Out of the Darkness (1939-1966) 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badly out of date.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 overturn them,

erasing the map of art and redrawing it for a new age.

All right, standby, then, please.

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.

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.

She's about to do something to this girl.

I think she's only just tickling her at the moment.

I don't think it's anything too serious, but something horrible is going to happen.

In this episode, we'll meet the British artists

whose imaginations were shaped by the horrors of the Second World War.

A man of today, who has seen

all that thing of the past, cannot go back.

He has to really work on himself

to be able to make these images of immediacy.

While in America, others found new and dramatic ways

to express themselves on canvas.

On the floor, I'm more at ease.

I feel nearer, more part of the painting.

Since this way, I can walk around it and, literally, be IN the painting.

In the brave new world of post-war affluence,

artists found inspiration in new places -

in the household gods of the consumer society

or in the garish imagery of popular culture...

..and the hedonistic freedom of the sexual revolution.

Marvellous shadow.

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

It's so glamorous! Oh!

It's 1939.

The shadow of war has fallen across Europe.

The people of Britain are about to find their world changed utterly.

The war would touch every corner of society.

And for British artists, its images of destruction and brutality

would provide compelling inspiration.

One of them was Henry Moore, the son of a Yorkshire coalminer,

who would become the most important

British sculptor of the 20th century.

Henry put sculpture on the map.

A sculptor was nothing.

It was... It was an unimportant thing.

Nobody knew about it. You didn't know what a sculptor was.

It happened because of him.

Entirely because of him.

Henry Moore had established himself

as an avant-garde sculptor in the 1930s.

SIREN WAILS

But the horror of war changed the focus of his art.

One night, during an air raid,

Moore was trapped in the London Underground.

He was so moved by what he saw,

he later began drawing the extraordinary scenes

of people huddled together on the platform.

Volunteering to become a war artist,

he returned, over the course of a year, producing 300 sketches.

These would become known as The Shelter Drawings.

The experience had a lasting impact on Moore.

At the age of 80, he spoke about it to the BBC

for the first time on film since the war.

If there was something that attracted...

or that I thought was interesting,

I'd have to make a surreptitious note in a little notebook I had.

And then the next day, when the scene was fresh in one's mind,

I had a notebook, which is this, and I began drawing.

What I was trying to show

was my reaction to this dramatic suspense.

It's the situation that you get

of a tension between people

and something about an impending, um...disaster,

impending doom.

There's a drama in silence, more than in shouting.

The Shelter Drawings are a turning point for Moore.

Before them, he's a very successful sculptor

but a sculptor showing in small commercial galleries.

The Shelter Drawings transform his reputation,

so that he comes out of the war

as maybe the best-known artist in Britain.

You can see in the drawings, the beginnings of the themes

that come to dominate his work in the years after the war.

The mother and child and the family group.

Moore produced his first group sculpture

two years after the war, called Three Standing Figures.

He said it reflected the same sense of community

as The Shelter Drawings.

The figures huddled together, as though scanning the horizon.

In his studio at his Hertfordshire home,

Moore pursued his obsession with the human form,

creating huge distorted figures in stone and bronze.

It was astonishing. It was different.

And how dare one do those things to the human figure, really?

But it was an eye-opener and I wasn't questioning it.

I was very much, you know, very much overwhelmed by it.

And my own work started getting influenced by him.

By the 1970s, Moore had become a global phenomenon.

He was interviewed by the BBC at an exhibition in Florence.

The human form for me is inevitable.

And if people think they can go through life

without being worried about, the human figure and the human form,

I think it's like somebody trying to go through life,

like a painter, probably, trying to go through life

looking only at blue. Never knowing any other colour.

We must know form. We must know the human figure.

In a successful and prolific career spanning over 50 years,

Moore produced over 6,000 sculptures.

His huge, oddly-vulnerable figures

dominated the forecourts of prestigious corporate buildings.

The extraordinary achievement of Moore

was that he was really the first,

the first British international artist.

In an extraordinary way.

And he believed that modernist tenet

that you could make art that talked to people universally,

irrespective of creed, language, and race

and maybe invite them to look at the world in a new way.

In his last interview, at the age of 85,

Moore spoke to broadcaster Bernard Levin about his life's achievement.

You now have the most immense renown.

Do you enjoy that?

Well, I'm pleased, in a way,

but if...if it hadn't have happened, I'd have gone on just the same.

Of course one's pleased.

It's like if somebody gives you a chocolate.

You want to contribute something.

I was struck by one thing I read of a remark you had made

when you said that when you are working on a maquette,

just a tiny thing you're holding

in the palm of your hand as you work it,

you... It's like, you said, "It's like God inventing a new animal."

Yes.

As a creator, a creative artist,

you are God for the moment, aren't you?

In that sense, yes.

One is a, yeah...is a creator.

And on the seventh day, you rested from your labour?

-Well...

-Hardly.

No, I like working.

While Henry Moore was drawing sleeping figures

sheltering in the London Underground,

the Second World War was having a profound impact

on another British artist.

The Irish-born Francis Bacon had come to London to become an artist,

but repeated rejection had led him to abandon painting.

He was 30 years old when war broke out.

As an asthmatic, he was unable to fight

and volunteered as a rescue worker,

pulling bodies from the bombed wreckage in London.

Seeing the victims of war haunted Bacon

and he felt compelled to paint again.

In 1944, he produced

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.

Bacon's strange beast-like figures

conjured up images of the violence of the war,

images that were still part of many people's everyday life.

When it was first seen, it was a sensation.

One critic said that there was painting before Three Studies

and there was painting after Three Studies, and you can never confuse the two.

And that is true, because no-one had ever seen a painting

quite like this before.

It's a brutal painting. I mean, it's a vicious, uncompromising painting.

It sends shivers up your spine, it's so awful in some ways.

Overnight, Francis Bacon became the most controversial painter in Britain.

How can you get high, civilised society

and this incredible brutality,

of exterminating people in a gas chamber?

How do those two things co-exist?

What is our human potential?

And, instead of saying,

"Well, I can't look at that. I'm going to have to go and paint fruit"

Bacon looked harshly at what it is that we are, as human beings.

In the aftermath of the war, Bacon produced another work,

which was no less unsettling.

A figure dressed in a dark business suit,

his expression one of menace and violence,

overshadowed by a bloody carcass, hanging above him, like a crucifix.

Years later, in a BBC interview in his studio, Bacon claimed

his dark visions were just a natural response to what he had seen.

A man of today, who has seen all that thing of the past,

cannot go back, so he has to go through...

back to...to what is called an immediacy of...of art

in a totally different way. He has to work on himself,

to go back and to be able to make these images of immediacy.

I call them... I know I drift in my conversation

between the expression "violence" and "immediacy".

I think immediacy is a better one than violence,

because violence has all sorts of implications,

which immediacy doesn't give,

because immediacy is just about the immediate object

there before you.

The violent imagery of Bacon's wartime paintings

ran like a dark thread through his work for the next 40 years.

The remarkable thing about Francis Bacon is that he was

so uncompromising in the way he addressed

what he saw as the fundamental issues of life.

Life is just this transient moment

and that's why I think he thinks of capturing a moment in time,

because that's all there is.

That's how we make sense, I think, of both the darkness that informs

everything he does, and the kind of gregarious joie de vivre

that informs everything he does outside the studio.

You know, you live for today, because tomorrow you're dead,

and it's that message, really, that runs through all of his art.

There, it is opening at last, yes.

Am I going to be the only one drinking?

I think you're actually as difficult to please over wine

as you are over painting.

Let's, erm, let's drink to that, then!

At the age of 75, in a film made for the BBC's Arena programme,

Bacon showed the art critic David Sylvester

around his famously-chaotic studio.

With him was Bacon's lover, John Edwards.

..the dust collects!

It's reasonably tidy at the moment, Francis, isn't it, really?

Well it is tidy compared to what it sometimes is.

John and I really try to throw out things and tidy them a bit,

because it became like you could hardly walk into the place, you know?

It was like having a great dog in here that kept you out.

There was so much of it in here!

I really would be very sad if I had to leave this place.

I feel at home here in this chaos.

Also, chaos suggests images to me.

Not necessarily, just that I love living in chaos.

Because after all, what is art about? It's trying to make something

out of the chaos of existence.

The war had other profound effects on the history of modern art.

It forced artists fleeing the war in Europe across the Atlantic.

New York became a magnet for exiled painters and sculptors.

Young American artists

were now able to see works by painters

like the Russian artist, Chagall...

..and the surrealist, Max Ernst,

at first hand.

Among them was a reclusive country boy, from the plains

of the mid-West, Jackson Pollock,

who had moved to New York at the age of 18 to become an artist.

But Pollock was among a handful of painters who, although inspired by

the foreign masters, wanted to break away from the European tradition.

There was a sense that, if art was going to be in made in New York,

it was going to be made anew, which was a perfect setting

for a sort of modernist... eruption, almost, in painting.

Pollock began to experiment.

His work became more abstract,

his paintings more expressive.

But it was in 1943 that he produced his most startling work,

a vast canvas called Mural.

It was unlike any style of painting ever seen before in America.

A mass of wild brushstrokes,

which seemed to take on no recognisable form.

On seeing Mural, the renowned American critic Clement Greenberg

hailed Pollock as "the greatest painter this country has produced".

Despite Greenberg's praise,

Pollock was still unknown outside the small American art clique.

It was when Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner moved to Long Island,

outside New York, that he was able to fully develop his unique style.

This documentary, which Pollock narrated,

is one of the few surviving records of the artist on film.

I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting.

I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall

or the floor.

On the floor I'm more at ease.

I feel nearer, more a part of the painting,

since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides,

and, literally, be IN the painting.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools,

such as easel, palettes, brushes.

I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint.

Pollock had a tremendous amount of excess energy.

When you think of Jackson... His eyes were like burning vortexes

and the energy in this man - you know, he was wired!

So think of him tuning in to the wiring system of the universe,

which is...we are all connected now

and think of his work that way.

When Pollock exhibited these new

so-called "drip paintings"

for the first time,

the art world, or at least some of it, was transfixed.

In a rare surviving interview,

Pollock spoke about the inspiration behind his new style.

INTERVIEWER: Mr Pollock, there's been a great deal of controversy and

a great many comments have been made regarding your method of painting.

Is there something you'd like to tell us about that?

POLLOCK: My opinion is that new needs need new techniques.

It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age -

the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio -

in the old forms of the Renaissance, or of any other past culture.

I suppose every time you're approached by a layman,

they ask you how they should look at a Pollock painting,

or any other modern painting?

I think they should not look for, but look passively,

and try to receive what the painting has to offer, and not bring a

subject matter or pre-conceived idea of what they're to be looking for.

It's an astonishing experience to stand in front of a great Pollock.

It's like being able to capture the Milky Way

and the capillary in somebody's eye, at the same moment.

And I find that thrilling, to be confronted with a Pollock

that does that, that has this incredible space through it.

And you're an active participant in the painting,

because your eyes are, literally, making the painting

as you're looking at it and you follow those balletic movements.

Pollock was at the forefront of a revolutionary group of artists,

known as the abstract expressionists.

Inspired by the surrealist principle of painting by free association,

these artists wanted to produce expressionistic

and spontaneous reactions to the world around them.

But with this new-found success came an increased demand

for his work, which Pollock struggled to cope with.

He became ever more reclusive.

At the age of 44, he died in a car accident,

after a heavy bout of drinking.

America in the 1950s was turning into a land of plenty.

Wartime austerity was now a thing of the past.

People were eager to spend and advertisers ready to help.

Televisions, cars, washing machines, toasters...

everyone wanted a piece of the new, modern lifestyle.

But the first person to spot the artistic potential of this

consumer revolution was not American, but British.

In 1956, this picture began a new chapter

in the story of 20th century art.

Its catchy title...

..hinted at a new humour and irony in art.

The artist was Richard Hamilton,

the 34-year-old son of a lorry driver, from South London.

Hamilton wasn't just important for British art,

Hamilton was important for art, full stop.

I mean, this is one of the giants of 20th century art,

who for some reason, has been strangely underestimated,

but if you think that, erm,

the discovery of the modern world as a suitable subject for art,

if you think that what pop art went on to do, which was essentially

say, "Hey, these are interesting things that are happening in the modern world, the commercial world,"

if you think that's an important discovery

- and I do, because it gave art a future - then Hamilton's your man.

Richard Hamilton had received a classical training in art at the

Royal Academy and the Slade, before working as a designer in London.

He became fascinated by the way the invasion of consumer goods

was transforming 1950s Britain.

This absolute tidal wave of exciting cultural things,

was a really exciting moment, it was a really overwhelming moment.

They hadn't really experienced anything like it before.

And it was a revelation,

and opened up everyone's eyes to this new world of possibilities.

Hamilton's collage is an ironic altarpiece to consumer culture,

a hymn to an achingly desirable modern lifestyle.

The vacuum cleaner with the extra-long cord

to reach that little bit further.

A comic book page framed like a work of art.

A supersize, branded tin of ham.

At the heart of the picture stands a body-builder,

holding an oversized lollipop labelled with the word "pop".

This image would thrust Hamilton to the forefront of a movement,

which became known as "pop art".

In 1969, Hamilton was interviewed at his home by Joan Bakewell

for the BBC's Late Night Line-Up.

Richard Hamilton, in 1957, you were doing work which was later

to earn you the title of "father of English pop art".

How do you feel about that now?

At the time, I was just doing something necessary,

in my own terms.

I was trying to make an art which was figurative, in the midst of

a lot of painting that was abstract. Hard-edge, abstract expressionism.

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

Suddenly, there seemed a need to be concerned with the mass media,

intellectually, but then to wipe it away from one's interest

in a studio, seemed very odd.

It was a question of making some adjustments

of these two separate fields of activity.

Well, he was tall and gangly, with his hair all over the place,

and he was very, very relaxed. He was very easy to be with.

He lived in a modern home, which was all full of rather eccentric things.

I remember there were helium balloons on the ceiling,

as I recall, and there was a work by Dieter Roth which he explained to me

was made of porridge and polythene, which I found rather bewildering.

At what point did you begin

to use these mass media - Hollywood movies, photographs,

advertising - in your painting?

I wrote myself a programme in 1957,

saying that these are the things that we were concerned with,

almost making a list, making a table of concerns.

And then I said, "If I were going to make a work of art

"which satisfied these requirements, and among them were such items,

"it could be witty, it could be glamorous..."

Young, transient, sexy, gimmicky, mass-produced, big business,

and low cost, as well.

I mean that's, I think, all part and parcel

of what Richard Hamilton felt pop art should be.

The interesting thing about British pop art was that it came

with a satiric edge to it at the same time, so it was...

But it wasn't satirising, so much, America

as satirising its own willingness to go belly-up to America.

So it was saying, here are these American cultural forms,

which we adore - and why not, because they are fantastic? -

but you know, look at us, our willingness to abandon

our own indigenous cultural forms, in such a shameless and craven way.

Through the '60s, Hamilton became the chronicler

of Swinging London, with an unerring eye for the iconic event.

Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, and Mayfair art gallery director Robert Fraser

were handcuffed yesterday during journeys between Lewes Prison and the Chichester court.

The newspaper cutting was shown to me by my girlfriend

and I was very impressed by it, as a photograph.

It seemed to be a very powerful image, altogether.

On analysis, the photograph started to show all sorts of interest.

It occurred to me that it was a flash photograph, for example,

something that I hadn't used before. And when I began to draw from it,

I realised that I had to make very heavy shadows.

The gesture of a hand over the face -

Mick Jagger is holding his hand over his face and there's a heavy-cast shadow underneath -

seems like a gesture against the glare.

Not only the glare of a flash, but the glare of publicity.

In fact, Mick Jagger is making this gesture simply to demonstrate

the handcuffs to the press, but he's doing it in a very theatrical way.

Inspired by Hamilton and the excitement of the new pop culture,

British art found a new confidence and energy.

In 1961, a buzz gathered around the Young Contemporaries exhibition

in London - a show dedicated to new work by British art students.

Answer - the Young Contemporaries exhibition at a London Gallery.

This exhibit is called Little Prince.

Beyond telling you that, no comment.

Next, 'Abstract Motive', a good title for a real puzzle in alabaster.

One of the artists grabbing attention in the exhibition

was Peter Blake.

The son of an electrician, Blake had made his living as a teacher

since leaving the Royal College of Art.

But it was a remarkable self-portrait

that really thrust him into the public eye.

Blake's painting took the traditional model of

the grand self-portrait, recasting it for a new, more democratic age.

A year later, the 29-year-old Blake appeared in a film,

directed by a young Ken Russell, called Pop Goes The Easel,

for the BBC arts series Monitor.

Good evening.

Our programme tonight consists of one single film

that we made about four young artists.

They're four painters, who turned for their subject matter to the world of pop art -

the world of popular imagination, the world of film stars,

The Twist, science fiction, pop singers - a world which you can dismiss,

if you feel so inclined, as being tawdry and second-rate,

but a world, all the same, in which everybody, to some degree, anyway, lives,

whether we like it or not.

In the film, Blake is shown indulging his love

of the worlds of the circus and music hall,

and the glamour of Hollywood.

This is a Kim Novak wall.

I've done other walls -

the Everley Brothers, Superman, Shirley Temple, Laverne Baker.

They're usually entertainers.

HE HUMS

This is the Love Wall. It's like a love shop, really.

All the postcards are in the windows.

When I did this picture, people said,

"Why did you stick the things on?

"Why don't you paint them?"

And when I do paint them, they say

"Why did you bother to paint them? Why didn't you just stick them on?"

You just can't win.

The arrival of pop art coincided with the rise of a new mass medium

still discovering its creative possibilities - television.

Pop Goes The Easel is the defining arts documentary of the 1960s,

the defining film about pop art.

It's a free-wheeling,

open, fluid, exciting, youthful,

glorious world.

You actually see them at work, but you don't hear them talk

in any kind of rigorous or thoughtful or deep way about their work.

It's a film of surfaces.

A film that is completely appropriate for its subject matter.

This picture, it's an oil painting.

It's called On The Balcony

and there are about 27 different versions of On The Balcony in it.

Blake's picture was a playful take

on Manet's painting from 1868.

Fine art in cheerful co-existence

with popular culture.

Blake filled his work with the imagery

of an exuberant consumer age,

channelling the energy of magazines,

advertising,

movies and, of course, pop music.

In 1967 came his most celebrated

fusion of art

and popular culture yet.

# Sergeant Pepper's lonely, Sergeant Pepper's lonely... #

Blake's now-legendary design for the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album

was a gloriously cheeky mash-up of heroes and villains,

Hollywood stars and musical idols,

that was also a uniquely-British bit of pop art.

In 1977, Blake talked about the album's conception,

while being filmed by the BBC,

painting a portrait of his friend, the model Twiggy.

Simply, the idea was that they were a band

and they'd just done a concert in the park,

and they've finished the concert, they've come to have a photo taken

and this is the crowd looking at them.

Then, I thought, "Well, if we did it by making life-size cut-outs,

"we could have anybody in the world.

"It could be a magic crowd of anybody."

I can see Brando, Monroe, Dylan.

-I mean the whole thing has always been breathed in mystery...

-I know!

..this album, mainly contrived, I mean we didn't do it.

It just...I mean, when there were rumours that Paul was dead

and this was a stand-in, one of the rumours was that because this hand

was above his head, this was the sign that he'd died.

In fact, it's Izzy Bon waving to his fans, you know.

What Peter Blake did was make modern art accessible.

He broke down the barriers between high culture

and popular culture, between fine art and folk art,

and he brought them together into this wonderful combination

that was rich and intelligent and elusive and, above all, fun.

I mean, that's the great thing about Peter Blake's work -

it's nearly always fun.

The fun wasn't over. At least, not yet.

The protests and the violence of the late '60s were still far away.

For now, many artists were feeling liberated

by a sense of possibility, creative energy, sexual freedom.

London remained the centre of this creative explosion.

And to London's Royal College of Art

came a precocious young student from Yorkshire - David Hockney.

17 years later,

David Hockney looked back on his early experience at the college.

When I first came to London,

I thought it was wonderful.

I mean, after Bradford, of course, it was wonderful.

I assumed all the students would be really good

and much better than I was,

and the more they looked like artists, the better I thought...

You know, the bigger the beard,

I thought they must be really fantastic artists.

But you realise it's not true,

after a while,

because you look around. I'd look around and think,

"Well, maybe they didn't know any more than I know."

Hockney's remarkable talent was spotted early on

and he was selling his first paintings before graduating from the college in 1962.

Unlike other British artists, Hockney wasn't satisfied

with observing American culture from afar.

He wanted to immerse himself in it.

Attracted to the vibrant gay community of Los Angeles,

he moved there at the age of 26.

In a BBC profile from 1981,

Hockney spoke about his first memories of being in California.

Within one week of coming here, I'd never driven before,

I'd got a driving licence, bought a car, got a studio.

I thought, "This is the place".

And I thought, "This is so sexy, all these incredible boys."

Everybody wore little white socks, then.

It's got all the energy of the United States

with the Mediterranean thrown in,

which I think is a wonderful combination.

It even looks a bit like Italy.

Hockney was mesmerised by the outdoor lifestyle

and affluence of his new home.

In a burst of creative energy, Hockney produced painting

after painting inspired by life in California.

Their brilliant colours and simple symmetrical composition

established Hockney as a major 20th century artist.

Marvellous shadow.

Perhaps the most celebrated was his 1967 painting, A Bigger Splash.

What I quite liked about doing it was the perversity of painting

something that lasts for one second,

but it took me seven days' work to paint the splash itself.

If you look carefully, it's painted in single lines with a small brush.

At the age of 43, Hockney reflected on what kept him painting.

I mean, I assume I get better, you get better,

but I've never really found it easy.

But you don't want to find it easy, either.

I mean often, of course, you deliberately make things,

you've to make things difficult for yourself.

Certain things I could do easy, but then you don't want to do them.

I mean, I don't want to...

Em, you know, I could paint ten pictures of swimming pools

make it look rather nice or something.

But I don't want to do that. It would bore me, which I don't want to do.

I don't mind boring you, but I don't want to bore myself.

While Hockney drew on the glamour and sunlight of Californian life,

another artist was looking to the urban detritus of New York

for his art, and preparing to take modern art in a whole new direction.

Robert Rauschenberg had grown up in Texas of part Cherokee parents,

and had gone to art school in New York,

when abstract expressionism was all the rage.

But he wanted to break away and find his own style

and as a struggling artist, turned to the streets for inspiration.

Interviewed at the age of 55, Rauschenberg recalled the times when he used to hunt for junk.

Actually I had a, kind of, a house rule.

If I walked completely around the block, and I didn't find enough to work with,

I could pick one other block, in any direction, to walk around,

but that was it. Whatever I did had to look at least as interesting

as anything that was going on outside.

I tended to work in things that were either self abstract,

that no-one knew

what this object was,

or it had been so mangled

that you couldn't recognise it

any more, or something so obvious that you didn't think about it.

Rauschenberg would take all sorts of discarded items back to his studio -

clothing, traffic cones, furniture,

even stuffed animals, and integrate them into his art.

He called these works "combines".

One of the first was Bed, from 1955.

An old quilt and a pillow, is pinned to a frame,

then, violently smothered with paint.

Most critics were appalled.

Time Magazine said it seemed to show the "vestiges of an axe murder".

But others saw exciting new possibilities

being opened up for art.

I think to get a sense of the impact Bed must have had,

you have to consider it in relation to what had come immediately before,

with the New York School of Painters, the abstract expressionists,

led by Jackson Pollock.

For them, painting was a very serious enterprise.

And, all of a sudden,

here pops up this very charming young southern artist,

who's presenting a duvet in a gallery, eventually,

covered with splashy paintwork. "There's the pillow."

It must have seemed completely anarchic.

This Bed one,

I think that I'd like to, if you're agreeable,

I'd quite like it to go in its own space on that wall down there,

-the tall, narrow one. Do you think that's a good idea?

-Sure.

In 1964, the BBC's Monitor programme filmed Rauschenberg

during preparations for an exhibition of his work in London.

He described how that anarchy, that sense of the unexpected,

was at the core of his art.

I wouldn't be interested in any preconception.

I'm not interested in doing what I know I can do

or what I think I can do.

I want to be both a spectator and the painter.

It's a matter of greed. Um...

You like to be surprised?

Yes, I have to, otherwise, it doesn't...work.

When you're working on a painting,

you have to leave room to take advantage of what is happening.

Otherwise, it's just a series of dry manipulations.

And it's very exciting to put paint on and watch it run.

I mean, the possibilities in any material are so enormous

and it's that constant investigation of what it can do

that does make it exciting.

Rauschenberg followed Bed

with a bold, often enigmatic, series of combines,

working, as he put it,

"in the gap between art and life".

In the 60s, he started adding screen printed images to his collages,

photographs, press clippings,

scraps from an increasingly image-saturated culture.

30 years later, he was visited by the art critic Robert Hughes

for the BBC.

Wandering around strange places,

looking in every corner...

I don't know, keeps you refreshed.

Yeah, I guess it must.

Because you can bring back all sorts of solidified memories

from the places you go to

and then, they surprise you when they come out of the...

Well, it's all very different. Once, it gets to be a photograph

and then, it gets blown up and then, it's a silkscreen.

And then, colour follows.

And then, there's a juxtaposition of imagery

that is, hopefully, non-logical.

Were you really stressing the idea of a work of art

being a puzzle with a solution that the viewer has to work towards?

I just collected a bunch of old posters or signs

and tried to make them as diverse as possible

and the colours supposedly was the key about how they were to be read.

But the whole thing was a fantasy, somewhat.

So you do establish these kinds of...?

You do. Those are your experiences.

No, no, you're drawing the pictures, doctor.

Yes, but you're the one who has all the references,

because of your experience.

And so, you're happy to let people make them up as they go along.

I insist on it.

Rauschenberg's often-unsettling work was a long way

from the light-hearted celebration of Americana of British pop art.

For most American artists, American popular culture was the enemy -

deadening, inescapable, commercial.

So when Roy Lichtenstein's first one-man show

opened in New York in 1962,

it was evident that something new was happening to American art.

In the brightly-coloured melodramas

of comic book fantasy,

Lichtenstein found a peculiarly 20th-century fascination.

Critics scoffed,

but a handful of canny buyers recognised what was happening.

Before the show even opened,

all 15 works had sold.

Some took his pictures to be satire or parody.

But as Lichtenstein explained in a BBC interview,

his work was based on a real affection and respect

for the pulp fiction he was drawing on.

It's dealing with the images that have come about

in the commercial world and it's using that.

Because there are certain things about it

which are impressive or bold or something

and it's that quality of the images that I'm interested in.

But it's not saying that commercial art is terrible

or look what we've come to.

That may be a sociological fact,

but that's not what this art is about.

Roy Lichtenstein was the son of a wealthy Jewish property developer.

Just five years before the one-man show that would make his name,

Lichtenstein was a failed artist in his thirties.

Uninspired by the abstract expressionism

that dominated American art,

but struggling to find a style of his own.

One night, he was reading to his young sons

when something caught his eye in a children's book.

Lichtenstein started to draw the cartoon characters he saw.

In 1961, he produced a large-scale painting called Look, Mickey.

Lichtenstein enlarged the cartoon image onto a huge canvas,

using bold primary colours

and adding comic book speech bubbles.

I think he was drawn to them

because they were looked upon as discredited.

Nobody thought of comic book art as art, as high art.

It turned art on its head.

Comic book images used tiny printed dots known as Ben-Day dots

to give an illusion of depth, or light and shade.

Lichtenstein faithfully replicated the dots,

and all the graphic devices of comic book art,

in his huge canvases,

exaggerating the familiar

and making it strange.

The original cartoon style just seemed to have...

every element necessary for me.

The comic book image, it had all the mechanical things,

the dots, the black lines around everything,

the more or less primary colours.

All of this was just something ready-made

to symbolise what we were really getting into -

a, kind of, ready-made and plastic era.

He's saying this is the nature of culture in the mid-20th century,

this is the nature of consumerist culture, of mass media,

where things are reproduced ad infinitum.

Some kernel of authenticity, has been lost

and instead, we live in this hall of mirrors, all about reproduction,

imagery going round and round and round,

losing that sense of individuality.

By taking a single cartoon image

and removing it from its original context,

Lichtenstein made it somehow mysterious,

enticing the viewer to invent their own narrative.

I think blowing them up does get you to examine them more closely,

you get the idea that it's kind of funny,

the way these things are made -

that a girl will have really yellow hair,

and she'll really have red dots on her face

and blue dots in her eyes or whatever the cliche is,

and we've taken this for real, kind of, without thinking about it,

and now, we can see how artificial and abstract it really is.

By the time this picture was painted,

the critics had stopped carping

and Lichtenstein was the toast of the art world.

Why do we care about Lichtenstein? There's no should, you know.

I mean, you don't have to care about Lichtenstein, at all.

But at a time when high culture was threatened by the mainstream,

he actually took what was threatening it

and turned it into a strength

and reinvigorated art in the process.

That's quite a nifty trick to pull off.

But he did it with great aplomb and style and wit.

But the darling of the new American pop art had a rival.

He faced competition from a shy, aspiring artist named Andy Warhol.

In the 1950s, Andy Warhol was working in New York

as an illustrator in advertising.

He found his inspiration in the well-stocked aisles

of the American supermarket.

In 1962, in his first one-man exhibition,

Warhol displayed 32 paintings

of different varieties of Campbell's soups.

Reactions ranged from bewildered amusement to plain bewilderment.

The Canadian government spokesman said

that your art could not be described as original sculpture.

Would you agree with that?

Oh, yes.

Why do you agree?

Well, because it's not original.

You have just, then, copied a common item?

Yes.

Why have you bothered to do that?

Why not create something new?

Because it's easier to do.

Andy would always say the worst thing,

the worst thing that you had at the back of your mind.

By responding in that way,

he amused himself.

He also took away all the sting

and all the attacks that can come in an interview.

He, sort of, deadened them.

Born to immigrant Slovak parents,

the young Andy Warhol was a shy, introverted child.

Awkward and often inarticulate,

Warhol instinctively grasped

the essentials of American popular culture,

from its mass-produced objects of desire

to its obsession with celebrity and fame.

His silk screen prints of American icons

strikingly brought the two together,

most famously in his series of images of Elvis

and Marilyn Monroe.

In some way, by mass-producing an image again, and again and again,

you almost drain it of meaning.

The thing that was so special about Marilyn Monroe

the fact that she was unique,

uniquely beautiful, maybe,

becomes defeated by the mass production of the imagery.

"I want to be a machine," he said

and he called his New York apartment The Factory.

Here, he gathered around him an entourage of admirers,

assistants and hangers-on,

making prints, taking photos, producing films.

In 1965, the writer Susan Sontag visited Warhol in his studio

for BBC's Monitor programme.

Andy! He's got Dionne Warwick on.

-Oh, hi.

-Is Andy in?

HE LAUGHS

-Is he in?

-The camera's already rolling?

-Is he here?

-No.

-Oh, Christ, he told me to come today.

I know, so come on in.

I brought the BBC with me.

Who are the BBC?

Hiya.

He's camera shy.

-Hi.

-Hi. I brought the BBC.

THEY LAUGH

Do you mind?

I thought maybe you'd like to see the Eclair.

Oh, I do, yeah, I really want to see the Eclair.

Can we see the Eclair?

Yeah, look, it's doing you right now.

-Oh, wow.

-All right.

It's, you know, it's like spontaneous.

-Wow.

-OK.

-Wow.

Can I really see the camera now?

What...? You mean, while it's watching you?

-Oh, yeah.

-You watch it and it watches you.

Can we do a cheese movie?

All you have to do is say, "Cheese...cheese."

All right.

So the next three minutes could be a cheese movie, all right?

What's the spirit of this?

You don't have to do anything,

just what you're doing.

Can I move?

Yeah, you can move,

but not too much.

The most influential artist of the late 20th century is Andy Warhol,

because Andy addressed all the issues of the day.

He did all of the things that an artist might do at that time

in a way that nobody else was doing.

He loved the movies and he loves stars,

so he creates his own cinema and he has his own stars.

In a sense, he recreates the cultural world.

A few years later, Warhol was followed by the BBC,

on a trip to London to promote his latest film.

'First stop, the Hyde Park home

'of Britain's premier film critic,

'Dilys Powell.'

I know you love the movies,

I'm going to ask you if you have a favourite film star.

It's always a question that people ask me and I can't think of anybody, I can't think of any names.

-No, I really like everybody.

-You like everybody?

-Yeah, I really do.

I've seen, up to now, Chelsea Girls, in a very sort of truncated version,

and I really didn't know what was going on, it was so cut.

And I saw Bike Boy and Flesh, which I really liked very much, indeed.

What we do is we're just learning how to make movies.

Yes, but you do it with real enthusiasm, don't you?

-It's so nice.

-Yeah.

-All of you, all three of you.

Yes, marvellous. Yes, marvellous, yes.

Warhol said pop was about liking everything.

Certainly, the art market liked Warhol - and still does.

In 2012, his 1963 painting, Double Elvis,

sold at auction for 33 million.

Not everyone, though, is convinced.

Warhol is probably my least favourite artist of the 20th century

and I think, you know, it's an argument I've had with many, many...

kind of nabobs of the contemporary art world,

is to say to them, "Do you really want to sit

"in front of an Andy Warhol silkscreen print

"for an hour or two, as you might sit

"in front of a canvas by Francis Bacon, for example,

"and just sop it up?

"Is there enough there to aesthetically interest you

"for a long period of time?"

Andy Warhol's a brilliant, you know, symbol of America, really,

and he's managed to do a great thing,

which is be iconic and ironic at the same time in his work,

which is... A lot of artists can't do that.

And I think, you know, he, kind of, poked the finger at America,

pointed, laughed at America,

and, you know, kind of, embraced its weaknesses and its strengths.

Genius or showman,

Warhol brought to a close 20 years of dramatic change

in the story of art.

Within two decades,

you've gone from the very dark existential angst

of artists like Bacon, responding to the cruelty and barbarity

of the Second World War,

to a much more glamorous

and shiny, exciting, bright, new art movement, known as Pop.

You find this explosion, right across the arts, of creativity,

and new modes, new ways of making art,

which, when you look back now,

I think seems like a real golden age.

Whenever I think about the artists who were working in the 60s,

they seem completely heroic.

What they were doing is STILL completely scintillating

and exhilarating.

But a new era of unrest was dawning...

..and a new generation of artists was waiting

to redefine the meaning of art itself.

MUSIC: "No Fun" by The Stooges

# No fun, my babe

# No fun

# No fun, my babe

# No fun

# No fun to hang around

# Or feeling that same old way... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd