0:00:44 > 0:00:47This series, The Shock Of The New, is about an old subject,
0:00:47 > 0:00:51almost 100 years old, the art of our own century, Modernism.
0:00:51 > 0:00:55Now in cultures, centuries don't start neatly on cue.
0:00:55 > 0:00:59Ours didn't, it began round about 1880 and it's finishing up its run now,
0:00:59 > 0:01:05leaving behind it, in my view, some of the most challenging, beautiful and intelligent works of art
0:01:05 > 0:01:09that have ever been made, along with a great mass of superfluity and rubbish.
0:01:09 > 0:01:12Now I don't want to do a history of modern art.
0:01:12 > 0:01:17Instead I want to evoke its spirit by showing how it's acted upon society and vice versa.
0:01:17 > 0:01:20How it stilts, for instance, with the idea of pleasure.
0:01:20 > 0:01:25How it has strived to confirm or reject the political status quo.
0:01:25 > 0:01:28How it's tried to construct utopias and so on.
0:01:28 > 0:01:34Not a history, then, and not a tour of the monument, although we do get around.
0:01:34 > 0:01:37But eight essays on eight separate themes,
0:01:37 > 0:01:41trying to look at ourselves and our century through the lens of its art.
0:01:41 > 0:01:45Through paintings, sculpture, architecture, photography to some extent,
0:01:45 > 0:01:48and cinema not at all because that's another subject.
0:01:48 > 0:01:50We're at the end of the modern era,
0:01:50 > 0:01:54and art no longer acts on us in the same way that it did on our grandfathers.
0:01:54 > 0:01:55I want to see why.
0:02:00 > 0:02:03So what can one put in eight programmes?
0:02:03 > 0:02:05Well, quite a lot, but not everything.
0:02:05 > 0:02:07You may not see all your favourite artists.
0:02:07 > 0:02:09This is television and not an encyclopaedia.
0:02:09 > 0:02:14And above all, I don't offer it as a substitute
0:02:14 > 0:02:18for the real experience of art, which can only take place one on one,
0:02:18 > 0:02:24face to face, you and the work without me or my talking shadow.
0:02:28 > 0:02:31The key word of the new century was modernity.
0:02:31 > 0:02:35Modernity meant believing in technology and not craft,
0:02:35 > 0:02:38in human perfectibility, not original sin,
0:02:38 > 0:02:43and above all, in a ceaseless consumption of things and the images of things.
0:02:43 > 0:02:46If you were a Parisian alive in 1890,
0:02:46 > 0:02:49and you wanted to show a visitor what modernity meant,
0:02:49 > 0:02:51you pointed to this structure,
0:02:51 > 0:02:54the tallest man-made object on earth,
0:02:54 > 0:02:57the Tower of Babel of the new machine age.
0:03:23 > 0:03:26Since the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London,
0:03:26 > 0:03:28the powers of Europe had taken to holding world fairs
0:03:28 > 0:03:30to show off their industrial strength.
0:03:30 > 0:03:33Paris scheduled one for 1889,
0:03:33 > 0:03:35the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.
0:03:49 > 0:03:52This was its emblem, a huge act of propaganda,
0:03:52 > 0:03:57designed not by an architect but by an engineer, Gustave Eiffel.
0:04:15 > 0:04:18The tower was the static totem of the cult of dynamism,
0:04:18 > 0:04:21a colossus planted with spread legs in the middle of Paris.
0:04:21 > 0:04:26Its shape alluded to the human body, and to the colossi of the past.
0:04:28 > 0:04:30It was the guardian of the future.
0:04:30 > 0:04:33It summed up what technological progress meant
0:04:33 > 0:04:36to the men who ran Europe at the end of the 19th century -
0:04:36 > 0:04:39the promise of unlimited control over the world and its wealth.
0:04:39 > 0:04:43It was praised by one of the key figures in the French avant-garde,
0:04:43 > 0:04:48the cosmopolitan poet, once a Catholic, Guillaume Apollinaire.
0:04:49 > 0:04:53At last you are tired of this old world.
0:04:53 > 0:04:58Oh, shepherd Eifel Tower, the flock of bridges bleats this morning.
0:04:58 > 0:05:01You are through with living in Greek and Roman antiquity.
0:05:01 > 0:05:05Here even the automobiles seem to be ancient.
0:05:05 > 0:05:08Only religion has stayed brand new.
0:05:08 > 0:05:12Religion has remained simple, as simple as the airport hangers.
0:05:12 > 0:05:17It's God who dies Friday and rises again on Sunday.
0:05:17 > 0:05:21It's Christ who climbs into the sky better than any aviator.
0:05:21 > 0:05:25He holds the world's altitude record, pupil Christ of the eye.
0:05:25 > 0:05:2920th pupil of the centuries, he knows what he's about.
0:05:31 > 0:05:36And the century, become a bird, climbs skyward like Jesus.
0:05:39 > 0:05:43To these capitalist romantics, the machine was good.
0:05:43 > 0:05:47They saw it as a giant slave, an untiring steel negro,
0:05:47 > 0:05:52obedient, mindless, controlled by reason, in a world of unlimited resources.
0:05:52 > 0:05:57Only very unusual sights like a rocket launch can give us the emotion
0:05:57 > 0:06:00with which people in 1889 contemplated heavy machinery.
0:06:12 > 0:06:16The machine also meant the conquest of horizontal space.
0:06:16 > 0:06:20The railroad stations were the true cathedrals of the late 19th century.
0:06:25 > 0:06:29The machine on wheels began to change people's experience of place.
0:06:29 > 0:06:32More of the world became available in less time,
0:06:32 > 0:06:38at first to a little elite of inventers, crackpots, and the adventurous rich.
0:06:38 > 0:06:43Because it promised to telescope more experience into the conventional frame of travel,
0:06:43 > 0:06:46and finally to burst the frame altogether,
0:06:46 > 0:06:50the avant-garde of engineering had something in common with the avant-garde of art.
0:06:55 > 0:06:59The most visible sign of the future was the automobile,
0:06:59 > 0:07:02and this is the first public sculpture ever set up in its praise.
0:07:02 > 0:07:07It commemorates the great road race of 1895 from Paris to Bordeaux and back,
0:07:07 > 0:07:10which was won by an engineer named Emile Levassor
0:07:10 > 0:07:15in the car that he designed and built himself, the Panhard-Levassor 5.
0:07:15 > 0:07:20It could do about the same speed as a jumping frog, but not very much more.
0:07:20 > 0:07:24Nevertheless, Levassor's victory was of tremendous social consequence
0:07:24 > 0:07:28because it persuaded Europeans, both manufacturers and public alike,
0:07:28 > 0:07:32that the future of road transport lay with the internal combustion engine
0:07:32 > 0:07:37and not, as many had thought before, with either electricity or steam.
0:07:37 > 0:07:40In all justice there ought to be a replica of this thing
0:07:40 > 0:07:43set up in every oil port from the Persian Gulf to Houston,
0:07:43 > 0:07:47but if it looks somewhat ludicrous to us as sculpture today,
0:07:47 > 0:07:53that's because of difficulties between sculpture and the new convention of the machine.
0:07:54 > 0:07:55A stone car,
0:07:55 > 0:08:00the idea seems surrealist to a modern eye, it's simply incongruous.
0:08:00 > 0:08:04Stone is immobile, mineral, brittle, cold.
0:08:04 > 0:08:09Cars are fast, metallic, elastic, warm.
0:08:09 > 0:08:13The human body is warm too, but we don't think of statues as stone men
0:08:13 > 0:08:17because we're used to the conventions of representing flesh with stone.
0:08:20 > 0:08:25There were no such conventions for depicting machinery, it was too new.
0:08:33 > 0:08:36But the conditions of seeing were also starting to change,
0:08:36 > 0:08:38and the Eiffel Tower stood for that too.
0:08:38 > 0:08:42What counted was not so much the view of the tower from the ground,
0:08:42 > 0:08:45it was seeing the ground from the tower.
0:08:45 > 0:08:49Nobody except a few men in balloons had ever seen this before.
0:08:51 > 0:08:54There were individual pilots who saw the sight from their planes,
0:08:54 > 0:08:58but it was the Eiffel Tower that gave a mass audience a chance
0:08:58 > 0:09:02to see what you and I take for granted every time we fly -
0:09:02 > 0:09:07the earth on which we live seen flat as pattern from above.
0:09:07 > 0:09:11The Eiffel Tower was therefore a pivot in human consciousness,
0:09:11 > 0:09:15and that view of the city as seen by those hundreds of thousands of visitors
0:09:15 > 0:09:16was as significant in 1889,
0:09:16 > 0:09:21as the sight of the earth from the moon would be 80 years later.
0:09:23 > 0:09:27Through the medium of technology, culture was reinventing itself everywhere.
0:09:27 > 0:09:33In 1877 Thomas Alva Edison came up with the most radical extension of cultural memory
0:09:33 > 0:09:37since the printed book. He invented sound recording,
0:09:37 > 0:09:41the first human utterance ever retrieved.
0:09:41 > 0:09:46I designed my original tinfoil phonograph in cylinder form,
0:09:46 > 0:09:49and gave it to my faithful chum Kruesi to make.
0:09:49 > 0:09:51He made fun of it.
0:09:51 > 0:09:54I was almost as surprised as he was
0:09:54 > 0:09:59when the first model produced "Mary had a little lamb", which I'd shouted into it.
0:09:59 > 0:10:01'Its fleece was white as snow.
0:10:01 > 0:10:06'And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.'
0:10:06 > 0:10:12In 1879, Edison invented the incandescent filament bulb.
0:10:12 > 0:10:16The fairy electricity was now let loose upon the world...
0:10:19 > 0:10:26..thus amazing people who had, up to now, depended upon gas and whale oil to see at night.
0:10:31 > 0:10:36In 1895, the Lumiere brothers made the images of a magic lantern move.
0:10:36 > 0:10:40They invented the movie camera and the projector.
0:10:40 > 0:10:44In 1898, Marie Curie discovered radium.
0:10:45 > 0:10:50In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio message
0:10:50 > 0:10:54along the virgin airwaves from Cornwall to the east coast of America.
0:10:56 > 0:11:02In 1903, two home inventors, Wilbur and Orville Wright, observed the wind,
0:11:02 > 0:11:08put wings on a bicycle, scrambled into it, started their motor,
0:11:08 > 0:11:10and to the stupefaction of the world took off,
0:11:10 > 0:11:14achieving man's first powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine.
0:11:21 > 0:11:27In 1905, an obscure physicist named Albert Einstein developed the special theory of relatively,
0:11:27 > 0:11:32the basis of the largest change in man's view of the universe since Isaac Newton.
0:11:32 > 0:11:35He ushered in the nuclear age with one formula.
0:11:35 > 0:11:38E is equal to MC square,
0:11:38 > 0:11:41in which energy is put equal to mass,
0:11:41 > 0:11:46multiply it with the square of the velocity of light,
0:11:46 > 0:11:49showed that very small amount of mass
0:11:49 > 0:11:53may be converted into a very large amount of energy.
0:11:53 > 0:11:58Very few people understood it, and nobody could foresee its implications.
0:12:01 > 0:12:07By 1913, Henry Ford had so developed the idea of mass production that the car,
0:12:07 > 0:12:09running on Mr Dunlop's pneumatic tyres,
0:12:09 > 0:12:13ceased to be a toy for the rich, and became every man's chariot.
0:12:16 > 0:12:20The Wright Brothers had only got a few yards off the ground,
0:12:20 > 0:12:24but within six years, a French aviator named Louis Bleriot
0:12:24 > 0:12:26managed to pilot his buzzing wooden dragonfly
0:12:26 > 0:12:29from one country to another, from France to England,
0:12:29 > 0:12:33across the vast cultural divide of the English Channel.
0:12:40 > 0:12:43In 1913, the French writer Charles Peguy remarked...
0:12:43 > 0:12:49"The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last 30 years."
0:12:49 > 0:12:52He was right, and it was a widespread feeling,
0:12:52 > 0:12:55for the essence of the early modernist experience
0:12:55 > 0:12:58was not the specific inventions - most people weren't affected by
0:12:58 > 0:13:03a prototype in a lab or an equation on a blackboard, not yet.
0:13:03 > 0:13:05No, the important thing was the sense
0:13:05 > 0:13:09of an accelerated rate of change in all areas of human discourse.
0:13:09 > 0:13:14It provided the feeling of an approaching millennium, a new order of things,
0:13:14 > 0:13:16as the 19th century clicked over into the 20th,
0:13:16 > 0:13:20the end of one kind of history, and the start of another.
0:13:22 > 0:13:24Soon after Bleriot flew the Channel,
0:13:24 > 0:13:28his monoplane was carried in procession through the streets of Paris
0:13:28 > 0:13:32and installed in a church, for all the world like the relic of an Archangel,
0:13:32 > 0:13:35and such was the early apotheosis of the machine.
0:13:35 > 0:13:39But to have a cult does not mean that the images automatically follow.
0:13:39 > 0:13:44The changes in man's view of himself and the world between 1880 and 1914
0:13:44 > 0:13:49was so far reaching that they produced as many problems for artists as they did stimuli.
0:13:49 > 0:13:55For instance, how could you make paintings that would reflect the immense shifts in consciousness
0:13:55 > 0:13:59that this changed, technological landscape implied?
0:13:59 > 0:14:02How could you produce a parallel dynamism to the machine age
0:14:02 > 0:14:06without falling into the elementary trap of just becoming a machine illustrator?
0:14:06 > 0:14:10And above all how, by shoving around on a canvas,
0:14:10 > 0:14:14sticky stuff like paint on a static surface,
0:14:14 > 0:14:20could you produce a convincing record of process and transformation?
0:14:21 > 0:14:27Now the first artists to come up with a sketch for an answer to this were the cubists.
0:14:27 > 0:14:31Since the Renaissance, almost all painting had obeyed a convention.
0:14:31 > 0:14:34It was that of one-point perspective.
0:14:34 > 0:14:38Perspective was a geometrical means for producing an illusion of reality,
0:14:38 > 0:14:42for showing things in space in their right sizes and positions.
0:14:42 > 0:14:45Nevertheless, it was an abstraction.
0:14:49 > 0:14:53It was a view seen by a motionless, one-eyed person
0:14:53 > 0:14:55clearly detached from what he sees.
0:14:55 > 0:14:59Perspective gathers the visual facts, and it stabilises them.
0:14:59 > 0:15:02It makes a god of the spectator,
0:15:02 > 0:15:06who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges,
0:15:06 > 0:15:08the unmoved onlooker.
0:15:08 > 0:15:13Cubism argued that reality includes the painter's efforts to perceive it.
0:15:13 > 0:15:18Both the viewer and the view are part of the same field.
0:15:18 > 0:15:24The first artist to explore this idea, and finally to base his work on it, was Paul Cezanne.
0:15:26 > 0:15:30The question of why the paintings that Cezanne made in his old age
0:15:30 > 0:15:35were to have such a vast effect upon the history of art can't be answered in terms of style.
0:15:35 > 0:15:38What they proposed was more radical than style,
0:15:38 > 0:15:43it was a fundamental argument about the way that we actually see.
0:15:43 > 0:15:50He wanted to show the process of seeing, not just the results, and he takes you through this process.
0:15:50 > 0:15:54You share his hesitations about the position of a trunk or a branch.
0:15:55 > 0:15:59Or the final shape of a mountain and the trees in front of it.
0:16:02 > 0:16:05The statement "this is what I see"
0:16:05 > 0:16:09becomes replaced by a question "is this what I see?"
0:16:09 > 0:16:10Relatively is all.
0:16:10 > 0:16:14The idea that doubt can be heroic if it is locked into a structure
0:16:14 > 0:16:17as grand as the paintings of Cezanne's old age,
0:16:17 > 0:16:22that is one of the keys of our century and a touchstone of modernism itself.
0:16:22 > 0:16:25Cubism would bring it to an extreme.
0:16:25 > 0:16:30The idea began here at 13 Rue Ravignon in Paris in 1907,
0:16:30 > 0:16:36in a warren of cheap artists' studios called the Bateau Lavoir or laundry boat.
0:16:36 > 0:16:41It was set off by a Spaniard, Pablo Picasso, then aged 26.
0:16:41 > 0:16:45Picasso's partner in inventing cubism was a slightly younger
0:16:45 > 0:16:49and rather more conservative Frenchman, Georges Braque.
0:16:49 > 0:16:52In the public eye these men didn't exist.
0:16:52 > 0:16:55The audience for their paintings might have been a dozen people,
0:16:55 > 0:17:00and this meant they were free, as researchers in some very obscure area of science are free.
0:17:00 > 0:17:03Nobody cared enough to interfere.
0:17:04 > 0:17:08They wanted to paint the fact that our knowledge of an object
0:17:08 > 0:17:13is made up of all possible views of it - top, sides, front, back.
0:17:13 > 0:17:17They wanted to compress this inspection, which takes time,
0:17:17 > 0:17:20into one moment, one synthesised view.
0:17:20 > 0:17:24One of their experimental materials was the art of other cultures,
0:17:24 > 0:17:28Oceanic and African, as despised as they then were.
0:17:28 > 0:17:33At the time, there were no museums of tribal art, like this one, to consult.
0:17:33 > 0:17:39One of the mild ironies of cubism is the extent to which it was helped by the French empire in Africa.
0:17:39 > 0:17:44Picasso and Braque both owned African carvings, but they have no anthropological interest in them.
0:17:44 > 0:17:49They didn't care about their ritual uses, they knew nothing about their original tribal meanings,
0:17:49 > 0:17:52or about the societies out of which they came.
0:17:52 > 0:17:58They simply used them formally, and in that regard cubism was like a small parody of the imperial model,
0:17:58 > 0:18:04the masks were simply raw material from the darkest Congo, like copper or palm oil,
0:18:04 > 0:18:07and Picasso's use of them was in effect a kind of cultural plunder.
0:18:07 > 0:18:10But then why use African art at all?
0:18:10 > 0:18:15The cubists were just about the first artists to even think of doing so.
0:18:15 > 0:18:20130 years before, when Benjamin West admired the cloths, the clubs and the carvings
0:18:20 > 0:18:23that had come back from the Pacific with Captain Cook,
0:18:23 > 0:18:28no Royal Academicians then took the cue and started painting Tahitian style.
0:18:28 > 0:18:33When Picasso started to produce what was in effect white art in black face,
0:18:33 > 0:18:39he was saying what no 18th-century painter would ever have imagined himself saying.
0:18:39 > 0:18:43He was proposing that the tradition of the human figure,
0:18:43 > 0:18:48which had served Western art so well over the preceding centuries, had at last run out,
0:18:48 > 0:18:51and that in order to renew its vitality you had to look elsewhere,
0:18:51 > 0:18:54in effect to look to those folks in Africa with rhythm.
0:18:54 > 0:18:59This was not so much a gesture of homage in the direction of the blacks though,
0:18:59 > 0:19:02as it was a successful raid on them by the whites.
0:19:03 > 0:19:08What Picasso did care about was the formal vitality of the carvings,
0:19:08 > 0:19:09the freedom to distort.
0:19:12 > 0:19:16And something else, they were to him in the most literal sense
0:19:16 > 0:19:18emblems of savagery,
0:19:18 > 0:19:22of violence transferred into the sphere of culture.
0:19:22 > 0:19:26But this did produce the painting whose shock value provoked cubism,
0:19:26 > 0:19:30and this was Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
0:19:40 > 0:19:46No painting ever looked more convulsive, and none signalled a faster change in the history of art,
0:19:46 > 0:19:49and yet it was anchored in the tradition of the new.
0:19:49 > 0:19:52Picasso began it the year Cezanne died,
0:19:52 > 0:19:56and its nearest ancestor was Cezanne's Bathers.
0:19:56 > 0:20:00It also descends from Picasso's Spanish heritage.
0:20:00 > 0:20:04Those unstable twisting bodies are like El Greco,
0:20:04 > 0:20:08and so is the angular, harshly lit space.
0:20:15 > 0:20:20The five nudes are chopped into planes and arks, as though the brush were a butcher knife.
0:20:20 > 0:20:25Their mass is breaking up, and even today you'd think of dismemberment.
0:20:25 > 0:20:27Even the melon looks like a weapon.
0:20:27 > 0:20:31The space is flattened like a squashed box,
0:20:31 > 0:20:33as solid as the figures.
0:20:34 > 0:20:39And in the midst of all this violent abstraction, the masks.
0:20:39 > 0:20:42The three on the left are derived from archaic Spanish sculpture.
0:20:46 > 0:20:49The two on the right from African carvings.
0:20:49 > 0:20:52All of them staring with the hypnotic fixity
0:20:52 > 0:20:55that Picasso would always give to the eye.
0:20:55 > 0:20:58Picasso never liked the title.
0:20:58 > 0:21:04He called his painting The Avignon Brothel because there had been a whorehouse on the Carrer d'Avinyo,
0:21:04 > 0:21:06or Avignon Street, in Barcelona when he was a student.
0:21:06 > 0:21:11His original idea was to paint an allegory of venereal disease called The Wages Of Sin,
0:21:11 > 0:21:16a man carousing in a brothel, and another man coming in at the left
0:21:16 > 0:21:20with what was going to be a skull, that very Spanish reminder of mortality.
0:21:22 > 0:21:26In the final painting though, only the nudes are left,
0:21:26 > 0:21:30archaic and aggressive, and their cult is the fear of women.
0:21:30 > 0:21:35No painter ever put his anxiety about castration more plainly than Picasso did here,
0:21:35 > 0:21:41and the combination of form and subject was alarming to the few people who saw Les Demoiselles.
0:21:41 > 0:21:45Georges Braque was horrified by its ugliness and intensity,
0:21:45 > 0:21:49but he painted a relatively timid and laborious response to it,
0:21:49 > 0:21:55and from then on Braque and Picasso would be locked in a partnership of questions and responses,
0:21:55 > 0:21:59"roped together like mountaineers" as Braque memorably said.
0:21:59 > 0:22:01Picasso cleared the ground for cubism,
0:22:01 > 0:22:07but it was George Braque who, over the next two years, 1908 and 1909,
0:22:07 > 0:22:09did the most to develop its vocabulary.
0:22:09 > 0:22:14They say the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
0:22:14 > 0:22:17Now Picasso was the fox, he was the virtuoso.
0:22:17 > 0:22:23Braque was the hedgehog, and the one big thing that he knew was Cezanne,
0:22:23 > 0:22:26with whom he identified to the point of obsession.
0:22:26 > 0:22:32He admired Cezanne, as he put it, for sweeping painting clear of the idea of mastery.
0:22:32 > 0:22:36He loved his doubt, his doggedness, his concentration, his lack of eloquence.
0:22:36 > 0:22:40Well, Braque wanted to see if Cezanne's way of building a painting -
0:22:40 > 0:22:44that fusing of little tilted facets, that solidity of structure
0:22:44 > 0:22:47and ambiguity of reading - could be pushed further,
0:22:47 > 0:22:52which he did with the landscapes he painted in two places where Cezanne himself had worked.
0:22:52 > 0:22:56First at L'Estaque in the South of France in 1908.
0:22:56 > 0:23:00The Estaque paintings began as almost straight Cezanne.
0:23:00 > 0:23:04This is one view that Braque looked at that summer.
0:23:04 > 0:23:05This is what he made of it.
0:23:05 > 0:23:09Every scrap of detail edited out - prisms, triangles.
0:23:09 > 0:23:13Yet the shading no longer gives you a feeling of solidity.
0:23:13 > 0:23:17Some of the corners could either be sticking out of the picture, or pointing back into it.
0:23:24 > 0:23:29In the summer of 1909, Braque went painting closer to Paris
0:23:29 > 0:23:32in a village in the Seine valley called La Roche-Guyon.
0:23:35 > 0:23:39The valley is lined with chalk cliffs, and there's a castle built into them.
0:23:39 > 0:23:43It belongs to the La Rochefoucauld family, and Braque made it his motif,
0:23:43 > 0:23:49that jumble of plains and gables and spires stacked up against the cliff.
0:23:49 > 0:23:53Moreover, on the top, there's a 13th-century Norman tower,
0:23:53 > 0:23:56and it was in ruins when Braque saw it, as it is today,
0:23:56 > 0:24:01but it gave him another part of his motif, a big strong cylinder on top.
0:24:01 > 0:24:04So there was this, from his point of view, nice rhyme
0:24:04 > 0:24:11between the actual forms of the landscape and the shapes that he wanted to put in a painting,
0:24:11 > 0:24:15between those plains ascending the cliff going in and out,
0:24:15 > 0:24:21pressed forward by the cliff itself which blocked off the perspective.
0:24:21 > 0:24:23This was what he painted.
0:24:53 > 0:24:56He then scrambled up the chalk bluff to the side,
0:24:56 > 0:24:59and looked at the castle from an angle which gave him
0:24:59 > 0:25:05an even more complicated geometry of gables and turrets coming down into the town.
0:25:44 > 0:25:47So would Braque have invented cubism on his own?
0:25:47 > 0:25:51Probably, but it would have lacked the power that Picasso brought to it.
0:25:51 > 0:25:55This was his unequalled ability to realise form,
0:25:55 > 0:25:59to make you feel the shape and the weight and the silence of things.
0:25:59 > 0:26:02This is the plastic power of a sculptor, but in paint,
0:26:02 > 0:26:06and distorted as they are, you're made to feel them so strongly
0:26:06 > 0:26:10that you can imagine them picked off the canvas in three dimensions.
0:26:12 > 0:26:16For the moment, Picasso's portraits, like this one of the dealer Vollard,
0:26:16 > 0:26:18was still recognisable,
0:26:18 > 0:26:20but any reality was bound to alter
0:26:20 > 0:26:24once it was thrust into the shifting abstract space
0:26:24 > 0:26:26that he and Braque had invented.
0:26:27 > 0:26:32By 1911, Picasso and Braque were painting like Siamese twins.
0:26:32 > 0:26:35This painting of a guitarist is by Braque.
0:26:35 > 0:26:40This one, of another guitarist, is by Picasso.
0:26:45 > 0:26:52Their paintings of this period are virtually indistinguishable except for fine differences of handwriting.
0:26:52 > 0:26:55Without the labels on the gallery wall, you could hardly guess
0:26:55 > 0:26:58which painting is by which of the two painters.
0:26:59 > 0:27:04All this break up and shuffling - nobody had ever painted more baffling images.
0:27:04 > 0:27:08Nothing is constant, every shape is a report on multiple meanings.
0:27:08 > 0:27:14It's an attempt to set out the world as a field of shifting relationships that include the onlooker.
0:27:14 > 0:27:17They were trying to paint process.
0:27:20 > 0:27:23Braque and Picasso were not mathematicians,
0:27:23 > 0:27:26and certainly they weren't philosophers.
0:27:26 > 0:27:30But their art was part of the same great tide of modernist thought
0:27:30 > 0:27:34that included Einstein and the philosopher Alfred Whitehead.
0:27:34 > 0:27:39The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries
0:27:39 > 0:27:42is the notion of independent existence.
0:27:42 > 0:27:44There is no such mode of existence.
0:27:44 > 0:27:48Every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which
0:27:48 > 0:27:51it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
0:27:54 > 0:27:57As Gertrude Stein remembered it,
0:27:57 > 0:28:00the cubist game of hide and seek with reality
0:28:00 > 0:28:02fed back into the world in odd ways.
0:28:06 > 0:28:12The first year of the war, Picasso and myself were walking down the Boulevard Raspail.
0:28:12 > 0:28:15All of a sudden, down the street came some big cannon,
0:28:15 > 0:28:19the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged.
0:28:19 > 0:28:22Pablo stopped, he was spellbound.
0:28:22 > 0:28:25"C'est nous qui avons fait ca," he said,
0:28:25 > 0:28:28It is we that have created that.
0:28:28 > 0:28:31And he was right, he had.
0:28:35 > 0:28:40Camouflage was cubism at war, and ever since the cubists' delight in ambiguity,
0:28:40 > 0:28:44what is seen and not seen, has had its ominously practical uses.
0:28:55 > 0:29:00Picasso's next step was to stick a piece of oilcloth to one of his still lives.
0:29:00 > 0:29:05It was printed with a design of chair cane, and so collage began.
0:29:05 > 0:29:11Collage, which simply means gluing, was a way of strengthening the link between cubism and the real world.
0:29:11 > 0:29:15It gave Picasso and Braque bigger and bolder shapes to play with,
0:29:15 > 0:29:19and these shapes were real things, emblems of the industrial present -
0:29:19 > 0:29:23newspapers, packets, wallpaper and the fake woodgraining
0:29:23 > 0:29:27that Braque learned as an apprentice house painter in Normandy.
0:29:27 > 0:29:31They were recoiling from the abstractness of those pictures of 1911,
0:29:31 > 0:29:35and in that they were joined by the third musketeer,
0:29:35 > 0:29:38a more classical artist than either of them, Juan Gris.
0:29:38 > 0:29:43In him, cubism found a mind of the coolest analytical weight.
0:29:43 > 0:29:47To Gris, the world of cheap mass production and reproduction
0:29:47 > 0:29:51was a sort of arcadia, a pastoral landscape, as it was to Apollinaire.
0:29:51 > 0:29:56You read hand bills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud,
0:29:56 > 0:29:58"Here's this morning's poetry."
0:29:58 > 0:30:01And for prose you've got the newspapers,
0:30:01 > 0:30:05sixpenny detective novels full of cop stories, biographies of big shots,
0:30:05 > 0:30:07a thousand different titles.
0:30:07 > 0:30:09Lettering on bill boards and walls,
0:30:09 > 0:30:13door plates and posters squawk like parrots.
0:30:20 > 0:30:23Cubist Paris is receding now.
0:30:23 > 0:30:28But it's still there, the glass and iron city of small arcades,
0:30:28 > 0:30:30the marble city of cafe tables,
0:30:30 > 0:30:35the place of zinc bars, dominoes, dirty chess boards,
0:30:35 > 0:30:41crumpled newspaper, the brown city of old paint and pipes and panelling,
0:30:41 > 0:30:46history to us now, but once the landscape of the modernist dream.
0:32:26 > 0:32:30The fourth major cubist was Fernand Leger.
0:32:30 > 0:32:33He wanted to make a public style of cubism,
0:32:33 > 0:32:37a popular art, images of the machine age for the man in the streets.
0:32:39 > 0:32:43He was the son of a Normandy farmer, an instinctive socialist
0:32:43 > 0:32:47who became a practising one in the trenches of World War I.
0:32:47 > 0:32:51I found myself on a level with the whole of the French people.
0:32:51 > 0:32:57My new companions in the Engineer Corps were miners, navvies, workers in metal and wood.
0:32:57 > 0:33:00Among these I discovered the French people.
0:33:00 > 0:33:04At the same time, I was dazzled by the breach of a 75mm gun
0:33:04 > 0:33:08which was standing uncovered in the sunlight,
0:33:08 > 0:33:10the magic of light on white metal.
0:33:10 > 0:33:13Metal or flesh, it made no difference.
0:33:13 > 0:33:18Leger painted the body as though it were made of interchangeable parts, like machinery.
0:33:18 > 0:33:23The soldiers' insignia on these card playing robots might as well be factory brands.
0:33:29 > 0:33:34To him, society as machine meant harmony, an end to loneliness.
0:33:35 > 0:33:39The Three Women, one of the paintings that best expresses this,
0:33:39 > 0:33:42is among the great didactic images of French classicism.
0:33:42 > 0:33:46This philosophical harem is Leger's vision of human relationships
0:33:46 > 0:33:53working as smoothly as a clock with the binding energy of desire transformed into rhymes of shape.
0:33:53 > 0:33:57There were some artists to whom this mechanical age was much more than a context,
0:33:57 > 0:33:59and very much more than a pretext.
0:33:59 > 0:34:02They wanted to explore its characteristic images
0:34:02 > 0:34:06of light, structure and dynamism as subjects in their work.
0:34:22 > 0:34:25Robert Delaunay was crazy about the Eiffel Tower.
0:34:25 > 0:34:27He thought of it as a new tower of Babel
0:34:27 > 0:34:33emitting a clamour of tongues from the first radio system installed on it in 1909.
0:34:50 > 0:34:57He must have painted it 30 times, the first time for his Russian wife and fellow painter, Sonya.
0:34:57 > 0:35:00Light seen through structure.
0:35:00 > 0:35:03It became a theme... his fundamental image of modernity,
0:35:03 > 0:35:08that great grid rising over Paris with the sky reeling through it.
0:36:19 > 0:36:24Delaunay also painted windows... landscapes of Paris seen as though through a prism.
0:36:24 > 0:36:28And Apollinaire illustrated them with words.
0:36:28 > 0:36:32Raise the blind and see how the window opens.
0:36:32 > 0:36:37If hands could weave light this was done by spiders.
0:36:37 > 0:36:41Beauty, pallor, unfathomable indigos.
0:36:41 > 0:36:45From the red to the green, all the yellow dies.
0:36:45 > 0:36:51Paris, Vancouver, Hyeres, Maintenon, New York and the West Indies.
0:36:51 > 0:36:54The window opens like an orange,
0:36:54 > 0:36:56the beautiful fruit of light.
0:37:01 > 0:37:05Whereas Leger thought the core of modernism was structure,
0:37:05 > 0:37:10the Delaunays believed it was light, pure energy, flooding the world.
0:37:10 > 0:37:12Its emblem was the disk.
0:37:15 > 0:37:19This was the basic unit of Robert's grand allegory of newness,
0:37:19 > 0:37:23the homage to Bleriot, the "great constructor", as he called the pilot.
0:38:29 > 0:38:34One of the effects of today's museums, with their white walls and feeling of perpetual presence,
0:38:34 > 0:38:37is to make art seem newer than it actually is.
0:38:37 > 0:38:41You have to pinch yourself to remember that when the paint was fresh
0:38:41 > 0:38:45on those cubist Picassos and Delaunays, people wore hobble skirts
0:38:45 > 0:38:49and they rode around in machines line this one, sitting up front of the driver.
0:38:49 > 0:38:54And that feeling of disjuncture, the sense of the oldness of the modern art,
0:38:54 > 0:39:00becomes acute when you reflect upon the only art movement that came out of Italy in the 20th century.
0:39:00 > 0:39:04Futurism was the invention of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
0:39:04 > 0:39:07part lyrical genius,
0:39:07 > 0:39:11part organ-grinder and part fascist demagogue
0:39:11 > 0:39:15and, by his own accounts, the most modern man in his own country.
0:39:15 > 0:39:18When right-minded people between the wars thought of modern artists
0:39:18 > 0:39:22as subversive buffoons, their image was formed by Marinetti.
0:39:22 > 0:39:25He was a genius of publicity and he used every trick
0:39:25 > 0:39:28to get it for himself and for the futurist painters.
0:39:28 > 0:39:33Posters, leaflets, demos, meetings, he even invented the happening,
0:39:33 > 0:39:37montage in real time, with poems and declamations, paintings and music,
0:39:37 > 0:39:39all on stage at once.
0:39:39 > 0:39:42He took his road show everywhere, even to Russia.
0:39:42 > 0:39:45Erster Akt.
0:39:45 > 0:39:47THEY CHANT IN GERMAN
0:39:52 > 0:39:55Zweiter Akt.
0:39:55 > 0:39:58THEY MUMBLE
0:39:58 > 0:40:00RAIN FALLS
0:40:01 > 0:40:03Dritter Akt.
0:40:03 > 0:40:06THEY CHANT IN GERMAN
0:40:13 > 0:40:16DISCORDANT NOTES ON PIANO
0:40:46 > 0:40:49Marinetti called himself "the caffeine of Europe".
0:40:49 > 0:40:53He was the first international agent provocateur that modern art had.
0:40:53 > 0:40:58The name futurism was a brilliant choice - challenging, but vague.
0:40:58 > 0:41:03But the central idea that Marinetti trumpeted forth in the first futurist manifesto in 1909
0:41:03 > 0:41:09was that the machine had created a new class of visionaries, himself and anyone who cared to join him.
0:41:09 > 0:41:12BIRDSONG
0:41:14 > 0:41:17ENGINE STARTS
0:41:17 > 0:41:21For Marinetti and his group, all the old ideas about art and artists
0:41:21 > 0:41:23were about to be blown off the cultural map.
0:41:23 > 0:41:26ENGINE REVS
0:41:40 > 0:41:43You needed to come from a technologically backward country
0:41:43 > 0:41:46to love the future as passionately as Marinetti did.
0:41:46 > 0:41:48HORN PEEPS
0:41:51 > 0:41:53Machinery was power.
0:41:53 > 0:41:56It was freedom from historical restraints.
0:41:57 > 0:42:00Manifesto Of Futurism.
0:42:00 > 0:42:04One, we intend to sing the love of danger,
0:42:04 > 0:42:07the habit of energy and fearlessness.
0:42:07 > 0:42:13We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty,
0:42:13 > 0:42:15the beauty of speed.
0:42:15 > 0:42:21A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath.
0:42:21 > 0:42:27A roaring car that seems to run on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
0:42:27 > 0:42:30We want to hymn the man at the wheel
0:42:30 > 0:42:36who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth along the circle of its orbit.
0:42:36 > 0:42:39We want to no part of it, the past.
0:42:39 > 0:42:43We, the young and strong futurists.
0:42:43 > 0:42:47So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers,
0:42:47 > 0:42:49here they are, here they are, come on!
0:42:49 > 0:42:55Set fire to the library shelves, turn aside the canals to flood the museums.
0:42:55 > 0:43:02Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discoloured and shredded.
0:43:02 > 0:43:06Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers,
0:43:06 > 0:43:11and retch, retch, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly.
0:43:23 > 0:43:26In their art, they set out to find an equivalent for the speed
0:43:26 > 0:43:29and the movement that they worshipped in their cars.
0:43:52 > 0:43:55TYPEWRITER CLATTERS
0:44:05 > 0:44:07They kept issuing manifestos,
0:44:07 > 0:44:12operatic love letters to industry and hymns to the beauty of its products.
0:44:18 > 0:44:21Engineers live in high-tension chambers
0:44:21 > 0:44:26where 100,000 volts flicker through great bays of glass.
0:44:26 > 0:44:30They sit at control panels with meters, switches, radio stats and commutators
0:44:30 > 0:44:36to right and left, and everywhere the rich gleam of polished levers.
0:44:36 > 0:44:42These men enjoy, in short, a life of power between walls of iron and crystal.
0:44:44 > 0:44:50Nothing is more beautiful than a great, humming power station, holding back the hydraulic pressures
0:44:50 > 0:44:57of a whole mountain range and the electric power for a whole landscape, synthesised in control panels,
0:44:57 > 0:45:00bristling with levers, gleaming commutators.
0:45:22 > 0:45:26The artists who gathered round Marinetti before the First World War
0:45:26 > 0:45:30were the core of the futurist group and some of them would soon be dead.
0:45:30 > 0:45:35The most gifted of them, Umberto Boccioni, fell off his horse and was killed in 1916
0:45:35 > 0:45:40in the war which he and Marinetti had praised as the hygiene of civilisation.
0:45:40 > 0:45:44But in the meantime, he had produced some extraordinary images,
0:45:44 > 0:45:49none more so than The City Rises, his peon of joy to industry and heavy construction,
0:45:49 > 0:45:53with its straining cables and draft horses and plunging figures.
0:45:57 > 0:46:00But the problem was how to represent movement.
0:46:02 > 0:46:06For that, the futurist resorted to photography,
0:46:06 > 0:46:11especially the sequential photographs published by the French pioneer, Etienne-Jules Marey.
0:46:13 > 0:46:17By giving you the successive positions of a figure on one plate,
0:46:17 > 0:46:21these photos introduce time into space.
0:46:24 > 0:46:27The body left its own memory in the air.
0:46:27 > 0:46:32400 years before, Leonardo had bought birds in the Florentine market
0:46:32 > 0:46:36and let them go to study the beat of their wings for a few seconds.
0:46:36 > 0:46:42Now the cameras of Marey and Edward Muybridge could describe this world of unseen movement.
0:46:42 > 0:46:46Some of Giacomo Balla's paintings were almost transcriptions of their photographs.
0:46:46 > 0:46:51This one, for instance, is entitled Swift Paths Of Movement And Dynamic Sequences.
0:47:08 > 0:47:12Dynamism Of A Dog On A Leash was a glimpse of boulevard life
0:47:12 > 0:47:16with a fashionable lady, or, at any rate, her feet, trotting her dachshund,
0:47:16 > 0:47:21a low-slung, modern animal, that sports car of the dog world, along the pavement.
0:47:21 > 0:47:24FOOTSTEPS
0:47:25 > 0:47:27DOG BARKS
0:47:34 > 0:47:40Watching a virtuoso's rapid fingers, gave Balla the clue for Rhythms Of A Violinist.
0:47:48 > 0:47:51As well as movement, they wanted to paint noise.
0:47:51 > 0:47:56This painting of Boccioni's is called The Noise Of The Street Penetrates The House.
0:47:56 > 0:48:02Futurism loved any noise that was dissonant, loud or made by a machine.
0:48:02 > 0:48:06The most ambitious effort to paint equivalents for sound and movement
0:48:06 > 0:48:09was Gino Severini's picture of a cabaret in Paris,
0:48:09 > 0:48:14where he and the cubists used to go, the Bal Tabarin.
0:48:14 > 0:48:18Like them, Severini loved common, popular entertainment.
0:48:50 > 0:48:54But not every artist had that kind of straightforward optimism about the machine.
0:48:54 > 0:48:58There were some that viewed it with more irony and detachment...
0:48:58 > 0:49:01more like voyeurs than participants,
0:49:01 > 0:49:04because they perceived that the thing was more than a tool...
0:49:04 > 0:49:07more than simply an extension of the manufacturing self.
0:49:07 > 0:49:14Having been made by man, it had become a perverse but substantially accurate self-portrait.
0:49:14 > 0:49:18Such was the implication of Francis Picabia's work, and of Marcel Duchamp's.
0:49:18 > 0:49:24The machine, as Picabia put it in one of his titles, is the daughter born without a mother,
0:49:24 > 0:49:29a modern counterpart to the Virgin birth in which Christ, the son, was born without a father.
0:49:29 > 0:49:32Machinery parodied both sex and religion.
0:49:32 > 0:49:37It contained limitless possibilities for giving offence, which Picabia was born to do.
0:49:39 > 0:49:44Picabia was one of those men, almost a modernist invention in themselves,
0:49:44 > 0:49:46who was locked in a struggle with the very idea of art.
0:49:46 > 0:49:49He wanted to laugh, the notion of painting to death.
0:49:49 > 0:49:54He had a strong sense of myth, and he couldn't find another outlet for it.
0:49:54 > 0:49:57The myth was that of the machine as man's counterpart.
0:49:57 > 0:50:00It obsessed Picabia. It was his main amusement.
0:50:00 > 0:50:03He married rich and he bought one fast car after another,
0:50:03 > 0:50:07as though he were trying to turn himself into a mechanical centaur.
0:50:07 > 0:50:11It was also the theme of his art, the body as machine.
0:50:11 > 0:50:17In 1914, he painted an enormous image of a sexual encounter with a dancer,
0:50:17 > 0:50:20called I See Again In Memory My Dear Udnie.
0:50:20 > 0:50:25The 19th-century novelist, Joris Huysmans foresaw it, in a way, when he wrote...
0:50:25 > 0:50:29Look at the machine, the play of pistons and the cylinders.
0:50:29 > 0:50:34They are steel Romeos inside cast-iron Juliets.
0:50:34 > 0:50:39The ways of human expression are in no way different to the back and forth of our machines.
0:50:39 > 0:50:44This is a law to which one must pay homage unless one is either impotent or a saint.
0:50:44 > 0:50:47Picabia was neither.
0:50:47 > 0:50:49He had a flare for the old in, out.
0:50:49 > 0:50:51Mechanical sex, mechanical self.
0:50:51 > 0:50:55No wonder Picabia's machine portrait still looks so very sardonic.
0:50:55 > 0:50:58The machine is amoral.
0:50:58 > 0:50:59Its movements are programmed.
0:50:59 > 0:51:03It can only act, and nobody wants to be compared to a mechanical slave.
0:51:06 > 0:51:11Marcel Duchamp would push the machine metaphor even further before giving up art for chess.
0:51:11 > 0:51:17Duchamp had played with every existing art movement and predicted a number of those to come.
0:51:17 > 0:51:22Well, when you are 15 and paint like the impressionists,
0:51:22 > 0:51:25you are experimenting with yourself, with people,
0:51:25 > 0:51:31you know what you're going to do, you don't know even if you are going to do anything else.
0:51:31 > 0:51:37It took me ten years or more to change the style, or at least to say,
0:51:37 > 0:51:41"Well, there's nothing more in the impressionist to find,"
0:51:41 > 0:51:45and I tried to find something else.
0:51:45 > 0:51:48I first went through fauvism,
0:51:48 > 0:51:54I went through cubism, and then, only 1912, or '13,
0:51:54 > 0:51:57I found, more or less, what I wanted to do,
0:51:57 > 0:52:03which would not be influenced by movements that I had been through, you see.
0:52:03 > 0:52:08The Nude Descending A Staircase is one of the half dozen most famous paintings of our century.
0:52:08 > 0:52:13It's a transcription of movement based, again, on Marey's photographs.
0:52:13 > 0:52:15As cubism, it's quite academic.
0:52:26 > 0:52:31When the American press saw it, it was seized on as a supreme joke
0:52:31 > 0:52:35but the cubists themselves, back in Paris, were not amused.
0:52:37 > 0:52:40When I came with my Nude Descending The Staircase,
0:52:40 > 0:52:43they didn't see that it applied to their theory.
0:52:43 > 0:52:47In other words, not an illustration of THEIR theory and, in fact,
0:52:47 > 0:52:49it had more...
0:52:49 > 0:52:52and cubism had the idea of movement,
0:52:52 > 0:52:55which the futurists had at the same time,
0:52:55 > 0:53:00so they thought it was too much, neither one,
0:53:00 > 0:53:03nor futurist, nor cubism and they condemned it.
0:53:03 > 0:53:07But it did open up the way to Duchamp's most influential work,
0:53:07 > 0:53:11The Large Glass, which he left unfinished after eight years.
0:53:11 > 0:53:17Like the Nude, the Glass treated the body as a mechanical object. Why on glass? Duchamp explained.
0:53:17 > 0:53:20Because of, mainly, the transparency of the glass.
0:53:20 > 0:53:25I wanted to... I had always noticed that the trouble with an oil painting,
0:53:25 > 0:53:29an easel painting, is, you never know how to do the background.
0:53:29 > 0:53:34You make a portrait or you make some scene, some still life,
0:53:34 > 0:53:38and then comes the background. What are you going to do in the background?
0:53:38 > 0:53:42You put something in the background and it's always false,
0:53:42 > 0:53:45or at least, very seldom justified.
0:53:45 > 0:53:47It's just filling up the canvas.
0:53:47 > 0:53:50With the glass, you don't have to do that.
0:53:50 > 0:53:53The glass is just transparent and you put anything behind you wish,
0:53:53 > 0:53:57and you change it every day, if you wish, as well.
0:53:57 > 0:54:00And that was, for me, an element of novelty,
0:54:00 > 0:54:02to convince me I could go on.
0:54:02 > 0:54:06There's also some kind of literary part to it,
0:54:06 > 0:54:11how it was intended to have every item on the glass,
0:54:11 > 0:54:13every design on the glass,
0:54:13 > 0:54:18explained with a language... with language, with words.
0:54:18 > 0:54:22It was nothing spontaneous about it,
0:54:22 > 0:54:26which of course is a great objection on the part of aestheticians.
0:54:26 > 0:54:30They want the subconscious to speak by itself.
0:54:30 > 0:54:32I don't. Don't care.
0:54:32 > 0:54:35And it was the opposite in that way.
0:54:35 > 0:54:41So at the end of eight years, even not finished, I stopped.
0:54:41 > 0:54:44I decided to stop.
0:54:44 > 0:54:47So, what is this thing?
0:54:47 > 0:54:49Well, it's a machine,
0:54:49 > 0:54:54but we'd be better off calling it a project for an unfinished contraption
0:54:54 > 0:54:57that could never be built because its use was never clear,
0:54:57 > 0:55:01because, in turn, it parodies the language and forms of science
0:55:01 > 0:55:05without the slightest regard for scientific probability or cause or effect.
0:55:05 > 0:55:08Supposing that an engineer were to use this thing as a blueprint.
0:55:08 > 0:55:10He'd be in deep trouble
0:55:10 > 0:55:13because The Large Glass is never explicit,
0:55:13 > 0:55:17and looked at from the point of view of technical systems, it's simply absurd.
0:55:17 > 0:55:19The notes that Duchamp left to go with it
0:55:19 > 0:55:24are the most scrambled instruction manual that you can imagine, but they're deliberately scrambled.
0:55:24 > 0:55:29For instance, he talked about the thing running on a mythical fuel of his own invention
0:55:29 > 0:55:33called "love gasoline", which passed through filters into feeble cylinders
0:55:33 > 0:55:40which activated a desire motor, none of which would really have meant very much to Henry Ford.
0:55:40 > 0:55:46But this was a meta-machine that takes us away from the real world of machinery into that of allegory,
0:55:46 > 0:55:51with the naked bride up there perpetually disrobing herself in the top half,
0:55:51 > 0:55:55and down below, the poor little bachelors in their empty jackets,
0:55:55 > 0:56:00endlessly grinding away, signalling their frustration to the girl above them.
0:56:00 > 0:56:05In fact, this thing is an allegory of profane love,
0:56:05 > 0:56:11which, Marcel Duchamp would have us believe, is the only sort that is left in the 20th century.
0:56:11 > 0:56:17Its real text was written by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation Of Dreams, published in 1900.
0:56:17 > 0:56:21"The imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus,"
0:56:21 > 0:56:24said Freud, "lends itself to symbolisation
0:56:24 > 0:56:29"by every sort of indescribably complicated machinery."
0:56:29 > 0:56:33But the male mechanism of The Large Glass is not imposing at all.
0:56:33 > 0:56:36The bachelors are just uniforms, like marionettes.
0:56:36 > 0:56:41According to Duchamp's notes, they try to indicate their desire to the bride
0:56:41 > 0:56:47by making the chocolate-grinder turn, and it grinds out an imaginary milky stuff like semen,
0:56:47 > 0:56:49which squirts out through those rings
0:56:49 > 0:56:54but can't get into the bride's half of the glass because of that bar,
0:56:54 > 0:56:57and so the bride is condemned always to tease,
0:56:57 > 0:57:00and the bachelor's fate is endless masturbation.
0:57:00 > 0:57:04In one sense, the bride stripped bare is a glimpse into Hell,
0:57:04 > 0:57:07a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.
0:57:07 > 0:57:11But you could also see it as a declaration of freedom,
0:57:11 > 0:57:17if you recall the crushing taboos against masturbation that were in force when Duchamp was young.
0:57:17 > 0:57:20It was the symbol of rebellion against parents
0:57:20 > 0:57:23and, to that extent, The Large Glass is a free machine,
0:57:23 > 0:57:27or at least a defiant machine,
0:57:27 > 0:57:31but it was also a sad machine, a testament to indifference,
0:57:31 > 0:57:34that emotion of which Duchamp was the master.
0:57:34 > 0:57:39When The Large Glass was broken in its crate while being shipped, how did he feel?
0:57:39 > 0:57:40Nothing. Not much.
0:57:40 > 0:57:42I was...
0:57:42 > 0:57:44Well, no, I was not.
0:57:44 > 0:57:47Because I'm fatalist, maybe.
0:57:47 > 0:57:51Enough to take anything else that can go wrong.
0:57:51 > 0:57:54Unfortunately, a little later, when I look at the breaks,
0:57:54 > 0:57:56I love the breaks.
0:57:56 > 0:58:01It happened to be that two panes, the glass panes on top of one another,
0:58:01 > 0:58:03with paint on it, holding a bit,
0:58:03 > 0:58:08when they break on the vibration of being transported flat, you see,
0:58:08 > 0:58:10on a...on a truck,
0:58:10 > 0:58:17the breaks take a similar direction in the two panes,
0:58:17 > 0:58:20so when you put them on top of one another,
0:58:20 > 0:58:26they seem to continue the same breaks as though I had done it on purpose.
0:58:26 > 0:58:29Duchamp's finely tuned indifference is one of the divides
0:58:29 > 0:58:33between the late machine age and the time in which we live.
0:58:33 > 0:58:37The Large Glass was a long way from the optimism and the sense of possibility
0:58:37 > 0:58:41with which greater painters but less sophisticated men than Duchamp
0:58:41 > 0:58:46greeted the machine in those long, lost days before World War I.
0:58:46 > 0:58:50The machinery was now turned on its inventors and their children.
0:58:50 > 0:58:55After 40 years of continuous peace in Europe, the worst war in history
0:58:55 > 0:58:58cancelled the playful good technology.
0:58:59 > 0:59:02The myth of the future went into shock
0:59:02 > 0:59:07and European art moved into its years of irony, disgust and protest.
0:59:47 > 0:59:51Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
0:59:51 > 0:59:55E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk