0:00:46 > 0:00:49In 1914, when the First World War began,
0:00:49 > 0:00:52the world into which modern art was born had begun to vanish.
0:00:52 > 0:00:54The joyful sense of possibility
0:00:54 > 0:00:58that was born of the machine was now cut down by other machines.
0:01:10 > 0:01:13GUNFIRE
0:01:13 > 0:01:16EXPLOSIONS
0:01:33 > 0:01:37This hill is called the Butte de Warlencourt.
0:01:37 > 0:01:41During the Battle of the Somme, tens of thousands of men died for it.
0:01:41 > 0:01:43The place became a symbol of obsession,
0:01:43 > 0:01:45first held by German machine gunners,
0:01:45 > 0:01:48then captured by British and Australian troops,
0:01:48 > 0:01:51then taken again by the Germans and finally stormed again
0:01:51 > 0:01:57by the Allies and this went on from the autumn of 1916 for two years.
0:01:57 > 0:02:01By the end of World War I, every yard of ground here
0:02:01 > 0:02:04had been dug up by high explosive, mixed with human flesh and bone
0:02:04 > 0:02:09and pulverised and buried again down to a depth of six feet.
0:02:09 > 0:02:11In such places as this,
0:02:11 > 0:02:15our grandfathers tasted the first terrors of the 20th century.
0:02:15 > 0:02:20The life of words and images in art was changed radically and for ever
0:02:20 > 0:02:24because our culture had now entered the age of mass produced industrialised death.
0:02:24 > 0:02:28And at first, there were no words to describe it.
0:02:29 > 0:02:35# We don't want to lose you
0:02:35 > 0:02:39# But we think you ought to go. #
0:02:39 > 0:02:43In 1914, not one man or woman in Europe had any real idea
0:02:43 > 0:02:46what total mechanised warfare would mean.
0:02:48 > 0:02:51Europe had been at peace for 44 years
0:02:51 > 0:02:54and nobody of draft age remembered a war.
0:02:57 > 0:03:00Their authorities sold the war to them
0:03:00 > 0:03:04in a language of rhetorical cliches that descended from chivalry,
0:03:04 > 0:03:08the language of the public school and the officers' mess.
0:03:08 > 0:03:16# Kiss you when you come back again. #
0:03:18 > 0:03:22"Those long uneven lines standing as patiently
0:03:22 > 0:03:27"as though they were stretched outside the Oval or Villa Park.
0:03:27 > 0:03:31"The crowns of hats, the sun on moustached archaic faces,
0:03:31 > 0:03:35"grinning as if it were all an August bank holiday lark.
0:03:35 > 0:03:39"Never such innocence. Never before or since.
0:03:39 > 0:03:42"As changed itself to past without a word.
0:03:42 > 0:03:45"The men leaving the garden tidy.
0:03:45 > 0:03:50"The thousands of marriages lasting a little while longer.
0:03:50 > 0:03:52"Never such innocence again."
0:03:54 > 0:03:57GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS
0:04:02 > 0:04:06In the trenches, millions of young Englishmen, Frenchmen and Germans
0:04:06 > 0:04:10found the idea that war was something between a joust
0:04:10 > 0:04:14and a cricket match had been wrecked by inventions which industrialised death,
0:04:14 > 0:04:17as they had industrialised life.
0:04:17 > 0:04:21This was what they found and what they became.
0:04:23 > 0:04:24By 1916
0:04:24 > 0:04:27and the summer catastrophes of the Somme battlefield,
0:04:27 > 0:04:32a whole generation on both sides of the trenches was becoming aware that it had been lied to.
0:04:32 > 0:04:37Its generals had lied about the nature and the length of the war.
0:04:37 > 0:04:39Its politicians had lied about its causes.
0:04:39 > 0:04:41Its journalists and propagandists
0:04:41 > 0:04:45had lied about what it was like for the troops.
0:04:45 > 0:04:46The flood of lies
0:04:46 > 0:04:50was so great that it seemed to contaminate all official language.
0:04:51 > 0:04:55And so a chasm opened between official language
0:04:55 > 0:04:58and what the young knew to be reality.
0:04:58 > 0:05:02The speech of the elders could not contain their experiences.
0:05:02 > 0:05:07America would repeat this trauma in the '60s with Vietnam.
0:05:07 > 0:05:09But Europe had it 50 years earlier
0:05:09 > 0:05:13and the antennae of the crisis were the ones whose business
0:05:13 > 0:05:17was language, the writers and artists mostly born between 1890
0:05:17 > 0:05:23and 1900, who had been sucked into the vast statistics of the war.
0:05:23 > 0:05:28"I knew a man, he was my chum, but he grew blacker every day,
0:05:28 > 0:05:31"And would not brush the flies away,
0:05:31 > 0:05:33"Nor blanch,
0:05:33 > 0:05:36"However fierce the hum of passing shells
0:05:36 > 0:05:40"I used to read to rouse him random things from Donne
0:05:40 > 0:05:45"But you could tell he was far gone for he lay gaping, mackerel-eyed
0:05:45 > 0:05:47"And stiff and senseless as a post
0:05:47 > 0:05:49"Even when that old poet cried,
0:05:49 > 0:05:52"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost
0:05:54 > 0:05:58"He stank so badly, though we were great chums, I had to leave him
0:05:59 > 0:06:01"Then rats ate his thumbs."
0:06:14 > 0:06:17World War I destroyed an entire generation.
0:06:17 > 0:06:20We don't know and we can't even guess what might have been painted
0:06:20 > 0:06:24or written if the war had never happened.
0:06:24 > 0:06:28Its imagery of waste, repetition, irony, loss and pain are so built
0:06:28 > 0:06:33into our whole idea of modernity that we simply take it for granted.
0:06:33 > 0:06:35We can't see its alternative.
0:06:35 > 0:06:36As for the waste of minds,
0:06:36 > 0:06:40we know the names of some who were killed too soon. Among the painters
0:06:40 > 0:06:44Umberto Boccioni and Franz Marc, the sculptor Gaudier-Brescha,
0:06:44 > 0:06:50the architect, Sant'Elia, the poets, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.
0:06:50 > 0:06:54But for every one of those whose name survives,
0:06:54 > 0:06:55there must have been scores
0:06:55 > 0:07:00and possibly hundreds of those who never simply got a chance to develop
0:07:00 > 0:07:04and so, if you were to ask where is the Picasso of England,
0:07:04 > 0:07:06or the Ezra Pound of France,
0:07:06 > 0:07:09the probable answer is that they are here.
0:07:14 > 0:07:18Above all, what the war produced in its survivors and onlookers
0:07:18 > 0:07:20was a longing for a clean slate,
0:07:20 > 0:07:23a sense of spiritual apocalypse.
0:07:23 > 0:07:27In return, they would be pacifists, internationalists.
0:07:27 > 0:07:31They would get out of the war if possible, but to where?
0:07:36 > 0:07:39The closest neutral country was Switzerland.
0:07:50 > 0:07:55Zurich attracted every sort of intellectual refugee from northern Europe.
0:07:55 > 0:08:00Great ones like Lenin and James Joyce, but a host of others.
0:08:00 > 0:08:02They had fled their natural homelands
0:08:02 > 0:08:06but they had a cultural one, the cafe.
0:08:10 > 0:08:12Today, the phrase "cafe intellectual"
0:08:12 > 0:08:17is a mild obsolete insult, but then it was not.
0:08:17 > 0:08:22Places like this one, the Odeon in Zurich, were cultural institutions.
0:08:22 > 0:08:25They were, in an almost literal sense,
0:08:25 > 0:08:28mediums of discourse, like magazines.
0:08:28 > 0:08:31People that were separated from the patterns of their society,
0:08:31 > 0:08:35whether by choice or not, still need a forum,
0:08:35 > 0:08:38they need a place where they can go to meet and drink and talk,
0:08:38 > 0:08:42preen themselves, or simply sit alone with a book.
0:08:42 > 0:08:45They say that sex is the poor man's opera,
0:08:45 > 0:08:48but the cafe was the opera of the dissenters.
0:08:50 > 0:08:53It was also the marketplace of ideas for exiles.
0:08:53 > 0:08:57And Modernism was very much the creation of exiles,
0:08:57 > 0:09:01whether you're talking about Picasso the Spaniard,
0:09:01 > 0:09:03or Joyce and Beckett, the Irishmen.
0:09:05 > 0:09:06In the cafes of Europe,
0:09:06 > 0:09:09the intellectuals got their sense of being a class.
0:09:09 > 0:09:11The mandarins of change.
0:09:11 > 0:09:17When Stalin declared war against what he called ruthless cosmopolitans in the '30s,
0:09:17 > 0:09:21he was in effect attacking the Odeons and those who sat in them.
0:09:21 > 0:09:25But even so, the revolution that brought him to power
0:09:25 > 0:09:27was partly hatched in this very room by Lenin,
0:09:27 > 0:09:31who was a regular at the Odeon in 1916.
0:09:31 > 0:09:35Among the other denizens of the Odeon were a Romanian poet
0:09:35 > 0:09:40named Tristan Tzara, a painter named Marcel Janco,
0:09:40 > 0:09:43a sculptor from Alsace, Jean Arp,
0:09:43 > 0:09:46and a German writer named Hugo Ball.
0:09:46 > 0:09:50It was Ball who decided to start a cultural cabaret,
0:09:50 > 0:09:52a club where they could all perform
0:09:52 > 0:09:55and read their work and show their paintings.
0:09:56 > 0:10:00He rented the ground floor of the building in the Spiegelgasse
0:10:00 > 0:10:04and called it the Cafe Voltaire, and here a movement was born.
0:10:04 > 0:10:06Its name was Dada.
0:10:14 > 0:10:15A nonsense name.
0:10:15 > 0:10:20Dada meant "yes yes" in Russian, it meant a rocking horse in Romanian.
0:10:20 > 0:10:24In any language, it was one of the child's first utterances.
0:10:33 > 0:10:37The word Dada signified the desire to go back to scratch,
0:10:37 > 0:10:41the impossible project of starting culture all over again
0:10:41 > 0:10:45from the beginning, uncontaminated by the language of the elders.
0:10:45 > 0:10:50Marcel Janco made theatre masks for the evenings at the Cafe Voltaire,
0:10:50 > 0:10:54gaudy primitive things, run up with cardboard and poster paint.
0:10:59 > 0:11:04Hugo Ball conducted mock rituals on the cafe stage in costume
0:11:04 > 0:11:06and gibberish.
0:11:06 > 0:11:09SPEAKS GIBBERISH
0:11:11 > 0:11:15The strongest influence on the Dadaists in Zurich was Futurism.
0:11:15 > 0:11:18In Italy before the war, Marinetti had already shown
0:11:18 > 0:11:21how to grab an audience with manifestos and stunts.
0:11:21 > 0:11:25His idea of a gratuitous art at the end of history whose full stop
0:11:25 > 0:11:29had been written by the machine and the Great War was what Dada adopted,
0:11:29 > 0:11:32along with the full range of publicity tricks.
0:11:37 > 0:11:40Provocation was the essential business of Dada,
0:11:40 > 0:11:44its claim to modernity. It was art's parody of revolution.
0:11:48 > 0:11:52But Futurism wanted to abolish the past in the name of the machine
0:11:52 > 0:11:55whereas the Dadaists wanted to produce
0:11:55 > 0:11:58an innocence whose metaphor was childhood.
0:11:58 > 0:12:00"We searched for an elementary art that would,
0:12:00 > 0:12:05"we thought, save mankind from the furious madness of these times.
0:12:05 > 0:12:08"We wanted an anonymous and collective art."
0:12:08 > 0:12:12Arp offended all the conventions of sculpture by making simple jigsaw
0:12:12 > 0:12:16reliefs of brightly painted wood, almost toy-like.
0:12:16 > 0:12:21And he used chance by tearing out scraps of paper and dropping them at random onto a sheet,
0:12:21 > 0:12:24glueing them down in the pattern that they fell in.
0:12:30 > 0:12:33These simple experiments gave the lingering impression
0:12:33 > 0:12:35that the Dadas were against art itself.
0:12:35 > 0:12:39Now it's true that in the years before 1920, not only in Zurich
0:12:39 > 0:12:42but also in Paris and New York, there were some very pointed jabs
0:12:42 > 0:12:46at the cult of art and its priests, the dealers and critics.
0:12:46 > 0:12:49Especially, they came from Marcel Duchamp,
0:12:49 > 0:12:52and the best-known of them was his moustache on the Mona Lisa,
0:12:52 > 0:12:55not only a jab at the middlebrow worship of the artist
0:12:55 > 0:13:00as divine creator, but also a pun on Leonardo's own homosexuality.
0:13:00 > 0:13:05Gioconda was another thing that I made in Paris in 1919
0:13:05 > 0:13:08before going back to America.
0:13:08 > 0:13:12And, well, it was one of these gestures
0:13:12 > 0:13:16because I added a moustache and a little goatee.
0:13:16 > 0:13:19And also wrote underneath something very risque.
0:13:19 > 0:13:22The letters pronounced as the French pronounce them
0:13:22 > 0:13:25mean "she's got a hot ass".
0:13:25 > 0:13:27Then there was Duchamp's Urinal,
0:13:27 > 0:13:31which he exhibited as a fountain and signed R Mutt.
0:13:32 > 0:13:38When I sent that urinal to be shown, is one incident,
0:13:38 > 0:13:40the jury, there was no jury,
0:13:40 > 0:13:44but the people who were organising it
0:13:44 > 0:13:46decided that it couldn't be shown.
0:13:46 > 0:13:48That urinal. So instead of...
0:13:48 > 0:13:50They didn't know I was concerned with it
0:13:50 > 0:13:52because I didn't sign my name,
0:13:52 > 0:13:53as you know.
0:13:53 > 0:13:55R Mutt, the name instead.
0:13:55 > 0:13:59So they just took the thing and threw it away.
0:13:59 > 0:14:01Above the partition.
0:14:01 > 0:14:05Like his bottle rack and bicycle wheel and other ready-mades,
0:14:05 > 0:14:08it said, in effect, that the world was so full of interesting objects
0:14:08 > 0:14:12that the artist need not add to them, instead he could just pick one
0:14:12 > 0:14:16and this ironic act of choice was equivalent to creation.
0:14:20 > 0:14:23When Dada moved to Berlin after the end of the war,
0:14:23 > 0:14:25it took a very different form.
0:14:25 > 0:14:28In Switzerland, it had been jokey and lyrical.
0:14:28 > 0:14:32It exulted innocence and chance. It was an alternative to conflict.
0:14:32 > 0:14:35But not in post-war Berlin.
0:14:35 > 0:14:38To be modern here meant to be engaged in a theatre of politics
0:14:38 > 0:14:42in a city torn by shortages and every other kind of post-war misery,
0:14:42 > 0:14:45as the left battled the centre
0:14:45 > 0:14:48and the right for possession of the streets.
0:14:48 > 0:14:51And it was generally felt that an artist who spent his time
0:14:51 > 0:14:54pulling words out of a hat at random or dropping little pieces
0:14:54 > 0:14:57of torn paper on a table in accordance with the laws of chance
0:14:57 > 0:15:01while other people were storming the Reichstag was not altogether
0:15:01 > 0:15:06living up to the historical possibilities of his age.
0:15:06 > 0:15:09In order for art to assert itself as radical,
0:15:09 > 0:15:14it needed to take political sides in this atmosphere.
0:15:14 > 0:15:191918 brought the end of the German monarchy and a republic was proclaimed in the city of Weimar.
0:15:19 > 0:15:22Between the assaults of the left and the right,
0:15:22 > 0:15:28the Weimar Republic lasted 15 years until Hitler finally snuffed it out.
0:15:28 > 0:15:32The first of its crises was a general socialist rising
0:15:32 > 0:15:35in November 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution.
0:15:35 > 0:15:37The left hoped to demolish
0:15:37 > 0:15:41the Prussian war machine for good, but it rolled over them.
0:15:41 > 0:15:43Strikes were answered by martial law
0:15:43 > 0:15:45and there were many young and radical artists
0:15:45 > 0:15:49who went with the rebels to the left of the Republic.
0:15:50 > 0:15:54Now there already was a strong thread of protest against war
0:15:54 > 0:15:56and authority in German art.
0:15:56 > 0:15:59It came from Expressionism, one of whose tenets was
0:15:59 > 0:16:01that there were no political solutions,
0:16:01 > 0:16:05only spiritual ones which must be made by artists.
0:16:05 > 0:16:07But to younger painters,
0:16:07 > 0:16:10the Expressionists didn't seem objective enough.
0:16:10 > 0:16:13To place one's sensitive ego above the whole of the world struck them
0:16:13 > 0:16:18as arrogant self pity and that was what Expressionism tended to do.
0:16:18 > 0:16:22When Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was in the army, he painted himself
0:16:22 > 0:16:24with his painting hand cut off,
0:16:24 > 0:16:25like a mutilated saint.
0:16:25 > 0:16:28A man symbolically castrated by war.
0:16:28 > 0:16:30In fact, he had never been wounded.
0:16:32 > 0:16:37And so the Berlin Dadaists laughed at the inwardness of Expressionism.
0:16:37 > 0:16:39It was becoming official culture.
0:16:39 > 0:16:42They wanted a more realistic and sardonic tone of voice.
0:16:42 > 0:16:45They wanted an art of the billboards and the streets,
0:16:45 > 0:16:48not one of confession and self-searching.
0:16:50 > 0:16:54And they said so in their manifesto of 1918.
0:16:54 > 0:16:58"The highest art will be the part which has been visibly
0:16:58 > 0:17:00"shattered by the explosions of last week,
0:17:00 > 0:17:04"which is for ever trying to collect his limbs after yesterday's crash.
0:17:04 > 0:17:08"Has Expressionism fulfilled our expectations of such an art?
0:17:08 > 0:17:10"No, no, no."
0:17:10 > 0:17:16"Under the guise of turning inward, the Expressionists have banded together into a generation
0:17:16 > 0:17:21"which is already looking forward to an honourable mention in the histories of literature and art."
0:17:21 > 0:17:25"Hatred of the press, hatred of advertising, hatred of sensations are typical of people
0:17:25 > 0:17:29"who prefer their armchair to the noise of the street."
0:17:29 > 0:17:31GUNFIRE
0:17:31 > 0:17:33"The signatories of this manifesto have,
0:17:33 > 0:17:38"under the battle cry Dada, gathered together to put forward a new art."
0:17:38 > 0:17:41"What then is Dadaism?
0:17:41 > 0:17:46"The word Dada symbolises the most primitive relation to the reality of the environment.
0:17:46 > 0:17:50"Life appears as a simultaneous muddle. Noises, colours, and spiritual rhythm..."
0:17:50 > 0:17:54"Which is taken unmodified with all the sensational screams and fevers
0:17:54 > 0:17:58"of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality."
0:18:14 > 0:18:17The man who made this collage had been in the trenches.
0:18:17 > 0:18:19His name was Max Ernst.
0:18:19 > 0:18:22The image is called The Murdering Aeroplane,
0:18:22 > 0:18:24half machine, half angel.
0:18:24 > 0:18:27Half aggression, and half...
0:18:27 > 0:18:29What would you say those arms suggest?
0:18:29 > 0:18:32Coquetry, modesty?
0:18:32 > 0:18:34I don't know of another work of art
0:18:34 > 0:18:37that speaks powerfully to me of the strangeness of the machine,
0:18:37 > 0:18:39its alien character...
0:18:39 > 0:18:41It's a world and a war away
0:18:41 > 0:18:45from Delaunay and his joyfully spinning propellers.
0:18:45 > 0:18:49Collage for Ernst was a way of rupturing one's grasp of the world.
0:18:49 > 0:18:52He didn't make any overtly political statements,
0:18:52 > 0:18:54but his work pointed to a way of making them
0:18:54 > 0:18:56by cutting out immediate pieces of reality
0:18:56 > 0:18:59and sticking them on a page.
0:18:59 > 0:19:02The best political collagist among the Dadaists
0:19:02 > 0:19:03was a woman named Hanne Hoch.
0:19:03 > 0:19:08whose acrid little images from the '20s ARE Weimar.
0:19:08 > 0:19:11She was never sentimental, never a party tub-thumper
0:19:11 > 0:19:15and being a woman she has regularly been written off as a minor artist.
0:19:15 > 0:19:16That she was not
0:19:16 > 0:19:19and for a vision of a world that was at the same time clear,
0:19:19 > 0:19:22estranged, bleakly funny
0:19:22 > 0:19:25and poisoned at the root, nobody could touch her.
0:19:25 > 0:19:30MUSIC FROM: "Threepenny Opera" by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
0:20:15 > 0:20:18Certain images haunted German Dadaism
0:20:18 > 0:20:20and were its obsessive emblems.
0:20:20 > 0:20:23One was the war cripples that were on every street corner.
0:20:23 > 0:20:26this was the body reformed by politics,
0:20:26 > 0:20:28half human half machine,
0:20:28 > 0:20:31prosthetic men, painted here by Otto Dix
0:20:31 > 0:20:33who had been through the trenches and never forgot it.
0:20:33 > 0:20:36This to him was the very essence of the Weimar Republic.
0:20:38 > 0:20:39With his mechanical parts,
0:20:39 > 0:20:42the cripple was brother to the tailor's dummies
0:20:42 > 0:20:44that the Dadaists had seen in the Italian artist
0:20:44 > 0:20:46who also inspired surrealism,
0:20:46 > 0:20:48Georgio de Chirico.
0:20:48 > 0:20:51Raoul Hausmann took a wooden dummy head
0:20:51 > 0:20:54and turned it into one of the great images of modern alienation,
0:20:54 > 0:20:57The Spirit Of Our Time he called it,
0:20:57 > 0:21:00mechanical man complete with a tape measure for making judgements,
0:21:00 > 0:21:03a simpering industrial statistic.
0:21:05 > 0:21:10But the master of radical sourness in Berlin was George Grosz.
0:21:10 > 0:21:13One of his friends called him a Bolshevik in painting,
0:21:13 > 0:21:14nauseated by painting.
0:21:14 > 0:21:18Actually, it was not painting, but Germany that made him sick.
0:21:18 > 0:21:19This one is called
0:21:19 > 0:21:21Republican Automatons.
0:21:21 > 0:21:24One cripple waves a German flag,
0:21:24 > 0:21:26and the other responds with a cheer
0:21:26 > 0:21:27from his empty head.
0:21:27 > 0:21:30As with politics, so with love,
0:21:30 > 0:21:32Weimar man, in Grosz's view,
0:21:32 > 0:21:33has no real passions,
0:21:33 > 0:21:35but the system has programmed him
0:21:35 > 0:21:36with certain desires
0:21:36 > 0:21:39so that he will consume well.
0:21:39 > 0:21:40Thus, the dummy's mechanical bride
0:21:40 > 0:21:42was the whore.
0:21:42 > 0:21:43Grosz drew prostitutes
0:21:43 > 0:21:46with a degree of moral vindictiveness
0:21:46 > 0:21:49that hadn't been seen in art since the late Middle Ages.
0:21:49 > 0:21:52To him, the whore was the giftmadchen,
0:21:52 > 0:21:54the poison maiden of German folklore,
0:21:54 > 0:21:58the bringer of syphilis and ruin.
0:21:58 > 0:22:04MUSIC FROM: "The Threepenny Opera"
0:22:22 > 0:22:24His theatre of capitalism was as clear and memorable
0:22:24 > 0:22:26as an old morality play.
0:22:26 > 0:22:30In it, everybody and everything is for sale.
0:22:30 > 0:22:33All human transactions, except the solidarity of workers
0:22:33 > 0:22:36as a class are poisoned.
0:22:36 > 0:22:39The world is owned by four breeds of pig...
0:22:39 > 0:22:41the capitalist, the officer,
0:22:41 > 0:22:42the priest and the hooker,
0:22:42 > 0:22:45whose other form is the society wife,
0:22:45 > 0:22:49since, in the end, Grosz didn't see much difference between the two.
0:22:49 > 0:22:52It's no use objecting that there were some kindly officers
0:22:52 > 0:22:55cultivated bankers and decent women in Berlin,
0:22:55 > 0:22:57as pointless as telling Daumier
0:22:57 > 0:23:00that there were honest lawyers in France.
0:23:00 > 0:23:02The rage and the pain of the images
0:23:02 > 0:23:04simply ignores that.
0:23:04 > 0:23:07Grosz was one of the hanging judges of art
0:23:07 > 0:23:09and his verdicts echo, whether you like them or not,
0:23:09 > 0:23:12in every German street and cafe
0:23:12 > 0:23:16and beer hall, now as then.
0:23:16 > 0:23:21MUSIC FROM: "The Threepenny Opera"
0:23:51 > 0:23:53Even though the '20s have gone and with them
0:23:53 > 0:23:56the shared idea that the art of opposition
0:23:56 > 0:23:59could have a real influence upon political events,
0:23:59 > 0:24:03German Dada still remains one of the moral examples of our century.
0:24:03 > 0:24:06For the last 30 years, the Brandenburg gate in Berlin
0:24:06 > 0:24:10has stood as one of the main symbols of ideological division in Europe.
0:24:10 > 0:24:13On this side, they generally don't put you in jail
0:24:13 > 0:24:15for uttering the wrong opinions,
0:24:15 > 0:24:18on that side, they generally do.
0:24:18 > 0:24:21Over there, for the last 50 years, not one artist
0:24:21 > 0:24:24has been able to claim the minimum freedom which the Dadaists
0:24:24 > 0:24:26and the Expressionists took for granted,
0:24:26 > 0:24:29which is the freedom to interpose one's art
0:24:29 > 0:24:32between the official message and its audience.
0:24:32 > 0:24:35Over there, Stalin is still rolling in his sleep...
0:24:37 > 0:24:40But before Stalin, there was one moment in Russia
0:24:40 > 0:24:42when advanced art served the power of the left,
0:24:42 > 0:24:45not only freely, but with brilliant results.
0:24:45 > 0:24:48It happened between 1917 and 1925
0:24:48 > 0:24:50when the promise of Communism was new
0:24:50 > 0:24:53and the newness of art fused with it.
0:24:53 > 0:24:56This hope that the revolutions in art and politics would join
0:24:56 > 0:24:59was a modern idea, but was also grounded
0:24:59 > 0:25:02in the Russia that existed before the revolution.
0:25:02 > 0:25:04Unchanged, frozen,
0:25:04 > 0:25:07with a tiny elite of aristocrats and a cultivated middle-class
0:25:07 > 0:25:11sitting on top of a vast pyramid of illiteracy.
0:25:11 > 0:25:18MUSIC: RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH CHOIR
0:25:24 > 0:25:27One of the few ways of reaching the mass of the Russian people
0:25:27 > 0:25:29was through visual images.
0:25:29 > 0:25:34The Orthodox church had been doing this for 1,000 years with icons.
0:25:38 > 0:25:40Without the European avant-garde,
0:25:40 > 0:25:43Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism,
0:25:43 > 0:25:45there could have been no modern art in Russia,
0:25:45 > 0:25:47but before the revolution, both Moscow
0:25:47 > 0:25:50and St Petersburg were truly cosmopolitan.
0:25:50 > 0:25:53And some of the greatest collectors in modern history,
0:25:53 > 0:25:55like Schukine with his Gaugins and Matisses,
0:25:55 > 0:25:57lived in Russia.
0:25:57 > 0:26:00When Russian artists reacted to Marinetti
0:26:00 > 0:26:02and the Futurist gospel of absolute modernity,
0:26:02 > 0:26:05they were not responding as provincials.
0:26:05 > 0:26:08But, the Russian economy was mainly rural,
0:26:08 > 0:26:10the life of its masses primitive
0:26:10 > 0:26:12and machine production was so new there,
0:26:12 > 0:26:16that the Futurist myths seemed doubly wonderful to Russian painters
0:26:16 > 0:26:19and to poets like Alexander Shevchenko in 1913.
0:26:19 > 0:26:23"The world has been transformed into a single monstrous, fantastic,
0:26:23 > 0:26:27"perpetually moving machine and a sense of rhythm
0:26:27 > 0:26:30"and mechanical harmony reflected in the whole of our life
0:26:30 > 0:26:33"cannot but be echoed in our thought and in our spiritual life,
0:26:33 > 0:26:34"in Art."
0:26:34 > 0:26:36EXPLOSION
0:26:36 > 0:26:37But it was the revolution
0:26:37 > 0:26:39that gave the Russian avant-garde
0:26:39 > 0:26:40its real vision of dynamism.
0:26:40 > 0:26:43Here, was process and transformation,
0:26:43 > 0:26:45the literal renewal of history,
0:26:45 > 0:26:47sweeping everything before it.
0:26:47 > 0:26:51MUSIC: LE DRAPEAU ROUGE
0:27:09 > 0:27:12Artists and poets saw in it the image of the future,
0:27:12 > 0:27:15not the real future of purges and terror
0:27:15 > 0:27:19in which so many of them would end, but a future that never came,
0:27:19 > 0:27:21one of equality, of collective energy,
0:27:21 > 0:27:24in which the arts would act like a transformer
0:27:24 > 0:27:26and this hope reached artists everywhere,
0:27:26 > 0:27:29including some Russians who were working in Paris.
0:27:29 > 0:27:32One of them was the sculptor Naum Gabo.
0:27:32 > 0:27:35Like the rest of the population,
0:27:35 > 0:27:38from the very beginning of this century,
0:27:38 > 0:27:41we all were convinced
0:27:41 > 0:27:44that only a total revolution
0:27:44 > 0:27:49can change the situation, in which we lived,
0:27:49 > 0:27:55during the absolute monarchy of the Czar.
0:27:57 > 0:28:00The revolution had swept away the middle-class,
0:28:00 > 0:28:04and from now on the only patron would be the state.
0:28:04 > 0:28:05The new state artists
0:28:05 > 0:28:07were encouraged to see themselves as social engineers.
0:28:07 > 0:28:10They believed that art could act as directly on politics
0:28:10 > 0:28:12as icons had on religion.
0:28:12 > 0:28:16Material was short, but at least they got ration cards
0:28:16 > 0:28:18and were employed on propaganda jobs.
0:28:18 > 0:28:21They did street theatre with parades and masks.
0:28:21 > 0:28:23They made propaganda trucks.
0:28:23 > 0:28:25They even devised an agitprop train
0:28:25 > 0:28:28that could travel the country, distributing leaflets,
0:28:28 > 0:28:33screening films and bringing posters and drawings to the proletariat.
0:28:34 > 0:28:36There was a man,
0:28:36 > 0:28:41Lunacharsky, who was at that time, the people's commissar,
0:28:41 > 0:28:45for people's education and enlightenment.
0:28:45 > 0:28:47He said, "You must all know
0:28:47 > 0:28:51"that what we need really, what the government need
0:28:51 > 0:28:55"and think ought to be, is an art of five kopeks".
0:28:55 > 0:28:59What he meant by that, not that the art should be cheap,
0:28:59 > 0:29:03but he means the art, which every man and workman
0:29:03 > 0:29:05and peasant could have bought.
0:29:05 > 0:29:08Of all the tendencies in Russian art,
0:29:08 > 0:29:11Constructivism seemed closest, at least as a metaphor
0:29:11 > 0:29:14to the ideals of the October Revolution.
0:29:14 > 0:29:16Naum Gabo explained it.
0:29:16 > 0:29:19It is made of nothing and then,
0:29:19 > 0:29:21the structure was built up.
0:29:21 > 0:29:23So, it is a construction.
0:29:23 > 0:29:27It has also an additional sense in the world,
0:29:27 > 0:29:29a philosophic sense, you know.
0:29:29 > 0:29:32We also demand
0:29:32 > 0:29:36that we should not make images
0:29:36 > 0:29:40which would increase the destructive spirit in man.
0:29:40 > 0:29:43It should give the man
0:29:43 > 0:29:45a sense of reason to live.
0:29:45 > 0:29:48It should be mentally constructive,
0:29:48 > 0:29:49not destructive.
0:29:50 > 0:29:54Vladimir Tatlin was one of the Constructivists.
0:29:54 > 0:29:58The collagist Raul Hausmann made a sort of icon of the man
0:29:58 > 0:30:02called Tatlin At Home with his head filled with thoughts of machinery
0:30:02 > 0:30:05and emblems of travel and industrial design.
0:30:05 > 0:30:07He wanted, he said...
0:30:07 > 0:30:11"To combine materials like iron and glass,
0:30:11 > 0:30:13"the materials of modern classicism,
0:30:13 > 0:30:17"comparable in their severity with the marble of antiquity."
0:30:17 > 0:30:20In 1919, two years after the revolution,
0:30:20 > 0:30:23the People's Commissariat for Education
0:30:23 > 0:30:26asked him to design a monument to the Third International.
0:30:26 > 0:30:29It was going to be 1,300 feet high,
0:30:29 > 0:30:32about 300 feet taller than the Eiffel Tower.
0:30:32 > 0:30:34And unlike the one in Paris,
0:30:34 > 0:30:36this would actually move.
0:30:36 > 0:30:39Inside it, three huge mobile units.
0:30:39 > 0:30:41The lowest, a cylinder,
0:30:41 > 0:30:43was the hall for the Soviet legislative council.
0:30:43 > 0:30:46It turned round once a year.
0:30:46 > 0:30:47Above it, a pyramid,
0:30:47 > 0:30:51the executive block, turning once a month.
0:30:51 > 0:30:52And next, another chamber,
0:30:52 > 0:30:56an information block which spun once a day.
0:30:56 > 0:30:58And finally, a half dome.
0:30:58 > 0:31:00All encased in the great spiral,
0:31:00 > 0:31:03an ancient Middle Eastern form,
0:31:03 > 0:31:07but in steel, on its heroic diagonal, the symbol of dynamism,
0:31:07 > 0:31:09of conversion of energy and of evolution
0:31:09 > 0:31:11from lower states to higher,
0:31:11 > 0:31:14dialectics in three dimensions.
0:31:14 > 0:31:15It couldn't be built.
0:31:15 > 0:31:18There wasn't enough steel in all Russia for that.
0:31:18 > 0:31:21So, it remains one of the great hypotheses of modernism,
0:31:21 > 0:31:24and Tatlin was the Leonardo of the Russian Revolution.
0:31:24 > 0:31:28In his quest for a perfect wedding of art and technology,
0:31:28 > 0:31:30he repeated some of Leonardo's own projects
0:31:30 > 0:31:34from 400 years earlier, like the design for a flying machine,
0:31:34 > 0:31:37a glider, a sort of cheap airborne bicycle
0:31:37 > 0:31:39that every proletarian could have,
0:31:39 > 0:31:41which he named the Letatlin
0:31:41 > 0:31:44from the Russian word "letat", to fly.
0:31:44 > 0:31:46"I have selected the flying machine
0:31:46 > 0:31:48"as an object for artistic composition,
0:31:48 > 0:31:51"since it is the most complicated, dynamic form
0:31:51 > 0:31:54"that can become an everyday object for the Soviet masses.
0:31:54 > 0:31:56"An ordinary item of use."
0:31:56 > 0:31:59Which it wasn't and could not have been.
0:31:59 > 0:32:02Without a highly abstract way of thinking creatively
0:32:02 > 0:32:04about matter, there is no technology.
0:32:04 > 0:32:07Likewise, there can be no science.
0:32:07 > 0:32:09If this power to abstract was the common denominator
0:32:09 > 0:32:14of a coming society whose modernity would depend on scientific progress,
0:32:14 > 0:32:17then its proper art must be abstract, too.
0:32:17 > 0:32:20Abstraction, for the Russians, was reality.
0:32:20 > 0:32:23The whole century, the 20th century
0:32:23 > 0:32:26and the end of the last century,
0:32:26 > 0:32:30even the science has taken and become abstract.
0:32:30 > 0:32:34Abstraction in science is the main foundation
0:32:34 > 0:32:38of contemporary thinking, of scientific thinking.
0:32:38 > 0:32:40And yet, in science,
0:32:40 > 0:32:45it has never been a separation from life.
0:32:45 > 0:32:49And that is what art must always remember.
0:32:49 > 0:32:54That our abstraction, just as in science, is natural
0:32:54 > 0:32:58and belonging to the development of the spirit of human beings.
0:32:58 > 0:33:00This is our spirit.
0:33:00 > 0:33:02It is abstract.
0:33:02 > 0:33:06But it does not mean it should totally alienate,
0:33:06 > 0:33:10separate itself from life. On the contrary,
0:33:10 > 0:33:12it must go deeper in life,
0:33:12 > 0:33:16and regard the laws of life and the laws of nature.
0:33:18 > 0:33:21Gabo took part in the Constructivist International.
0:33:21 > 0:33:24It extended from Holland to Moscow and as one of its members,
0:33:24 > 0:33:27the Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy remarked,
0:33:27 > 0:33:29"Constructivism is pure substance,
0:33:29 > 0:33:32"it is the socialism of vision".
0:33:38 > 0:33:41In this spirit, Moholy-Nagy made what he called
0:33:41 > 0:33:43his light space modulators.
0:33:46 > 0:33:49Another Russian artist, El Lissitsky,
0:33:49 > 0:33:52also tried to marry abstract art with social use.
0:33:52 > 0:33:56Through the '20s, he produced a flow of what he named Proun artworks,
0:33:56 > 0:34:00the word "proun", pro unovis, meaning "for a new art".
0:34:02 > 0:34:04They look like imaginary architecture
0:34:04 > 0:34:06and so in a sense they were,
0:34:06 > 0:34:08because he thought of them as way stations
0:34:08 > 0:34:10between once rigid categories,
0:34:10 > 0:34:13the building blocks of a new Socialist Jerusalem
0:34:13 > 0:34:16in which all the differences between the older artistic professions
0:34:16 > 0:34:20would be merged in one evolved creature, the artist engineer.
0:34:24 > 0:34:29Is this Proun room sculpture or painting or architecture?
0:34:29 > 0:34:31Impossible to say.
0:34:32 > 0:34:35The artist engineer must also be able to work at anything
0:34:35 > 0:34:38and here, Lissitsky redesigned a maths textbook
0:34:38 > 0:34:40for Russian elementary schools.
0:34:41 > 0:34:44He did posters which were meant to communicate with the masses
0:34:44 > 0:34:48in a purely abstract way.
0:34:48 > 0:34:49How do you incite people
0:34:49 > 0:34:51against the White Russian army?
0:34:51 > 0:34:52The message is, beat the Whites
0:34:52 > 0:34:54with the Red Wedge.
0:34:54 > 0:34:56One may doubt if this classic poster
0:34:56 > 0:34:58was ever much use as propaganda,
0:34:58 > 0:35:01but the work of Lissitsky's colleague Alexander Rodchenko
0:35:01 > 0:35:03was more practical in its effect.
0:35:05 > 0:35:08Painter, sculptor, poster maker, designer, photographer.
0:35:08 > 0:35:12He even designed a leather reinforced workers' suit in 1925
0:35:12 > 0:35:14and wore it himself.
0:35:14 > 0:35:16And his emblem was the camera.
0:35:16 > 0:35:19For the camera was objective, unsentimental.
0:35:19 > 0:35:21Instead of symbolist dreams,
0:35:21 > 0:35:22it gave the cheap, reproducible,
0:35:22 > 0:35:25accessible poetry of fact,
0:35:25 > 0:35:26of photomontage.
0:35:26 > 0:35:28In his posters and book covers,
0:35:28 > 0:35:30Rodchenko combined that
0:35:30 > 0:35:33with a brilliant, punchy sense of design.
0:35:33 > 0:35:37His montages are not so much still images
0:35:37 > 0:35:39as frozen cinema, like documentary film.
0:35:41 > 0:35:45Constructivism demanded that every work should speak plainly
0:35:45 > 0:35:49and not mystify anyone. This was true of architecture too.
0:35:49 > 0:35:51The building as declaration.
0:35:51 > 0:35:55This is a design for the offices of the party newspaper, Pravda.
0:35:56 > 0:36:00The trouble was that Lenin wasn't much interested in the avant-garde.
0:36:00 > 0:36:01He wanted a mass art.
0:36:01 > 0:36:04And after him, Stalin, the terrible simplifier,
0:36:04 > 0:36:08made anything that wasn't mass art a political crime.
0:36:08 > 0:36:12The Constructivists were, from his point of view, bourgeois formalists,
0:36:12 > 0:36:15little specks of useless, free imagination
0:36:15 > 0:36:18in the great ocean of his new Russia.
0:36:18 > 0:36:23Some he killed, some he starved and all of them he degraded
0:36:23 > 0:36:26and state art went back to its traditional job
0:36:26 > 0:36:28of reinforcing the narcissism of power.
0:36:30 > 0:36:32And so, you might think, the one brave effort
0:36:32 > 0:36:33to connect revolutionary art
0:36:33 > 0:36:35to revolutionary politics
0:36:35 > 0:36:36was crushed.
0:36:39 > 0:36:42But not quite. Because although we like to think
0:36:42 > 0:36:45that modern art is left wing, or at any rate, liberal by nature,
0:36:45 > 0:36:47it certainly wasn't in Italy
0:36:47 > 0:36:50where Futurism provided the first official style for Fascism.
0:36:51 > 0:36:54Mussolini was enraptured by the rhetoric
0:36:54 > 0:36:58of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the leader of the Futurists.
0:36:58 > 0:37:01His watchword, as it was Marinetti's, was modernity.
0:37:03 > 0:37:06And he too loved what Marinetti loved...
0:37:06 > 0:37:10Speed, dynamism, mechanical force, war,
0:37:10 > 0:37:13contempt for women, the cult of masculinity,
0:37:13 > 0:37:15the cult of youth.
0:37:16 > 0:37:19MUSIC: "Giovinezza" by Giuseppe Blanc
0:37:45 > 0:37:49In 1933, to mark his 10th year in absolute power,
0:37:49 > 0:37:52Mussolini held an exhibition of the fascist revolution.
0:37:52 > 0:37:55The catalogue proclaimed that it wanted to recall...
0:37:55 > 0:37:58"The atmosphere of the times, all fire and fever.
0:37:58 > 0:38:02"Tumultuous, lyrical, glittering.
0:38:02 > 0:38:04"It could only take place in a style
0:38:04 > 0:38:06"matching the artistic adventures of our time
0:38:06 > 0:38:08"in a strictly contemporary mode.
0:38:08 > 0:38:11"The artist had from Il Duce a clear and precise order
0:38:11 > 0:38:14"to make something modern, full of daring.
0:38:14 > 0:38:17"And they have faithfully obeyed his command."
0:38:18 > 0:38:21Montage, collage, blow ups, Cubist figures,
0:38:21 > 0:38:25constructivist devices, references to cinema and photography...
0:38:25 > 0:38:27It was all there.
0:38:27 > 0:38:30And very like the work of the early Russian revolutionaries.
0:38:32 > 0:38:34Enrico Prampolini, one of the fathers
0:38:34 > 0:38:35of abstract painting in Italy,
0:38:35 > 0:38:37did this mural
0:38:37 > 0:38:39of Mussolini's Blackshirts trampling
0:38:39 > 0:38:40the red flags of Communism
0:38:40 > 0:38:42during the Fascist rising of 1919.
0:38:42 > 0:38:45If you switched the colour of the flags and the shirts, of course,
0:38:45 > 0:38:49it would celebrate a Communist victory over Fascism.
0:38:50 > 0:38:53By the mid-1930s, there was little real difference
0:38:53 > 0:38:56between the official style of the Russian Proletarian Revolution,
0:38:56 > 0:38:58as approved by Stalin,
0:38:58 > 0:39:03and the official style of National Socialism as approved by Hitler.
0:39:03 > 0:39:07Both sides thought there was and Hitler's architect, Albert Speer,
0:39:07 > 0:39:09thought that his version was the best,
0:39:09 > 0:39:12even though they all look much the same today.
0:39:12 > 0:39:14It looks like nowadays, you know...
0:39:14 > 0:39:17In this time, we thought there are worlds between it
0:39:17 > 0:39:22because the Russians, in my opinion,
0:39:22 > 0:39:24they were crude in their architecture.
0:39:24 > 0:39:27I had a fine architecture, of course, but this was crude.
0:39:27 > 0:39:31What Speer designed for Hitler over the years had little or nothing
0:39:31 > 0:39:34to do with modernism, except for the crucial fact that he did it
0:39:34 > 0:39:38in the 20th century and made it the most grandiose state architecture,
0:39:38 > 0:39:42at least in theory, since the time of the pyramids.
0:39:42 > 0:39:45Some of the ideas were actually Hitler's.
0:39:45 > 0:39:48In 1925, as a penniless nobody,
0:39:48 > 0:39:52Hitler was already making these sketches of giant domes and arches
0:39:52 > 0:39:55for a remade Berlin to be the capital of the world.
0:39:55 > 0:39:59Speer's job was to build these megalomaniac objects.
0:39:59 > 0:40:02This dome would have been seven times the diameter
0:40:02 > 0:40:04of Michelangelo's dome in St Peter's.
0:40:04 > 0:40:06It would have held meetings
0:40:06 > 0:40:08of 130,000 party members.
0:40:08 > 0:40:10In such a huge building,
0:40:10 > 0:40:12the man who is most important
0:40:12 > 0:40:14of the whole thing,
0:40:14 > 0:40:17for which the building is really done,
0:40:17 > 0:40:19shrinks together to nothing.
0:40:19 > 0:40:20One can't see him.
0:40:22 > 0:40:25I haven't had any way to solve it.
0:40:25 > 0:40:30I put a huge eagle with a swastika
0:40:30 > 0:40:34behind him to say, "Here he is."
0:40:34 > 0:40:38But he wouldn't have been really visible in the grandeur
0:40:38 > 0:40:42he would have deserved with his position in the world.
0:40:42 > 0:40:44Speer knew that authority
0:40:44 > 0:40:45demanded not only size
0:40:45 > 0:40:50but absolute regularity, like the rhythm of jackboots on concrete.
0:40:50 > 0:40:53What was the average man meant to feel in the Nuremberg stadium?
0:40:53 > 0:40:55Nothing.
0:40:55 > 0:41:00It was not my aim that he feels anything.
0:41:00 > 0:41:04I had only the aim to...
0:41:04 > 0:41:08impose the grandeur of this building
0:41:08 > 0:41:11to the people who are in this building.
0:41:11 > 0:41:16And one can already read in Goethe's Voyage To Italy
0:41:16 > 0:41:20when he saw the Roman arena in Verona,
0:41:20 > 0:41:23he said, "If people who have different minds
0:41:23 > 0:41:24"are in such a surrounding
0:41:24 > 0:41:28"pressed together, they all get unified to one mind".
0:41:28 > 0:41:32And I think this was the aim of those buildings
0:41:32 > 0:41:38and not what the small man will feel personally.
0:41:38 > 0:41:39CROWD ROARS
0:41:39 > 0:41:41Sieg Heil!
0:41:41 > 0:41:44Sieg Heil!
0:42:02 > 0:42:06Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil!
0:42:09 > 0:42:12Of all the projects that he designed for Hitler,
0:42:12 > 0:42:16the domes and the arches, the palaces, the stadiums and the tombs,
0:42:16 > 0:42:20only one is left and this is it.
0:42:20 > 0:42:24This was Hitler's reviewing stand at the Zeppelin field in Nuremberg.
0:42:24 > 0:42:27Speer made a drawing of it to show what it would look like
0:42:27 > 0:42:30as a ruin in the year 3,000.
0:42:30 > 0:42:32Bigger than the Coliseum,
0:42:32 > 0:42:35twice as long as the Baths of Caracalla in Rome,
0:42:35 > 0:42:39the stone witness to the beginnings of the Third Reich
0:42:39 > 0:42:41and to the end of history.
0:42:41 > 0:42:44And so it is,
0:42:44 > 0:42:47but not quite as they intended it.
0:42:55 > 0:42:59I am a little bit sad that there's not much left,
0:42:59 > 0:43:02the whole columns have gone.
0:43:02 > 0:43:04And to my astonishment,
0:43:04 > 0:43:09the stone we used was of a bad quality.
0:43:09 > 0:43:15So I only can say thank goodness that I am no more together with Hitler.
0:43:15 > 0:43:19He would have a very mad with me about this bad stone quality.
0:43:19 > 0:43:23MUSIC: "An Alpine Symphony" by Richard Strauss
0:43:30 > 0:43:32Today, only the ruins are left.
0:43:34 > 0:43:38The epitaph for their builder and his client was written
0:43:38 > 0:43:40by WH Auden 40 years ago.
0:43:40 > 0:43:44"Perfection of a kind was what he was after
0:43:44 > 0:43:48"and the poetry he invented was easy to understand
0:43:48 > 0:43:51"He knew human folly like the back of his hand
0:43:51 > 0:43:55"and was greatly interested in armies and fleets
0:43:56 > 0:44:01"When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter
0:44:01 > 0:44:06"And when he cried, the little children died in the streets."
0:44:30 > 0:44:34Under Speer's influence, Mussolini too switched away from modernism
0:44:34 > 0:44:36to a classical style of state architecture.
0:44:36 > 0:44:39This was his Italian forum outside Rome
0:44:39 > 0:44:42and its metaphor is continuity.
0:44:42 > 0:44:48The past underwriting the present, the new Rome reborn from the old.
0:44:48 > 0:44:51MUSIC: "Giovinezza" by Giuseppe Blanc
0:45:19 > 0:45:22If Hitler had been impressed by the ruins of Rome,
0:45:22 > 0:45:26Mussolini actually owned them and he got his architects to exploit them.
0:45:29 > 0:45:32He wanted to build "La Terza Roma", a third Rome.
0:45:32 > 0:45:36There had been the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes
0:45:36 > 0:45:38and now there would be the Rome of Fascism
0:45:38 > 0:45:40halfway between Saint Peter's and the sea.
0:45:40 > 0:45:43It's head architect was called Piacentini.
0:45:43 > 0:45:46It was going to be finished in 1942.
0:45:46 > 0:45:49It wasn't, but a good deal of it is still there.
0:45:51 > 0:45:55This is the only piece of fascist town planning that still works.
0:45:55 > 0:45:57They didn't need to tear it down after the war because it was
0:45:57 > 0:46:02far enough outside Rome not to become a troublesome symbol.
0:46:02 > 0:46:03The result is a set of buildings
0:46:03 > 0:46:08that are the architectural equivalent of Mussolini's famous feat
0:46:08 > 0:46:10of getting the Italian trains to run on time.
0:46:10 > 0:46:13They're efficient, they're easy to clean -
0:46:13 > 0:46:15you just run a damp rag over them -
0:46:15 > 0:46:20but unfortunately, they're quite dead.
0:46:20 > 0:46:23When Hitler made his first state visit to Rome in the '30s,
0:46:23 > 0:46:26Mussolini lined the last couple of miles of railroad track
0:46:26 > 0:46:30coming into the Stazione Termini with stage sets -
0:46:30 > 0:46:32fake apartment blocks, just the front -
0:46:32 > 0:46:34with hundreds of Italians leaning out of the windows
0:46:34 > 0:46:36and cheering the Fuhrer.
0:46:36 > 0:46:40And this provoked one anonymous wag to write the lines
0:46:40 > 0:46:45which in translation run, "Rome of marble remade of cardboard.
0:46:45 > 0:46:48"Salute the house painter who will be your next master."
0:46:48 > 0:46:50Well, this is cardboard Rome.
0:46:50 > 0:46:53MUSIC: "Il Canto Degli Italiani" by Michele Novaro
0:47:24 > 0:47:27Classicism with a pastry cutter.
0:47:27 > 0:47:3025 years later, a lot of southern Californian universities
0:47:30 > 0:47:34were going to look just like this. Mussolini didn't like the style
0:47:34 > 0:47:36just because he was a bully and a braggart -
0:47:36 > 0:47:40he liked it because he had a jackboot in either camp,
0:47:40 > 0:47:42one in the myth of ancient Rome
0:47:42 > 0:47:46and the other one in the vision of a technocratic future.
0:47:47 > 0:47:50So this kind of architecture seemed just right to him,
0:47:50 > 0:47:52as it did to many an American corporate president
0:47:52 > 0:47:55and University regent after the war,
0:47:55 > 0:47:58like the Lincoln Centre in New York.
0:47:58 > 0:48:00All the ingredients of an architecture of state power
0:48:00 > 0:48:04as imagined by the totalitarian planners of our century
0:48:04 > 0:48:07are also present in what used in the '50s to be called
0:48:07 > 0:48:09"the architecture of democracy".
0:48:10 > 0:48:15What grandeur came down to was history without the trim.
0:48:15 > 0:48:19Not direct revival, certainly not ironic parody,
0:48:19 > 0:48:23but solemn parody, high-minded kitsch,
0:48:23 > 0:48:26the architectural equivalent of the world's hundred greatest books
0:48:26 > 0:48:29bound in hand-tooled Naugahyde.
0:48:29 > 0:48:321950s television-set Renaissance.
0:48:34 > 0:48:38Or like the Kennedy Centre for the performing arts in Washington.
0:48:38 > 0:48:42This was the international power style of the '50s and '60s
0:48:42 > 0:48:44as Art Deco had been to the '30s.
0:48:44 > 0:48:50Scale-less, opaque and its metaphors running slightly out of control.
0:49:30 > 0:49:32This is the scariest new monument that I know -
0:49:32 > 0:49:35Albany Mall, the seat of government
0:49:35 > 0:49:36of New York State.
0:49:36 > 0:49:37It was designed for one purpose
0:49:37 > 0:49:39and it does it very well -
0:49:39 > 0:49:42it expresses the centralisation of power
0:49:42 > 0:49:44and I don't imagine there's a single citizen
0:49:44 > 0:49:48who's ever wandered on this plaza and felt the slightest connection
0:49:48 > 0:49:50with the bureaucrats who live in their towers up there.
0:49:50 > 0:49:54The place would make Albert Speer seem delicate.
0:49:54 > 0:49:58Utter simplicity of meaning, no ambiguities.
0:49:58 > 0:50:02And what comes out is not the difference between America and Russia,
0:50:02 > 0:50:04but the similarities between the corporate
0:50:04 > 0:50:06and the bureaucratic states of mind.
0:50:06 > 0:50:09Any one of those buildings there you can imagine
0:50:09 > 0:50:11with an eagle on top or a swastika,
0:50:11 > 0:50:13or a hammer and sickle.
0:50:13 > 0:50:15It makes very little difference
0:50:15 > 0:50:16to the buildings.
0:50:16 > 0:50:19If you forget about the projects and the manifestoes
0:50:19 > 0:50:21and think about what it actually built,
0:50:21 > 0:50:26there's no doubt that our culture has its language of political power.
0:50:26 > 0:50:28It's not linked to any particular ideology -
0:50:28 > 0:50:31it's value-free. It can mean anything.
0:51:09 > 0:51:13The architecture of power and coercion is always with us,
0:51:13 > 0:51:17but in the area of public building our century has not yet managed
0:51:17 > 0:51:20to come up with an architecture of free will.
0:51:20 > 0:51:24But on the other hand, what is left of the art of dissent?
0:51:24 > 0:51:26Not a great deal.
0:51:26 > 0:51:29Only one humane political work of art in the last 100 years
0:51:29 > 0:51:33has achieved something like permanent fame and wide affect.
0:51:33 > 0:51:37It was Guernica, painted by Pablo Picasso in 1937.
0:51:39 > 0:51:42Its imagery was set off by an act of war -
0:51:42 > 0:51:45the German bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish civil war.
0:51:47 > 0:51:51I say "set-off" because although Guernica has certainly been taken
0:51:51 > 0:51:54as the most powerful invective against violence in modern art,
0:51:54 > 0:51:57it was not entirely inspired by the war.
0:51:57 > 0:52:00These motifs of the weeping woman, the horse and the bull
0:52:00 > 0:52:02had been running through Picasso's work for years
0:52:02 > 0:52:05before Guernica brought them together.
0:52:05 > 0:52:09Nor can you call this a very specific statement about politics.
0:52:09 > 0:52:12It's more a general meditation on suffering
0:52:12 > 0:52:15and its symbols are deliberately archaic, not historical.
0:52:15 > 0:52:20The horse, the bull, the fallen warrior, the sword.
0:52:20 > 0:52:24The only modern elements - apart from the late Cubist style -
0:52:24 > 0:52:27are the electric light and the suggestion that the horse's body
0:52:27 > 0:52:31is made of parallel lines of newsprint, like the newspaper
0:52:31 > 0:52:34in Picasso's collages a quarter of a century earlier.
0:52:34 > 0:52:38Otherwise, its heroic abstraction and monumentalised pain
0:52:38 > 0:52:40belong as much to the world of the Greek pediment
0:52:40 > 0:52:44as they do to the time of dive bombers and photography.
0:52:44 > 0:52:46STUKAS WAIL
0:53:03 > 0:53:06Since then, full dress-revivals of the old Dada spirit
0:53:06 > 0:53:09of flat-out opposition to the world as it is
0:53:09 > 0:53:11have been the exception rather than the rule.
0:53:11 > 0:53:14Or, to be exact, ones that work convincingly as art
0:53:14 > 0:53:16have been the exceptions.
0:53:16 > 0:53:20Some have been produced by a Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely,
0:53:20 > 0:53:22who makes sculptures that wildly parody
0:53:22 > 0:53:27the rationalism of technology, of machines and interests they serve.
0:53:27 > 0:53:31I'm involved by our civilisation,
0:53:31 > 0:53:34in our technical civilisation,
0:53:34 > 0:53:38and the problem of machine is the problem of an all-new world.
0:53:39 > 0:53:42It is first of all a sculpture
0:53:42 > 0:53:46and I have tried to give him new dimensions,
0:53:46 > 0:53:49to give him the quality of a classical sculpture
0:53:49 > 0:53:54and to let him, in the same time, to become a fantastic machine.
0:53:58 > 0:54:02This has also the quality of a spectacle,
0:54:02 > 0:54:04of a show, at the same time.
0:54:04 > 0:54:07It has to have some different faces.
0:54:08 > 0:54:12The noises and the sounds are very important - it belongs to it.
0:54:14 > 0:54:18In art, perhaps the machine had nowhere to turn but on itself.
0:54:18 > 0:54:21One cold spring evening in New York in 1960
0:54:21 > 0:54:23in the courtyard of the Museum Of Modern Art,
0:54:23 > 0:54:26a small invited audience of trustees, collectors,
0:54:26 > 0:54:29critics and artists assembled to experience
0:54:29 > 0:54:31what Tinguely called his homage to New York,
0:54:31 > 0:54:34a machine which, with a little help from its friends,
0:54:34 > 0:54:37succeeded in its intention of assassinating itself.
0:54:37 > 0:54:39A self-destroying work of art
0:54:39 > 0:54:43for an audience composed mainly of millionaires.
0:54:52 > 0:54:54SIREN BLARES
0:55:04 > 0:55:05Bravo!
0:55:05 > 0:55:07CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
0:55:07 > 0:55:09Bravo!
0:55:15 > 0:55:18MUSIC: "Happy End" by Kurt Weill
0:55:26 > 0:55:30This was a long way from the original spirit of Berlin Dada in the '20s,
0:55:30 > 0:55:33with its hope of changing society and to hell with amusing it.
0:55:33 > 0:55:36It was as far as the Berlin railway station of the '20s -
0:55:36 > 0:55:41when it was one of the hubs of a shuttling, changing European avant-garde -
0:55:41 > 0:55:43was from its form today.
0:55:47 > 0:55:49That particular hope -
0:55:49 > 0:55:53of having political effect through painting or sculpture - is ended.
0:56:11 > 0:56:13As far as today's politics is concerned,
0:56:13 > 0:56:16art aspires to the condition of Muzak -
0:56:16 > 0:56:19it provides the background hum for power.
0:56:19 > 0:56:22If the Third Reich had lasted until today, the young bloods in the party
0:56:22 > 0:56:26wouldn't be interested in old fogeys like Albert Speer or Arno Breker -
0:56:26 > 0:56:30they'd be queueing up to have their portraits done by Andy Warhol.
0:56:30 > 0:56:33It's hard to think of any work of art of which one can say,
0:56:33 > 0:56:35"This made men more just to one another",
0:56:35 > 0:56:40or, "This saved the life of one Jew or one Vietnamese".
0:56:40 > 0:56:45Books, perhaps, but as far as I know, no paintings or sculptures.
0:56:45 > 0:56:48The difference between us and the artists in the '20s
0:56:48 > 0:56:51is that they thought that such a work of art could be made.
0:56:51 > 0:56:55Perhaps it was their naivety that they could think so,
0:56:55 > 0:56:56but it's our loss that we can't.
0:57:27 > 0:57:30Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd