0:00:02 > 0:00:05MUSIC: "Theme 21" by Peter Howell
0:00:54 > 0:00:58One of the themes of 19th century romantic art was the world and the spirit,
0:00:58 > 0:01:02experiences that go beyond or below our conscious control.
0:01:02 > 0:01:06The grandeur of the outer world, seen as a sacred place,
0:01:06 > 0:01:08as the trace of God's creation
0:01:08 > 0:01:11and the conflicts and terrors of the inner one,
0:01:11 > 0:01:13the unsatisfied self.
0:01:20 > 0:01:23The search for these precarious images of man and nature
0:01:23 > 0:01:28was one of the great projects that the 19th century bequeathed to modernism.
0:01:46 > 0:01:49BIRDS TWEET
0:01:55 > 0:01:58From classical times, through many centuries of Christianity,
0:01:58 > 0:02:04man and nature were considered to be in the reliable, pastoral care of God.
0:02:04 > 0:02:06But in the 19th century, God died,
0:02:06 > 0:02:09and artists weren't feeling too well, either.
0:02:10 > 0:02:14Strangely enough, it was in this idyllic landscape
0:02:14 > 0:02:17that one great painter, in his last years before suicide,
0:02:17 > 0:02:22was to express his own sense of isolation in the world.
0:02:23 > 0:02:26This is the lunatic asylum at St-Remy-de-Provence
0:02:26 > 0:02:29in the South of France, near Arles.
0:02:29 > 0:02:34For a year and eight days, from May 1899 to May 1890,
0:02:34 > 0:02:37Vincent Van Gogh was under treatment here.
0:02:37 > 0:02:41Just what his illness was, nobody to this day is quite sure.
0:02:41 > 0:02:44The one aspect of its symptoms that everybody knows about
0:02:44 > 0:02:47was that he cut off his earlobe
0:02:47 > 0:02:50and gave it to a prostitute in Arles.
0:02:50 > 0:02:53He suffered, as they say, from manic depression,
0:02:53 > 0:02:56which is an opaque way of skirting an issue
0:02:56 > 0:02:58that we still don't understand.
0:02:59 > 0:03:04"Though you continually hear terrible cries and howls, like beasts in a menagerie,
0:03:04 > 0:03:06"in spite of that, people get to know each other very well
0:03:06 > 0:03:09"and help each other when their attacks come on.
0:03:09 > 0:03:11"When I'm working in the garden they all come to look,
0:03:11 > 0:03:16"and I assure you, they have more discretion and good manners to leave me alone
0:03:16 > 0:03:19"than the good people of the town of Arles."
0:03:19 > 0:03:23The garden and the asylum look much as they did in Van Gogh's time.
0:03:23 > 0:03:26Even his irises are still there.
0:03:28 > 0:03:33"There are people who love nature, even though they are cracked or ill.
0:03:33 > 0:03:35"Those are the painters.
0:03:35 > 0:03:39"Then there are those who like what is made by men's hands,
0:03:39 > 0:03:41"and these even go so far as to like pictures.
0:03:41 > 0:03:45"Though here there are some patients very seriously ill,
0:03:45 > 0:03:48"the fear and horror of madness that I used to have
0:03:48 > 0:03:51"is already much lessened."
0:03:52 > 0:03:55He suffered from agonising fits of paranoia
0:03:55 > 0:03:59and a kind of paralysis of the will, accompanied by hallucinations,
0:03:59 > 0:04:01during which he couldn't work at all.
0:04:01 > 0:04:06And these were separated by long, clear months during which he could and did,
0:04:06 > 0:04:08which were in turn punctuated
0:04:08 > 0:04:12by the most extraordinary moments of visionary insight.
0:04:12 > 0:04:17At such moments, everything he saw was swept up in a current of energy.
0:04:17 > 0:04:20Everything he sees is made from the same plasma.
0:04:20 > 0:04:24The moon comes out of eclipse, the stars blaze,
0:04:24 > 0:04:28the sky heaves like the ocean and the cypresses move with it.
0:04:30 > 0:04:34Van Gogh's cypresses are like thick, dark, lightening conductors
0:04:34 > 0:04:37grounding the energies of the sky and the earth.
0:04:37 > 0:04:40They are alive as no painted tree had ever been
0:04:40 > 0:04:43and as no real cypress could be.
0:04:43 > 0:04:46"The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts.
0:04:46 > 0:04:50"It astonishes me that they have never been done as I see them.
0:04:50 > 0:04:55"The cypress is as beautiful in line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk,
0:04:55 > 0:04:59"a splash of black in a sunny landscape."
0:05:01 > 0:05:05Outside the asylum walls, you can walk in Van Gogh's olive grove
0:05:05 > 0:05:07and measure the way that he changed it,
0:05:07 > 0:05:11inventing the form of the dry grasses and the flickering blue shadows on them
0:05:11 > 0:05:14and turning the olive trunks themselves into shapes,
0:05:14 > 0:05:18like human bodies grown old and arthritic with work.
0:05:18 > 0:05:22Again, the continuous field of energy pouring through the light
0:05:22 > 0:05:26rising from the ground, solidifying in the trunks.
0:05:26 > 0:05:29You can see his landscapes motif by motif
0:05:29 > 0:05:32without necessarily seeing what he saw.
0:05:32 > 0:05:38But Van Gogh's sense of the power behind the natural world was so strong
0:05:38 > 0:05:40that once you have seen the paintings,
0:05:40 > 0:05:44you have no choice but to see the real places in terms of them.
0:05:52 > 0:05:55CHURCH BELLS RING
0:05:57 > 0:06:01Another artist might've found these landscapes of twisted grey limestone
0:06:01 > 0:06:03formless, unpaintable.
0:06:03 > 0:06:06What Van Gogh found in them was a perfect unity
0:06:06 > 0:06:09between the shapes of those strangely distorted rocks,
0:06:09 > 0:06:12their fierce plasticity and the details within them -
0:06:12 > 0:06:16the grain of the rock, how it scooped and veined,
0:06:16 > 0:06:19how it resembles the grain of old olive roots, silvery-grey, too.
0:06:19 > 0:06:23How the far shape is echoed in the close detail
0:06:23 > 0:06:27and how both accord with the sharp linear strokes of his brush.
0:06:38 > 0:06:41One of his favourite sites was over the Plaine de la Crau,
0:06:41 > 0:06:45whose flat fields and furrows and trees were, he said,
0:06:45 > 0:06:50as infinite as the sea, only better because people lived on them.
0:06:51 > 0:06:54To draw them, he used an amazing range of notation -
0:06:54 > 0:06:58every shape suggested by a different dot or stroke or squiggle,
0:06:58 > 0:07:01everything seen, nothing generalised about.
0:07:01 > 0:07:04Few drawings have this richness of surface.
0:07:04 > 0:07:07It feels as though the life of the landscape is bursting through the paper
0:07:07 > 0:07:12so that the brown ink becomes almost as eloquent as the colour in his paintings.
0:07:17 > 0:07:20Van Gogh's paintings were not the work of a madman.
0:07:20 > 0:07:25They were done by an ecstatic, who was also a great formal artist.
0:07:25 > 0:07:28Today, the doctors would give him lithium and tranquillisers
0:07:28 > 0:07:31and we wouldn't have the paintings perhaps - we don't know.
0:07:31 > 0:07:36For Van Gogh confronted the world with a kind of insecure joy.
0:07:36 > 0:07:40Nature was to him both exquisite and terrible.
0:07:40 > 0:07:43It consoled him but it was his judge.
0:07:43 > 0:07:45It was the fingerprint of God,
0:07:45 > 0:07:48but the finger was always pointed at him.
0:07:51 > 0:07:53Sometimes the eye of God was, too,
0:07:53 > 0:07:56the yellow disc of the sun, huge and merciless,
0:07:56 > 0:07:59the emblem of Apollo.
0:07:59 > 0:08:02What Van Gogh called "the gravity of great sunlight effects"
0:08:02 > 0:08:05filled his work not only with a flood of colour
0:08:05 > 0:08:08but also with a symbolism that one can only call religious,
0:08:08 > 0:08:13the idea that human life is lived within an immense exterior will
0:08:13 > 0:08:16and that work like sewing and reaping is not simply work
0:08:16 > 0:08:19but an allegory of life and death.
0:08:22 > 0:08:25"I saw in this reaper
0:08:25 > 0:08:30"a vague figure, struggling like a devil in great heat to finish his task.
0:08:30 > 0:08:33"I saw then in it the image of death,
0:08:33 > 0:08:37"in the sense that humanity would be the wheat one reaps.
0:08:37 > 0:08:42"So it is, if you like, the opposite of the sewer I had tried before.
0:08:42 > 0:08:44"I find it strange that I saw like this
0:08:44 > 0:08:48"through the iron bars of a cell."
0:08:48 > 0:08:50Such things did not come by chance.
0:08:50 > 0:08:54Van Gogh knew what he was looking for when he came South and, of course, he found it,
0:08:54 > 0:08:58bringing the high spiritual ambitions of a northern romantic from Holland
0:08:58 > 0:09:00into a landscape of the senses.
0:09:00 > 0:09:01He went there, he wrote...
0:09:01 > 0:09:05"Because not only in Africa but from Arles onward,
0:09:05 > 0:09:09"you are bound to find beautiful contrasts of red and green,
0:09:09 > 0:09:12"of blue and orange, of sulphur and lilac,
0:09:12 > 0:09:15"and all true colourists must come to this,
0:09:15 > 0:09:20"must admit that there is another kind of colour than that of the north."
0:09:20 > 0:09:25There was, and he fixed it as no artist has done before or since.
0:09:29 > 0:09:31Van Gogh was 37 when he shot himself,
0:09:31 > 0:09:35but in the last four years of his life, he changed the history of art.
0:09:35 > 0:09:40The freedom of modernist colour, the way emotions are worked upon directly by optical means
0:09:40 > 0:09:43was one of his legacies, as it was Gauguin's, too.
0:09:43 > 0:09:46But Van Gogh had taken this even further than Gauguin
0:09:46 > 0:09:50because he had opened up the modernist syntax to pity and terror
0:09:50 > 0:09:53as well as to formal research and pleasure.
0:09:53 > 0:09:56He was the hinge upon which 19th century romanticism
0:09:56 > 0:09:59turned into 20th century expressionism,
0:09:59 > 0:10:02and as he lay dying, another artist -
0:10:02 > 0:10:05ten years younger and many hundreds of miles to the north -
0:10:05 > 0:10:08was preparing to take this process a step further.
0:10:08 > 0:10:13In Van Gogh's work, you can see the self scratching to be let out.
0:10:13 > 0:10:17But in Edward Munch's, the self is out.
0:10:17 > 0:10:22And if that bony Norwegian face, which he scrutinised and painted for 70 years,
0:10:22 > 0:10:27starting like a young pastor and going through the stages of bohemia and middle age
0:10:27 > 0:10:29to finish like a paranoid old Viking,
0:10:29 > 0:10:31if that face still haunts us,
0:10:31 > 0:10:34it is because Munch was the first modern painter
0:10:34 > 0:10:38to explore the idea of the self as a battleground.
0:10:40 > 0:10:4425 years ago, there was not a general agreement about Munch's greatness.
0:10:44 > 0:10:46People who should've known better
0:10:46 > 0:10:49kept on thinking of him as a sort of gaunt, psychotic troll
0:10:49 > 0:10:54whose obsessive self-inspection didn't make much sense below the Arctic Circle.
0:10:54 > 0:10:59But today he seems in every way as universal an artist as Ibsen or Strindberg.
0:11:00 > 0:11:03He was almost literally raised in the family sick room
0:11:03 > 0:11:09in a dreadful atmosphere of whispers, silences, vomit and carbolic acid.
0:11:09 > 0:11:15"Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle.
0:11:15 > 0:11:20"In my childhood, I felt always that I was treated in an unjust way,
0:11:20 > 0:11:22"without a mother, sick
0:11:22 > 0:11:26"and with threatened punishment in hell hanging over my head."
0:11:27 > 0:11:32A great deal of Munch's creative life was spent exorcising the demons of childhood -
0:11:32 > 0:11:34the sick room, the praying faces,
0:11:34 > 0:11:37the small twisting hands of anxious women,
0:11:37 > 0:11:40the terrible apprehension that went with Munch's use of illness
0:11:40 > 0:11:42as a central metaphor of visionary insight -
0:11:42 > 0:11:47these surface in the paintings over and over again.
0:11:52 > 0:11:53So does the fear of women.
0:11:53 > 0:11:58Munch thought they were vampires, forces and not social beings.
0:11:58 > 0:12:02They meant jealousy, misery, tension and the loss of precious bodily fluids.
0:12:02 > 0:12:06He imagined love as the losing struggle of the male against the female mantis.
0:12:06 > 0:12:11He felt that men only had two choices - to be castrated by a femme fatale
0:12:11 > 0:12:13or get rejected by a virgin.
0:12:13 > 0:12:17This painting, "Puberty", carries the clearest of messages -
0:12:17 > 0:12:20sex is ominous and hateful.
0:12:20 > 0:12:23Munch's work oscillated between fantasies of rape
0:12:23 > 0:12:25and visions of woman as an invincible devourer.
0:12:25 > 0:12:30In his "Madonna", you can almost see the feet sticking out of her mouth.
0:12:33 > 0:12:35When Munch was at the height of his powers,
0:12:35 > 0:12:38this was his summer studio at Asgardstrand,
0:12:38 > 0:12:42a couple of hours by car today outside Oslo.
