0:00:45 > 0:00:49One of the great projects of art is to reconcile us with the world.
0:00:49 > 0:00:52Now, of course, not all art wants to do that or tries to,
0:00:52 > 0:00:55but from time to time, some artists do give you a glimpse
0:00:55 > 0:00:59of a universe which is neither hostile or indifferent
0:00:59 > 0:01:02nor indeed in much need of change.
0:01:02 > 0:01:04And in such a place, you can move without strain,
0:01:04 > 0:01:08because, in some way, it completes in nature.
0:01:08 > 0:01:12Now, for Picasso and Matisse and for the Fauves,
0:01:12 > 0:01:14the Mediterranean was such a place.
0:01:14 > 0:01:20It was the sea that stood for a kind of timeless sensual satisfaction beyond history
0:01:20 > 0:01:26as well as for a continuous historical tradition back to the antique past.
0:01:27 > 0:01:32This is what happened to it within 60 years of the paintings they made on the coast.
0:01:33 > 0:01:38Endless kitsch infinitely prolonged, a terrible parody of pressure.
0:01:38 > 0:01:42No wonder their work looks like a lost paradise now.
0:01:42 > 0:01:45MUSIC: Ca Plane Pour Moi, by Plastic Bertrand
0:02:58 > 0:03:02Of course, the 19th century did not invent the art of pleasure.
0:03:02 > 0:03:03But it broadened it.
0:03:03 > 0:03:05There was some truth to Talleyrand's remarks
0:03:05 > 0:03:08that those who were not alive before the Revolution,
0:03:08 > 0:03:12meaning the French Revolution, did not know the sweetness of life.
0:03:12 > 0:03:15For the rich, it was absolutely true.
0:03:15 > 0:03:18And in fact, the pleasure principle, in 18th-century art,
0:03:18 > 0:03:22belonged to one class - the aristocracy.
0:03:22 > 0:03:24The great image of civilised pleasure in painting
0:03:24 > 0:03:26was the fete champetre,
0:03:26 > 0:03:29a gathering of people enjoying themselves in the open air.
0:03:29 > 0:03:33Culture preening itself in the presence of its opposite - nature.
0:03:33 > 0:03:38These picnics begin with Titian and Giorgione in the 16th century.
0:03:38 > 0:03:42Antoine Watteau painted them in France in the early 18th century
0:03:42 > 0:03:44and they became a staple of court art.
0:03:47 > 0:03:50Thomas Gainsborough married the fete champetre to the formal portrait -
0:03:50 > 0:03:55Mr and Mrs Andrews, contemplating nature as condensed in their own property.
0:04:01 > 0:04:05The landscape and the figures in it, their clothes, their possessions,
0:04:05 > 0:04:10all these things stand for the class that also owns the painting...
0:04:10 > 0:04:12which is normal in art.
0:04:12 > 0:04:14But within a few decades of the French Revolution,
0:04:14 > 0:04:17there was a new ruling class in France and England -
0:04:17 > 0:04:19the bourgeoisie.
0:04:19 > 0:04:21It wanted to be depicted.
0:04:21 > 0:04:25It wanted its pleasures described its life documented.
0:04:25 > 0:04:27And this triumphant middle class
0:04:27 > 0:04:30included not only the conservative painters,
0:04:30 > 0:04:33but some of the most advanced artists of its time.
0:04:33 > 0:04:37MUSIC: Pelleas Et Melisande by Gabriel Faure
0:06:09 > 0:06:11For most of the last hundred years,
0:06:11 > 0:06:14Impressionism has been the most popular of all art movements.
0:06:14 > 0:06:17The appetite for Impressionist paintings never seems to wear off.
0:06:17 > 0:06:19And at the same time,
0:06:19 > 0:06:23Impressionism seems to us to represent a lost world,
0:06:23 > 0:06:26a pre-modern world whose icons have very little to do
0:06:26 > 0:06:30with the realities of our own time and culture.
0:06:30 > 0:06:33And both these things are true for the same reason.
0:06:33 > 0:06:38Around 1870, the field of paintable pleasure dramatically widened.
0:06:38 > 0:06:40Impressionism found its subjects
0:06:40 > 0:06:43in pleasures which nearly everybody above street level could have,
0:06:43 > 0:06:47including the life of the painters themselves and of their friends.
0:06:47 > 0:06:49One thing they all had in common
0:06:49 > 0:06:52was the feeling that the life of the city and the village,
0:06:52 > 0:06:55and the cafes and the parks, the salons, the bedrooms,
0:06:55 > 0:06:59the seaside and the banks of the Seine could become a vision of Eden.
0:06:59 > 0:07:04A world of ripeness and bloom, with an untroubled sense of wholeness.
0:07:04 > 0:07:08MUSIC: Pelleas Et Melisande, by Gabriel Faure
0:07:17 > 0:07:19The Impressionists had their moment
0:07:19 > 0:07:21at the start of the longest continuous peace
0:07:21 > 0:07:23that Europe would ever know.
0:07:23 > 0:07:2644 years from 1870 to 1914,
0:07:26 > 0:07:30a lost world that you need to be very old to remember.
0:07:42 > 0:07:45By the middle '80s, the Impressionist love of spontaneity
0:07:45 > 0:07:47was being challenged by younger artists.
0:07:47 > 0:07:51They saw it as the dictatorship of the eye over the mind.
0:07:56 > 0:07:58The unit, the building block of Impressionism,
0:07:58 > 0:08:02had been the brush stroke, which was as personal as handwriting.
0:08:03 > 0:08:06The greatest of the younger artists was Georges Seurat,
0:08:06 > 0:08:08who replaced the stroke with the dot.
0:08:08 > 0:08:11Hundreds of them, thousands.
0:08:11 > 0:08:12The dot was impersonal.
0:08:12 > 0:08:15It grew in colonies, like coral.
0:08:15 > 0:08:19It stiffened the shapes and gave them the archaic, Egyptian stillness
0:08:19 > 0:08:25that Seurat contrived as the antidote to the Impressionist love of the moment.
0:08:25 > 0:08:29Above all, the dot meant control of colour, step by step.
0:08:29 > 0:08:34Seurat's eye for colour was one of the subtlest in all art history,
0:08:34 > 0:08:36and he wanted each touch to have
0:08:36 > 0:08:39the analytic clearness of scientific thought.
0:08:39 > 0:08:41His subject matter was that of Impressionism,
0:08:41 > 0:08:43but his aims were not.
0:08:43 > 0:08:46He wanted to give his images the density and permanence
0:08:46 > 0:08:49of classical art - order, system, dignity.
0:08:51 > 0:08:53He didn't want snapshots,
0:08:53 > 0:08:56he wanted to reveal the processional aspect of modern life,
0:08:56 > 0:09:00something formal and rigorous and akin to the heroic dandyism
0:09:00 > 0:09:04that Baudelaire had seen in Paris 30 years before.
0:09:05 > 0:09:09"I want to show the moderns moving about on friezes,
0:09:09 > 0:09:11"stripped to their essentials.
0:09:11 > 0:09:15"To place them in paintings arranged in harmonies of colours,
0:09:15 > 0:09:19"in harmonies of lines, line and colour fitted to each other."
0:09:20 > 0:09:22He did this in an enormous painting
0:09:22 > 0:09:25of Parisians strolling on a Sunday afternoon
0:09:25 > 0:09:29on grassy island in the Seine, called La Grande Jatte.
0:09:29 > 0:09:33Here, the middle class at play got the ceremonious nobility of treatment
0:09:33 > 0:09:36that art once reserved for gods and kings.
0:09:39 > 0:09:42Here, pleasure takes on the gravity of history painting.
0:09:42 > 0:09:44Seurat built his space like a Renaissance fresco,
0:09:44 > 0:09:47with the most exacting precision.
0:09:47 > 0:09:50It's held together by complicated rhymes and chords of shape,
0:09:50 > 0:09:52some of which you hardly notice at first.
0:09:52 > 0:09:55The woman fishing there is the twin
0:09:55 > 0:09:59of that tiny figure in the extreme distance.
0:09:59 > 0:10:03The monkey's tail emulates the hook of the dandy's cane.
0:10:04 > 0:10:07The decorum of posture and gesture,
0:10:07 > 0:10:10the distances people allow themselves on that green lawn,
0:10:10 > 0:10:13is turned into the decorum of classical art itself.
0:10:15 > 0:10:17He's a bit ironic about his middle-class moderns.
0:10:17 > 0:10:20They guide about on the grass like tin toys on wheels.
0:10:22 > 0:10:24But the irony is part of the modernity.
0:10:24 > 0:10:27Just because it is a distanced painting,
0:10:27 > 0:10:29it makes you aware of its semantics,
0:10:29 > 0:10:33and the spectacle of art as a language fascinated Seurat.
0:10:33 > 0:10:37He had grasped that there is something atomised, divided,
0:10:37 > 0:10:39about Modernist awareness.
0:10:39 > 0:10:41To build a unified meaning,
0:10:41 > 0:10:45the subject had to be broken down into molecules and fragments,
0:10:45 > 0:10:49and then reassembled under the eye of formal order.
0:10:49 > 0:10:50Hence the dots.
0:10:50 > 0:10:52You can make reality permanent
0:10:52 > 0:10:56by displaying it as a web of tiny stillnesses.
0:10:56 > 0:10:58That is what La Grande Jatte was really about.
0:10:58 > 0:11:02Infinite division, infinite relationships.
0:11:04 > 0:11:08Claude Monet had come to the same place by a different route.
0:11:08 > 0:11:11If Monet had died in the same year as Seurat, 1891,
0:11:11 > 0:11:16we'd honour him as the essential Impressionist and, sooner or later, pass on by.
0:11:23 > 0:11:26None of the Impressionists had praised the surface of landscape more eloquently.
0:11:26 > 0:11:31He was to trees and grass and wind what Renoir was to women's skin.
0:11:31 > 0:11:33But at the same time,
0:11:33 > 0:11:36not very much that Monet painted before his 50th birthday
0:11:36 > 0:11:39had the complete reflective permanence of great art.
0:11:39 > 0:11:41The problem was to deepen the game of seeing,
0:11:41 > 0:11:44to show that the eye was connected to the brain,
0:11:44 > 0:11:47with its immense powers of discrimination.
0:11:49 > 0:11:52But, to do that, one must posses the subject.
0:11:54 > 0:11:57This kind of meditation needs pleasure, and not pain.
0:11:57 > 0:11:59It has to come from the centre of the self,
0:11:59 > 0:12:02and not from its disturbed edges.
0:12:02 > 0:12:04The novelist Gustave Flaubert once remarked that,
0:12:04 > 0:12:08"Art is a luxury, it requires calm, white hands."
0:12:09 > 0:12:13And I suppose, the supreme example of this in the life of a painter
0:12:13 > 0:12:16is the garden which Claude Monet built for himself at Giverny
0:12:16 > 0:12:19about 50 miles outside Paris.
0:12:50 > 0:12:52Ten years later, in 1893,
0:12:52 > 0:12:55Monet was past 50 when he started work on the second half,
0:12:55 > 0:12:58which was a water garden across the road.
0:12:58 > 0:13:01Now, this project obsessed him for 30 years.
0:13:01 > 0:13:04At first, the authorities didn't want him to do it at all
0:13:04 > 0:13:08because he wanted to divert a little stream nearby
0:13:08 > 0:13:11and they were afraid it was going to cause a water shortage.
0:13:11 > 0:13:12Well, it didn't.
0:13:12 > 0:13:15But what it did do was supply him
0:13:15 > 0:13:17with the motifs for his greatest paintings
0:13:17 > 0:13:19for the last half of his life.
0:13:21 > 0:13:24His water garden was a work of art, and it released a stream of others.
0:13:24 > 0:13:27Pottering around in it, he was in complete control.
0:13:27 > 0:13:30He had made the subject as well as the paintings.
0:13:30 > 0:13:32It was, as one art historian rather elegantly put it,
0:13:32 > 0:13:34"His hareem of nature."
0:13:34 > 0:13:37And so, all of late Monet is right here,
0:13:37 > 0:13:42that endless inspection and contemplation of a drowned, reflected world -
0:13:42 > 0:13:46the sky in the water, the lily pads, the willows
0:13:46 > 0:13:48and this Japanese bridge.
0:13:50 > 0:13:53MUSIC: The Harp And The French Impressionist by Maurice Ravel
0:14:11 > 0:14:14The pond was as artificial as painting itself.
0:14:14 > 0:14:16It was flat, as a painting is.
0:14:16 > 0:14:20What showed on it, the clouds and lily pads and cat's-paws of wind,
0:14:20 > 0:14:22was caught in a shallow space,
0:14:22 > 0:14:25just on the surface, like the space of painting.
0:14:29 > 0:14:32The willows touched it like brushes.
0:14:32 > 0:14:36No foreground, no background -
0:14:36 > 0:14:38a web of connections.
0:14:40 > 0:14:44Monet's water lilies were a slice of infinity.
0:14:44 > 0:14:49In them, emptiness matters as much as fullness,
0:14:49 > 0:14:52reflections have the weight of things.
0:14:53 > 0:14:58To seize the indefinite, to fix what is unstable,
0:14:58 > 0:15:04to give form to sights so complex, so nuanced, that they can hardly be named.
0:15:04 > 0:15:07This was a basic project of Modernism.
0:15:07 > 0:15:11It went against the smug view of reality that materialism gives us.
0:15:12 > 0:15:17And it could only be developed in a context of visual pleasure.
0:15:17 > 0:15:19No distractions.
0:15:21 > 0:15:26Its other pioneer, but a very different one, was Paul Cezanne.
0:15:26 > 0:15:30From 1880 to the year of this death, 1906,
0:15:30 > 0:15:33Cezanne spent most of his time working here,
0:15:33 > 0:15:37in the South of France, in a studio outside Aix-en-Provence.
0:15:41 > 0:15:45This studio is one of the sacred places of the modern mind,
0:15:45 > 0:15:46a kind of reliquary.
0:15:46 > 0:15:49But the irritable diabetic ghost who haunts it still baffles us,
0:15:49 > 0:15:55partly because he spent those 25 years secluded in a small town
0:15:55 > 0:15:57and we don't know much about what he really thought,
0:15:57 > 0:16:00and partly too because so much later painting
0:16:00 > 0:16:03claimed Cezanne as its ancestor.
0:16:04 > 0:16:07In an earlier programme, I mentioned Cezanne's effect on Cubism
0:16:07 > 0:16:11as a painter looking for structures in a welter of uncertainties -
0:16:11 > 0:16:13a genius of doubt.
0:16:13 > 0:16:14Which he was.
0:16:14 > 0:16:16But he never imagined Cubism
0:16:16 > 0:16:20and he would have loathed the very idea of abstract painting.
0:16:20 > 0:16:24The one great desire of his work was to return you to the world,
0:16:24 > 0:16:26to the look and feel of things,
0:16:26 > 0:16:29to prove the coherence of what he saw
0:16:29 > 0:16:32when he looked, for example, at some onions on a table.
0:16:35 > 0:16:40MUSIC: French Music For Two Pianos by Francis Poulenc
0:17:01 > 0:17:05He took an enormous amount of time and trouble over his paintings,
0:17:05 > 0:17:07sitting after sitting.
0:17:08 > 0:17:10By the time a still life was finished,
0:17:10 > 0:17:13the onions were sprouting, the apples withered.
0:17:51 > 0:17:53The landscape could not decay
0:17:53 > 0:17:56and Cezanne made a point of trudging out to his view, day after day,
0:17:56 > 0:17:58lugging his portable easel in all weathers,
0:17:58 > 0:18:00until he died of a chill
0:18:00 > 0:18:04that he caught from painting in the open air.
0:18:04 > 0:18:05He was a Provencal,
0:18:05 > 0:18:09and his art proclaims that before it says anything else.
0:18:09 > 0:18:14This landscape was in his blood - clear, bony, archaic
0:18:14 > 0:18:16and as recognisable on an instinctive level
0:18:16 > 0:18:19as taste of olives or cold water.
0:18:21 > 0:18:24And what did he paint? Approximations.
0:18:24 > 0:18:26The art schools used to teach
0:18:26 > 0:18:30that Cezanne wanted to reduce nature to spheres and cubes and cylinders.
0:18:30 > 0:18:34This is nonsense. He was a most ungeometrical painter.
0:18:38 > 0:18:42Instead of clear forms, he set down tiny adjustments.
0:18:42 > 0:18:47You see him engaging his subject, inch by inch, minute by minute.
0:18:50 > 0:18:54Cezanne had no time for smooth generalisations.
0:18:54 > 0:18:55And by the end of his life,
0:18:55 > 0:18:58he wasn't interested in the Impressionist snapshot either -
0:18:58 > 0:19:01the one day painting that set down one scene
0:19:01 > 0:19:04under one fleeting condition of light.
0:19:06 > 0:19:09He painted the same motifs over and over again
0:19:09 > 0:19:12without ever once repeating himself.
0:19:12 > 0:19:16The hill that became his emblem was Mont Ste-Victoire, outside Aix.
0:19:20 > 0:19:23He wanted his images to be the accumulated evidence of thought,
0:19:23 > 0:19:28every painting a deposit, a sort of uneven crust of observations.
0:19:29 > 0:19:31The more he painted, the more he saw.
0:19:31 > 0:19:36And the more he saw, the more manifold and unattainable truth became.
0:19:38 > 0:19:41No painter ever achieved more in such isolation.
0:19:41 > 0:19:45Instead of facility, he had an immense scrupulousness.
0:19:45 > 0:19:49And so, he was frustrated most of the time, right up to the end.
0:19:51 > 0:19:56A few weeks before his death, he wrote a letter to his son in Paris.
0:19:56 > 0:19:57"I must tell you that, as a painter,
0:19:57 > 0:20:01"I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature.
0:20:01 > 0:20:05"But with me, the realisation of my sensations is always painful.
0:20:05 > 0:20:10"I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses.
0:20:10 > 0:20:15"I do not have the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature."
0:20:26 > 0:20:30But the idea that nature is endless suggests that it is also paradise.
0:20:30 > 0:20:34And other painters than Cezanne believed so too.
0:20:34 > 0:20:38MUSIC: Printemps by Claude Debussy
0:21:25 > 0:21:28What happened was that artists were looking for the kind of landscape
0:21:28 > 0:21:31that suited the pictures they wanted to do.
0:21:31 > 0:21:34Van Gogh's disappearance to Arles was part of that,
0:21:34 > 0:21:36and so were the trips that Derain and Matisse
0:21:36 > 0:21:38made to Collioure in the early 1900s.
0:21:38 > 0:21:42What they were looking for was a greater purity of natural sensation.
0:21:42 > 0:21:47Instead of grey Paris, they wanted the blue sky and the silvery olives
0:21:47 > 0:21:49and the red earth and the lavender.
0:21:49 > 0:21:52It wasn't a question of detaching colour from nature.
0:21:52 > 0:21:57Rather the aim was to find in nature
0:21:57 > 0:22:00a special kind of chromatic intensity -
0:22:00 > 0:22:03colour that spoke directly to the psyche
0:22:03 > 0:22:05and could be concentrated on a canvas.
0:22:07 > 0:22:10The man who did most to bring in the idea of independent, symbolic colour
0:22:10 > 0:22:12and free its role in art
0:22:12 > 0:22:16was a brilliant, histrionic fugitive named Paul Gauguin.
0:22:16 > 0:22:20Now, everybody knows something about him. He was the archetypal dropout.
0:22:20 > 0:22:23The man who gave up banking to paint,
0:22:23 > 0:22:25who went half crazy with his mad friend, Van Gogh,
0:22:25 > 0:22:29trying to set up and artists' commune in the Yellow House at Arles,
0:22:29 > 0:22:32and who left his wife for the embraces of the Tahitians.
0:22:37 > 0:22:40What provoked his famous escape was the great Paris exposition,
0:22:40 > 0:22:43which had a Tahitian sideshow and travel brochures which read,
0:22:43 > 0:22:50"The lucky inhabitants of the remote South Seas paradise of Tahiti know life only at its brightest."
0:22:54 > 0:22:56The idea of the noble savage,
0:22:56 > 0:23:00living in a blissful state of virtue in the fruitful bosom of nature,
0:23:00 > 0:23:02was one of the great fantasies of European thought,
0:23:02 > 0:23:06and Tahiti was the proof that this creature existed.
0:23:06 > 0:23:09So the myth of Tahiti blossomed very quickly.
0:23:09 > 0:23:13Moreover, Paradise was a French colony.
0:23:13 > 0:23:17So in 1891, Gauguin set off, cheered on by his friends and admirers
0:23:17 > 0:23:20who, nevertheless, wisely stayed in Paris.
0:23:21 > 0:23:25Instead of paradise, he found a trading port.
0:23:25 > 0:23:29Instead of noble savages, prostitutes.
0:23:29 > 0:23:31A culture wrecked by bibles and booze,
0:23:31 > 0:23:33its rituals dead, its memory lost,
0:23:33 > 0:23:37its population down from 40,000 in Captain Cook's time
0:23:37 > 0:23:39to 6,000 in Gauguin's.
0:23:41 > 0:23:45So the paradise Gauguin painted was deceptive, even pessimistic,
0:23:45 > 0:23:47a lost Eden full of cultural ghosts.
0:23:47 > 0:23:50And his Tahitians were like survivors of a golden age
0:23:50 > 0:23:52that they could not remember.
0:23:53 > 0:23:56"Those nymphs, I want to perpetuate them,
0:23:56 > 0:23:59"with the golden skins,
0:23:59 > 0:24:01"their searching animal odour,
0:24:01 > 0:24:04"their tropical savours."
0:24:04 > 0:24:07It was his colour that pointed to the future.
0:24:07 > 0:24:08The colours of Tahiti were brilliant,
0:24:08 > 0:24:11and Gauguin used them with a moody intensity.
0:24:13 > 0:24:16He believed that colour could act almost like words,
0:24:16 > 0:24:19that it held an exact counterpart for every emotion
0:24:19 > 0:24:21and every nuance of feeling.
0:24:21 > 0:24:25Colour became the interpreter between the mind and the world.
0:24:25 > 0:24:29It was a language made up of patches on a flat surface.
0:24:29 > 0:24:32Its job was to express rather than to describe.
0:24:36 > 0:24:39For younger painters, this was a tremendous liberty.
0:24:39 > 0:24:41But they wanted to use it inside France,
0:24:41 > 0:24:45and its natural theatre was the South.
0:24:45 > 0:24:50For colour was the sign of vitality, the emblem of well-being.
0:24:50 > 0:24:52MUSIC: La Belle Excentrique by Erik Satie
0:26:23 > 0:26:26What came out of this was a movement named Fauvism,
0:26:26 > 0:26:28which essentially meant the work of the three painters
0:26:28 > 0:26:30in the early 1900s -
0:26:30 > 0:26:31Andre Derain,
0:26:31 > 0:26:33Maurice de Vlaminck
0:26:33 > 0:26:35and Henri Matisse.
0:26:36 > 0:26:39The word "fauve" means wild beast.
0:26:39 > 0:26:42It was a tag given them in 1905 by a dubious critic
0:26:42 > 0:26:45who had been offended by the intensity of their paintings.
0:26:45 > 0:26:49And what they produced was less a movement than an episode -
0:26:49 > 0:26:53a meeting of instincts among painters who liked strong sensation,
0:26:53 > 0:26:56but had no binding theory.
0:26:56 > 0:26:59If you can imagine an aesthetic based solely on exhilaration,
0:26:59 > 0:27:01this came close to it.
0:27:01 > 0:27:05MUSIC: Traditional Folk Music Of Great Britain And France. L'Esprit De Paris
0:27:59 > 0:28:03The master of reflection within pleasure was Henri Matisse.
0:28:03 > 0:28:06He was born in 1869 and he died in 1954.
0:28:06 > 0:28:08And nowhere in the span of his work
0:28:08 > 0:28:11do you feel a trace of the alienation and conflict
0:28:11 > 0:28:12to which Modernism consigned us.
0:28:14 > 0:28:16His studio was a place of equilibrium
0:28:16 > 0:28:19that produced images of refuge for 60 continuous years.
0:28:21 > 0:28:25In 1904, Matisse got interested in Seurat's technique of pointillism,
0:28:25 > 0:28:28the coloured dots that were being used by his followers,
0:28:28 > 0:28:31among them, Matisse's friend, the painter Signac.
0:28:33 > 0:28:35Signac had a house at St Tropez
0:28:35 > 0:28:38and Matisse went there in the summer of 1904.
0:28:38 > 0:28:42The result was one of those awkward demonstration pieces of modern art,
0:28:42 > 0:28:44where Matisse's literary instincts
0:28:44 > 0:28:47merged with his fantasies about Arcadia,
0:28:47 > 0:28:49a picnic by the sea at St Tropez,
0:28:49 > 0:28:53with a lateen rigged boat and a pine tree
0:28:53 > 0:28:55and a cluster of spotty, bulbous nudes,
0:28:55 > 0:28:58and a thoroughly Baudelairean title -
0:28:58 > 0:29:01Luxury, Calm And Pleasure.
0:29:01 > 0:29:05It was Matisse's first image of the Mediterranean as a state of mind.
0:29:05 > 0:29:08A clumsy painting but a portent.
0:29:08 > 0:29:12In 1905, Matisse went with Andre Derain
0:29:12 > 0:29:14to paint in the little coastal village of Collioure,
0:29:14 > 0:29:16near the Spanish border.
0:29:16 > 0:29:20This was one of the crucial moments in the short history of Fauvism,
0:29:20 > 0:29:22because at Collioure,
0:29:22 > 0:29:25both men painted their most radical pictures so far.
0:29:25 > 0:29:29This was the point at which Matisse's colour broke free.
0:29:29 > 0:29:33Thick blobs of paint one moment, bare canvas the next,
0:29:33 > 0:29:36and the harsh glitter of local colour
0:29:36 > 0:29:39to mimic the dazzle of afternoon light on the water.
0:29:40 > 0:29:43The new Matisses were very shocking indeed.
0:29:43 > 0:29:45Their defenders were uncertain about them
0:29:45 > 0:29:48and their detractors thought them barbaric.
0:29:51 > 0:29:55Particularly offensive was Matisse's use of this new colour system,
0:29:55 > 0:29:59discordant and ragged, in the familiar matrix of the salon portrait -
0:29:59 > 0:30:01even though the victim was his wife.
0:30:12 > 0:30:16Time and again, Matisse set down an image of a pre-civilised world,
0:30:16 > 0:30:18Eden before the fall.
0:30:18 > 0:30:21Gauguin's dream, inhabited by men and women without a history,
0:30:21 > 0:30:25languid as plants or energetic as animals.
0:30:25 > 0:30:27The primitive look of these two huge paintings,
0:30:27 > 0:30:30The Dance and Music, still throws you.
0:30:30 > 0:30:33Matisse presents his image of music at its origins,
0:30:33 > 0:30:37enacted by half a dozen naked cavemen, prehistorical,
0:30:37 > 0:30:40pre-social almost, and definitely pre-technological.
0:30:42 > 0:30:45A reed flute or two, the slap of hand on skin,
0:30:45 > 0:30:49and yet, how powerful that editing down is.
0:30:49 > 0:30:52The simplest elements, Earth, sky, body,
0:30:52 > 0:30:56each allotted its own local colour, and nothing more.
0:30:56 > 0:30:59And within that simplicity, what energy.
0:30:59 > 0:31:03The Dance is one of the few entirely convincing images of ecstasy
0:31:03 > 0:31:05made in the 20th century.
0:31:05 > 0:31:07That circle of twisting,
0:31:07 > 0:31:11stamping maenads takes you right back down the line
0:31:11 > 0:31:16to the red figure vases of Greece, and beyond them to the caves.
0:31:16 > 0:31:19It tries to be as old as dance itself.
0:31:24 > 0:31:27Matisse got the idea in the summer of 1905 at Collioure,
0:31:27 > 0:31:31while watching some fishermen and peasants in a circular dance.
0:31:31 > 0:31:36TRADITIONAL FOLK MUSIC
0:33:16 > 0:33:20The other side of this coin was an intense interest in civilised craft -
0:33:20 > 0:33:23Islamic pottery, Persian miniatures.
0:33:23 > 0:33:26Matisse loved pattern, and through it, he gives you
0:33:26 > 0:33:29the illusion of a completely full world, where everything,
0:33:29 > 0:33:33background, foreground and in-between acts equally on the eye.
0:33:35 > 0:33:39One of the results was The Red Studio, which he painted in 1912.
0:33:41 > 0:33:44On one hand, he wants to bring you into the painting,
0:33:44 > 0:33:47to make you fall into it, like walking through the looking glass.
0:33:47 > 0:33:50That box of crayons is put just under your hand,
0:33:50 > 0:33:53as it was under his.
0:33:53 > 0:33:57But then, it isn't a real space, and because it's all soaked in red,
0:33:57 > 0:33:59a red beyond ordinary experience,
0:33:59 > 0:34:02it describes itself as a fiction, as art.
0:34:05 > 0:34:08Like a Persian miniature, it's all inlaid pattern.
0:34:12 > 0:34:17And more than that, everything in it is a work either of art or of craft.
0:34:17 > 0:34:19The paintings are Matisse's.
0:34:19 > 0:34:21So are the sculptures.
0:34:23 > 0:34:26The only hint of nature is the plant,
0:34:26 > 0:34:30but it's a very tame plant, a house plant trying to be a work of art,
0:34:30 > 0:34:32and it's trained to rhyme with the curves of that chair.
0:34:34 > 0:34:37And those curves are also reflected on the other side of the room
0:34:37 > 0:34:40in a pink painting of a nude.
0:34:43 > 0:34:45So the red studio is, among other things,
0:34:45 > 0:34:48a poem about how painting refers to itself,
0:34:48 > 0:34:50how art nourishes itself from other art,
0:34:50 > 0:34:54and how, to this cast of mind, art can form its own republic of pleasure,
0:34:54 > 0:34:59a Switzerland, a parenthesis within the real-world,
0:34:59 > 0:35:00a paradise.
0:35:02 > 0:35:06In 1916, Matisse moved more or less permanently
0:35:06 > 0:35:08to the south of France, to Nice.
0:35:08 > 0:35:11He found an apartment in the Hotel Regina,
0:35:11 > 0:35:14named after Queen Victoria, who had stayed there.
0:35:16 > 0:35:19When the Great War broke out in 1914,
0:35:19 > 0:35:21he was 45, too old to fight,
0:35:21 > 0:35:24too wise to imagine that his painting
0:35:24 > 0:35:26could interpose itself between history and its victims,
0:35:26 > 0:35:30and too certain of his aims as an artist to change them, anyway.
0:35:31 > 0:35:35I don't suppose that any great artist since the 18th century
0:35:35 > 0:35:38has so devoted his work to an idea of comfort and refuge.
0:35:38 > 0:35:44Matisse once said that he wanted his art to have the effect of a good armchair upon a tired businessman.
0:35:44 > 0:35:48Now, 20 years ago, when we thought that art was going to change the world,
0:35:48 > 0:35:51this seemed, at best, rather a limited aim.
0:35:51 > 0:35:54But now that I'm sure that it can't and it won't,
0:35:54 > 0:35:57I can only admire Matisse's common sense.
0:35:57 > 0:36:03He thought that an educated bourgeoisie is the one audience that an advanced art can claim,
0:36:03 > 0:36:05and it seems that history has shown he was right.
0:36:06 > 0:36:09Anyway, this is where he lived and what he painted -
0:36:09 > 0:36:11the great indoors.
0:36:11 > 0:36:15And how fitting it is that so many of Matisse's best paintings
0:36:15 > 0:36:18should have been done in apartments and hotels.
0:36:18 > 0:36:23The room is a metaphor of their nature - a private place,
0:36:23 > 0:36:25always fresh, signifying luxury.
0:36:25 > 0:36:29The playpen of the adult mind. A womb with a view.
0:36:29 > 0:36:33And the common theme of Matisse's Mediterranean interiors
0:36:33 > 0:36:38is that of looking out on benevolent nature from a position of absolute security.
0:36:38 > 0:36:43The filter between those two worlds is the shutters.
0:36:43 > 0:36:47MUSIC: "Concertino Pour Piano Et Orchestre" by Jean Francaix
0:37:01 > 0:37:04"My purpose is to render my emotion.
0:37:05 > 0:37:08"This state of soul is created by the objects which surround me
0:37:08 > 0:37:12"and which react in me, from the horizon to myself.
0:37:12 > 0:37:16"I express as naturally the space and the objects which are situated there
0:37:16 > 0:37:20"as if I had only the sea and the sky in front of me.
0:37:20 > 0:37:23"That is the simplest thing in the world."
0:38:18 > 0:38:20"In order to paint my pictures,
0:38:20 > 0:38:24"I need to remain for several days in the same state of mind,
0:38:24 > 0:38:28"and I don't find this in any atmosphere but that of the Cote d'Azur."
0:38:28 > 0:38:30There were other painters who believed
0:38:30 > 0:38:33their emotional temperature was always right on the Mediterranean.
0:38:33 > 0:38:38Notably, Pierre Bonnard, who, after years of painting trips to the south,
0:38:38 > 0:38:41finally moved to this house near Cannes in 1925.
0:38:41 > 0:38:45Matisse would never have lived in a garden like this.
0:38:46 > 0:38:49In some ways, Bonnard was his opposite,
0:38:49 > 0:38:52the little bourgeois against the grand one.
0:38:52 > 0:38:55A poet of unpruned domestic intimacy, rather than of the grand apartment.
0:38:58 > 0:39:02Matisse's compositions carried an air of formal grandeur,
0:39:02 > 0:39:04of declamation in the high tradition of French art,
0:39:04 > 0:39:06but Bonnard's did not.
0:39:06 > 0:39:09In still life, he took things as he found them,
0:39:09 > 0:39:11or at least he painted them to seem so.
0:39:11 > 0:39:17The arrangement of jugs and bowls and plates on that breakfast table seems fragile and chancy -
0:39:17 > 0:39:19they've strayed into view.
0:39:21 > 0:39:25And even when the still life is more arranged, like this one,
0:39:25 > 0:39:28he vaporises it with colour and with loose brushwork
0:39:28 > 0:39:33so that it seems soft, half-formed, ready to disappear, as moments do.
0:39:35 > 0:39:39Everything in Bonnard is seen with the private eye, not the public one.
0:39:39 > 0:39:43The food about the house, the flowers around the house,
0:39:43 > 0:39:44and the woman.
0:39:48 > 0:39:52She is almost always the same woman, Marie Boursin.
0:39:54 > 0:39:58Bonnard met her in 1894, and after a liaison that lasted
0:39:58 > 0:40:01more than 30 years, he finally married her.
0:40:01 > 0:40:04They then lived together until 1942, when she died.
0:40:04 > 0:40:09Far from being the contented painter's wife in a cottage in the South of France,
0:40:09 > 0:40:13she was a nagging, jealous shrew, who made life impossible for him and his friends,
0:40:13 > 0:40:16knew nothing about painting, and couldn't even cook.
0:40:16 > 0:40:20But he was utterly and masochistically loyal to her.
0:40:22 > 0:40:26Bonnard was obsessed with the facts of domesticity
0:40:26 > 0:40:29and the memories of sexual pleasure, the privacy and the glimpsing,
0:40:29 > 0:40:34the feeling that the eye is privileged, a party to all secrets.
0:40:42 > 0:40:46The sexuality of early Bonnard is still amazing.
0:40:46 > 0:40:51At a certain point around 1920, she stops getting older.
0:40:51 > 0:40:55When she was 60, Bonnard was still painting her 30-year-old body.
0:41:05 > 0:41:10But she is always apart, self-absorbed, spied on.
0:41:10 > 0:41:13The perpetual Susanna in her bath,
0:41:13 > 0:41:16with Bonnard as the perpetually peeping elder,
0:41:16 > 0:41:21dissolving her in light, reconstituting her in colour,
0:41:21 > 0:41:26possessing her again and again from a distance.
0:41:26 > 0:41:30MUSIC: "Pavane De La Belle Au Bois Dormant" by Ravel
0:43:13 > 0:43:19The greatest painter of disciplined pleasure between the wars was Georges Braque.
0:43:19 > 0:43:22In 1915, a fracture opened in Braque's career.
0:43:22 > 0:43:25He joined the army and he was shot in the head.
0:43:25 > 0:43:28There was no brain damage, but he couldn't paint for some years.
0:43:28 > 0:43:31When he got back to the easel, he had decided once and for all
0:43:31 > 0:43:34that he could push no further towards abstraction.
0:43:34 > 0:43:40"There is in nature," he remarked, "a tactile, I almost mean manual space."
0:43:40 > 0:43:44And this is what he explored in the still lifes of the '20s and '30s.
0:43:44 > 0:43:48If ever a group of paintings made concrete the desire
0:43:48 > 0:43:54for measure, sublimation, attention and calm, it was these.
0:43:55 > 0:43:59The objects are ordinary - a guitar, newspapers, bottles,
0:43:59 > 0:44:02the routine subjects of cubism.
0:44:02 > 0:44:05But each is given its exact visual weight.
0:44:05 > 0:44:08He wanted to distribute one's attention across the painting
0:44:08 > 0:44:10as evenly as possible.
0:44:10 > 0:44:13What all this meant was an ambition different from Cubism,
0:44:13 > 0:44:17to pick up and reassemble the pieces of the French tradition
0:44:17 > 0:44:20of still life painting that Braque, as a cubist, had helped to shatter.
0:44:20 > 0:44:24The result is solider than cubism, less hypothetical.
0:44:24 > 0:44:27He even mixed sand with his paint to give it more body,
0:44:27 > 0:44:31to endow it with a more resistant surface, like fresco,
0:44:31 > 0:44:34and to insist upon a slowness of inspection
0:44:34 > 0:44:38parallel to the immense deliberation which he brought to the act of painting.
0:44:42 > 0:44:46There wasn't very much in Picasso's output over the same 25 years
0:44:46 > 0:44:49that could really equal that kind of frozen music,
0:44:49 > 0:44:52but then, Picasso had no talent for serenity.
0:44:53 > 0:44:57His whole idea of pleasure was much more prehensile than Braque's.
0:44:57 > 0:45:02He wanted to seize and touch and absorb and enter the objects of the Mediterranean.
0:45:02 > 0:45:05He liked strong, specific sensations.
0:46:17 > 0:46:20The strongest node of feeling was sex.
0:46:20 > 0:46:25Picasso never tried to hide what he felt about it, and when his fear of woman was aroused,
0:46:25 > 0:46:27and it often was, he had to paint it out.
0:46:27 > 0:46:29So, at one end of the scale,
0:46:29 > 0:46:32he produced some of the most demonic images of women ever done.
0:46:32 > 0:46:36This isn't distortion, it's more like dismemberment,
0:46:36 > 0:46:38killing the witch.
0:46:38 > 0:46:42But on the other hand, he painted some of the most intense images of
0:46:42 > 0:46:44sexual pleasure in all modern art.
0:46:47 > 0:46:49They were provoked by his affair with a woman named
0:46:49 > 0:46:53Marie-Therese Walther, whom he met in 1931.
0:46:56 > 0:47:00In the paintings, her body becomes not so much a structure of flesh and bone,
0:47:00 > 0:47:04as a series of orifices, looped together by that sinuous line,
0:47:04 > 0:47:08tender, composed, swollen, abandoned.
0:47:08 > 0:47:15The point is not that Picasso managed to will himself into the skin of this woman - not at all.
0:47:15 > 0:47:17He depicted his own state of arousal,
0:47:17 > 0:47:21and projected it on his lover's body like an image on a screen.
0:47:21 > 0:47:24Her body is reformed in the shape of his desire,
0:47:24 > 0:47:26and it's recognisable to anyone.
0:47:30 > 0:47:34It was about this time that Picasso began to mythologise himself
0:47:34 > 0:47:36as THE Mediterranean artist,
0:47:36 > 0:47:40with a series of etchings called The Vollard Suite.
0:47:40 > 0:47:43One part of this marvellous cycle is autobiographical,
0:47:43 > 0:47:46or, at any rate, in a loose way, self descriptive.
0:47:46 > 0:47:50The sculptor and his model, she the passive and obliging nymph,
0:47:50 > 0:47:53and he the genius of the place, a sort of river god in costume.
0:47:58 > 0:48:01These prints where Picasso's invocation of the past.
0:48:01 > 0:48:05The enabled him to place himself in Arcadia.
0:48:05 > 0:48:08The Vollard Suite was one of the most convincing parts
0:48:08 > 0:48:09of a general revival of antiquity
0:48:09 > 0:48:13seen in terms of the cult of the sun, of pleasure and the healthy body
0:48:13 > 0:48:17that went on in the 1920s and spilled over into the 1930s.
0:48:17 > 0:48:20It goes without saying that there was a much more complicated
0:48:20 > 0:48:24and doubt-ridden Picasso behind these antique simplicities.
0:48:24 > 0:48:28Picasso's image as the old man of the sea was to some extent a role,
0:48:28 > 0:48:32just as Hemingway's famous cojones were a mask worn on the groin.
0:48:33 > 0:48:37Nevertheless, The Vollard Suite remains the last major work of art
0:48:37 > 0:48:41to be directly inspired by the classical Mediterranean.
0:48:41 > 0:48:45It's the end of an immense tradition that lasted for more than 2,500 years,
0:48:45 > 0:48:49and then perished amid the historical disjuncture,
0:48:49 > 0:48:54the suffering, the physical ruin and the irony of the 20th century.
0:48:54 > 0:48:58Within 40 years of the completion of The Vollard Suite, officials in Athens
0:48:58 > 0:49:01were debating whether to remove the caryatids from the Acropolis
0:49:01 > 0:49:06and replace them with fibreglass copies, and the whole Cote d'Azur
0:49:06 > 0:49:10was one mass of pinball machines and pizza parlours from end to end.
0:49:10 > 0:49:15Of course, the more the tradition receded, the more famous Picasso became.
0:49:15 > 0:49:17He turned into a kind of living fetish object.
0:49:17 > 0:49:20He was famous as no other artist ever had been.
0:49:20 > 0:49:23But none of his later Arcadian images would carry
0:49:23 > 0:49:25quite the same conviction as The Vollard Suite,
0:49:25 > 0:49:29because World War II had killed the classical Mediterranean
0:49:29 > 0:49:32just as surely as World War I killed the Belle Epoque.
0:49:32 > 0:49:35One of the first tremors of modernism
0:49:35 > 0:49:38is in a poem by Mallarme called The Afternoon Of A Faune,
0:49:38 > 0:49:43and its very first line runs, "I would perpetuate these nymphs."
0:49:43 > 0:49:45Picasso's motto, too.
0:49:45 > 0:49:50But those nymphs couldn't survive except as a sort of dumb decor after Auschwitz and Hiroshima,
0:49:50 > 0:49:52or even after Guernica.
0:49:52 > 0:49:57And Picasso's efforts to maintain an Arcadian art in his old age
0:49:57 > 0:49:59began to look less and less convincing.
0:50:00 > 0:50:03This didn't happen with the ageing Matisse,
0:50:03 > 0:50:05whose art in the early 1940s
0:50:05 > 0:50:08was suddenly clarified by a brush with death.
0:50:08 > 0:50:11There was long surgery, and then a long convalescence.
0:50:11 > 0:50:14"My terrible operation has completely rejuvenated
0:50:14 > 0:50:17"and made a philosopher of me.
0:50:17 > 0:50:20"I had so completely prepared for my exit from life,
0:50:20 > 0:50:23"that it seems to me that I am in a second life."
0:50:23 > 0:50:25He expressed this rebirth not with a brush,
0:50:25 > 0:50:28and with scissors and coloured paper.
0:50:28 > 0:50:31He cut out shapes and pinned them on a wall or a sheet of paper,
0:50:31 > 0:50:34and cutting straight into colour, he said,
0:50:34 > 0:50:36reminded him of the direct carving of a sculptor.
0:50:36 > 0:50:40It linked drawing and colour in one sweep of the hand.
0:50:47 > 0:50:49The images were like heraldic emblems of pleasure,
0:50:49 > 0:50:51signs for well-being.
0:50:51 > 0:50:53At an age when most painters
0:50:53 > 0:50:56are either dead or repeating themselves,
0:50:56 > 0:50:59Matisse had re-entered the avant-garde, and redefined it.
0:50:59 > 0:51:01These cut outs were the most advanced painting
0:51:01 > 0:51:04and perhaps the most august being made in Europe.
0:51:06 > 0:51:10They showed the wholeness of gesture that most abstract painting wanted,
0:51:10 > 0:51:12but didn't always reach.
0:51:12 > 0:51:16The fast coordination of hand, mind, eye and memory
0:51:16 > 0:51:18as the scissors flowed through the paper.
0:51:18 > 0:51:20One cut, the essence of decision.
0:51:22 > 0:51:27And then the pleasurable digestion - moving the shapes around,
0:51:27 > 0:51:31pinning them here and here until the harmony was reached.
0:51:36 > 0:51:39The cut-outs summed up what he had learnt about Islamic art
0:51:39 > 0:51:42over the years since his first visits to North Africa and Spain.
0:51:42 > 0:51:46One of their sources lies in Moorish tiles in the walls
0:51:46 > 0:51:47of the Alhambra in Granada.
0:51:50 > 0:51:53But they were more than decorative, because Matisse,
0:51:53 > 0:51:55more than any other artist except Picasso,
0:51:55 > 0:51:59had saturated his work in the memory of physical sensation -
0:51:59 > 0:52:03of sunshine and water, the ecstasy of healthy bodies,
0:52:03 > 0:52:06salt and wine and flowers.
0:52:06 > 0:52:10The Mediterranean world, which he evoked for the last time
0:52:10 > 0:52:12in a frieze of diving figures, The Swimming Pool.
0:52:16 > 0:52:18This was his farewell to a subject which had been
0:52:18 > 0:52:23one of the tests of an artist's virtuosity since the 15th century.
0:52:23 > 0:52:25The human animal in energetic movement,
0:52:25 > 0:52:28the body stripped of its guilt, an end in itself.
0:52:29 > 0:52:34Between 1947 and 1951, Matisse was continuously busy with
0:52:34 > 0:52:38what he called "the last stage in an entire lifetime of work,
0:52:38 > 0:52:41"and the apex of an immense, sincere and difficult effort."
0:52:41 > 0:52:44It was also probably the last major work of art
0:52:44 > 0:52:47that Catholicism would be able to evoke in our century,
0:52:47 > 0:52:51and this was the Dominican Chapel here in Vence,
0:52:51 > 0:52:55for which he designed just about everything -
0:52:55 > 0:52:59the murals, the stained-glass windows, the crucifix, the lot.
0:52:59 > 0:53:02MUSIC: "Flute Sonata" by Francis Poulenc
0:55:49 > 0:55:51It was a hard act to follow.
0:55:51 > 0:55:55In secular terms, there was everything to be learned from Matisse.
0:55:55 > 0:55:58He was the most influential painter of the third quarter of the 20th century,
0:55:58 > 0:56:02as Picasso had been of the second quarter, and Cezanne of the first.
0:56:02 > 0:56:04Especially in America.
0:56:04 > 0:56:08But, there was something in his work that wouldn't transplant across the Atlantic.
0:56:10 > 0:56:14What wouldn't transplant was its Mediterranean-ness,
0:56:14 > 0:56:17that ease and sensuous completeness that was rooted in Matisse's own youth.
0:56:17 > 0:56:20This wasn't a matter of style,
0:56:20 > 0:56:24it was a matter of a complete attitude towards life and how to live it,
0:56:24 > 0:56:29and how to sustain human relationships which came out of the 19th century,
0:56:29 > 0:56:33and, for thousands of people, was wrecked by the last world war.
0:56:33 > 0:56:38After that, you could paint Matisses, certainly, but you couldn't BE Matisse.
0:56:38 > 0:56:41That particular paradise was closed,
0:56:41 > 0:56:45especially if you happened to live in a highly utilitarian society
0:56:45 > 0:56:50fuelled by pragmatism and guilt, like post-Freudian America.
0:57:00 > 0:57:04Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd.