cure him of his deepest worries.

But this time, things were different.

This time, everywhere he looked,

he saw reminders of the brutal world in which he lived.

Sutherland became most obsessed with thorn trees, like this one.

He thought they were the perfect metaphor for everything

that had gone wrong with the world in his lifetime.

They reminded him of the barbed wire of the concentration camps,

of instruments of human torture,

and the sharp lines of military hardware.

For Sutherland, a tiny natural form like this little thorn,

symbolised a cruel and broken world,

in which atrocity was ever present,

and in which nature and man was doomed to destroy itself.

GRAHAM SUTHERLAND: These thorn trees seemed to be a subject on their own.

A piece where the points of the thorns pierce the air,

mark out space,

were to me like a piece of open sculpture.

If you meet this man, he's charm, he's lovely, he's intelligent.

He's sort of Renaissance in a way. He's interested in everything,

music, architecture, painting, people...

but then he's painting spiky.

And you think, "I wonder why?"

Because the spikiness and the sensitivity

of the man and the painting

doesn't quite go together.

But I quite like that.

It's the precarious tension, as he calls it, of opposites.

I did thorn trees, thorn heads,

again based on this original sickle shaped idea,

which you see all over the county.

I find Sutherland's thorn paintings dark and disturbing pictures.

But he realised that if he was to fully confront

and express the brutal age in which he was now living,

landscape painting was simply not enough.

He felt that now he had no choice, but to tackle the biggest

and most powerful subject in the history of western art.

BELL RINGS, CHORAL MUSIC

In 1945, Sutherland came to this church, St Matthew's in Northampton.

Here, he would conceive of a monumental painting,

a piece he hoped would speak to an anxious and bewildered nation.

...God's grace, mercy and peace be with you.

CONGREGATION RESPONDS

Sutherland concluded that only one subject could truly express

the horrors of his own age, and that was the Crucifixion.

He'd never painted anything like it before - he was, after all,

a landscapist - but he was determined to do it, and do it well.

So determined that he built a crucifix in his studio,

strung himself up against it with some rope,

and sketched himself in the mirror as he hung there.

That way, he reasoned, his crucifixion would be more real,

and more honest than any that had gone before it.

SUTHERLAND: The commissioning of the painting

was suggested by the Vicar of St Matthew's, Cannon Hussey.

The picture was finished by the end of 1946,

and hung in the transept of St Matthew's Church, Northampton.

And here it is.

This is as close to an old master painting

as you can get in the 20th century.

Sutherland has taken the most influential theme of them all,

the subject of all those great medieval sculptures

and Renaissance paintings, and he's converted it, masterfully,

I think, into a gruesome salute to a genocidal world.

Look at Christ's suffering.

Look at the contorted hands.

Look at the gasping ribcage, look at the stretched limbs.

It's these limbs that Sutherland would have seen

as he crucified himself in his studio.

And look, the crown of thorns. Those thorns again.

This isn't a landscape painting,

but the memory of Pembrokeshire is still there.

And in all this suffering, and in all this pain,

Sutherland, I think, wants us to see the bodies at Belsen,

the burnt victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

and the countless murdered soldiers and civilians around the globe.

All the world's sins, combined, condensed, distilled,

into one suffering body.

But, the whole point of the Crucifixion

is that Christ triumphs over death, his suffering isn't in vain.

Even now, there is hope in despair

and there is some goodness left in a wicked world.

Sutherland's masterpiece chimed well

with an emerging spirit in post-war Britain.

Amidst the austerity there came hope that a new Jerusalem could be built

from the ashes of war.

This was the vision of Prime Minister, Clement Attlee,

and he began creating a welfare state

to provide a standard of living

that previous generations could only have dreamt of.

But there was one place that showed little interest

in Attlee's Utopian vision.

Soho was a kind of netherworld,

a nefarious haven of criminals, chancers and ne'er-do-wells,

who revelled in all the illicit pleasures that London could offer.

And at its very centre was one of our most notorious artists.

For him, salvation was an illusion.

He only believed in fear, pain and desire.

His name, was Francis Bacon.

IN TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:

Bacon was the son of an Irish racehorse trainer,

but he fled home as a teenager

after his father found him trying on his mother's underwear.

He then embarked on a dissolute and promiscuous youth,

dominated by alcohol, drugs and sadomasochism.

And it was these sordid pleasures and pains of the flesh

that he decided to explore in his art.

IN TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:

The violence in his life was matched by the way he worked.

Bacon had no formal training,

he painted with intuition and intensity,

using walls as pallets, clothes as brushes,

and destroying anything that failed to please him.

But his secret lay in found imagery,

which he devoured and distorted in his art.

And when it came to his breakthrough painting,

Bacon, like Sutherland before him,

turned to the most evocative subject in western art.

But his approach was very different.

What is the difference in the attitude

when you start on a crucifixion?

Well, you're working then about your own feelings and sensations, really.

You might say it's almost nearer to a self-portrait,

that you are working on all sorts of very private feelings

about behaviour and about the way life is.

Bacon's crucifixion is not about Jesus, it is about us.

While Sutherland paints the heroic figure of Christ,

Bacon paints grotesque figures at the base of the Crucifixion.

Here's one weeping on the side, another one

grimacing with the teeth showing, and a rather disgusting figure here,

baying for blood.

And while Sutherland believes that in the end things will get better,

Bacon tells us there is no better, this is all there is.

No wonder everyone who saw this in the 1940s was shocked

to their very core, and no wonder people still see this

as one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century.

But I have a confession to make.

I don't think it's a masterpiece. I think it's badly painted,

I think it's cliched, and I think it's too obviously strident

and too obviously monstrous.

You know, it's very easy for artists to scare us, to horrify us,

but it's very, very difficult for them to move us and to touch us.

And I think that Bacon had a long, long way to go,

before he could truly represent the sorry lot of humanity.

From his paint-splattered studio,

Bacon continued his lonely exploration

of the darkness that lay at the heart of humanity.

But there was another side to Bacon's complex personality

that very few would ever see.

Right at the first sitting, it struck me immediately

how warm and kind and enthusiastic he was.

Here was, in my view, the greatest living painter in the world.

And I was a student, basically.

But he treated me totally as an equal.

And he was so sweet, you know? So nice and normal,

and not anything like the Francis that I'd read about.

I do resent films and books that depict only Francis

as some kind of masochistic sexual predator.

He wasn't.

He really wasn't.

He was trying to express in his work

the awfulness of what human beings have to experience.

Francis lived through a time

when somebody needed to say what he said.

In 1971, Bacon was awarded with a major retrospective

at the Grand Palais,

the most prestigious exhibition hall in Paris.

The only other living painter to have been honoured in this way

was Picasso.

It was to be the pinnacle of Bacon's career.

Bacon had brought with him to Paris his boyfriend,

a low-life Londoner called George Dyer,

who Bacon had apparently met while Dyer was burgling his apartment.

A passionate relationship ensued between the two men,

but here, as Bacon expected his greatest triumph,

that relationship would bring about a tragedy.

On the eve of the grand opening,

Bacon was out celebrating his success with the rich and famous,

while George Dyer was left to drink alone at a cafe round the corner.

After a night of heavy drinking,

Dyer finally found his way back to this hotel,

and he waited alone for Bacon to return.

Dyer had a history of depression and self-harm,

but we'll never know exactly what went through his mind

that night in this hotel room.

What we do know is that shortly after returning here,

he decided to swallow a lethal cocktail

of anti-depressants, amphetamines and barbiturates.

The pain started immediately, so Dyer staggered into the bathroom

and tried to vomit the pills back into this sink.

But it was too late.

This extraordinary footage of the exhibition opening

was taken just hours after Bacon had found his lover dead.

That's the one where he suddenly thought of George.

And there was like this frozen moment...

and his eyes just welled with tears.

And he was far, far away.

I think it was only now, in grief, that Bacon truly felt the pain

that he'd been seeking to explore in his art.

And he began a series of memorials to his dead lover,

which I believe are his finest achievements in painting.

This is one of Bacon's memorials to Dyer,

and it's very much an attempt to bring him back to life.

These two canvasses on the side,

these are portraits of Dyer sitting down in his underwear,

just as he used to do when he was alive,

and staying the night at Bacon's apartment.

And this middle painting,

this is a great celebration of their relationship,

and they're making love.

But the closer you look at this painting,

the less certainty you find, the less optimism you find.

Look again at these portraits - the eyes are closed,

the body is scarred, wounded and mutilated and bleeding,

and even here, in this remarkable passage of painting,

being eaten away by the shadows that surround it.

It's almost here as though a hand has reached out from behind

and is pulling Dyer back into the void.

This is an intensely dramatic piece of painting.

You can see Bacon is really fighting a desperate battle,

desperately trying to paint his lover back to life,

as death is painting him away.

And look again at this middle painting -

are they really making love?

Or is this a fatal embrace of the living and the dead?

Bacon's last desperate, grief-ridden embrace

with someone who's gone already?

What a painting this is.

What a devastating meditation on the human condition.

Suddenly this feeling develops, that humans are nothing more than

the flesh and fluids from which they're made,

that despite all our pretensions, all life is, is desire and death,

and that, try as we might to make our lives meaningful,

all we are is lonely and fragile creatures,

fighting in vain against the night.

In his masterpiece,

Bacon had finally expressed the hopelessness of life.

But his was a message not everyone wanted to hear.

# Hey, have you heard about... #

JAUNTY TUNE PLAYS

# ..Yes, for smoking that you're bound to like... #

'You see, Dristan tablets shrink swollen...'

ROMANTIC MUSIC PLAYS

From across the Atlantic,

a new idea of salvation had taken root.

'Come to where the flavour is.

'Come to Marlboro country.'

Happiness, health and freedom were available to everyone.

All they had to do was go shopping.

Hi, kids!

This is the watch.

In the charm and colour of natural gold...

The imagery of consumerism was everywhere,

and no-one, not even our painters, could fail to be seduced.

Your mouth feels clean, your throat refreshed.

The snow-fresh coolness of cool.

All of these things were so much more exciting

than those dusty old paintings at the Royal Academy.

Why not make paintings about Coca-Cola and motorcars

and aeroplanes and band aids and corn flakes?

Surely these things were just as valid subjects for art,

as all that other stuff?

Things go better with Coke after Coke after Coke.

One man was determined to examine this onslaught of images,

and his name was Richard Hamilton.

The influence of America was very strong at that time in England,

and I simply felt the need for artists becoming concerned

with the world about them,

their own environment, their own visual environment,

and trying to find some solution to this problem.

In 1956, Hamilton joined forces with a maverick group

of artists, architects and thinkers.

Together they formed the Independent Group,

and they set themselves a very ambitious task.

Hamilton and his group wanted to investigate every aspect

of the new consumer culture that was taking over Britain.

They wanted to know what food people were eating,

what magazines they were reading...

Hamilton's favourite was Playboy.

..what they were speaking about on the telephone,

listening to on the radio,

and what they were watching on the newest invention of them all,

the television set.

# TV is the thing this year... #

'Anyone who thinks abstract artists are too abstract

'should drop in at the Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition

'devoted to collaboration between architects,

'painters and sculptors.'

To tell the world about their work,

the Independent Group put on an exhibition

and they called it This Is Tomorrow.

'But don't be too sure our houses won't look like this tomorrow.

'Anything can happen.

'Remember, you probably wouldn't have believed yesterday

'what is happening today.'

Frankly, their efforts would largely have been forgotten

had it not been for Hamilton's contribution.

A piece of work that would catapult him to stardom

and change art for good.

And this is it. It's called, rather wonderfully,

Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?

It consists of all the different things

that Hamilton thought defined the modern age.

It's a kind of distillation of all his research.

So, you've basically got everything there - a comic book on the wall,

a Ford motor car sign on the lampshade,

a television, a telephone, some tinned food,

and I think "ham" is a kind of signature, short for Hamilton.

You've got a couple of electrical appliances,

and at the heart of this mass-produced Garden of Eden

are of course its very own Adam and Eve -

a body-builder and a glamour model.

And they're made beautiful by the products that surround them.

And this is Hamilton's profound answer to the question

of what makes us human.

We are, he declares, what we buy.

But Hamilton wanted to go further and look deeper

into the mechanisms of the consumer world.

# I walk

# Where once the grass was green. #

And there was one product which excited his inquisitive mind

like no other.

# ..What bird could sing

# Whose eyes have seen

# Broken blossoms

# On the field of war? #

The motor car.

Now, in the 1950s almost everyone had them,

but for Hamilton, their sparkling chromes and curvaceous lines

made them the grand public sculptures of the mid-20th century.

And he was determined to immortalise them in paint.

But the motor car would become the subject of his most cryptic

and penetrating painting.

# ..Then have died so many dreams... #

It's called Hommage A Chrysler Corp,

and Hamilton gave it a French title solely in order

to make fun of all those pretentious paintings

that'd been coming out of Paris for years.

Now, you can see quite clearly the car. There is the chrome bumper,

there we've got the headlamps and its pink wing.

But this painting isn't ABOUT the motor car.

Hamilton's far cleverer than that.

Look more closely and you begin to notice

this shadowy figure of a woman with bright-red lipstick

leaning over the car's bonnet.

Now why? Why has Hamilton included such a strange figure here?

I think he's done it

because that's precisely what the car companies did.

Their adverts always included

a glamorous and scantily clad woman draped over their products.

That way, their products would become irresistible

to gullible male consumers like me.

So, what Hamilton's painting is not just the car.

He's painting how we consumers are manipulated into buying things

that we don't need, we don't want

and we certainly can't afford.

If you want to know what Hamilton actually thinks about this,

there is one clue,

and that's this little form sneaking out from underneath the bumper.

That, Hamilton tells us, is a jawbone, part of a skull.

And when you see that, suddenly the whole painting begins to change,

and a secret image begins to emerge from the obvious image.

Suddenly, the whole car becomes a skull.

You can see here, I hope, the eye socket, the nostril,

the mouth, the jaw bone.

Underneath the glamorous surface of the consumer age,

things aren't so pretty.

But in a town far, far away

from the flash car showrooms of London,

there lived a boy.

Unlike Hamilton, he wanted to believe in

the Utopian promises of the 1950s,

and he was convinced they could liberate him

from the shackles of his upbringing.

David Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937.

His parents were old-fashioned working-class do-gooders.

They raised their children as devout Methodists,

and refused to allow even drinking or smoking in the family home.

But from an early age, it was clear that David didn't quite fit in.

David Hockney's school reports speak volumes.

And they're very funny, too, and I'm going to read a few.

Divinity - "Does not concentrate and disturbs others".

In Geography - "Too casual".

Maths - "His efforts have been spasmodic."

In French, this is particularly good -

"Negligible progress, only the occasional gleam of understanding".

But my favourite part of the report is from the headmaster,

and he writes,

"He will be glad to establish himself

"as a sincere and serious person

"by steady work and merit."

That's my favourite, because David Hockney's idea of merit

couldn't have been more different.

David actually wanted to be... an artist.

But not everyone in Bradford appreciated his talents.

That's when I first met Hockney,

a student helping the post office

deliver all their parcels and letters.

It wasn't a hard job, and by lunchtime, usually, we'd finished,

and so we tended to park the wagon up and go into hiding a little bit

till about 3pm, and then we'd sit in the back of this wagon

and Hockney would be there with his sketchpad,

and he'd say, "What do you think of this?"

And I'd look at them and I thought, "Well, these are rubbish." Yeah!

Bradford wasn't a Bohemian city.

It wasn't a city particularly for the arts...

and it wasn't a city for individualism, really.

If you wore a tie that was a little bit bright,

people would...you know.

I think David didn't look any different

to any other student that was on the Christmas post,

and I suppose that's because he didn't WANT to look any different.

We conformed. We conformed.

By his early 20s,

Hockney realised that if he was to ever succeed as an artist,

he had to leave his home town behind him and make his way instead

to somewhere that was just about to get swinging.

In 1959, at the age of 20,

David won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London.

At the time, the Royal College was the cosmopolitan heartbeat

of British avant-garde

and as far away from Bradford as you could possibly get.

# Oh, oh, and then you move it slow

# When lights are low

# Now, you got something... #

David Hockney re-invented himself almost overnight.

He bleached his hair,

he bought himself some now-famous circular spectacles,

and he started to wear some very strange clothes.

The V-neck yellow tank top, pistachio-green polo shirt,

and within just months, little David from Bradford

had become the living embodiment

of Britain's entire youth counter-culture movement.

'But between parties, David did find time for some painting.

'At the Royal College, he started making pictures

'that were as uninhibited as his lifestyle.

'The amorous embrace of two lovers.

'And confessions of childhood crushes.

'David was gay,

'and at the Royal College, he used his paintings to come out.

CRACKLY RADIO BROADCAST

'But in the 1960s,

'David's desires were actually still illegal.'

'To satisfy them, he had to look beyond Britain.'

RADIO: ..I would like to help people be cured of,

where it occurs.

'Hockney's favourite magazine was this one,'

Physique Pictorial,

published in Los Angeles

but available in all specialist London newsagents.

This is the May 1958 edition,

and it shows, well,

I mean, it shows a lot of naked male bodies,

bodies that are somehow freed from the laws of anatomy.

I mean, it really is, when you look at it, rather absurd,

but these butch Californian bodies

convinced Hockney that if he wanted to liberate himself,

California was the place to go.

'In January 1964,

'David Hockney visited Los Angeles for the first time.

'He fell instantly in love

'with the beautiful place and its beautiful people.'

I thought this is the place.

I thought it's so sexy, all these incredible boys.

Everybody wore little white socks then.

It's always sunny.

It's got all the energy of the United States

with the Mediterranean thrown in.

'Hockney started to paint Los Angeles as an earthly paradise.'

It's a bit like Europe in the sense it's like a sunny, naked version

of the Portobello Road with more healthy people.

'Emerald-green lawns are sprinkled with hypnotic elegance.

'Young men shower in clean, modern interiors

'and housewives pose in impeccably furnished homes.'

Marvellous shadow.

'But nothing about California

'excited Hockney quite like its swimming pools.'

The interesting thing about water

is it's something you can't quite define, isn't it?

It's, uh, unclear yet clear.

And somehow the problem of depicting it

becomes a wonderful way of

thinking of graphic terms and devices.

Somehow it's a subject that's got a lot of richness there.

Now they've gone right in the shadow, though.

Come back over here where the light is.

'And a swimming pool was the setting for David's most famous painting.'

A Bigger Splash.

It's only called that

because Hockney painted two smaller splashes before it.

Now people often ask me

why this painting is so enduringly popular,

and I think first it's very, very beautiful.

The whole thing is about balance -

the balance between the top half and the bottom half,

between the horizontals and the verticals,

between the pinks and the blues,

and of course between order and chaos.

The whole thing has been painstakingly calculated

to create a sense of visual perfection.

Nothing has been left to chance.

In fact I feel that the whole thing

is like a kind of piece of frozen music,

and that makes it endlessly fascinating to look at.

It is of course about the moment forever captured,

those couple of seconds when the splash

is right up in the air.

But at the same time it's about the moment forever missed.

Ironically, the only human presence in this painting

isn't present at all,

because he or she

has just disappeared under the water.

That creates a sense of suspense.

It's like a whodunnit without an ending.

You know something -

I feel that if I look, at this painting long enough,

the splash will subside and a little human head

will pop out from underneath the water.

But it hasn't happened yet.

But I think the real reason this painting is so popular

is because it's unashamedly optimistic.

It's about paradise found, captured and bottled forever

for our delectation.

It's about happiness.

It's about Hockney finally finding a place

where he could be himself and where he could be free.

And who wouldn't like a painting that's about that?

Aren't we all searching for our own version of this?

'In just 20 years,

'British painters had led the nation on a path of discovery.

'They had taken us on a journey from despair...

'..to optimism.

'It was a golden age of creativity.

'But it was about to come to an end.'

'In the late 1960s, students across Europe revolted.

'America, the great hope of the west,

'was mired in the Vietnam conflict

'and Britain sank into economic depression.

'The young wanted to revolutionise the entire cultural landscape.

'They embraced the new trends of conceptual art...

'..and declared painting officially dead.'

'The crisis in painting

'was captured in the tragic story of one man.

'This fleeting fragment is the only film that exists

'of Keith Vaughan.'

Vaughan was one of the most respected artists of his day.

Keeping company with Graham Sutherland and David Hockney.

For Vaughan, painting was not old fashioned,

it was fundamental to understanding human nature.

Vaughan felt that painting the human figure again and again

and again, would grant him an insight into the deepest truths

of the human condition.

Now he didn't exactly know how, but he did know that

if he got it right, his paintings would not just be helpful and

therapeutic to him, but they could potentially benefit the whole world.

With his figure paintings, his manscapes...

Um, yeah, I've always felt that he's got this group,

and wanted to... He was exploring,

looking for something that was missing in his life,

I'm sure he was.

You get that feeling with some of his paintings, don't you?

That, you know, they obscure, the figures disappear,

and...I don't understand them really.

You just feel them.

'Vaughan's most telling work

'was a piece he called The Ninth Assembly of Figures.'

This is actually a deeply ambitious painting, that intends

to chronicle the whole cycle of human life,

and at the same time draw on an incredibly rich tradition

of European painting.

It begins here with this figure

who's said to be a self-portrait of Vaughan with a foetus pose,

so this is the beginning of life.

You then have these three figures who all represent different aspects

of adult life.

This figure here is based on the sort of active world,

and is based on the ancient Greek javelin thrower.

This figure represents sexuality, so this is the adult life.

This is based on the crucifixion

and of course it reminds us of Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon.

And here, most dark of all, a figure who's already died.

So this picture shows a belief in the power of painting.

He believed this kind of painting

could not just reveal what life was all about,

what its journeys were, what its hopes were, what its desires were.

He believed that by looking at these paintings

you could understand yourself,

and he could understand himself better.

It's a great testament to Keith Vaughan's ambition.

But there is a little part of this painting

that suggests that ambition may have been in vain.

But that clue is not at the front of this painting.

It's on the back.

Vaughan has included an excerpt from one of Charles Baudelaire's poems.

And it says here in French:

"What is this sad and black island?

"It's Cythera, someone tells us, the land of our songs,

"the banal Eldorado of all the old boys.

"Look, after all, it isn't much of a place."

This little extract on the back, this little scribbling of writing

that you might never see, for me reveals so much.

Eldorado, of course, was one of those great legendary paradises,

the kind of paradise that Hockney had found in California.

But with this little excerpt,

Vaughan tells us that paradise is non-existent,

that happiness is impossible,

and that his own grand ambitions of a universal humanistic painting,

the kind of painting that's on the other side of this canvas,

will always be unachievable.

As new artists emerged, with fashionable new ideas,

Vaughan felt hopelessly out of date.

And all his anxieties are recorded in minute detail

in his remarkable diaries, which he kept for his entire adult life.

"I look at my work, the result of some 40 years' effort and hope,

"and there's the result of five or six at the most,

"and it's I who feel defeated. For it turns out that toffee papers,

"cereal packages, and mass media wrappings and publicity

"are the most vital, significant and fertile aspects

"of the age we live in.

"I live in it too, and I just don't feel that way.

"I feel like a stranded dinosaur,

"because all the values I've lived by now count for nothing.

"If this is what it was all going to lead to, one need not have bothered."

With his increasingly marginal place in the art world,

failing health, and loneliness, Keith Vaughan became overwhelmed.

On 4th November 1977,

he sat down and wrote a truly extraordinary entry in his diary.

"The capsules have been taken with some whisky.

"What is striking is the unreality of the situation.

"I feel no different,

"but suddenly the decision came that it must be done.

"It's a bright sunny morning, full of life,

"such a morning as many people have died on.

"I cannot believe I have committed suicide.

"Since nothing has happened, no big bang, or cut wrists.

"65 was long enough for me.

"It wasn't a complete failure, I did some..."

And it's at that point that his words taper off.

His back was to us, he was at his table.

I just remember that he was really neatly dressed,

and his jacket was very soft, cos I touched it.

And, um, the pen was still in his hand on that last entry of his diary,

and he was dead.

I mean, I really loved Keith, it was great. A very close...

Vaughan, I think, had been defeated in his ambition to find meaning

in his life through painting.

But his suicide wasn't just a personal tragedy.

I think it spelled the end of a great era of British painting

that stretched all the way back to the early 20th century.

It seems to me that today,

the British painting tradition has been sidelined,

consigned to the margins,

while the often vapid creations of younger artists steal the limelight.

Of the few that upheld that tradition,

one towered above them all.

He was the man who began this programme,

and will now end it.

Lucian Freud.

In a career spanning 70 years, right up to his death,

he shunned fame, disregarded money, and devoted himself unwaveringly

to painting the reality and the beauty of the human body.

This is probably my favourite of the many nudes that Lucian Freud

painted in his career.

It's so epic, it's so monumental.

He somehow seems to make even cellulite seem heroic.

And you know, standing here is really like standing

in front of an Old Master painting.

You know, it's difficult to believe this was painted in 1988.

I like to think of it as a kind of defiant statement.

I think Lucian Freud is telling us that in an age of celebrity gossip

and popular entertainment, that the quiet,

and the thoughtful and the understated still count.

And I think he's trying to tell us

that in an ever-changing and disorientating world,

that the only thing that remains constant is us.

And I think he's also saying that in a world in which pickled sharks

and unmade beds count as art,

that painting, good old-fashioned painting, is still standing.

I don't know if our painting tradition will disappear forever,

or be reborn.

But whatever the future many be, we cannot forget the past.

Because the 20th century was Britain's greatest artistic century.

It was a time of inspiration, dedication, and daring.

And I think it stands alongside

some of Europe's greatest artistic achievements.

There, for all future generations to admire.

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