The Future Is Now (1907-1939) Great Artists in Their Own Words

In the 20th century something strange happened to art.

Traditions that had held good for centuries

suddenly felt badly out of date.

And a new breed of artists emerged to smash them to pieces.

EXPLOSION

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

Come back over here!

This new breed ripped apart the old categories of art.

They embraced film and photography.

And startling new materials.

When the people ask me, "What does it mean?"

Art is not there to be understand.

And something else had changed.

For the first time television allowed artists

to talk about their work to a mass audience.

What kept you going then?

I can't say, just I kept going, something made me keep on going.

I couldn't stop, I couldn't stop when I was young.

In this series, we'll be digging deep into the BBC archives

to hear the story of 20th century art first hand

from the artists themselves.

Why did you choose to live as artists?

It was not our choice. We are driven to be artists.

In this first episode,

we'll meet the artists who came of age after the First World War.

A generation who tore up the rule book of art

and began a revolution.

Pablo Picasso, who reinvented painting.

Salvador Dali, who stunned the world with surrealist fantasy.

Dali is not crazy at all.

Rene Magritte laid bare dark areas of the psyche.

While Man Ray dreamt up new possibilities for photography.

I never think about art

and I don't think the old masters ever thought they were creating art.

In their wake art would never be the same.

This is how they did it, in their own words.

Paris - 1907.

City of elegance, and capital of taste.

Yet, in a street in a seedy part of town, a young man

was about to subject good taste to a full frontal assault.

Set in a brothel,

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon slashed to shreds polite ideals of painting.

Five prostitutes stare out from a canvas

that deliberately sabotaged hallowed laws of decorum and beauty.

Painted in a fever of creativity, mostly at night,

it was the work of an extraordinary 25-year-old.

Pablo Picasso.

Born in Malaga in southern Spain in 1881,

he was precocious and explosively talented.

But it was with his arrival in Paris as a young man

that Picasso began to redefine art for the 20th century.

Picasso was amazingly prolific.

This person, this kind of animal, that churns out ideas

and feelings, and playfulness, and changes their style,

and has loads of relationships and sits in cafes and talks

about politics, and is constantly dabbling in all this stuff.

He sort of set the standard about what it was

to be a contemporary artist.

Picasso's cubist paintings shattered the laws of perspective.

His portraits reached new levels of intensity.

While more than any other artist of his age,

he revelled in the power of sex.

Picasso understood Spanish painting, he understood Italian painting,

he understood the French tradition

and absorbed it all like this most fantastic kind of sponge

and then spat it all out again in his own absolutely inimitable way.

And then at the same time looked where nobody looked before,

and managed to find, a kind of what we could almost say was,

the equivalent of the fourth dimension.

A born self-publicist with a flair for finding the spotlight,

Picasso nonetheless rarely gave filmed interviews.

On one occasion late in his career, a French film crew

managed to speak to the great man.

Yet instead of his art,

Picasso seemed happier discussing other subjects.

But if Picasso rarely spoke on camera, there was one occasion

when he allowed a unique window onto his creative process.

In 1956, legendary French director Henri-George Clouzot asked Picasso

if he could film him at work.

The artist would paint onto translucent paper

so the camera could see his creativity unfold.

Picasso agreed.

-Attention. Tu es pret?

-Oui.

One of the things about Picasso was that he was quite a showman.

He did like to present himself,

He was very aware of his own image, I am Picasso, the great artist.

And although he became more and more reclusive as he got older,

I mean, he was never quite above, you know, a bit of showmanship.

SPANISH GUITAR MUSIC

Tres bien. C'est fini.

But if Picasso set out to reshape art for the 20th century,

he wasn't doing it alone.

He had a rival.

Far from the Parisian metropolis,

on the sun-drenched south coast of France,

another artist was pursuing his own revolutionary vision.

But he was to prove even more controversial.

Henri Matisse was born in French Flanders in 1869.

The son of a seed merchant, Matisse was introduced to art

when his mother brought him a box of paints while he was ill in hospital.

His early paintings were conventional northern still lifes.

But it was the 25-year-old Matisse's move to the south of France

that truly unlocked his dazzling gifts.

Matisse always said he was painting his emotion.

And what he was painting was something that came

from inside himself, it was an interior kind of painting.

He was not at all interested in reproducing the surface of reality.

He wanted to paint its inner reality.

Matisse's new works were great hymns to harmony and tranquillity.

But back in Paris they were anything but calmly received.

He was rejected by the art schools, he was rejected by all the dealers,

he was certainly rejected by the public.

And people fell into the habit in Paris you would,

for a Sunday outing, it was like going to the circus.

Instead of going to the circus

you'd go to the Salon des Independants

and you'd take your girlfriend, and you'd tell her dress up,

and when you got there and opened the door you could always tell

where the Matisses were because the jeers and the cat calls,

the screams and the howls, and the roaring of laughter

were always loudest in front of the Matisse.

Lacking Picasso's swagger, Matisse felt the abuse keenly

and shrank from public exposure.

But an exception occurred late in his career

when, in 1946, he allowed a documentary film crew

the privilege of watching him at work.

Matisse was asked when he'd been happiest in his career.

Quelle est la periode de votre vie qui a ete pour vous la plus agreable?

It's a good analogy and he used it quite often,

that of a mother and her unfavoured and unfortunate child.

Yes, that can create a very intense bond between mother and child,

but it also causes very great suffering to the mother.

Matisse suffered a lot from this absolute rejection by everybody,

including the people whom he most respected.

The criticisms continued throughout Matisse's career,

and by his 70s, ill health meant he was too frail to stand at an easel.

But neither of these stopped him reinventing himself once again.

By cutting out paper, Matisse made his final voyages into pure colour.

This new way of seeing was a dazzling coda

to the rebellion begun in the very first years of the century.

But there was one young artist

for whom Matisse and Picasso's revolutions hadn't gone far enough.

In April 1917 a vast contemporary art exhibition

opened in New York City.

The show's open admissions policy meant of the 2,500 works submitted,

every piece was accepted and put on display.

Every piece, that is, except one.

The work that got the thumbs down was a porcelain urinal, laid flat

and signed with the mysterious name, R. Mutt.

The title of the piece was Fountain.

And it has become one of the most influential works of art

ever created.

The initial thing to a lot of people is that it is a urinal

so, therefore, it is seen as quite transgressive

and it is literally, you know, taking the piss.

The artist behind the anonymous work was Marcel Duchamp,

a young Frenchman living in the city.

So, he had that sort of initial idea of,

I'm going to take this thing I've just bought from a plumber's merchant

and put it into the art gallery and challenge the art establishment

of the day, to see how liberal and accepting they can really be.

Also he's making reference to the ideas of what is sculptural.

We can see the sculptural not just in things in an art gallery,

but they're in everything.

As well as his Fountain, Duchamp selected other ordinary objects,

signed them, and declared them to be works of art.

He called them the Readymades.

And once this simple gesture had been made,

the genie could never be put back in the bottle.

Suddenly, the material of the world, virtually everything

becomes expressively potential material for artists

and that totally transforms the nature of human expression.

Duchamp stunned his followers in the 1920s

by apparently abandoning art altogether

and turning his attention to chess.

So who was this mysterious man, and what had been his intentions?

In 1968, the BBC arts programme, Late Night Line-Up,

was given the opportunity to find out.

The task fell to their young presenter, Joan Bakewell.

They'd dumped us in what had been the weather forecasting studio

which was enormously tiny, very cramped,

and you can see that he and I are knee to knee

and that this work of art of his, the Bottle Rack,

is standing close up next to him.

Very often every day...

I knew that he had given up art,

so I thought he might be rather reluctant.

I was delighted, in fact, that he was so voluble and talkative.

What you were also attempting to do, as I understand it,

was to devalue the art as an object simply by saying,

"If I say it's a work of art that makes it a work of art".

Yeah, but the word, work of art, you see is not so important for me.

I don't care about the word 'art' because it's been so,

you know, discredited and so forth.

But you in fact contributed to the discrediting, didn't you,

quite deliberately.

Deliberately, yes, so I really want to get rid of it.

Because the way many people today have done away with religion.

'You can't make a statement about art, and remain within art.'

There was a paradox about what he was doing.

He was destroying it, and he was remaining within it

and he knew that, and he knew that I knew, and so did the audience.

His work may have seemed like a paradox,

but to Duchamp it was very simple.

The old art had been swept away,

replaced by his idea that anyone could be an artist.

You said in the '20s, you proclaimed - art is dead.

It isn't, is it?

Yes, but that's what I meant by that, you see.

I meant that it's dead

by the fact that instead of being singularised

in a little box like that, so many artists in so many squares,

it would be universal in anyone's life to be an artist

but not noticed as an artist. You see what I mean, the difference?

-Marcel Duchamp, thank you very much.

-Well, I'm delighted.

The democratic ticket that Duchamp offers us

is that everything in the world that has been made by humans

is interpretable.

And that actually true value comes from the fact

that we do half of the work and we have to continually interpret

those objects that we have made around ourselves

in order to derive that meaning.

That's our job and that's what, in a way, art can give us to do.

That's a beautiful thought.

It's very generous.

I think Duchamp was absolutely essential, you know,

he literally kick-started a certain strand of thinking in art

and kind of hovered there the whole time.

We are all the children of Duchamp in many ways.

Duchamp's Fountain had begun a revolution that would become

known as conceptual art.

But this revolution was put on hold by an event that threatened

to destroy art altogether.

The First World War was tearing Europe apart.

Could artists offer anything in the face of mechanised slaughter?

The answer was to come from the darkest moments

of the conflict itself.

Max Ernst was a soldier in the German artillery.

Born near Cologne in 1891,

he served on both the Western and Eastern Fronts

and was wounded in action.

Ernst had been a promising artist before the war.

But the conflict changed everything.

For Ernst, the art of the past was parlour decoration

for the generation that had marched its children to war.

He was to take things in a startling new direction.

It's easy nowadays

to not understand how original those pictures were,

but when he made them in the early 1920s

they were like nothing anyone had ever seen before.

As a student, Ernst had become deeply influenced

by the work of Sigmund Freud.

When you look at Ernst he is accessing

some kind of collective unconscious.

A kind of primeval world of fear and anxiety

dominated by sexuality and death

by the classic Freudian drives.

He's trying to address the viewer's psyche and summon up darkness

in a very, very immediate way.

Ernst's dramatic explorations of the unconscious

helped lay the foundation for one of the most important

artistic movements of the 20th century.

Surrealism.

But what had driven Ernst to paint the way he did?

In 1961, Ernst was interviewed

on the BBC's flagship arts programme, Monitor.

The British painter Roland Penrose was keen to understand

why Ernst made such apparently irrational art.

Who made world history?

Not the most reasonable people.

-The mad men did.

-Yes, that's very true.

So if a painting is the mirror

of a time,

it must be mad to have the true image of what time is.

When Ernst says that art needs to be mad

you have to bear in mind the kind of period that he was living through

and the kind of crucible of the interwar period in particular,

where you had the rise of the Popular Front

to counter the rise of Fascism.

I think that the early to mid point of the 20th century

is, in a sense, the kind of high watermark of seeming irrationality

and collective insanity on the part of social and political development.

And I think individual artists like Ernst very much felt

they had to respond to that.

So the irrational in art is an absolutely essential ingredient,

-do you think?

-It is essential.

-Yes, that sounds a very dangerous...

-Everything is dangerous.

Because if art is to be mad as politicians are mad...

-No, no, no, we are mad in a very different way.

-Yes, I suppose so.

-Exactly the opposite.

-That is the great difference, isn't it?

-To one madness we oppose another madness.

-Yes.

He didn't look like the average surrealist,

he looked very respectable, and like an academic.

He always wore a tie and a tweed jacket.

And yet beneath that utterly respectable exterior,

you know, a madness dwelled.

I mean he was as mad as any surrealist.

In fact, he said that his work was about exploring

the borderland between sanity and insanity, and he spent a lot of time

in mental asylums for this reason because he was so interested in it.

So that there is something always of a game in it, is there?

There is a very strong game in it, of course.

The one big danger is that you lose your mind.

Madness is always in the background and menaces you.

But that is a risk that is worth taking?

That is a risk worth taking, yes, sure.

What would life be only, a life without any risk?

Ernst's surrealist painting and collage work

had unlocked a new visual world.

In his wake, other artists would push his discoveries

well beyond the confines of traditional art.

With films like Entr'acte, irrationality and dreams

started to flood the newer media of film and photography.

In one scene, Marcel Duchamp can be seen playing chess on a rooftop.

His opponent was an artist who,

more than any other figure in the 20th century,

broke down the boundaries between visual art, photography and film.

Man Ray.

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890,

Man Ray was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants.

As a teenager he found work as an atlas designer

and engraver of umbrella handles.

But his dream was to be an artist,

and failing to find success at home,

in 1921 Man Ray set sail for the capital of the avant garde world.

By the early '20s, Paris was a magnet

drawing in radical artists from across the world.

Interviewed on the BBC in 1972, Man Ray recalled his arrival.

What was Paris like when you arrived?

Oh, for me it was a new world.

I didn't speak a word of French when I came here in '21.

And I felt like a newborn baby after my struggles in America

and rejections from the galleries and collectors.

But from the very first day, Duchamp was already in Paris,

and he took me around, and we met everybody.

Looking back, I always have the feeling that the '20s and the '30s

and the Surrealist movement, it was a great deal of fun.

No, not at the time.

People look back to it and think it was a marvellous period,

romantic and all that sort, but, no, it was very tense.

It was very bitter and there was no humour in it.

But what we did was really to upset things.

Galvanised by his new surroundings,

Man Ray began to work across many artistic forms.

The objects he displayed combined simple items to unsettling effect.

While his dazzling discoveries in exposure and light

transformed the possibilities of photography.

The idea to go back and forth between photography,

sculpture and painting was entirely new in the early 20th century.

Normally, when an artist used photography,

as many artists did, many painters did,

they would use it only from the point of view of studies.

Man Ray didn't to it that way. He decided that photography

would be one of his arts, and he very often would sign

and present photographs as finished works in their own right.

And there was one more area in which Man Ray's

surreal artistic creativity and technical brilliance could combine.

Cinema.

With films like Emak Bakia, Man Ray brought his restless experimentation

and visual brilliance to bear on this still young medium.

His incredible versatility dazzled his contemporaries.

One described him as, "the man with the head of a magic lantern".

Were you ever conscious of creating art?

No. I never think about art.

I don't think the old masters ever thought that they were creating art.

They had to express the spirit of their times.

'I think Man Ray was one of the people who gave us an idea

'that if you see what the orthodoxy is and you say no.'

Duchamp does the same thing.

These are people who are engaged in resistance.

They want to attack art

because of what they see as its unreasonable limitations.

You said once that, fortunately, there is no progress in art.

What did you mean by that?

Well, the only thing I, my answer to that was,

just as there's no progress in the manner of making love.

There are only different ways of doing it.

I cannot do anything better than the old masters did.

My only justification is that I do something different.

When they ask me, "Do you still like the old masters?"

I say, "I think they're wonderful."

But my only justification is that I do something different.

You ask the old masters what they think of my things,

it may be much more interesting to hear their opinion.

Looking back at your life, what would you say satisfied you most?

I think women.

Man Ray's photographs, films and unsettling objects

were part of a wave of extraordinary Parisian creativity.

In a few short years, the avant garde

had revolutionised ideas of what it meant to be an artist.

But how would such ideas go down across the Channel?

In the early 1930s, British tastes in art were deeply conservative.

The public had only just got used to Impressionism.

And the exploits of Duchamp and the Surrealists

might have occurred in a different universe.

But there was one artist who set his own unique course -

in a very British way.

This is a film about a man who became an artist because he missed a train.

This happened many years ago.

He left the station in a Manchester suburb

and started to walk up the Bolton Road, wondering what to do.

As he took in the scene, he was filled with the urge to paint it.

And at that moment, he decided to become an artist.

His name is Lawrence Stephen Lowry.

LS Lowry was born in Manchester in 1887.

Although passionate about drawing as a child,

he bowed to parental pressure and got a job as a rent collector.

But for 15 years, Lowry studied art in evening classes.

And by the 1930s, he had begun to paint

some of the defining images of the British 20th century.

In 1957, the BBC filmed Lowry in Manchester.

I really don't know why I paint these streets. I just paint them.

That's all. As far as I can see.

There's something about them that attracts me. A pictorial sense.

But I do feel that the pictures that I like the best are

pictures done entirely from...

Call it imagination if you like.

Building up scenes from the blank canvas.

I like to do that the best, and I think myself that's more me

than the pictures painted from the drawings.

A reclusive man, Lowry didn't want to speak on camera,

but discussed his work in a sound interview.

People call them matchsticks, matchstick figures,

they may be, I don't mind,

if they like to call them matchstick figures,

well, let them do it, I don't mind at all.

Quite right, they're probably quite right, but it doesn't concern me.

All I do is to paint figures as I see them.

Lowry's paintings of everyday life were popular with the public.

But perhaps for that reason,

many in the art establishment treated him with disdain.

One thing that people often say about Lowry is that he was

a naive painter, he was an amateur painter, he was a Sunday painter.

That is absolutely not the case.

He was trained, he went to art school,

he knew what was going on in the art of his time,

he knew about Surrealism and all these things,

and he did not paint men like matchsticks

because he didn't know how to paint men properly.

He was trying to find his own voice,

and a voice that expressed what he was trying to say about the world.

Like his cityscapes, Lowry's work in other forms -

such as his portraits - received little critical attention.

Also less publicised was the encouragement Lowry gave

to young painters on his visits to art schools.

Lowry was invited to come to the Slade

and I was one of the chosen ones, which was lovely.

I took all my pictures into the room, and he stood there,

with his belly, and he said - I can't do the accent -

"I can't do that. I can't do that. This is very good."

I liked that he liked what I was doing,

it doesn't matter that it isn't modern or whatever.

And he was very helpful to me. The only one, really.

Lowry rarely spoke publicly about his own early years as a painter.

But in a recently rediscovered BBC interview, originally shown in 1967,

he explained what it was that first drove him to paint.

I started off with the intention -

I went to the industrial scene in Manchester and area

from a residential side

and I got very obsessed by it.

And I felt that I'd like... I found that nobody had done it before,

that was important, so I'd try and put it on the map

as a real subject matter, a real subject matter.

And I think I did that by about 1948 or '51

and I was going to get out and stop.

But I kept on, unfortunately.

What kept you going then?

I can't say. Just, I kept going, something made me keep on going,

I couldn't stop, I couldn't stop when I was young.

Eventually, Lowry found some acceptance

by the arts establishment.

Yet in life and art, he always remained a solitary figure.

Well, I spent the whole of my life wondering what it all means.

I can't understand it, don't understand it at all.

I don't see any point in it myself.

Still, there it is, you still keep on working,

and you still keep on wondering what it all means,

and it goes on and on and on, and there you are.

Lowry's paintings revealed a man trying to carve out

a style on his own defiantly original terms.

Back in the London of the '30s,

another painter was about to make an equally original debut.

But this particular avant garde artist came from unlikely origins.

The London season is getting under way,

a fact that's important to the debutantes if not to you.

So here's the exclusive picture

of the exclusive Debutantes' Ball at Grosvenor House.

She was a debutante. Recently presented at court to King George V.

Leonora Carrington was the daughter of wealthy textile manufacturers,

destined for a life of gilded confinement.

But something else caught her eye.

With the opening of a major exhibition in 1936

the strange visual world of Surrealism

finally arrived in Britain.

The world of dreams is a strange world,

which most of us visit only in our sleep.

The whole aim of Surrealism is to explore this world,

and to bring it into relation with our daily life.

The 19-year-old Carrington was one of the thousands

who flocked to the show.

Inspired by the movement,

she began producing her own Surrealist paintings.

It's said that Leonora Carrington didn't paint her pictures -

she brewed them up in a cauldron at midnight.

And there is something of the dark arts about those paintings.

It's almost like stepping onto the stage set

of an Alice in Wonderland adaptation.

In 1992, the BBC's Omnibus travelled to Mexico, where Carrington

had been living in self-imposed exile for almost five decades.

They wanted me to conform to the life of horses and hunt balls

and being well considered by the local gentry,

I suppose, that sort of thing.

And were you supposed to go out into society?

Yes, well, we... Don't you have debutantes in England still?

What a marvellous thing, I didn't know. They scrapped it, did they?

But if the Surrealists of the 1930s

had provided Carrington with inspiration,

there was one among them who changed her life.

At this time Max Ernst was the sage of Surrealism.

Carrington became intoxicated with his art,

and met Ernst at a dinner party in 1937.

She fell instantly in love with him, he fell instantly in love with her.

And a few days later she went to see her father

and said, "I want to go to Paris and live with Max Ernst."

Her father said, "If you do I'll disown you."

So she did, and he disowned her,

and they never spoke again for the rest of their lives.

And in 1937 she went to Paris with Max Ernst.

When I was with the Surrealists I didn't have to fit into anything.

I was in love,

I was with someone who was also an extremely interesting person.

Ernst was equally smitten.

His Robing of the Bride

is believed to have been inspired by his new lover.

But was the former debutante being cast as yet another male stereotype?

There was a very strong feeling that people like Carrington

were kind of these creatures who inspired desire.

They were just there to serve men's greater faculties

and powers of imagination.

She was the incarnation of so much of their, now to us,

rather perverted ideas of women, and women's place, women's inspiration,

the idea that the child woman, the "femme-enfant",

was a door through which men like Max Ernst could enter

these realms of gold

where there would be all this rich erotic symbolism.

But despite the alpha male circles in which she moved,

Carrington wasn't intimidated.

There's a story that she had people to stay the night,

and when they were asleep she snuck into their room, cut off their hair,

and then fed it to them in the form of an omelette the next morning.

So she really entered into the spirit of Surrealism in the 1930s,

and she was as strong a character as any of them.

Shortly after painting this portrait of Ernst,

Carrington's relationship with her lover was ended

by their separation during the Second World War.

Surviving a breakdown,

Carrington went on to produce a series of extraordinary paintings,

fuelled by her two years with the Surrealists.

She was a national treasure in Mexico.

She was a superstar in the United States.

Her pictures fetched fortunes.

And yet here in Britain, in the country of her birth,

she's been curiously neglected.

And that is terrible

because Carrington was one of the great Surrealists,

and one of the great female artists of the century, without a doubt.

In the Omnibus documentary,

Carrington was asked what she'd learned from her life.

I don't feel that I know anything.

Be probably nice if I could sit back and say, "I know now."

But I don't.

I'm an old woman,

human species,

sitting in Mexico.

Anything else?

No, I can't think offhand

of anything that I could really say was true.

And I think that's true, I'm a female, old, sitting in Mexico.

Do you think that's a good story?

It gives one a lot to speculate on.

Carrington's time in the Paris of the '30s

set the course for her life.

Another artist new to the city

was also taking Surrealism into uncharted waters.

He came not from the frenetic atmosphere of avant garde France,

but the altogether calmer world of provincial Belgium.

Rene Magritte was born in the town of Lessines in 1898.

The son of a merchant and a hat maker,

he was given a conventional bourgeois upbringing

and went to art school in Brussels at the age of 17.

Supporting himself with a job designing wallpaper,

the young Magritte began to develop the visual style

that would make him one of the most puzzling -

and most famous - painters of the 20th century.

Magritte's painting is essentially a game of mysteries.

He recognises what we're going to anticipate

when we see a particular scene

and then he gives us something shockingly different.

There's an interesting poetry of ideas that goes on in Magritte

that I like a lot.

They're incredibly simple ideas that somehow touch

what it is like just to wake from a dream.

Very familiar but just slightly wrong.

Magritte spent much of his later life

living in a quiet Brussels suburb.

In 1965 the BBC's Monitor

paid a visit on Magritte and his wife at their comfortable home.

But true to his enigmatic nature, the artist didn't speak on camera.

And yet, was this bowler-hatted bourgeois the real Rene Magritte?

Magritte put on a bit of an act.

He wore a trilby hat,

but if he saw a photographer he put on a bowler hat.

He would then walk down the street in his bowler hat.

He played the game of being ultra orthodox in his dress

and the way he lived.

But inside his brain he was seething

with rebellious, irrational thoughts.

Although he never spoke to the BBC, in 1965 the master of mystery

granted a rare interview to Belgian television.

But if Magritte's work was unknowable,

one of the dark sources of that work was revealed by the artist himself.

When he was 13 his mother, who was mad,

had been trying to kill herself on a regular basis.

She even jumped into the water tank in the attic

to try and drown herself, and it didn't work,

so Magritte's father had locked her in her bedroom

but she escaped one night, jumped in the river,

and according to Magritte, she took off her night dress,

wrapped it round her face and jumped into the river.

It's now believed that this idea

that the boy saw his mother's veiled face

when she was drowned is a fantasy,

that in fact the body wasn't discovered for 17 days,

by which time her face would probably have rotted away.

It's more likely that the boy was told

that his mother had lost her face

without knowing any details,

but it would have been sufficient, no doubt, to have preyed on him

and to have left him with a haunted mind.

Like his paintings, Magritte remained impenetrable.

But this most enigmatic of artists

was about to be usurped by a new arrival on the Surrealist scene.

And he was no shrinking violet.

EXPLOSION

From an early age, Salvador Dali had set his sights on global fame.

Born in Figueres, Spain, in 1904,

by his 20s, Dali was producing

some of the most intriguing surreal paintings of all.

His pin-sharp dreamscapes rapidly gripped the popular imagination.

Their contorted forms conjured up

by an exceptionally strange creative mind.

In Paris, Dali befriended Surrealists like Ernst and Man Ray

and quickly became the poster boy of the movement.

But where Magritte had shied away from television interviews,

for Dali, they were a chance to promote his favourite creation -

himself.

In 1955, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge

interviewed the painter for the BBC's Panorama.

The first question I want to put you,

it really ought to be about modern art but I can't help it,

there's some delicious frivolity in you which makes me ask it,

is, how did you manage to produce those marvellous moustaches?

In the last moment of dinner, not clean my fingers,

and put a little on my moustache,

and remain for all afternoon very efficient...efficient...

..efficiently.

Mm.

Do you have any trouble with it at night, do you have to peg it

or anything like that, or does it stand up at night?

No, in the night, clean every night, and becoming soft, sleep.

So at night it droops down?

Completely, completely.

And then in the morning up she goes again?

Three minutes. Only in three minutes, fix my moustache.

And then you feel you can face the world

with that wonderful moustache standing up?

Yes, because every day, becoming much more practical for my inspiration.

The global face of Surrealism

courted the attention of celebrities.

Dali was a great talent, there's no doubt about it,

but ultimately, he was interested in fame and in fortune

and he sold out.

And, you know, his friends knew it, the Surrealists knew it,

he knew that he'd sold out.

But Dali didn't care.

First it dissolves.

Happy bubbles, but devoted bubbles.

Then the Alka-Seltzer shoots into the stomach.

Here it neutralizes that bad excess acid.

Meantime this special aspirin is speeding into your bloodstream

to all places of pain,

so those beautiful places will feel beautiful again.

Alka-Seltzer is a work of art.

Truly one of a kind.

Like Dali!

Dali himself made no bones about his motivation,

as he revealed later in his career in a BBC Arena documentary.

Salvador Dali, myself, is very rich

and Dali love tremendously money and gold.

And Dali sleep the best

after one day of work

receive one tremendous quantity of cheques.

But did Dali's slavish pursuit of celebrity and wealth

finally damage his art?

Opinions are still divided.

Dali didn't waste the talent he had, he corrupted it.

What went wrong with Dali was not that his hands

couldn't do it any more. They always could.

What went wrong with Dali was that his mind turned into the Dali mind.

A beautiful, crisp apple has gone very, very rotten.

I think Dali was much more important than most people realise.

It's his own fault, he acted the buffoon

and people remember that too much.

But the fact is that Salvador Dali

is one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

And if people belittle him

because of his weaknesses and his follies, it's a great mistake.

Because Dali alone, in front of a canvas,

could weave magic.

But the magic of modern art had found some powerful enemies.

The Nazis put so-called 'degenerate' modern artists

on their wanted lists.

And with the start of the Second World War,

many were forced to flee for their lives.

The first great wave of modern art was over.

Yet the previous three decades had seen a total transformation

in the possibilities of what art could be.

There is an explosion of possibility and of diversity in art.

The art today is a consequence of all those things

that happened during that time.

This was a ripping apart of art, this was a complete restart.

Picasso comes along and he questions

the fundamentals of the image.

Duchamp comes along and he questions what an art object is.

The Surrealists come along and they start exploring

the inner mind of the human being.

I mean, no-one's been down there before, you know,

it's dark, it's horrible, it's spooky.

So the whole of this early period was spent going places

people hadn't been before in art.

You can't look at this great art being made at that time

and not sense the excitement of the change and the difference of it,

all the avenues that were being opened up for the future.

And as the artists dispersed,

many travelled to the city that was to take over from Paris,

and where the next chapter in the history of art would be written.

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