0:00:44 > 0:00:47CROWD CHEERS
0:00:50 > 0:00:54'The wish for absolute freedom is one of the constants of intellectual life.
0:00:54 > 0:00:57'And in France, it amounts to a tradition.
0:00:59 > 0:01:02'This tradition is more anarchist than Marxist.
0:01:02 > 0:01:05'It wants to reform reality and the shape of desire,
0:01:05 > 0:01:10'and by uniting people with their desires, it wants to change all life.'
0:01:10 > 0:01:12SIREN WAILS
0:01:13 > 0:01:16'It is ironic and scarcely ideological at all.'
0:01:16 > 0:01:18SIREN WAILS
0:01:18 > 0:01:23'It boasts of its absolute modernity, but its roots lie in the 18th century.
0:01:23 > 0:01:28'It seeks spontaneity but it's doomed to failure when it runs up against the real world.
0:01:28 > 0:01:34'Its enemies are priest, cop, bureaucrat, boss and censor.
0:01:35 > 0:01:37'But it's too highbrow to have a broad base.
0:01:37 > 0:01:40'It breathes the air of privilege and is self-indulgent.
0:01:40 > 0:01:43'Generally workers don't like it
0:01:43 > 0:01:47'and socialists reject it as impractical, which it is.
0:01:47 > 0:01:53'It is the product of young, middle-class people fed up with their own assigned social role.'
0:01:54 > 0:01:56GUNSHOTS
0:01:58 > 0:02:02'The last time it surfaced in France was in May 1968,
0:02:02 > 0:02:04'but the time before that,
0:02:04 > 0:02:08'it took a more complicated and aesthetic form and called itself Surrealism.'
0:02:08 > 0:02:11SIREN WAILS
0:02:24 > 0:02:29Of all art movements of our century, Surrealism was the one most concerned with the question,
0:02:29 > 0:02:31"how shall I be free?"
0:02:31 > 0:02:33Now, many works of art are metaphors of freedom,
0:02:33 > 0:02:36they show us the free play of the mind and the senses
0:02:36 > 0:02:38and their models of choice.
0:02:38 > 0:02:41But Surrealism aspired to be the instrument of liberty.
0:02:43 > 0:02:45It wanted to set people free to save them,
0:02:45 > 0:02:50in the way that revolutionaries and evangelists promise salvation through an act of faith.
0:02:50 > 0:02:53Consequently, there was a good deal more to Surrealism
0:02:53 > 0:02:57than simply a solemn parody of revolutionary threats.
0:02:57 > 0:02:59It had something in common with a religion.
0:02:59 > 0:03:02It had dogmas and rituals,
0:03:02 > 0:03:04it had martyrs and holy saints,
0:03:04 > 0:03:08it had a circle of faithful, and it had a Pope.
0:03:08 > 0:03:11'He was a young medical student turned poet.
0:03:11 > 0:03:13'His name was Andre Breton
0:03:13 > 0:03:17'and in the 20s he developed into one of the great fascinators of modern art.
0:03:17 > 0:03:21'He inspired, as one of his disciples put it, a dog-like devotion,
0:03:21 > 0:03:25'largely because he was very inventive, very perceptive and very moral.
0:03:25 > 0:03:30'Not a combination one gets very often in French or any other cultural circles.
0:03:30 > 0:03:34'So this evangelist believed that both art and life could renew themselves
0:03:34 > 0:03:38'by contacting forbidden areas of the mind, the unconscious.
0:03:38 > 0:03:41'That, in turn, would refresh our sense of the world
0:03:41 > 0:03:44'by disclosing a whole network of hidden relationships,
0:03:44 > 0:03:48'chance, memory, desire, coincidence,
0:03:48 > 0:03:53'a new reality, a surreality, in the word that he borrowed from Apollinaire.
0:03:54 > 0:03:57'The dream was the instrument for this.
0:03:57 > 0:03:59'In dreams, the id spoke.
0:03:59 > 0:04:02'The dreaming mind was unlegislated truth.
0:04:02 > 0:04:07'And so was neurosis, the permanent, involuntary form of dreams.
0:04:09 > 0:04:12'In this, Breton and his circle were part of the great movement of thought
0:04:12 > 0:04:15'whose motor was the work of Sigmund Freud.
0:04:15 > 0:04:17'But they were not really Freudians
0:04:17 > 0:04:20'and there is no evidence that Freud took them seriously
0:04:20 > 0:04:24'any more than Stalin would have taken notice of the Surrealists' masochistic efforts
0:04:24 > 0:04:27'to put themselves at the service of Communism in the 1930s.
0:04:29 > 0:04:32'Breton was a natural clan leader
0:04:32 > 0:04:34'and he soon acquired the devotion of a group,
0:04:34 > 0:04:37'gently caricatured here by Max Ernst in 1922.
0:04:39 > 0:04:42'In these early years, Surrealism was mainly a literary group.
0:04:42 > 0:04:46'But the presiding spirit of Surrealist painting is over there.
0:04:46 > 0:04:49'His name was Giorgio De Chirico
0:04:49 > 0:04:53'and his work was the link between Romantic art and Surrealism.
0:04:55 > 0:04:58'Below the rational surface of 19th century art
0:04:58 > 0:05:03'there ran a fascination with dreams, with mystery, melancholy, fear.
0:05:03 > 0:05:07'It was a world of pre-Freudian phantoms.
0:05:09 > 0:05:13'Its main influence on De Chirico came through Arnold Bocklin,
0:05:13 > 0:05:15'a late 19th century German.
0:05:15 > 0:05:19'Bocklin specialised in images of death and melancholy
0:05:19 > 0:05:21'set among the ruins and the sea coasts of Italy.
0:05:36 > 0:05:38'One thing that he extracted from Italy
0:05:38 > 0:05:42'was the idea of historical places as condensers of memory.
0:05:42 > 0:05:45'And this fascinated De Chirico, too.
0:05:48 > 0:05:51'What he discovered in the squares and arcades of Italy
0:05:51 > 0:05:54'was not their solid architectural reality
0:05:54 > 0:05:56'but their staginess.'
0:06:25 > 0:06:30De Chirico was 23 and on his way from Florence to Paris in 1911
0:06:30 > 0:06:33when he stopped off for a few days here in Turin.
0:06:33 > 0:06:36The city that afforded him more images than any other,
0:06:36 > 0:06:41with its bronze paternal monuments and its vast, melancholy, 19th century squares,
0:06:41 > 0:06:45grandiose and provincial, and to him, extraordinarily new.
0:06:47 > 0:06:51Later he remarked that this novelty "has a strange and profound poetry,
0:06:51 > 0:06:54"which is based upon the atmosphere of an Autumn afternoon,
0:06:54 > 0:06:58"when the sky is clear, and the shadows are longer than in mid-summer.
0:06:58 > 0:07:00"And there is no Italian city," he said,
0:07:00 > 0:07:04"in which this extraordinary phenomenon more displays itself than in Turin."
0:07:06 > 0:07:08So there it was, the verbal blueprint for the paintings
0:07:08 > 0:07:13with which De Chirico was going to have such an enormous influence upon Surrealism.
0:07:27 > 0:07:30'As theatre replaces life, so nostalgia replaces history.
0:07:30 > 0:07:35'And its emblems are the sunlit square, the tiny dark figures,
0:07:35 > 0:07:39'the tower, the stopped clock and the train.
0:07:50 > 0:07:52'De Chirico was still in his early 20s
0:07:52 > 0:07:57'when he was captivated by what he called the metaphysics of these scenes.'
0:07:57 > 0:07:59HE SPEAKS ITALIAN
0:08:01 > 0:08:05TRANSLATOR: The special quality about the city of Turin which Nietzsche talks about,
0:08:05 > 0:08:11revealed a spiritual phenomenon to me which I didn't know about before.
0:08:11 > 0:08:15I understood, in fact, that what he saw in Turin,
0:08:15 > 0:08:20especially in its arcades, was something deeply poetic.
0:08:20 > 0:08:23I realised the value of this discovery of Nietzsche's.
0:08:30 > 0:08:33'De Chirico's Italy is a brooding place.
0:08:33 > 0:08:38'Its perspective suggests that reality is very far away, perhaps unattainable.
0:08:50 > 0:08:53'Human society has ceased to exist.
0:08:53 > 0:08:56'The main figures in his squares are statues.
0:09:00 > 0:09:02'And in the most disturbing of all his paintings,
0:09:02 > 0:09:05'called The Mystery And Melancholy Of A Street,
0:09:05 > 0:09:07'the statue does not appear at all,
0:09:07 > 0:09:10'it just announces itself with the tip of its long shadow,
0:09:10 > 0:09:13'drawing the girl towards it.
0:09:39 > 0:09:41'His favourite image became the mannequin,
0:09:41 > 0:09:44'neither a man nor a sculpture, halfway between,
0:09:44 > 0:09:49'a sketch for a man made up of tools and mementos, parts and emblems,
0:09:49 > 0:09:53'a metaphor of fragmented Modernist consciousness.
0:10:03 > 0:10:08'That tilted space came more from Cubism than real Italian squares.
0:10:08 > 0:10:12'But it wasn't the Cubist scaffolding that Surrealism admired,
0:10:12 > 0:10:14'it was the strange encounters between objects,
0:10:14 > 0:10:20'and the clarity, which later Surrealist painters would imitate because it made the dream look real.
0:10:20 > 0:10:24'De Chirico's space became the norm for Surrealist art,
0:10:24 > 0:10:29'a neutral place, an ideal plain on which odd things met in full light.
0:10:39 > 0:10:42'The root of this idea lay in the work of Isidore Ducasse,
0:10:42 > 0:10:45'who wrote under the name of the Comte de Lautreamont
0:10:45 > 0:10:49'a long, unreadable prose poem called The Songs Of Maldoror.
0:10:50 > 0:10:52'It contained the phrase,
0:10:52 > 0:10:56'"Beautiful is the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table."
0:10:56 > 0:11:00'This summed up the Surrealist ideal of beauty.
0:11:00 > 0:11:04'A beauty of strangeness, of incompatibility and secret correspondences,
0:11:04 > 0:11:08'which was the beauty of De Chirico's pre-war paintings.
0:11:11 > 0:11:14'By 1921, Surrealism, a poet's movement,
0:11:14 > 0:11:17'had got its first major artist in Paris,
0:11:17 > 0:11:19'the young German, Max Ernst.
0:11:22 > 0:11:25'He arrived with a packet of his strange collages
0:11:25 > 0:11:29'and their incongruous meetings of images cut from catalogues and magazines
0:11:29 > 0:11:33'struck Breton and his circle as Lautreamont applied to art.
0:11:33 > 0:11:35'They seemed to subvert the world.
0:11:35 > 0:11:41'They seemed revolutionary, an edgy poetry distilled from the most ordinary materials.
0:11:41 > 0:11:44'They were the view through the gap in middle-class reality.
0:11:46 > 0:11:48'Much later, in the 60s,
0:11:48 > 0:11:51'Ernst was interviewed by his old friend Roland Penrose,
0:11:51 > 0:11:54'once the leader of the English Surrealists.'
0:11:54 > 0:12:00I was born with a very strong feeling
0:12:00 > 0:12:04- of a need of freedom, liberty. - Mm-hm.
0:12:04 > 0:12:08And that means also with a very strong feeling of revolt.
0:12:10 > 0:12:12Revolt and revolution is not the same thing.
0:12:12 > 0:12:15But when you have this very strong feeling
0:12:15 > 0:12:18of this need of revolt, need of freedom,
0:12:18 > 0:12:21and you are born into a period
0:12:21 > 0:12:27where so many events invite you to get revolted,
0:12:27 > 0:12:33through what is going on in the world, and be disgusted with it and so on,
0:12:33 > 0:12:39it is absolutely natural that the work you produce
0:12:39 > 0:12:41is revolutionary work.
0:12:42 > 0:12:46'In Paris, Ernst grafted his collage technique onto De Chirico.
0:12:46 > 0:12:49'This monster is called The Elephant Celebes.
0:12:49 > 0:12:52'Its shape was inspired by a photo of an African corn bin.
0:12:54 > 0:12:58'Its topknot comes from De Chirico's mannequins.
0:12:59 > 0:13:03'But for most of Ernst's images there is no rational explanation.
0:13:03 > 0:13:06'They come from a parallel world,
0:13:06 > 0:13:11'a place of lucid dread akin to the powerlessness that children sometimes feel.
0:13:11 > 0:13:15'Ernst could compress a lot of psychic violence into a small space
0:13:15 > 0:13:17'the size of a booby-trapped toy.
0:13:21 > 0:13:26'One of the Surrealists' favourite ways of evoking what they called the "Marvellous"
0:13:26 > 0:13:30'was by chance association, like seeing faces in the fire.
0:13:30 > 0:13:32'Our minds prefer order to chaos,
0:13:32 > 0:13:36'and so we read coherent images into random sights.
0:13:36 > 0:13:39'The fact that these images are not willed but spontaneous
0:13:39 > 0:13:42'was what interested Ernst and his friends.
0:13:42 > 0:13:45'How could one set up meetings with the unexpected?
0:13:45 > 0:13:48'In 1925, Ernst found a way.
0:13:48 > 0:13:51'He made crayon rubbings from wood grain or stone
0:13:51 > 0:13:55'and then he altered them to isolate the images they suggested,
0:13:55 > 0:13:58'and he called these drawings his natural history.
0:14:03 > 0:14:06'But the strongest illusion of a parallel world in Ernst's work
0:14:06 > 0:14:10'came from the collages that he began to make around 1930.
0:14:10 > 0:14:15'He used Victorian steel engravings cut and reassembled.
0:14:16 > 0:14:20'For us today, their effect has changed a bit.
0:14:22 > 0:14:25'They're still sinister, still disturbing
0:14:25 > 0:14:28'and still marvellous in their power of suggestion.
0:14:28 > 0:14:31'The peculiarity of Ernst's world never lets up.
0:14:31 > 0:14:35'It's always suddenly there, as though stumbled upon.
0:14:35 > 0:14:39'But what we don't get is the sense of an immediate vicious past
0:14:39 > 0:14:41'upon which Ernst's work depended.
0:14:44 > 0:14:47'This Edwardian world looks very remote to us.
0:14:47 > 0:14:49'But it was the world in which Max Ernst grew up,
0:14:49 > 0:14:54'and to subvert it was, for him, akin to an act of terrorism,
0:14:54 > 0:14:57'the irrational attacking the world of ordered structures.'
0:14:58 > 0:15:03It is important in a time when those who run the world,
0:15:03 > 0:15:09but then they can do it only with reason, rational.
0:15:09 > 0:15:15- HE COUGHS - And they are not even noticing
0:15:15 > 0:15:17that...
0:15:19 > 0:15:21..reason has almost nothing to do.
0:15:21 > 0:15:25- Look what is going on in the world right now.- Yes.
0:15:25 > 0:15:30What has gone on in the world in the last 20 years, anyhow.
0:15:30 > 0:15:33Who make... made world history?
0:15:33 > 0:15:37Not the most reasonable people, the mad men did.
0:15:38 > 0:15:42So if a painting is the mirror...
0:15:43 > 0:15:47..of a time,
0:15:47 > 0:15:48it must be mad...
0:15:49 > 0:15:52..to have the true image of what the time is.
0:15:56 > 0:16:00- That sounds a very dangerous parallel...- Everything is dangerous.
0:16:00 > 0:16:05..because if art is to be mad as the politicians are mad...
0:16:05 > 0:16:07No, no, no. We are mad in a very different way.
0:16:07 > 0:16:09- Yes. I suppose so. - Exactly the opposite.
0:16:09 > 0:16:11- That is the great difference, isn't it?- Yes.
0:16:11 > 0:16:15- To one madness we oppose another madness.- Yes. Yes.
0:16:15 > 0:16:21We do not pretend that this madness that we oppose to the other madness
0:16:21 > 0:16:26can heal these people and keep them from doing what they are doing.
0:16:26 > 0:16:30But the artist is only
0:16:30 > 0:16:34somebody who... makes a statement.
0:16:34 > 0:16:39Yes. So the irrational in art is an absolutely essential ingredient,
0:16:39 > 0:16:42- do you think?- It is essential.
0:16:45 > 0:16:49'Irrationality has no given form, and in their pursuit of it,
0:16:49 > 0:16:53'the Surrealists had to mimic the conventions of art in which it appeared.
0:16:53 > 0:16:55'There was, for instance, the art of children.
0:16:55 > 0:16:58'Now, children have always drawn and painted,
0:16:58 > 0:17:02'but not until the 18th century did child art seem a special cultural form
0:17:02 > 0:17:06'with something to tell us about the growth and the life of the mind.
0:17:06 > 0:17:09'The Surrealists passionately believed that it was.
0:17:09 > 0:17:11'They believed in the innocent eye,
0:17:11 > 0:17:14'since young kids were not repressed, as their parents are.
0:17:18 > 0:17:20'Madness was another culture in itself.
0:17:20 > 0:17:23'To the Surrealists, it was the highest form of revolt,
0:17:23 > 0:17:28'the mind's big no to an intolerable world. The poet Paul Eluard,
0:17:28 > 0:17:32'who knew nothing about the sufferings of mental patients who made paintings like these,
0:17:32 > 0:17:35'praised mental illness as "the earthly paradise."
0:17:35 > 0:17:40'And he added that, "We who love the insane know that they refuse to be cured."
0:17:40 > 0:17:43'The first clinical studies of mad people's art
0:17:43 > 0:17:46'were beginning to appear in France in the 20s.
0:17:46 > 0:17:49'To the Surrealists, they were a fertile source,
0:17:49 > 0:17:52'images that were truly obsessive, spontaneous
0:17:52 > 0:17:54'and not censored by the conscious mind.
0:17:55 > 0:17:58'The third source of the irrational was primitive art,
0:17:58 > 0:18:03'the work of self-taught men and women, the Sunday painters, the amateurs and hobbyists.
0:18:08 > 0:18:10'Their compulsion to make images was pure,
0:18:10 > 0:18:15'and thus seemed more valuable to the Surrealists than any amount of professional painting.
0:18:17 > 0:18:22'The greatest of them was Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier, or the Customs Man,
0:18:22 > 0:18:26'with his tight, patiently-rendered visions of a jungle that he had never seen.
0:18:27 > 0:18:32'These, to Surrealism, were the Marvellous made concrete.'
0:19:00 > 0:19:06In 1879, a French country postman in the village of Hauterives picked up a stone.
0:19:06 > 0:19:11He was then 43 years old and his name was Joseph Ferdinand Cheval.
0:19:11 > 0:19:14He had absolutely no training as an architect.
0:19:14 > 0:19:17But he did have a very strong sense of immortality.
0:19:17 > 0:19:21And for the next 33 years, he laboured incessantly here in his own backyard,
0:19:21 > 0:19:2593,000 working hours by his own count,
0:19:25 > 0:19:27to construct this.
0:19:33 > 0:19:37'He made it out of stones and cement and iron bars and bits of wire
0:19:37 > 0:19:40'and oyster shells salvaged from the local restaurants
0:19:40 > 0:19:42'and anything else that came to hand.
0:19:50 > 0:19:53'It was his ideal palace, his testament to the future.
0:19:58 > 0:20:01'It was also the greatest single unofficial work of art
0:20:01 > 0:20:04'that has come down to us since the 19th century.
0:20:05 > 0:20:07'A cathedral of the unconscious mind.
0:21:01 > 0:21:04'The Surrealists drew their own map of the world
0:21:04 > 0:21:07'with the countries redone to their scale of Surrealist interest.
0:21:07 > 0:21:13'No England, but Ireland, which they saw as a place of myth, twilight, and revolution, is huge.
0:21:14 > 0:21:17'The United States don't exist at all.
0:21:17 > 0:21:19'Mexico and Labrador have swallowed them.
0:21:21 > 0:21:25'Australia just gets in, I'm glad to say, but it's dwarfed by New Guinea.
0:21:26 > 0:21:30'Africa is small because the Cubists had discovered it.
0:21:30 > 0:21:33'Germany dominates Europe and the only city is Paris.
0:21:33 > 0:21:36'And no Spain, which is odd,
0:21:36 > 0:21:40'because two of the lynchpins of Surrealist art were born there.
0:21:49 > 0:21:54'The best painter among the Surrealists grew up in this landscape south of Barcelona.
0:21:56 > 0:22:02'His name was Joan Miro and he has outlived most of his fellow artists.
0:22:04 > 0:22:06'In a sense, Miro didn't join the movement.
0:22:06 > 0:22:10'Surrealism joined him. It needed his art.
0:22:10 > 0:22:16'A free lyrical mixture of folk tales, eroticism, sardonic humour and absurdity.
0:22:18 > 0:22:22'As a young man, before 1920, one sees him becoming a Modern painter.
0:22:26 > 0:22:30'First the bright Mediterranean colour derived from Matisse.
0:22:32 > 0:22:35'And then looking to Cubism for the geometry.
0:22:36 > 0:22:41'At this stage, his art is a vision of detail, like a biblical counting of blessings,
0:22:41 > 0:22:45'the folds of ploughed earth, the sharp edges of barn and house.
0:22:45 > 0:22:49'The creatures are laid out flat and bright, one by one,
0:22:49 > 0:22:52'as in one of the Romanesque frescos of northern Spain.
0:22:57 > 0:23:02'Miro broke loose from Cubism with this painting, The Tilled Field.
0:23:02 > 0:23:07'There are the furrows of the plough, a house and a piebald mare in front, suckling her foal.
0:23:07 > 0:23:09'But then that tree has grown an ear.
0:23:11 > 0:23:14'And that lizard is chatting with a snail while reading a French newspaper,
0:23:14 > 0:23:17'a sort of ironical wave to Cubism.
0:23:20 > 0:23:23'And up in the air, a rooster leaning from a tree, crowing,
0:23:23 > 0:23:26'while the cloud behind it becomes its feathers.
0:23:27 > 0:23:29'This is a metamorphic landscape,
0:23:29 > 0:23:32'everything in it can become something else.
0:23:38 > 0:23:41'In this image, a child is feeding at the breast.
0:23:41 > 0:23:44'In the 20s, with such works as Maternity,
0:23:44 > 0:23:47'Miro became the modern heir to the medieval Illuminators,
0:23:47 > 0:23:50'to the Romanesque sculptors with their bestiaries and demons,
0:23:50 > 0:23:53'and to Hieronymus Bosch himself.
0:23:53 > 0:23:57'100 years before, William Blake had urged his readers to,
0:23:57 > 0:24:00'"Seek those images that constitute the wild,
0:24:00 > 0:24:03"the lion and the virgin, the harlot and the child."
0:24:05 > 0:24:09'Which is what Miro did for us in paintings like The Harlequins Carnival.
0:24:09 > 0:24:14'He had the range of a man who owns all his sensations and is ashamed of none of them.
0:24:17 > 0:24:22'And he set forth his immense vitality with a diction of pure, flat colour
0:24:22 > 0:24:26'that almost no other modern artist except Matisse had used with such mastery.
0:24:30 > 0:24:32'In the twilight of his work,
0:24:32 > 0:24:35Miro is probably the last great national painter of the 20th century,
0:24:35 > 0:24:38'a Catalan to the fingertips.
0:24:38 > 0:24:42'And nobody is more certain of that than the people of Barcelona.
0:24:43 > 0:24:46'For their city had a much deeper connection with Surrealism
0:24:46 > 0:24:48than the Miro mosaic in its main street,
0:24:48 > 0:24:51'and it goes back to the turn of the century
0:24:51 > 0:24:54'when Barcelona was a cultural capital.
0:24:54 > 0:24:57'Art Nouveau, the luxury style of 1900,
0:24:57 > 0:25:01'still marks Barcelona deeper than any other city.
0:25:05 > 0:25:08'Its master was a Catalan architect named Antoni Gaudi,
0:25:08 > 0:25:11'who was still at work when Miro was a young man.
0:25:12 > 0:25:16'But Gaudi's main work was only just begun when he died in 1927.
0:25:16 > 0:25:20'This is the unfinished temple, the Sagrada Familia,
0:25:20 > 0:25:22'or Cathedral of the Holy Family.
0:25:22 > 0:25:26'He started it in 1903, and it's still going up, but very slowly.
0:25:26 > 0:25:29'Probably they'll never finish it, but in any case,
0:25:29 > 0:25:33'this is the last delirious monument of Catholic Spain.'
0:25:35 > 0:25:39In this case you can say that form really does follow function.
0:25:39 > 0:25:43Sliding, rippling, dissolving, reforming, changing colour.
0:25:43 > 0:25:45Juicy architecture.
0:25:45 > 0:25:48Soft architecture.
0:25:48 > 0:25:51The architecture of ecstasy.
0:25:51 > 0:25:54GRAND ORGAN MUSIC
0:26:44 > 0:26:47'Above the city is the Park Guell,
0:26:47 > 0:26:50'which Gaudi designed for his main patrons, the Guell family.
0:26:50 > 0:26:54'It was going to be a housing estate, but the houses weren't finished,
0:26:54 > 0:26:56'and only the extraordinary park is left,
0:26:56 > 0:26:59'with its mosaics and undulating seats,
0:26:59 > 0:27:01'its fountains and arcades.
0:27:02 > 0:27:05'To the Classical eye, this is madness.
0:27:05 > 0:27:07'Not a straight line in the place.
0:27:07 > 0:27:09'To purist advanced taste to the 20s and 30s,
0:27:09 > 0:27:13'Art Nouveau was really no better than garbage deluxe.
0:27:13 > 0:27:15'But to the Surrealists, it was Marvellous.'
0:27:17 > 0:27:19It was desire made concrete.
0:27:19 > 0:27:22And at the extreme end of the style,
0:27:22 > 0:27:25you get a kind of nervous irritability, a tropical growth,
0:27:25 > 0:27:30a feeling of substance continuously melting into metaphor
0:27:30 > 0:27:33that was very congenial to them and it provided the legacy
0:27:33 > 0:27:38for another and slightly more dubious Catalan genius, Salvador Dali.
0:27:59 > 0:28:04'For almost 40 years, Dali has been one of the two most famous painters alive.
0:28:04 > 0:28:09'His moustache was the only rival to Van Gogh's ear and Picasso's potency.'
0:28:09 > 0:28:13Do you have any trouble with it at night? Do you have to peg it?
0:28:13 > 0:28:19- Or does it stand up at night? - No. In the night, clean every night, it becoming soft.
0:28:19 > 0:28:22- So at night it droops down. - Completely.
0:28:22 > 0:28:26- And then in the morning, up she goes again?- Three minutes. In three minutes fix my moustache.
0:28:26 > 0:28:30And then you feel you can face the world with that wonderful moustache standing up.
0:28:30 > 0:28:35Yes, because every day becoming much more practical for my inspiration.
0:28:35 > 0:28:37Well, I'm fascinated to know that.
0:28:47 > 0:28:49'He has also been a great embarrassment,
0:28:49 > 0:28:52'with the political views of Torquemada, the greed of a barracuda
0:28:52 > 0:28:55'and the vanity of an old drag queen.'
0:28:55 > 0:28:58Everybody talk about eccentricity.
0:28:58 > 0:29:01Is a little true but I am
0:29:01 > 0:29:07total and absolutely paradoxical man.
0:29:07 > 0:29:09Yeah, it's true, I am eccentric
0:29:09 > 0:29:14but in this time, I am concentric.
0:29:14 > 0:29:16Eccentric and concentric.
0:29:17 > 0:29:21'He started tamely enough as an art student in Madrid in the early 20s.
0:29:22 > 0:29:26'But around 1925, he discovered what Realism could do.
0:29:26 > 0:29:29'It could subvert one's sense of reality.
0:29:29 > 0:29:33'Instead of a Modernist surface, Dali went in for what he called,
0:29:33 > 0:29:36'"all the most paralysing tricks of eye fooling."
0:29:36 > 0:29:41'Photographic accuracy, masses of detail and smooth paint.
0:29:41 > 0:29:45'To this he added what he called his paranoiac critical method.
0:29:45 > 0:29:48'Basically this meant looking at one thing and seeing another,
0:29:48 > 0:29:51'as these figures make up a face.
0:29:55 > 0:29:59'Dali used this trick again and again in his paintings.
0:29:59 > 0:30:03'This one is called The Metamorphosis Of Narcissus.
0:30:03 > 0:30:08'There he squats on the left, head on his knee, staring at his reflection in the pool.
0:30:08 > 0:30:10'And the giant hand on the right,
0:30:10 > 0:30:12'holding an egg from which a narcissus sprouts,
0:30:12 > 0:30:15'exactly mimics his body.
0:30:18 > 0:30:22'Dali's own considerable narcissism produced many self-portraits.
0:30:22 > 0:30:25'Some quite open, like this.
0:30:27 > 0:30:32'Others were concealed, as in this painting called The Great Masturbator.
0:30:32 > 0:30:35'A grasshopper clings to the soft, yellow shape,
0:30:35 > 0:30:38'which is Dali's profile, boned, as it were,
0:30:38 > 0:30:41'and laid nose down on its side.
0:30:43 > 0:30:46'And that same profile, by now as runny as wax,
0:30:46 > 0:30:50'turns up on the beach in his most famous image, The Persistence Of Memory.
0:30:53 > 0:30:56'Dali had a brilliant sense of provocation.
0:30:56 > 0:30:59'He even managed to alarm Breton with this one
0:30:59 > 0:31:01'and provoke a solemn argument among his fellow Surrealists
0:31:01 > 0:31:04'upon whether a pair of pants spattered with faeces
0:31:04 > 0:31:07'was an acceptable dream image or not.
0:31:09 > 0:31:11'Like a gland irritated by constant scratching,
0:31:11 > 0:31:15'his mind threw off many such images before the end of the 30s,
0:31:15 > 0:31:17'when they began to get rather tedious and predictable.
0:31:17 > 0:31:21'And most of them had to do with sex, blood, dung and putrefaction
0:31:21 > 0:31:24'mixed with declarations of impotence and guilt.
0:31:27 > 0:31:30'For Dali loved anything that spoke of flaccidity,
0:31:30 > 0:31:34'runny cheese, flesh held up by crutches,
0:31:34 > 0:31:36'soft watches.
0:31:38 > 0:31:42'Dali inherited a lot from Spanish religious art.
0:31:42 > 0:31:45'An almost paralysing morbidity about flesh.
0:31:45 > 0:31:49'It is phosphorescent, always on the point of dissolution and rot.
0:31:49 > 0:31:54'In Dali, there is no such thing as the confident body of Classicism.
0:31:54 > 0:31:57'But there is no spiritual transcendence either.
0:31:57 > 0:32:00'He locked himself up in the prison of the narcissistic self
0:32:00 > 0:32:03'and then threw away the key.
0:32:03 > 0:32:07'Eventually the dreams weren't real at all.
0:32:07 > 0:32:11'Just Dali being Dali, the nickelodeon of the id.
0:32:13 > 0:32:18'He had not reached his 40th birthday when Sigmund Freud had the last word on him.
0:32:19 > 0:32:24'"It is not the unconscious that I seek in your pictures," he wrote, '"but the conscious."
0:32:24 > 0:32:30"Your mystery is manifested outright. The picture is only a mechanism to reveal it."
0:32:33 > 0:32:38'So there he is. Not great enough for marble, but just right for wax.
0:32:38 > 0:32:43'It's proper that Dali should have found his place here in the Paris Wax Museum, The Musee Grevin,
0:32:43 > 0:32:46'representing culture along with the novelist Francoise Sagan
0:32:46 > 0:32:49'and the clothes designer Pierre Cardin.
0:32:50 > 0:32:54'For the wax museum was one of the favourite spots of Surrealism.
0:32:54 > 0:32:57'It was a house of bizarre but second-hand illusion.'
0:32:59 > 0:33:01Wax works are neither art nor life.
0:33:01 > 0:33:03They're failures, they're sinister hybrids,
0:33:03 > 0:33:07and from that point of view, the cruder they are, the more potent they get.
0:33:07 > 0:33:11They mock the powers of art and offer none of the consolations of nature.
0:33:11 > 0:33:13No wonder the Surrealists liked them.
0:33:15 > 0:33:19'This place was one of several that made up a Surrealist itinerary of Paris.
0:33:19 > 0:33:23'A city of monuments and gates, passageways and parks,
0:33:23 > 0:33:26'where the Surrealists would meet at dawn or at midnight
0:33:26 > 0:33:29'in the hope setting up encounters with the unexpected,
0:33:29 > 0:33:31'with the secret history of Paris.
0:35:15 > 0:35:19'One of the most potent spots in Paris was the flea market.'
0:35:25 > 0:35:29Except as a backdrop, landscape was of no interest to Surrealism.
0:35:29 > 0:35:33They probably found it disagreeably bucolic.
0:35:33 > 0:35:37It was a city movement, made by pale, aggressive young eggheads
0:35:37 > 0:35:41whose natural lair was the cafe and whose essential city was Paris.
0:35:41 > 0:35:46In fact, it's impossible to imagine Surrealism without Paris.
0:35:46 > 0:35:50And their equivalent to the endless variety of nature
0:35:50 > 0:35:56was the endless profusion of baffling objects which washed up here in the flea market.
0:35:57 > 0:36:02Of course, that was in the good old days before they started calling junk antiques,
0:36:02 > 0:36:05but even so, you never knew what you might find here.
0:36:08 > 0:36:12The flea market was like the unconscious mind of capitalism,
0:36:12 > 0:36:14it contained the repressed surplus.
0:36:14 > 0:36:19This is where the sewing machine met the umbrella on the operating table,
0:36:19 > 0:36:22and in due course gave birth to a whole flock of progeny,
0:36:22 > 0:36:25a new art form, the Surrealist object.
0:36:26 > 0:36:30'The object was collage in three dimensions.
0:36:30 > 0:36:33'The Surrealists thought that it made secret affinities visible.
0:36:33 > 0:36:35'It was a way of declassifying the world
0:36:35 > 0:36:38'and rendering it permeable to imagination.
0:36:38 > 0:36:41'A head with the eyes closed with zippers
0:36:41 > 0:36:46'became Marcel Jean's quietly sadistic image, The Spirit Of The Gardenia.
0:36:46 > 0:36:49'Victor Brauner made a wolf table.
0:36:51 > 0:36:54'Dali made a whole compendium of his fetishes.
0:36:56 > 0:37:00'Wolfgang Paalen called this Articulated Cloud,
0:37:00 > 0:37:05'the source of rain and the protection against it fused into one image.
0:37:05 > 0:37:10'And Meret Oppenheim produced the most famous and contradictory Surrealist object of all,
0:37:10 > 0:37:14'her fur cup and spoon, the very essence of uselessness.
0:37:16 > 0:37:19'One particularly good object maker
0:37:19 > 0:37:23was the American photographer Man Ray, a veteran of Dadaism.'
0:37:23 > 0:37:27An object is a result of looking at something
0:37:27 > 0:37:31which in itself has no quality or charm.
0:37:31 > 0:37:36I pick something which in itself has no meaning at all.
0:37:37 > 0:37:43I disregard completely the aesthetic quality of the object.
0:37:43 > 0:37:46I'm against craftsmanship.
0:37:46 > 0:37:49I say the world is full of wonderful craftsmen,
0:37:49 > 0:37:52but there are very few practical dreamers.
0:37:52 > 0:37:55In the early days in Paris, when I first came over
0:37:55 > 0:38:01and I passed by a hardware shop and I saw a flat iron in the window,
0:38:01 > 0:38:06I said, "There's an object which is almost invisible. Maybe I could do something with that."
0:38:06 > 0:38:10What could I do to add something in it that was provocative?
0:38:10 > 0:38:12And so I got a box of tacks,
0:38:12 > 0:38:17I glued on a row of tacks to it to make it useless, as I thought.
0:38:17 > 0:38:20But nothing is really useless.
0:38:20 > 0:38:24You can always find a use even for the most extravagant object.
0:38:24 > 0:38:27'The iron, entitled Gift, was pure malice.
0:38:27 > 0:38:31'This one he called Object To Be Destroyed.'
0:38:31 > 0:38:34SLOW TICKING
0:38:37 > 0:38:41'The cult of objects underlined another aspect of the Surrealist imagination,
0:38:41 > 0:38:43'the belief that the Marvellous,
0:38:43 > 0:38:47'that state of almost sexual excitement that Breton called "convulsive beauty,"
0:38:47 > 0:38:51'was always available, hidden just below the skin of reality.
0:38:53 > 0:38:56'The artist who produced the best evidence for this idea
0:38:56 > 0:39:00'lived in a modest house in a Belgian suburb and his name was Rene Magritte.
0:39:01 > 0:39:06'Magritte was Monsieur Bourgeois to the letter, stocky, taciturn, suburban.
0:39:06 > 0:39:10'He died in 1968 but his work continues to serve its audience
0:39:10 > 0:39:14'rather as Victorian story painters serve theirs.
0:39:15 > 0:39:20'People like stories. But modern art doesn't tell many and Magritte did.
0:39:21 > 0:39:25'However, his stories weren't narratives. They were snapshots of the impossible.
0:39:30 > 0:39:33'In 1923, the architect Le Corbusier
0:39:33 > 0:39:36'put this photo in his tract on the new machine architecture
0:39:36 > 0:39:40'as an example of plain, rational design, a pipe.
0:39:40 > 0:39:44'Five years later, Magritte contradicted him with this painting.
0:39:44 > 0:39:47'"This is not a pipe."
0:39:47 > 0:39:49'It became one of the most famous phrases in modern art.
0:39:49 > 0:39:55'A manifesto about language, the way meaning is conveyed or frustrated by symbols.
0:39:55 > 0:39:57'Because this, indeed, is not a pipe.
0:39:57 > 0:39:59'It is a painting, a work of art,
0:39:59 > 0:40:03'a sign that denotes an object and triggers memory.
0:40:03 > 0:40:07'No painter had ever isolated that basic fact about art so clearly before.
0:40:08 > 0:40:13'Denying the names of things took you through the mirror of illusion into a quite different world,
0:40:13 > 0:40:17'where things change their names and lose their meanings.
0:40:17 > 0:40:21'A candle equals a ceiling, and the moon, a shoe.
0:40:25 > 0:40:28'The first characteristic of this world is dread.
0:40:28 > 0:40:33'Sometimes at the crude, dramatic level of the silent movies that Magritte used to watch,
0:40:33 > 0:40:37'which is echoed here in his painting, The Menaced Assassin.
0:40:40 > 0:40:45'Magritte has given us some of the most vivid images of alienation in the whole lexicon of art.
0:40:45 > 0:40:48'This one is entitled The Lovers.
0:40:50 > 0:40:55'This, a painting of the most piercing sadness and sexual pungency,
0:40:55 > 0:40:57is called The Rape.
0:40:59 > 0:41:04'The usual tone of Magritte's work was of a world both matter of fact and slightly out of control.
0:41:04 > 0:41:08'Magritte painted things so ordinary that they might have come from a phrase book.
0:41:08 > 0:41:10'An apple.
0:41:11 > 0:41:13'A glass.
0:41:15 > 0:41:17'A stolid Belgian nude.
0:41:18 > 0:41:21'Or a human eye.'
0:41:22 > 0:41:26There wasn't much on that list that an average Belgian clerk, circa 1935,
0:41:26 > 0:41:30might not have seen in the course of an average Belgian day.
0:41:30 > 0:41:34But then, that clerk was one of Magritte's favourite images, too.
0:41:35 > 0:41:38'Here the clerk's descent like rain on the roofs of Belgium
0:41:38 > 0:41:41as though they were commuting from Heaven.
0:41:44 > 0:41:49'In a painting, you have a canvass on an easel in front of a view.
0:41:49 > 0:41:51'The canvass bears a picture of the view.
0:41:51 > 0:41:54'This picture exactly overlaps the real view.
0:41:56 > 0:42:01'And so the play between image and reality suggests that the real world is only a construction of mind
0:42:01 > 0:42:06'and that somewhere among the infinite number of ways of experiencing that world,
0:42:06 > 0:42:11'there is one ideal angle, from which art and reality overlap, match and fuse.
0:42:11 > 0:42:15'That is the moment of Surrealist vision.'
0:42:16 > 0:42:19Magritte's best images don't look like fantasy.
0:42:19 > 0:42:22They are dry, tightly painted, matter of fact, and even pedestrian.
0:42:22 > 0:42:26They seem to have more in common with reporting than with imagination.
0:42:26 > 0:42:29And so the proper response to them is the double-take.
0:42:29 > 0:42:33Magritte loved paradox. And he was its absolute master.
0:42:33 > 0:42:37And his paradoxes needed the context of real life.
0:42:40 > 0:42:43'His paintings are not so much about the world
0:42:43 > 0:42:45'as about the ways we find to describe it.
0:42:50 > 0:42:55'Magritte was obsessed by the weak hold that language has on what it describes.
0:42:55 > 0:42:59'That sense of slippage between word and thing, image and object,
0:42:59 > 0:43:02'is one of the sources of Modernist disquiet.
0:43:02 > 0:43:05'And in making it his subject, Magritte became one of the artists
0:43:05 > 0:43:09'without whom Modernist culture can't be understood.
0:43:09 > 0:43:12'His visual booby-traps go off again and again
0:43:12 > 0:43:15'because their trigger is thought itself.
0:43:15 > 0:43:19'When the cannon fires, the walls of familiar images go down
0:43:19 > 0:43:22'and we stand, as the title of this painting tells us,
0:43:22 > 0:43:24'on The Threshold Of Liberty.'
0:43:32 > 0:43:36The Surrealists had no heroes among politicians, dead or alive,
0:43:36 > 0:43:38but they did have a gallery of saints,
0:43:38 > 0:43:42of men and women who were considered to have lived out the ideals of the movement before its time.
0:43:42 > 0:43:46And of these, the greatest was the Marquis De Sade,
0:43:46 > 0:43:48whose castle here at Lacoste in Provence
0:43:48 > 0:43:51was considered one of the sacred sites of the Surrealist movement.
0:43:51 > 0:43:56The Divine Marquis was the one 18th century man whom the Surrealists respected,
0:43:56 > 0:44:00because it was he who had preached the supremacy of desire.
0:44:00 > 0:44:04And it was he who had shown what has become a commonplace in our century,
0:44:04 > 0:44:07that in order to establish the rule of reason,
0:44:07 > 0:44:11the imagination must be censored and repressed.
0:44:11 > 0:44:15Sade was the first writer to understand the relationship between sex and politics.
0:44:15 > 0:44:20He did most of his writing in prison, which is a good place for thinking about the unthinkable.
0:44:20 > 0:44:24He became the unspeakable answer to Rousseau and his milky doctrine
0:44:24 > 0:44:28of the natural goodness of man when left in a state of nature.
0:44:28 > 0:44:32Not so, said Sade. We don't know what our natures are,
0:44:32 > 0:44:37and moreover, we can't find out what they are unless we follow our desires to the absolute limit,
0:44:37 > 0:44:40no matter how appalling the disclosures may be.
0:44:41 > 0:44:46'Sade was a blasphemer, an atheist, and a traitor to his class, the aristocracy.
0:44:46 > 0:44:48'No wonder, then, that he had such an appeal to the Surrealists,
0:44:48 > 0:44:53'who were also atheists, blasphemers, and traitors to their class, the Bourgeoisie.
0:44:55 > 0:44:57'The Surrealists' tributes to Sade,
0:44:57 > 0:44:59'like this proposed monument to him by Man Ray,
0:44:59 > 0:45:03'often had a blasphemous tone which may seem a little dated today.
0:45:03 > 0:45:06'But the Surrealists were almost all baptised Catholics,
0:45:06 > 0:45:10'living in France when the church still had a great deal of power.
0:45:11 > 0:45:13'The best crack was by Max Ernst.
0:45:13 > 0:45:15'The Virgin Mary spanking the infant Jesus,
0:45:15 > 0:45:17'watched by the three wise men,
0:45:17 > 0:45:21'Eluard, Breton and Ernst himself.
0:45:25 > 0:45:30'Sex, being loaded with taboo, was one of the great Surrealist themes.
0:45:30 > 0:45:33'But the Surrealists only stood for one kind of sexual freedom,
0:45:33 > 0:45:39'which insisted that imagination could only be set free by single-minded devotion to one woman.
0:45:39 > 0:45:42'Yet this romantic spirit did not translate into their art.
0:45:42 > 0:45:45'There, the idea of woman was a thing,
0:45:45 > 0:45:48'a mannequin or a piece of furniture.
0:45:49 > 0:45:54'In Hans Bellmer's sculpture, the woman is no more than a sexual doll,
0:45:54 > 0:45:58'abused, manipulated, intensely pornographic.'
0:46:00 > 0:46:03WOMAN LAUGHS
0:47:22 > 0:47:26'As the 30s wore on, through the Spanish Civil War towards 1939,
0:47:26 > 0:47:30'their tone was less frustration than apocalypse.
0:47:30 > 0:47:34'Max Ernst summed up the sense of foreboding in one prophetic painting
0:47:34 > 0:47:36'called Europe After The Rain,
0:47:36 > 0:47:39'a place reduced to creepy namelessness,
0:47:39 > 0:47:42'a vacated planet, all ruins and jungle and decay.
0:47:45 > 0:47:50'And when the rain, in fact, did come, and the German army rolled into France,
0:47:50 > 0:47:52'the Surrealists prudently ran.
0:47:55 > 0:47:58'Many of them went to America.
0:47:58 > 0:48:02'And so it was in New York that the remains of Surrealism took root and mutated.
0:48:02 > 0:48:06'But the greatest American artist of the irrational was already living there,
0:48:06 > 0:48:11'in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens outside Manhattan.
0:48:11 > 0:48:15'His name was Joseph Cornell and he made boxes.
0:48:17 > 0:48:21'In one sense, the box was a metaphor of Cornell's own shyness.
0:48:21 > 0:48:27'Very few American artists have ever so banished their outward lives to preserve their inward one.
0:48:27 > 0:48:30'And there were its emblems, preserved under glass,
0:48:30 > 0:48:33'filed away inside the wooden walls.
0:48:36 > 0:48:38'They represent a distant reality.
0:48:38 > 0:48:41'Not a historical reality, exactly,
0:48:41 > 0:48:45'more like a theatre of memory whose images keep crossing and recombining.
0:48:45 > 0:48:48'The birds, the planets,
0:48:48 > 0:48:51'the charms, the provincial hotels
0:48:51 > 0:48:55'and ballerinas and foreign postage stamps.
0:48:55 > 0:48:58'It could have looked precious, like Victoriana,
0:48:58 > 0:49:01'but it didn't, because Cornell had such a rigorous sense of form,
0:49:01 > 0:49:05'strict and spare like good New England carpentry.
0:49:05 > 0:49:09'De Chirico's paintings were full of nostalgia for lost experience,
0:49:09 > 0:49:12'but in Cornell, there is much less sense of loss.
0:49:12 > 0:49:16'Everything is there and possessed, as memories are in the mind.
0:49:22 > 0:49:25'Some of the boxes were very elaborate.
0:49:25 > 0:49:29'This one he called The Egypt of Mademoiselle Cleo de Merode.
0:49:30 > 0:49:34'She was a famous French courtesan of the 1890s,
0:49:34 > 0:49:36'renowned equally for her greed and her beauty.
0:49:36 > 0:49:39'In effect, Cornell compares her to Cleopatra
0:49:39 > 0:49:42'and makes a casket for her with the emblems of Egypt in it.
0:49:43 > 0:49:48'A sphinx, sand, pearls, serpents of the Nile, and so on.
0:49:48 > 0:49:51'Cornell was already a developed artist, though unknown,
0:49:51 > 0:49:53'before the Surrealists came to America.
0:49:53 > 0:49:57'The side of the American irrational that got most from Surrealism in the 40s,
0:49:57 > 0:50:02'was the work of painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky,
0:50:02 > 0:50:06'later to be numbered among the Abstract Expressionists.
0:50:06 > 0:50:09'And among them, the main bridge was Gorky.
0:50:09 > 0:50:12'He had a peculiar career, this Armenian refugee,
0:50:12 > 0:50:15'with his florid imagination, deep insecurities
0:50:15 > 0:50:18'and eventual suicide at 44.
0:50:18 > 0:50:20'For the best part of 20 years,
0:50:20 > 0:50:24'he turned out pastiches of the artists that he wanted to become.
0:50:24 > 0:50:26'Of Picasso, and then of Miro,
0:50:26 > 0:50:29'imitating him in paintings like this.
0:50:33 > 0:50:36'And then, quite suddenly, Gorky found himself.
0:50:36 > 0:50:39'The spidery fluent line that he had got from Miro
0:50:39 > 0:50:42'began to describe landscapes of not quite abstract form.
0:50:42 > 0:50:48'Shapes like flower stems, tendons, sexual organs, livers and feathers.
0:50:50 > 0:50:52'The canvas pulsates.
0:50:52 > 0:50:56'It's filled with a kind of glowing, sweaty, pre-conscious life.
0:50:56 > 0:50:59'It looks into the body, and not out from it.
0:51:02 > 0:51:06'A great issue among the New York painters was myth.
0:51:06 > 0:51:10'Like the Surrealists, they felt rational civilisation had let them down.
0:51:10 > 0:51:15'They wanted painting to return its audience to what they imagined was primitive reality,
0:51:15 > 0:51:17'to art as a magical sign.
0:51:17 > 0:51:22'And so Jackson Pollock, in the years before he began to drip paint directly on the canvas,
0:51:22 > 0:51:25'used these charged, meaty squiggles of paint
0:51:25 > 0:51:28'to translate the shapes of southwest Indian art,
0:51:28 > 0:51:30'of rock pictographs and sand paintings,
0:51:30 > 0:51:35'into images like this one, The Key, done in 1946.
0:51:39 > 0:51:42'Or Male And Female, painted four years before.
0:51:45 > 0:51:49'Painting accumulated resonance by appealing to myth.
0:51:49 > 0:51:52'But the myths were in decline and the painters were not Indians or cavemen,
0:51:52 > 0:51:56'but New Yorkers living in the age of psychoanalysis.
0:51:56 > 0:51:59'They were like religious artists without a context.
0:51:59 > 0:52:01'And like the Surrealists, they concluded that
0:52:01 > 0:52:04'the only unpolluted areas left to the modern imagination
0:52:04 > 0:52:07'were the unconscious and the distant past.
0:52:09 > 0:52:13'With their tiny audience, and their exalted sense of the artist's role,
0:52:13 > 0:52:19'American painters like Mark Rothko or, here, Hans Hoffman in the 1940s, were the last Romantics,
0:52:19 > 0:52:25'the last artists to paint as though art had the power to change the objective conditions of life.
0:52:25 > 0:52:29'For them, the Surrealist ideal still held true,
0:52:29 > 0:52:32'although there was no chance that it would come true.
0:52:33 > 0:52:35'And no promised liberation of the mind
0:52:35 > 0:52:40'could compare to the real liberation of Europe in 1945.
0:52:40 > 0:52:43'The fact that so many of the Surrealists had gone to America
0:52:43 > 0:52:48'guaranteed that Surrealism would be a dead issue in France after the war was won.
0:52:48 > 0:52:50'After all, they had run away
0:52:50 > 0:52:53'and they could no longer command the respect earned by writers
0:52:53 > 0:52:57'like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus who had stayed and resisted.
0:52:57 > 0:53:00'So as a movement, Surrealism faded,
0:53:00 > 0:53:03'and its absorption into chic, which had begun in the late 30s,
0:53:03 > 0:53:05'became almost complete.
0:53:05 > 0:53:08'The movement that had hoped to reshape the mind of Western man
0:53:08 > 0:53:11'ended by advertising booze and cigarettes.'
0:53:11 > 0:53:14CHEERING
0:53:16 > 0:53:19'But was that all? Not quite.
0:53:19 > 0:53:21'For the memory of Surrealism, its deposit of ideas,
0:53:21 > 0:53:25'was strip-mined by artist after artist in the 60s and 70s.
0:53:25 > 0:53:30'As a proposition about freedom, it still remained infinitely intriguing.
0:53:31 > 0:53:34'In 1969, the Romanian artist Christo
0:53:34 > 0:53:38'wrapped a whole section of Australian coastline in plastic and rope.
0:53:38 > 0:53:40'This harked back to 1920
0:53:40 > 0:53:43'when Man Ray wrapped a sewing machine in blanket
0:53:43 > 0:53:46'and called it The Enigma Of Isidore Ducasse.
0:53:48 > 0:53:52'By the same token, Breton wrote that the simplest Surrealist act,
0:53:52 > 0:53:58'the most gratuitous one, would be to walk into the street shooting a revolver at random into the crowd.
0:53:58 > 0:54:01'Again, almost 50 years later,
0:54:01 > 0:54:06'a Californian named Chris Burden fired a revolver at an airliner taking off over Los Angeles.
0:54:06 > 0:54:10'He missed, and this action he called art.
0:54:18 > 0:54:20'It is surprising when you look back on the 60s
0:54:20 > 0:54:24'to see how much of their cultural surface was affected by Surrealism.
0:54:24 > 0:54:30'A lot of the time, the kids who were enacting their pantomimes of desire and revolt didn't know this.
0:54:30 > 0:54:33'There was the illusion that the world was being born again,
0:54:33 > 0:54:37'the innocence renewed, the old contracts torn up in a new way.
0:54:37 > 0:54:42'And the key to this was simply being yourself, whatever that self might be.
0:54:43 > 0:54:47'From love-ins to the living theatre to the caterwaulings of stoned poets,
0:54:47 > 0:54:50'the word went out that art is me, me, me.
0:54:50 > 0:54:54'Art is anything made by anyone called an artist.
0:54:54 > 0:54:56'Quite so, but the question that such art begs
0:54:56 > 0:55:00'is the same question that a lot of Surrealist activity also skimmed.
0:55:00 > 0:55:06'Is the self, that great sacred cow of our culture, automatically interesting?'
0:55:07 > 0:55:10ROCK MUSIC
0:55:11 > 0:55:17'Or can it only hold our interest as art to the extent that it produces ordered structures?
0:55:17 > 0:55:20'Looking back, I don't think there's much choice.
0:55:20 > 0:55:25'But in the 60s there was, because then diffused through the West, as in the 20s,
0:55:25 > 0:55:29'you had a dandyistic, theatrical revolt based upon a cult of youth,
0:55:29 > 0:55:32which, like Surrealism, was a Romantic revival.
0:55:35 > 0:55:37'Ecstasy, irrationality,
0:55:37 > 0:55:40'old Dionysus trying to assert himself again,
0:55:40 > 0:55:45'dressed like a pantomime wizard and nattering about hobbits and cosmic consciousness.
0:55:45 > 0:55:49'If there was one link between Surrealism and the 60s,
0:55:49 > 0:55:51'it was the illusion that youth was truth.
0:55:51 > 0:55:54'By being born, one surpassed history.
0:55:54 > 0:55:58'By finding reality intolerable, one became a prophet.
0:56:02 > 0:56:04'There was another war, in Vietnam this time,
0:56:04 > 0:56:07'to help create an idea of class based on age.
0:56:07 > 0:56:11'So it was thought, or rather felt.
0:56:11 > 0:56:15'But all this fabric of illusion came apart in the 70s.'
0:56:15 > 0:56:18POLICE SIRENS
0:56:41 > 0:56:44So what remains of Surrealism? Not much.
0:56:44 > 0:56:47It became exactly what it set out not to be, a style.
0:56:47 > 0:56:50And not a very durable style at that.
0:56:50 > 0:56:53It took European artists the best part of 200 years
0:56:53 > 0:56:55to digest the implications of Michelangelo's nudes,
0:56:55 > 0:56:58but Surrealism was completely digested
0:56:58 > 0:57:02within a matter of 50 years, a quarter of the time.
0:57:02 > 0:57:06And in the meantime, its devices have come to look more nostalgic than revolutionary.
0:57:06 > 0:57:10The Magrittes and Ernsts that were once the hard nuggets of contradiction
0:57:10 > 0:57:13now end up in the salerooms fetching enormous prices,
0:57:13 > 0:57:16just more units in the smooth flow of exchange
0:57:16 > 0:57:19that blurs the meanings of all art.
0:57:19 > 0:57:21But there is another side to it,
0:57:21 > 0:57:24because Surrealism was less an art movement
0:57:24 > 0:57:27than a rebellion of the mind that chose painting as its vehicle.
0:57:27 > 0:57:30It may not choose not to inhabit painting again.
0:57:30 > 0:57:33Yesterday the poltergeist was throwing plates in the kitchen,
0:57:33 > 0:57:37tomorrow it may turn up in the hall. You don't know.
0:57:37 > 0:57:41It's a very durable spirit and it's hard to exorcise.
0:57:41 > 0:57:44But it loves everything that is contrary, extravagant and free.
0:57:44 > 0:57:48And its very cussedness, its perversity, is a form of innocence,
0:57:48 > 0:57:50a declaration of hope.
0:57:50 > 0:57:53TRAIN RUMBLES
0:58:15 > 0:58:19Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
0:58:19 > 0:58:19.