0:12:45 > 0:12:48Before Van Gogh, cypresses were just trees
0:12:48 > 0:12:51and before Munch, this was just a stony provincial beach
0:12:51 > 0:12:53with a grey horizon and a pier
0:12:53 > 0:12:57and rocks and trees coming down to the water.
0:12:57 > 0:13:01But what he made it into was one of the emblematic landscapes of the modern mind.
0:13:01 > 0:13:07In his hands, it came to stand for alienation and loss and yearning.
0:13:22 > 0:13:24"My whole life has been spent
0:13:24 > 0:13:27"walking by the side of a bottomless chasm,
0:13:27 > 0:13:30"jumping from stone to stone.
0:13:30 > 0:13:32"Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path
0:13:32 > 0:13:36"and join the swirling mainstream of life,
0:13:36 > 0:13:38"but I always find myself drawn inexorably back
0:13:38 > 0:13:40"towards the chasm's edge,
0:13:40 > 0:13:42"and there I shall walk
0:13:42 > 0:13:46"until the day I finally fall into the abyss."
0:13:46 > 0:13:50"For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety
0:13:50 > 0:13:53"which I have tried to express in my art.
0:13:53 > 0:13:55"Without anxiety and illness,
0:13:55 > 0:13:59"I should've been like a ship without a rudder."
0:14:00 > 0:14:03Munch was one of the fathers of expressionism,
0:14:03 > 0:14:07which was less a style or a unified movement than an attitude of mind.
0:14:07 > 0:14:11The idea that reality was so distant and somehow ungraspable,
0:14:11 > 0:14:14that great leaps of emotion must bridge the gap
0:14:14 > 0:14:17and that the only secure point in a hostile or indifferent world
0:14:17 > 0:14:20was the artist's self.
0:14:23 > 0:14:28Munch's sense of estrangement in the crowd filled his images of the city.
0:14:28 > 0:14:32"I can see behind everyone's masks.
0:14:32 > 0:14:34"Peacefully smiling faces,
0:14:34 > 0:14:38"pale corpses who endlessly wend their torturous way
0:14:38 > 0:14:42"down the road that leads to the grave."
0:14:48 > 0:14:51This feeling of anxiety and helplessness in the face of big cities
0:14:51 > 0:14:54was not confined to Munch or to Oslo.
0:14:54 > 0:14:59Since the mid-19th century, the image of the metropolis as the devourer of souls,
0:14:59 > 0:15:02a place of lonely crowds and artificial distractions,
0:15:02 > 0:15:04had been seeping into art and poetry.
0:15:04 > 0:15:08Soon it would be the main backdrop for European culture.
0:15:08 > 0:15:12Charles Baudelaire addressed Paris as his "ant-swarming city,
0:15:12 > 0:15:16"city full of dreams, where in broad day the spectre tugs your sleeve."
0:15:16 > 0:15:20MUSIC: "Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra Opus 12" by Kurt Weill
0:15:31 > 0:15:34From the crowded boulevards and cafes of Paris,
0:15:34 > 0:15:36a peculiarly ironic view of life was emerging
0:15:36 > 0:15:39based on disposable style, dandiest display,
0:15:39 > 0:15:42fleeting encounters.
0:15:42 > 0:15:46The grimy eddies of social mixture replaced the ordered pyramid of rural France
0:15:46 > 0:15:50and they found their painter in Henri de Toulouse Lautrec.
0:15:50 > 0:15:54In Lautrec's scenes of lowlife at the Moulin Rouge,
0:15:54 > 0:15:57the face literally becomes the mask.
0:16:04 > 0:16:08The Belgian painter James Ensor also picked up that image,
0:16:08 > 0:16:12using it to convey the idea that society was not only unreal
0:16:12 > 0:16:18but a sort of demonic carnival, a collective of threatening masks.
0:16:25 > 0:16:27Art is less spontaneous than we think
0:16:27 > 0:16:32and there is no such thing as serious art without a formal language.
0:16:32 > 0:16:35But the question was, where did one go for the language of extreme emotion,
0:16:35 > 0:16:38the human shapes of loss and fright?
0:16:38 > 0:16:41Actors? Medical textbooks?
0:16:41 > 0:16:43Where?
0:16:43 > 0:16:45Well, curiously enough,
0:16:45 > 0:16:47one of the solutions that Munch found
0:16:47 > 0:16:50would seem to have been archaeology.
0:16:50 > 0:16:54The cultures that Spain had destroyed in South America in the 16th century
0:16:54 > 0:16:59were beginning to acquire a certain amount of popular glamour in Paris in the late 19th -
0:16:59 > 0:17:03Incas, gold, lost cities and the jungle, all that kind of thing.
0:17:03 > 0:17:08Now, one of the minor sensations of the great Paris Exposition of 1889
0:17:08 > 0:17:10was this Inca mummy,
0:17:10 > 0:17:13which had been dug up in Peru.
0:17:13 > 0:17:15It was buried in the foetal position,
0:17:15 > 0:17:17which is to us - I don't know about the Incas -
0:17:17 > 0:17:23the archetypal emblem of fright and the desire for security.
0:17:23 > 0:17:26Paul Gauguin saw it at the Exposition
0:17:26 > 0:17:29and he was so moved by it that he copied it.
0:17:33 > 0:17:35Munch was also very moved by it,
0:17:35 > 0:17:38as so it is to this withered foetus that used to be a man,
0:17:38 > 0:17:43that we owe probably the most famous image of neurosis in the history of art -
0:17:43 > 0:17:46The Scream.
0:17:46 > 0:17:51"I stopped and leaned against the railing, half dead with fatigue.
0:17:51 > 0:17:54"Over the grey-blue fjord the clouds hung,
0:17:54 > 0:17:58"red as blood and tongues of flame.
0:17:58 > 0:18:01"Alone and trembling with fear,
0:18:01 > 0:18:05"I experienced nature's great scream."
0:18:06 > 0:18:08BRAKES SCREECH
0:18:13 > 0:18:16This theme of the city as a condenser of anxiety
0:18:16 > 0:18:18also ran through German expressionism
0:18:18 > 0:18:21in the years between the turn of the century and WWI,
0:18:21 > 0:18:25especially in the work of as group of artists which called itself Die Brucke,
0:18:25 > 0:18:29the bridge, meaning a bridge to the future.
0:18:29 > 0:18:33Their leader was a young painter named Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
0:18:33 > 0:18:36who transposed Munch's pessimism into Van Gogh's colour,
0:18:36 > 0:18:39added the influence of African carvings
0:18:39 > 0:18:41and took Berlin as his favourite subject -
0:18:41 > 0:18:45its streets, its dandies and its prostitutes.
0:18:45 > 0:18:50Kirchner's style, with its hatchings and sharp angles and harsh colour,
0:18:50 > 0:18:52was jittery and highly strung,
0:18:52 > 0:18:55a visual analogy to cocaine nerves.
0:18:55 > 0:18:58It was also rooted in a specifically German past -
0:18:58 > 0:19:01German gothic without the religious content,
0:19:01 > 0:19:05full of skinny unrepentant Mary Magdalenes.
0:19:05 > 0:19:09These predatory ladies are Munch's fatal women,
0:19:09 > 0:19:12raised to a pitch of style unknown in Norway,
0:19:12 > 0:19:15and they take the image of women as castrator one step further
0:19:15 > 0:19:18towards pure glamour.
0:19:18 > 0:19:21WOMAN SINGS IN GERMAN
0:20:07 > 0:20:12In pre-war Vienna, the leading expressionist was the painter and playwright Oskar Kokoschka,
0:20:12 > 0:20:17whose early work, including his self portraits, was more baroque than gothic -
0:20:17 > 0:20:19high strung, elaborate,
0:20:19 > 0:20:21switching between elation and misery.
0:20:21 > 0:20:24They came out of the same milieu as Freud and Schoenberg,
0:20:24 > 0:20:28that brief moment when Vienna, in the decay of its empire,
0:20:28 > 0:20:31was one of the capitals of introspective modernism.
0:20:31 > 0:20:33Kokoschka lived to 1980,
0:20:33 > 0:20:37and in his 60s he talked about his ambitions as a painter.
0:20:37 > 0:20:42Life is so short and I want to squeeze every bit out of life.
0:20:42 > 0:20:46Like, to live in the light, to live under the sun
0:20:46 > 0:20:50is such a... such a very great gift.
0:20:50 > 0:20:51We forget it today.
0:20:51 > 0:20:53I am not a spectator.
0:20:53 > 0:20:56It's not the object that I want to paint.
0:20:56 > 0:20:59It's like an opera and you can see what happens.
0:20:59 > 0:21:03I want to participate. I identify myself with the object.
0:21:03 > 0:21:08Therefore, as much in midst of life I want to be.
0:21:08 > 0:21:12I am far away.
0:21:12 > 0:21:17I am not here, a sitting onlooker, a patient onlooker,
0:21:17 > 0:21:19I am active.
0:21:21 > 0:21:26This landscape is not so much different for me.
0:21:26 > 0:21:30I wander in the face, I wander in the landscape.
0:21:30 > 0:21:36I am a wanderer. I can't stay stiff and admire.
0:21:36 > 0:21:41I have to do something. I have to mix it up with myself.
0:21:41 > 0:21:45In the twisting hands and strained faces of Kokoschka's portraits,
0:21:45 > 0:21:47the artist becomes the sitter's accomplice,
0:21:47 > 0:21:50not by giving him or her a socially useful mask,
0:21:50 > 0:21:56but by admitting a shared neurosis, a kind of mutual outsidership.
0:22:08 > 0:22:13This very private, intimate contract between Kokoschka and his sitters
0:22:13 > 0:22:15was strongest of all in 1912
0:22:15 > 0:22:17when he painted himself with Alma Mahler,
0:22:17 > 0:22:20the great love of his life.
0:22:25 > 0:22:28His affair also inspired Kokoschka
0:22:28 > 0:22:32to paint what is still the key image of expressionist love - The Tempest.
0:22:32 > 0:22:35The two lovers whirled along in a cockleshell of a boat,
0:22:35 > 0:22:37not on the sea but in space,
0:22:37 > 0:22:41the shapes turbulent and broken, all high light and darkness,
0:22:41 > 0:22:43the air, the lovers' bodies and the boat
0:22:43 > 0:22:47caught up in the same ecstatic dislocation of form.
0:22:47 > 0:22:50MUSIC: "Symphony No 9" by Gustav Mahler
0:23:11 > 0:23:16The chief expressionist in France was a Polish Jew named Chaim Soutine.
0:23:16 > 0:23:18He was wretchedly poor
0:23:18 > 0:23:21and his art became a way of stealing substance from the world.
0:23:21 > 0:23:23He was obsessed with food,
0:23:23 > 0:23:27a scraggy chicken on a hook stared at for days,
0:23:27 > 0:23:31life seen as meat and as a preparation for death.
0:23:31 > 0:23:34MUSIC: "Oxygene" (Side 2 Part 4) Jean Michel Jarre
0:24:01 > 0:24:05Soutine could give the carcass of an ox the pathos of a crucifixion.
0:24:05 > 0:24:07In painting that mass of bone, meat and fat
0:24:07 > 0:24:11he was paying homage to Rembrandt, who had painted the same subject.
0:24:11 > 0:24:14But Soutine gave it an even more intense carnality,
0:24:14 > 0:24:18as though the thick painted self were also a paste of meat
0:24:18 > 0:24:20smeared on the canvas.
0:24:31 > 0:24:33His landscapes,
0:24:33 > 0:24:38particularly the ones he painted near Ceret in the South of France in 1920 to '22,
0:24:38 > 0:24:42are even more turbulent, like an extreme distortion of Van Gogh.
0:24:42 > 0:24:46The hills rear up, the houses lean like rags in a gale,
0:24:46 > 0:24:49the horizon strains against the sky
0:24:49 > 0:24:53and the whole scene becomes one mass of tumbling visceral paint.
0:24:54 > 0:24:57Soutine's brushwork looks like chicken guts.
0:24:57 > 0:25:01Never had a landscape been so transformed by emotion.
0:25:01 > 0:25:03The violence of the paint
0:25:03 > 0:25:07predicts the violence that would later surface in American abstract painting,
0:25:07 > 0:25:10but the images are still concrete.
0:25:25 > 0:25:28After the Second World War, the English painter Francis Bacon
0:25:28 > 0:25:31took up Soutine's theme of the dismembered carcass
0:25:31 > 0:25:34to set forth his own vision of a cannibal's world,
0:25:34 > 0:25:38from which all moral relationships had been erased.
0:25:39 > 0:25:42I have tried to be...
0:25:42 > 0:25:46..as realistic in my way as I can be.
0:25:46 > 0:25:50After all, you only have to think about life,
0:25:50 > 0:25:53or have experienced it in any way,
0:25:53 > 0:25:58or think about the meat on your plate
0:25:58 > 0:26:05to think how disturbing what is called reality is.
0:26:05 > 0:26:09And we are nearly... Everybody lives their life screened from it,
0:26:09 > 0:26:15and if my pictures seem to give over
0:26:15 > 0:26:20a kind of sense of violence or mortality,
0:26:20 > 0:26:23it's only in my attempt to be as realistic as I can.
0:26:23 > 0:26:27Mind you, when you talk about realism, I can only paint for myself.
0:26:27 > 0:26:33I don't paint for anybody else because you can't.
0:26:33 > 0:26:38You try to bring the thing back onto your own nervous system
0:26:38 > 0:26:41in its most poignant form.
0:26:43 > 0:26:47In Bacon, the ideal body of classical art is dismissed.
0:26:47 > 0:26:51The nude becomes a two-legged animal with addictions.
0:26:55 > 0:26:57One of his sources was photography,
0:26:57 > 0:27:01the early sequential photos of human action by Eadweard Muybridge.
0:27:01 > 0:27:03In Muybridge's book "Animal Locomotion",
0:27:03 > 0:27:08the naked body is studied with perfect detachment as a machine.
0:27:12 > 0:27:17Muybridge's are raw statements of movement.
0:27:17 > 0:27:21Because every way that a person moves, stands,
0:27:21 > 0:27:24moves their arms or anything else
0:27:24 > 0:27:27has not only its movement,
0:27:27 > 0:27:29but, you may say,
0:27:29 > 0:27:34all the implications of that movement, as well.
0:27:37 > 0:27:41In Bacon's paintings, all sexuality is turned into violence,
0:27:41 > 0:27:44a sort of dog-like grappling in closed rooms
0:27:44 > 0:27:46whose furnishings you can't identify.
0:27:46 > 0:27:49The bed suggests a cage or an operating table,
0:27:49 > 0:27:53the walls and floor are the colour of bad motels.
0:27:54 > 0:27:57Yet the fragments of a traditional lurk behind the images
0:27:57 > 0:28:03and one of Bacon's obsessive emblems was Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X.
0:28:03 > 0:28:07I was particularly obsessed
0:28:07 > 0:28:14by Velazquez's painting of the Pope
0:28:14 > 0:28:20and I was, at the same time, very interested...
0:28:20 > 0:28:27..by Eisenstein's photograph in Potemkin of the nurse.
0:28:27 > 0:28:32And I made a combination, which I think has been very unsuccessful,
0:28:32 > 0:28:36of the Pope screaming in the way of the nurse.
0:28:36 > 0:28:41Now, the scream was not to do with expressionism,
0:28:41 > 0:28:45because I am not expressionistic, I have nothing to express.
0:28:45 > 0:28:50I was absorbed by the idea of the colour of the mouth,
0:28:50 > 0:28:52the teeth, the saliva,
0:28:52 > 0:28:55you may say the beautiful red and purples
0:28:55 > 0:28:58of the interior rather of the mouth,
0:28:58 > 0:29:03rather like Monet was obsessed by haystacks
0:29:03 > 0:29:06and the light falling on them from hour to hour.
0:29:06 > 0:29:09In the face of paintings like this,
0:29:09 > 0:29:13you may well feel that Bacon has a great deal to express.
0:29:20 > 0:29:24The other important painter of the disquieting human figure in the '50s
0:29:24 > 0:29:28was a Dutchman who had emigrated to America, Willem de Kooning.
0:29:28 > 0:29:31His paintings of women came partly out of American ads,
0:29:31 > 0:29:34the white smiles and big dominating glamour girls
0:29:34 > 0:29:38in the lush pop landscape of America's post-war boom,
0:29:38 > 0:29:40Marilyn with shark teeth.
0:29:40 > 0:29:43- WOLF WHISTLE - Hey, hey, Suzy Q,
0:29:43 > 0:29:45what's cooking with you?
0:29:45 > 0:29:47Your teeth look whiter than new, new, new!
0:29:47 > 0:29:49My teeth aren't new but my toothpaste is!
0:29:49 > 0:29:54New Pepsodent. Get with it. New package, new flavor,
0:29:54 > 0:29:58new formula, too, means brighter smile for me and you.
0:29:58 > 0:30:00# You'll wonder where the yellow went
0:30:00 > 0:30:04# When you brush your teeth With Pepsodent #
0:30:04 > 0:30:06Got the message?
0:30:06 > 0:30:07Like Kirchner's and Munch's,
0:30:07 > 0:30:10De Kooning's women are about anxiety.
0:30:10 > 0:30:15They take the expressionist fear of the fatal woman to an almost comic extreme -
0:30:15 > 0:30:18squat, broad, overwhelming and primitive,
0:30:18 > 0:30:20glimpsed but not analysed,
0:30:20 > 0:30:24the sex goddess changes into a fiercer and older kind of idol.
0:30:25 > 0:30:31It also was some kind of glimpse, like meeting one of those ladies.
0:30:31 > 0:30:35So when people say they are not really figures but they are landscapes,
0:30:35 > 0:30:37that's true to a certain extent.
0:30:37 > 0:30:39But they look fierce to me.
0:30:39 > 0:30:44Figures maybe, in a landscape, I don't know where exactly,
0:30:44 > 0:30:47not here, not there, but somewhere.
0:30:47 > 0:30:52I don't think that I'm expressing the world around me.
0:30:52 > 0:30:55You know, this real world, this so-called real world
0:30:55 > 0:30:59is just something you put up with, like everybody else.
0:30:59 > 0:31:04I am in my element and I... am a little bit out of this world.
0:31:04 > 0:31:07I'm in the real world.
0:31:07 > 0:31:09I'm on the beam.
0:31:09 > 0:31:13Because when I'm falling, I'm doing all right.
0:31:13 > 0:31:16When I'm slipping I say, "Hey, this is very interesting."
0:31:16 > 0:31:20It's when I'm standing upright that bothers me.
0:31:20 > 0:31:23I'm not doing so good. I'm stiff.
0:31:23 > 0:31:28As a matter of fact, I'm really slipping most of the time into that glimpse.
0:31:28 > 0:31:33That's a wonderful sensation, to slip into this glimpse.
0:31:33 > 0:31:35I'm like a slipping glimpser.
0:31:35 > 0:31:39This spontaneity of touch and looking, the slipping glimpse,
0:31:39 > 0:31:43ran all through De Kooning's work, both figurative and abstract.
0:31:43 > 0:31:46But he and Bacon were among the few artists
0:31:46 > 0:31:49who could handle expressionist distortion after WWII,
0:31:49 > 0:31:54because reality had now outstripped art.
0:31:54 > 0:31:57MUSIC: "Alpine Symphony" by Richard Strauss
0:32:35 > 0:32:37By the end of the war, the entire world knew
0:32:37 > 0:32:40what had been done in the death camps of Nazi Germany
0:32:40 > 0:32:43and there was no testimony that art could give
0:32:43 > 0:32:46that could rival the evidence of the photograph.
0:32:49 > 0:32:53Today, places like Dachau are their own monuments.
0:32:53 > 0:32:57But any distortion of the human body that an artist might make after 1945
0:32:57 > 0:32:59was going to have to bear comparison
0:32:59 > 0:33:02with what the Nazis had done to real bodies,
0:33:02 > 0:33:06and very few expressionist paintings could stand this strain.
0:33:06 > 0:33:09Here, photography was enough.
0:33:09 > 0:33:12Anything else would've seemed gratuitous.
0:33:24 > 0:33:29In the face of this, there seemed to be very little that art could say.
0:33:29 > 0:33:33What we understand about the Holocaust, we get from writing and photography.
0:33:33 > 0:33:35But art had very little to contribute,
0:33:35 > 0:33:38almost nothing of importance.
0:33:38 > 0:33:41The effects of this failure are still with us.
0:33:41 > 0:33:45After the war, there were very few people who believed that art could carry the burden
0:33:45 > 0:33:47of major social meanings any more.
0:33:47 > 0:33:51There would be no more Goyas and Courbets.
0:33:51 > 0:33:56In the death camps, the only product, as far as art was concerned,
0:33:56 > 0:33:57was silence.
0:34:11 > 0:34:13Beside these horrors
0:34:13 > 0:34:17there were only two sources of uncontaminated images open to art -
0:34:17 > 0:34:20one was complete abstraction, the other was the natural world.
0:34:20 > 0:34:24Artists had been combining and recombining these for 30 years.
0:34:24 > 0:34:27MUSIC: "Phaedra" by Tangerine Dream
0:34:45 > 0:34:47Just before the First World War
0:34:47 > 0:34:50a group of German artists that called itself the Blue Rider
0:34:50 > 0:34:54had looked to pure nature for transcendental images.
0:34:54 > 0:34:57One of them was the painter Franz Marc.
0:34:58 > 0:35:02"I tried to heighten my feeling for the organic rhythm of all things,
0:35:02 > 0:35:04"tried to feel myself pantheistically
0:35:04 > 0:35:07"into the trembling and coursing of the blood in nature,
0:35:07 > 0:35:11"in trees, in animals, in the air.
0:35:11 > 0:35:14"I see no happier means to the animalising of art,
0:35:14 > 0:35:18"as I like to call it, than the animal picture."
0:35:44 > 0:35:48"Very early in life, I already found man ugly
0:35:48 > 0:35:53"and animals seemed to me cleaner and more beautiful.
0:35:53 > 0:35:56"But even in them, I discovered much that was unacceptable and ugly,
0:35:56 > 0:36:01"so that my art instinctively and out of inner compulsion
0:36:01 > 0:36:04"became increasingly schematic and abstract."
0:36:04 > 0:36:08Marc wrote that from the trenches in 1915.
0:36:08 > 0:36:12By then, he believed that abstraction was the only route to spiritual knowledge,
0:36:12 > 0:36:15and certainly it seems to have had a prophetic quality for him.
0:36:15 > 0:36:19In 1914, he painted this image called "Forms In Battle".
0:36:19 > 0:36:22Two years later, at the age of 36,
0:36:22 > 0:36:25he was killed at the Battle of Verdun.
0:36:30 > 0:36:34Paul Klee had been one of Marc's closest friends.
0:36:34 > 0:36:37He survived the war and went on to teach at the Bauhaus,
0:36:37 > 0:36:39and for another 20 years
0:36:39 > 0:36:43he would produce some of the most exquisite visions of nature in modern art.
0:36:43 > 0:36:46Small, witty, delicate and mysterious,
0:36:46 > 0:36:51his idea of the natural world was like the image in this watercolour "The Open Book",
0:36:51 > 0:36:54page after page opening backwards into the centre,
0:36:54 > 0:36:57disclosing another world of growth and form.
0:36:57 > 0:37:00MUSIC: "Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky (Part 1)
0:38:02 > 0:38:07He loved to invent odd little hieroglyphs that signified unfamiliar corners of nature.
0:38:07 > 0:38:10He was drawn to structures so small that the normal eye misses them -
0:38:10 > 0:38:15plant cells, seeds, plankton, diatoms.
0:38:15 > 0:38:19MUSIC: "Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky (Part II)
0:38:46 > 0:38:50He loved whimsy and the grotesque, as long as they weren't too scary.
0:38:50 > 0:38:54Seeing a man with a barrel organ at a fair led to this watercolour
0:38:54 > 0:38:57entitled "Dance You Monster To My Soft Song".
0:39:00 > 0:39:02But for all its waywardness,
0:39:02 > 0:39:06Klee's imagination was connected to deep strands in German romantic art,
0:39:06 > 0:39:08a vision of nature as sacramental,
0:39:08 > 0:39:11a gift of God, mysterious and benevolent.
0:39:11 > 0:39:16Hence his liking for subjects which had long been part of the romantic repertoire,
0:39:16 > 0:39:20icy mountains, for instance, with a stand of jagged pines.
0:39:21 > 0:39:25He used abstraction as a way of sharpening his perceptions of nature
0:39:25 > 0:39:28and ours, too.
0:39:32 > 0:39:34In fact, the central theme of Klee's work,
0:39:34 > 0:39:38to which his watercolours and paintings return over and over,
0:39:38 > 0:39:40is the garden of paradise -
0:39:40 > 0:39:44all life composed under the eye of natural order.
0:39:45 > 0:39:49Klee taught painting at the Bauhaus in Germany in the '20s
0:39:49 > 0:39:51and one of his colleagues there was the first artist
0:39:51 > 0:39:55to try to paint transcendental images that were completely abstract.
0:39:55 > 0:39:58His name was Wassily Kandinsky.
0:39:59 > 0:40:02Kandinsky was Russian. He came to art late.
0:40:02 > 0:40:05He didn't begin until he was past 30.
0:40:05 > 0:40:07Folk art and the Russian icon were his early influences
0:40:07 > 0:40:11and they showed in his bright patterns of flat colour.
0:40:11 > 0:40:13Of course, he'd looked at Fauve paintings, too,
0:40:13 > 0:40:17as you can see in this Kandinsky from the early 1900s.
0:40:17 > 0:40:21But gradually, the patterns become more abstract.
0:40:21 > 0:40:25These shapes are not immediately recognisable as women.
0:40:25 > 0:40:27But there they are,
0:40:27 > 0:40:30in the midst of a pastoral scene with animals.
0:40:35 > 0:40:40In the landscapes he painted at Murnau, near Munich, in 1908,
0:40:40 > 0:40:42the forms are broader and freer,
0:40:42 > 0:40:45the colour more localised and specific.
0:40:45 > 0:40:49"Colour directly influences the soul.
0:40:49 > 0:40:53"Colour is the keyboard - the eyes are the hammers,
0:40:53 > 0:40:56"the soul is the piano with many keys.
0:40:56 > 0:40:59"The artist is the hand that plays,
0:40:59 > 0:41:03"touching one key or another with purpose, to create vibrations.
0:41:03 > 0:41:07"So it follows that colour harmony must rest ultimately
0:41:07 > 0:41:10"on intentional playing upon the human soul.
0:41:10 > 0:41:15"This is one of the guiding principals of internal necessity."
0:41:15 > 0:41:18So the next step was pure abstraction.
0:41:18 > 0:41:19Kandinsky was a theosophist
0:41:19 > 0:41:24and he believed that the sins of man came from too much material reality.
0:41:24 > 0:41:26He thought an age of the spirit was coming
0:41:26 > 0:41:29and was sure the right art for it would be totally abstract,
0:41:29 > 0:41:31ideal and immaterial.
0:41:42 > 0:41:45MUSIC: "Syrinx" For Solo Flute by Claude Debussy
0:41:59 > 0:42:03Although Kandinsky painted his first abstract pictures around 1911,
0:42:03 > 0:42:07the natural world continued to offer images of another sort
0:42:07 > 0:42:09to both painters and sculptors.
0:42:09 > 0:42:13Some of the greatest images in modern art come from the tranquil assurance
0:42:13 > 0:42:15that however abstract you may get,
0:42:15 > 0:42:18there is no break between human culture and the natural order.
0:42:18 > 0:42:23The high priest of this feeling was the son of a Carpathian peasant.
0:42:23 > 0:42:26His name was Constantin Brancusi.
0:42:26 > 0:42:29He lived in Paris and died here in 1957.
0:42:29 > 0:42:33This was his studio, a place visibly sacred to tools
0:42:33 > 0:42:37and to the beauty of the marks that they make.
0:42:37 > 0:42:40Coming out of a strong craft background,
0:42:40 > 0:42:43Brancusi knew the nature of his substances very well -
0:42:43 > 0:42:49the qualities of bronze, timber, marble, limestone, plaster.
0:42:49 > 0:42:52He wanted his sculpture to have as substance
0:42:52 > 0:42:55the same perfection that his subjects had as organisms.
0:42:58 > 0:43:02What this rapturous feeling for the skin of materials produced
0:43:02 > 0:43:06was sculpture that declared itself in mass and in contour and surface
0:43:06 > 0:43:08but not in detail.
0:43:08 > 0:43:12It began to look as timeless and as perfect as a new laid egg.
0:43:12 > 0:43:16MUSIC: "Syrinx" For Solo Flute by Claude Debussy
0:43:29 > 0:43:34Brancusi wanted to find the most compressed form that still contained the subject.
0:43:34 > 0:43:37Not geometrical, always organic,
0:43:37 > 0:43:42like this stone fish, whose shape makes you see it slipping through layers of water.
0:43:42 > 0:43:45Or the minimum form repeated, as in his endless columns,
0:43:45 > 0:43:49composed of units that, in theory, could keep going up forever.
0:43:49 > 0:43:53In every piece, the tightest possible image.
0:44:29 > 0:44:33Whereas for Brancusi nature was pure and clearly defined,
0:44:33 > 0:44:36there was an alternative tradition running through American painting
0:44:36 > 0:44:40that had its roots in grandeur and the mysteries of landscape.
0:44:41 > 0:44:45MUSIC: "Quiet City" by Aaron Copland
0:45:28 > 0:45:31In the 19th century, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River
0:45:31 > 0:45:35had come to typify what the American wilderness meant to artists.
0:45:35 > 0:45:40It represented the designs of God, his unedited manuscript.
0:46:20 > 0:46:25There was no question of painting a place like this as a metaphor of the human soul.
0:46:25 > 0:46:30Human beings don't enter into it. No soul is that vast.
0:46:30 > 0:46:32To paint what you saw was enough,
0:46:32 > 0:46:35and this, I think, is the underlying reason why so much American romantic art
0:46:35 > 0:46:38from the 19th century to the mid 20th
0:46:38 > 0:46:41was less a description of the troubled self
0:46:41 > 0:46:45than a sustained homage to vastness and antiquity.
0:46:46 > 0:46:50MUSIC: "Alpine Symphony" by Richard Strauss
0:47:00 > 0:47:02Looking for images of the sublime,
0:47:02 > 0:47:07painters went even further west than the Grand Canyon to the valley of the Yosemite.
0:47:07 > 0:47:09MUSIC CONTINUES
0:48:05 > 0:48:07The feelings set off by such places
0:48:07 > 0:48:11had been described by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
0:48:12 > 0:48:15"I become a transparent eyeball.
0:48:15 > 0:48:16"I am nothing.
0:48:16 > 0:48:18"I see all.
0:48:18 > 0:48:22"The currents of the universal being circulate through me.
0:48:22 > 0:48:26"I am part or parcel of God."
0:48:36 > 0:48:39Much later, an American evangelist said that his idea of God
0:48:39 > 0:48:42was a sort of luminous oblong blur.
0:48:42 > 0:48:46This was the unwitting text for the paintings of the American abstract expressionist
0:48:46 > 0:48:50Mark Rothko in the 1950s.
0:48:55 > 0:48:57Rothko kept the format of landscape,
0:48:57 > 0:49:01the soft rectangles that can be red as sky and flat plain,
0:49:01 > 0:49:05sometimes with a bar like the horizon in between.
0:49:05 > 0:49:07But he gave the colour a kind of breathing intensity
0:49:07 > 0:49:12and that, more than any reference to landscape as such, is what the paintings are about.
0:49:12 > 0:49:16They tried to suggest that transcendence of Emerson's,
0:49:16 > 0:49:19but through light and colour alone.
0:49:19 > 0:49:22There wasn't much direct landscape imagery in abstract expressionism,
0:49:22 > 0:49:25and the general line was to deny that it was there at all
0:49:25 > 0:49:29in case the paintings looked less radical and less abstract than they really were.
0:49:29 > 0:49:32But all the same, it was there in an oblique way
0:49:32 > 0:49:35and the form that it took was a concern with giant scale.
0:49:35 > 0:49:38A painting like this one, by Jackson Pollock,
0:49:38 > 0:49:41is almost large enough to walk into.
0:49:41 > 0:49:43The space it suggests is not just an illusion
0:49:43 > 0:49:46but a physical fact, at least in two dimensions.
0:49:46 > 0:49:52In it, the web of paint takes on a completely physical look, like nature itself.
0:49:52 > 0:49:54The eye can't take it in all at once.
0:49:54 > 0:49:57It goes from knot to knot, from skein to skein,
0:49:57 > 0:49:59assembling the details into a whole,
0:49:59 > 0:50:02as one assembles a landscape by looking at it.
0:50:09 > 0:50:14Now, abstract expressionism is less the creation of cowboys but of New York Jews -
0:50:14 > 0:50:20all the same space itself, radiant, optimistic, endless,
0:50:20 > 0:50:22very much an American myth
0:50:22 > 0:50:25and bound to affect them in some degree or another.
0:50:25 > 0:50:28And on Jackson Pollock, who was not a migrant's son
0:50:28 > 0:50:31but a native American from the western states,
0:50:31 > 0:50:34its effect was very large indeed.
0:50:34 > 0:50:39Pollock was the first American artist to influence the course of world art.
0:50:39 > 0:50:43For the last 10 years of his life, until he died in a car crash in 1956,
0:50:43 > 0:50:47he lived and worked on Long Island, outside New York.
0:50:47 > 0:50:53My painting is direct. I usually paint on the floor.
0:50:53 > 0:50:59I enjoy working on a large canvas. I feel more at home, more at ease in a big area.
0:50:59 > 0:51:05Having the canvas on the floor, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting.
0:51:05 > 0:51:11This way, I can walk around it, work from all four sides and be in the painting,
0:51:11 > 0:51:15similar to the Indian sand painters of the West.
0:51:15 > 0:51:19Sometimes I use a brush, but often prefer using a stick.
0:51:19 > 0:51:23Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can.
0:51:24 > 0:51:26I like to use a dripping, fluid paint...
0:51:27 > 0:51:31..a method of painting that is a natural growth out of a need.
0:51:31 > 0:51:35I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.
0:51:35 > 0:51:40Pollock's drip technique used to be treated as a joke, as though he were out of control.
0:51:40 > 0:51:43But he wasn't. The drips of paint were spontaneous,
0:51:43 > 0:51:45but they fell just where he wanted them,
0:51:45 > 0:51:49building the surface into a web of skeins and subtle energies,
0:51:49 > 0:51:51working across the whole canvas.
0:51:51 > 0:51:54Pollock once declared that he wanted to become nature.
0:51:54 > 0:51:59What did he mean? That he wanted to work parallel with its variety,
0:51:59 > 0:52:02its unpredictability and above all, its vitality.
0:52:02 > 0:52:06He had a very light hand. Sometimes, as in Blue Poles,
0:52:06 > 0:52:09you might be looking at a sort of abstract Tiepolo,
0:52:09 > 0:52:13the same kind of airy, light and spritely drawing.
0:52:13 > 0:52:17This nervous energy of Pollock's, expanding under strict control,
0:52:17 > 0:52:21seems to refute the picture of him as a rip-roaring wildcatter from Middle America.
0:52:21 > 0:52:24Only intelligence, allied to a deep sense of the natural world
0:52:24 > 0:52:28can produce work like this.
0:52:45 > 0:52:48Another leading figure in abstract expressionism,
0:52:48 > 0:52:51both as painter and a writer, was Robert Motherwell,
0:52:51 > 0:52:55the last major collagist in the tradition of George Braque,
0:52:55 > 0:52:58but perhaps best known for his series of black and white paintings
0:52:58 > 0:53:00The Elegies for The Spanish Republic.
0:53:00 > 0:53:05He has always preferred to keep direct imagery out of his work.
0:53:05 > 0:53:11A painting is, so to speak, working by indirections,
0:53:11 > 0:53:16synthesising what is scanned both internally and externally,
0:53:16 > 0:53:20in which the real object is not the world
0:53:20 > 0:53:23but the canvas itself.
0:53:23 > 0:53:27I always loved that title of Max Ernst's on one of his pictures,
0:53:27 > 0:53:28The Blind Swimmer.
0:53:28 > 0:53:32I think, in a way, we all worked as blind swimmers,
0:53:32 > 0:53:35as quite good swimmers but quite blind.
0:53:35 > 0:53:39What the black was doing
0:53:39 > 0:53:43was slowly becoming, erm...
0:53:43 > 0:53:46..a sombre force,
0:53:46 > 0:53:50but also a brilliant force.
0:53:50 > 0:53:53There's certain painters who use black as a colour
0:53:53 > 0:53:57as vividly as, um,
0:53:57 > 0:54:01other artists can use fire-engine red, let's say.
0:54:01 > 0:54:05But in the end, it seems that, in my mind,
0:54:05 > 0:54:11black is also symbolic of death.
0:54:13 > 0:54:17Motherwell's Spanish Elegies were provoked by the memory of the Civil War,
0:54:17 > 0:54:20though their field of suggestion is not only political.
0:54:20 > 0:54:24But in the meantime, what happened to the older ambitions of abstract art,
0:54:24 > 0:54:26like Kandinsky's hope that it could bring about
0:54:26 > 0:54:30some kind of spiritual change in those who saw it?
0:54:30 > 0:54:35The last religious commission given to a major artist is actually in America.
0:54:35 > 0:54:37It's here in Houston, Texas,
0:54:37 > 0:54:40where the de Mille family built a non-denominational chapel,
0:54:40 > 0:54:43a space for contemplation.
0:54:43 > 0:54:48They also commissioned the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko to do paintings for it.
0:54:48 > 0:54:50This was in 1964
0:54:50 > 0:54:55and they were installed and finished in 1971, a year after his death.
0:54:56 > 0:54:58GONG ECHOES
0:55:35 > 0:55:38In this chapel Rothko, who was soon to commit suicide,
0:55:38 > 0:55:41took to its ultimate extreme the idea that colour,
0:55:41 > 0:55:44in this case a very narrow range of colours,
0:55:44 > 0:55:47from dark plummy red, through violet to black,
0:55:47 > 0:55:50could carry the whole load of a spiritual experience.
0:55:50 > 0:55:55This is truly the last silence of romanticism.
0:56:15 > 0:56:17I can't enter this chapel without emotion,
0:56:17 > 0:56:21but I never know whether I'm feeling what Rothko meant me to feel.
0:56:21 > 0:56:24He wanted to be a great religious artist.
0:56:24 > 0:56:27He was not only a Jew, but a Russian Jew,
0:56:27 > 0:56:29and he wanted his paintings to act like icons
0:56:29 > 0:56:34and to possess the full moral seriousness of the Russian novel.
0:56:34 > 0:56:38He had the wrong equipment for this. He had an exquisite sense of nuance
0:56:38 > 0:56:41and silence and vagueness,
0:56:41 > 0:56:47but this he wanted to carry the full patriarchal grandeur of the Old Testament.
0:56:47 > 0:56:51It couldn't and these paintings are the result.
0:56:51 > 0:56:55These are not active images. They're more like zones of silence,
0:56:55 > 0:56:58blank slates which you complete by looking at them.
0:56:58 > 0:57:00What they present as sacred
0:57:00 > 0:57:03is the state of receptivity, of slow looking -
0:57:03 > 0:57:08in fact, the condition of being an artist, of being Mark Rothko.
0:57:08 > 0:57:12The world has drained out of them. Does that makes them religious art?
0:57:12 > 0:57:15Holier men than I have thought so in this chapel.
0:57:15 > 0:57:19If I have my doubts, it's because they're so very withdrawn.
0:57:19 > 0:57:23The horizons and storms of earlier romantic sublimities have gone
0:57:23 > 0:57:26and what is left as the soul subject of contemplation
0:57:26 > 0:57:28is a void.
0:57:35 > 0:57:38GONG ECHOES
0:57:51 > 0:57:55Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd