The View from the Edge The Shock of the New

MUSIC: "Theme 21" by Peter Howell

One of the themes of 19th century romantic art was the world and the spirit,

experiences that go beyond or below our conscious control.

The grandeur of the outer world, seen as a sacred place,

as the trace of God's creation

and the conflicts and terrors of the inner one,

the unsatisfied self.

The search for these precarious images of man and nature

was one of the great projects that the 19th century bequeathed to modernism.

BIRDS TWEET

From classical times, through many centuries of Christianity,

man and nature were considered to be in the reliable, pastoral care of God.

But in the 19th century, God died,

and artists weren't feeling too well, either.

Strangely enough, it was in this idyllic landscape

that one great painter, in his last years before suicide,

was to express his own sense of isolation in the world.

This is the lunatic asylum at St-Remy-de-Provence

in the South of France, near Arles.

For a year and eight days, from May 1899 to May 1890,

Vincent Van Gogh was under treatment here.

Just what his illness was, nobody to this day is quite sure.

The one aspect of its symptoms that everybody knows about

was that he cut off his earlobe

and gave it to a prostitute in Arles.

He suffered, as they say, from manic depression,

which is an opaque way of skirting an issue

that we still don't understand.

"Though you continually hear terrible cries and howls, like beasts in a menagerie,

"in spite of that, people get to know each other very well

"and help each other when their attacks come on.

"When I'm working in the garden they all come to look,

"and I assure you, they have more discretion and good manners to leave me alone

"than the good people of the town of Arles."

The garden and the asylum look much as they did in Van Gogh's time.

Even his irises are still there.

"There are people who love nature, even though they are cracked or ill.

"Those are the painters.

"Then there are those who like what is made by men's hands,

"and these even go so far as to like pictures.

"Though here there are some patients very seriously ill,

"the fear and horror of madness that I used to have

"is already much lessened."

He suffered from agonising fits of paranoia

and a kind of paralysis of the will, accompanied by hallucinations,

during which he couldn't work at all.

And these were separated by long, clear months during which he could and did,

which were in turn punctuated

by the most extraordinary moments of visionary insight.

At such moments, everything he saw was swept up in a current of energy.

Everything he sees is made from the same plasma.

The moon comes out of eclipse, the stars blaze,

the sky heaves like the ocean and the cypresses move with it.

Van Gogh's cypresses are like thick, dark, lightening conductors

grounding the energies of the sky and the earth.

They are alive as no painted tree had ever been

and as no real cypress could be.

"The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts.

"It astonishes me that they have never been done as I see them.

"The cypress is as beautiful in line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk,

"a splash of black in a sunny landscape."

Outside the asylum walls, you can walk in Van Gogh's olive grove

and measure the way that he changed it,

inventing the form of the dry grasses and the flickering blue shadows on them

and turning the olive trunks themselves into shapes,

like human bodies grown old and arthritic with work.

Again, the continuous field of energy pouring through the light

rising from the ground, solidifying in the trunks.

You can see his landscapes motif by motif

without necessarily seeing what he saw.

But Van Gogh's sense of the power behind the natural world was so strong

that once you have seen the paintings,

you have no choice but to see the real places in terms of them.

CHURCH BELLS RING

Another artist might've found these landscapes of twisted grey limestone

formless, unpaintable.

What Van Gogh found in them was a perfect unity

between the shapes of those strangely distorted rocks,

their fierce plasticity and the details within them -

the grain of the rock, how it scooped and veined,

how it resembles the grain of old olive roots, silvery-grey, too.

How the far shape is echoed in the close detail

and how both accord with the sharp linear strokes of his brush.

One of his favourite sites was over the Plaine de la Crau,

whose flat fields and furrows and trees were, he said,

as infinite as the sea, only better because people lived on them.

To draw them, he used an amazing range of notation -

every shape suggested by a different dot or stroke or squiggle,

everything seen, nothing generalised about.

Few drawings have this richness of surface.

It feels as though the life of the landscape is bursting through the paper

so that the brown ink becomes almost as eloquent as the colour in his paintings.

Van Gogh's paintings were not the work of a madman.

They were done by an ecstatic, who was also a great formal artist.

Today, the doctors would give him lithium and tranquillisers

and we wouldn't have the paintings perhaps - we don't know.

For Van Gogh confronted the world with a kind of insecure joy.

Nature was to him both exquisite and terrible.

It consoled him but it was his judge.

It was the fingerprint of God,

but the finger was always pointed at him.

Sometimes the eye of God was, too,

the yellow disc of the sun, huge and merciless,

the emblem of Apollo.

What Van Gogh called "the gravity of great sunlight effects"

filled his work not only with a flood of colour

but also with a symbolism that one can only call religious,

the idea that human life is lived within an immense exterior will

and that work like sewing and reaping is not simply work

but an allegory of life and death.

"I saw in this reaper

"a vague figure, struggling like a devil in great heat to finish his task.

"I saw then in it the image of death,

"in the sense that humanity would be the wheat one reaps.

"So it is, if you like, the opposite of the sewer I had tried before.

"I find it strange that I saw like this

"through the iron bars of a cell."

Such things did not come by chance.

Van Gogh knew what he was looking for when he came South and, of course, he found it,

bringing the high spiritual ambitions of a northern romantic from Holland

into a landscape of the senses.

He went there, he wrote...

"Because not only in Africa but from Arles onward,

"you are bound to find beautiful contrasts of red and green,

"of blue and orange, of sulphur and lilac,

"and all true colourists must come to this,

"must admit that there is another kind of colour than that of the north."

There was, and he fixed it as no artist has done before or since.

Van Gogh was 37 when he shot himself,

but in the last four years of his life, he changed the history of art.

The freedom of modernist colour, the way emotions are worked upon directly by optical means

was one of his legacies, as it was Gauguin's, too.

But Van Gogh had taken this even further than Gauguin

because he had opened up the modernist syntax to pity and terror

as well as to formal research and pleasure.

He was the hinge upon which 19th century romanticism

turned into 20th century expressionism,

and as he lay dying, another artist -

ten years younger and many hundreds of miles to the north -

was preparing to take this process a step further.

In Van Gogh's work, you can see the self scratching to be let out.

But in Edward Munch's, the self is out.

And if that bony Norwegian face, which he scrutinised and painted for 70 years,

starting like a young pastor and going through the stages of bohemia and middle age

to finish like a paranoid old Viking,

if that face still haunts us,

it is because Munch was the first modern painter

to explore the idea of the self as a battleground.

25 years ago, there was not a general agreement about Munch's greatness.

People who should've known better

kept on thinking of him as a sort of gaunt, psychotic troll

whose obsessive self-inspection didn't make much sense below the Arctic Circle.

But today he seems in every way as universal an artist as Ibsen or Strindberg.

He was almost literally raised in the family sick room

in a dreadful atmosphere of whispers, silences, vomit and carbolic acid.

"Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle.

"In my childhood, I felt always that I was treated in an unjust way,

"without a mother, sick

"and with threatened punishment in hell hanging over my head."

A great deal of Munch's creative life was spent exorcising the demons of childhood -

the sick room, the praying faces,

the small twisting hands of anxious women,

the terrible apprehension that went with Munch's use of illness

as a central metaphor of visionary insight -

these surface in the paintings over and over again.

So does the fear of women.

Munch thought they were vampires, forces and not social beings.

They meant jealousy, misery, tension and the loss of precious bodily fluids.

He imagined love as the losing struggle of the male against the female mantis.

He felt that men only had two choices - to be castrated by a femme fatale

or get rejected by a virgin.

This painting, "Puberty", carries the clearest of messages -

sex is ominous and hateful.

Munch's work oscillated between fantasies of rape

and visions of woman as an invincible devourer.

In his "Madonna", you can almost see the feet sticking out of her mouth.

When Munch was at the height of his powers,

this was his summer studio at Asgardstrand,

a couple of hours by car today outside Oslo.

Before Van Gogh, cypresses were just trees

and before Munch, this was just a stony provincial beach

with a grey horizon and a pier

and rocks and trees coming down to the water.

But what he made it into was one of the emblematic landscapes of the modern mind.

In his hands, it came to stand for alienation and loss and yearning.

"My whole life has been spent

"walking by the side of a bottomless chasm,

"jumping from stone to stone.

"Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path

"and join the swirling mainstream of life,

"but I always find myself drawn inexorably back

"towards the chasm's edge,

"and there I shall walk

"until the day I finally fall into the abyss."

"For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety

"which I have tried to express in my art.

"Without anxiety and illness,

"I should've been like a ship without a rudder."

Munch was one of the fathers of expressionism,

which was less a style or a unified movement than an attitude of mind.

The idea that reality was so distant and somehow ungraspable,

that great leaps of emotion must bridge the gap

and that the only secure point in a hostile or indifferent world

was the artist's self.

Munch's sense of estrangement in the crowd filled his images of the city.

"I can see behind everyone's masks.

"Peacefully smiling faces,

"pale corpses who endlessly wend their torturous way

"down the road that leads to the grave."

This feeling of anxiety and helplessness in the face of big cities

was not confined to Munch or to Oslo.

Since the mid-19th century, the image of the metropolis as the devourer of souls,

a place of lonely crowds and artificial distractions,

had been seeping into art and poetry.

Soon it would be the main backdrop for European culture.

Charles Baudelaire addressed Paris as his "ant-swarming city,

"city full of dreams, where in broad day the spectre tugs your sleeve."

MUSIC: "Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra Opus 12" by Kurt Weill

From the crowded boulevards and cafes of Paris,

a peculiarly ironic view of life was emerging

based on disposable style, dandiest display,

fleeting encounters.

The grimy eddies of social mixture replaced the ordered pyramid of rural France

and they found their painter in Henri de Toulouse Lautrec.

In Lautrec's scenes of lowlife at the Moulin Rouge,

the face literally becomes the mask.

The Belgian painter James Ensor also picked up that image,

using it to convey the idea that society was not only unreal

but a sort of demonic carnival, a collective of threatening masks.

Art is less spontaneous than we think

and there is no such thing as serious art without a formal language.

But the question was, where did one go for the language of extreme emotion,

the human shapes of loss and fright?

Actors? Medical textbooks?

Where?

Well, curiously enough,

one of the solutions that Munch found

would seem to have been archaeology.

The cultures that Spain had destroyed in South America in the 16th century

were beginning to acquire a certain amount of popular glamour in Paris in the late 19th -

Incas, gold, lost cities and the jungle, all that kind of thing.

Now, one of the minor sensations of the great Paris Exposition of 1889

was this Inca mummy,

which had been dug up in Peru.

It was buried in the foetal position,

which is to us - I don't know about the Incas -

the archetypal emblem of fright and the desire for security.

Paul Gauguin saw it at the Exposition

and he was so moved by it that he copied it.

Munch was also very moved by it,

as so it is to this withered foetus that used to be a man,

that we owe probably the most famous image of neurosis in the history of art -

The Scream.

"I stopped and leaned against the railing, half dead with fatigue.

"Over the grey-blue fjord the clouds hung,

"red as blood and tongues of flame.

"Alone and trembling with fear,

"I experienced nature's great scream."

BRAKES SCREECH

This theme of the city as a condenser of anxiety

also ran through German expressionism

in the years between the turn of the century and WWI,

especially in the work of as group of artists which called itself Die Brucke,

the bridge, meaning a bridge to the future.

Their leader was a young painter named Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

who transposed Munch's pessimism into Van Gogh's colour,

added the influence of African carvings

and took Berlin as his favourite subject -

its streets, its dandies and its prostitutes.

Kirchner's style, with its hatchings and sharp angles and harsh colour,

was jittery and highly strung,

a visual analogy to cocaine nerves.

It was also rooted in a specifically German past -

German gothic without the religious content,

full of skinny unrepentant Mary Magdalenes.

These predatory ladies are Munch's fatal women,

raised to a pitch of style unknown in Norway,

and they take the image of women as castrator one step further

towards pure glamour.

WOMAN SINGS IN GERMAN

In pre-war Vienna, the leading expressionist was the painter and playwright Oskar Kokoschka,

whose early work, including his self portraits, was more baroque than gothic -

high strung, elaborate,

switching between elation and misery.

They came out of the same milieu as Freud and Schoenberg,

that brief moment when Vienna, in the decay of its empire,

was one of the capitals of introspective modernism.

Kokoschka lived to 1980,

and in his 60s he talked about his ambitions as a painter.

Life is so short and I want to squeeze every bit out of life.

Like, to live in the light, to live under the sun

is such a... such a very great gift.

We forget it today.

I am not a spectator.

It's not the object that I want to paint.

It's like an opera and you can see what happens.

I want to participate. I identify myself with the object.

Therefore, as much in midst of life I want to be.

I am far away.

I am not here, a sitting onlooker, a patient onlooker,

I am active.

This landscape is not so much different for me.

I wander in the face, I wander in the landscape.

I am a wanderer. I can't stay stiff and admire.

I have to do something. I have to mix it up with myself.

In the twisting hands and strained faces of Kokoschka's portraits,

the artist becomes the sitter's accomplice,

not by giving him or her a socially useful mask,

but by admitting a shared neurosis, a kind of mutual outsidership.

This very private, intimate contract between Kokoschka and his sitters

was strongest of all in 1912

when he painted himself with Alma Mahler,

the great love of his life.

His affair also inspired Kokoschka

to paint what is still the key image of expressionist love - The Tempest.

The two lovers whirled along in a cockleshell of a boat,

not on the sea but in space,

the shapes turbulent and broken, all high light and darkness,

the air, the lovers' bodies and the boat

caught up in the same ecstatic dislocation of form.

MUSIC: "Symphony No 9" by Gustav Mahler

The chief expressionist in France was a Polish Jew named Chaim Soutine.

He was wretchedly poor

and his art became a way of stealing substance from the world.

He was obsessed with food,

a scraggy chicken on a hook stared at for days,

life seen as meat and as a preparation for death.

MUSIC: "Oxygene" (Side 2 Part 4) Jean Michel Jarre

Soutine could give the carcass of an ox the pathos of a crucifixion.

In painting that mass of bone, meat and fat

he was paying homage to Rembrandt, who had painted the same subject.

But Soutine gave it an even more intense carnality,

as though the thick painted self were also a paste of meat

smeared on the canvas.

His landscapes,

particularly the ones he painted near Ceret in the South of France in 1920 to '22,

are even more turbulent, like an extreme distortion of Van Gogh.

The hills rear up, the houses lean like rags in a gale,

the horizon strains against the sky

and the whole scene becomes one mass of tumbling visceral paint.

Soutine's brushwork looks like chicken guts.

Never had a landscape been so transformed by emotion.

The violence of the paint

predicts the violence that would later surface in American abstract painting,

but the images are still concrete.

After the Second World War, the English painter Francis Bacon

took up Soutine's theme of the dismembered carcass

to set forth his own vision of a cannibal's world,

from which all moral relationships had been erased.

I have tried to be...

..as realistic in my way as I can be.

After all, you only have to think about life,

or have experienced it in any way,

or think about the meat on your plate

to think how disturbing what is called reality is.

And we are nearly... Everybody lives their life screened from it,

and if my pictures seem to give over

a kind of sense of violence or mortality,

it's only in my attempt to be as realistic as I can.

Mind you, when you talk about realism, I can only paint for myself.

I don't paint for anybody else because you can't.

You try to bring the thing back onto your own nervous system

in its most poignant form.

In Bacon, the ideal body of classical art is dismissed.

The nude becomes a two-legged animal with addictions.

One of his sources was photography,

the early sequential photos of human action by Eadweard Muybridge.

In Muybridge's book "Animal Locomotion",

the naked body is studied with perfect detachment as a machine.

Muybridge's are raw statements of movement.

Because every way that a person moves, stands,

moves their arms or anything else

has not only its movement,

but, you may say,

all the implications of that movement, as well.

In Bacon's paintings, all sexuality is turned into violence,

a sort of dog-like grappling in closed rooms

whose furnishings you can't identify.

The bed suggests a cage or an operating table,

the walls and floor are the colour of bad motels.

Yet the fragments of a traditional lurk behind the images

and one of Bacon's obsessive emblems was Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X.

I was particularly obsessed

by Velazquez's painting of the Pope

and I was, at the same time, very interested...

..by Eisenstein's photograph in Potemkin of the nurse.

And I made a combination, which I think has been very unsuccessful,

of the Pope screaming in the way of the nurse.

Now, the scream was not to do with expressionism,

because I am not expressionistic, I have nothing to express.

I was absorbed by the idea of the colour of the mouth,

the teeth, the saliva,

you may say the beautiful red and purples

of the interior rather of the mouth,

rather like Monet was obsessed by haystacks

and the light falling on them from hour to hour.

In the face of paintings like this,

you may well feel that Bacon has a great deal to express.

The other important painter of the disquieting human figure in the '50s

was a Dutchman who had emigrated to America, Willem de Kooning.

His paintings of women came partly out of American ads,

the white smiles and big dominating glamour girls

in the lush pop landscape of America's post-war boom,

Marilyn with shark teeth.

-WOLF WHISTLE

-Hey, hey, Suzy Q,

what's cooking with you?

Your teeth look whiter than new, new, new!

My teeth aren't new but my toothpaste is!

New Pepsodent. Get with it. New package, new flavor,

new formula, too, means brighter smile for me and you.

# You'll wonder where the yellow went

# When you brush your teeth With Pepsodent #

Got the message?

Like Kirchner's and Munch's,

De Kooning's women are about anxiety.

They take the expressionist fear of the fatal woman to an almost comic extreme -

squat, broad, overwhelming and primitive,

glimpsed but not analysed,

the sex goddess changes into a fiercer and older kind of idol.

It also was some kind of glimpse, like meeting one of those ladies.

So when people say they are not really figures but they are landscapes,

that's true to a certain extent.

But they look fierce to me.

Figures maybe, in a landscape, I don't know where exactly,

not here, not there, but somewhere.

I don't think that I'm expressing the world around me.

You know, this real world, this so-called real world

is just something you put up with, like everybody else.

I am in my element and I... am a little bit out of this world.

I'm in the real world.

I'm on the beam.

Because when I'm falling, I'm doing all right.

When I'm slipping I say, "Hey, this is very interesting."

It's when I'm standing upright that bothers me.

I'm not doing so good. I'm stiff.

As a matter of fact, I'm really slipping most of the time into that glimpse.

That's a wonderful sensation, to slip into this glimpse.

I'm like a slipping glimpser.

This spontaneity of touch and looking, the slipping glimpse,

ran all through De Kooning's work, both figurative and abstract.

But he and Bacon were among the few artists

who could handle expressionist distortion after WWII,

because reality had now outstripped art.

MUSIC: "Alpine Symphony" by Richard Strauss

By the end of the war, the entire world knew

what had been done in the death camps of Nazi Germany

and there was no testimony that art could give

that could rival the evidence of the photograph.

Today, places like Dachau are their own monuments.

But any distortion of the human body that an artist might make after 1945

was going to have to bear comparison

with what the Nazis had done to real bodies,

and very few expressionist paintings could stand this strain.

Here, photography was enough.

Anything else would've seemed gratuitous.

In the face of this, there seemed to be very little that art could say.

What we understand about the Holocaust, we get from writing and photography.

But art had very little to contribute,

almost nothing of importance.

The effects of this failure are still with us.

After the war, there were very few people who believed that art could carry the burden

of major social meanings any more.

There would be no more Goyas and Courbets.

In the death camps, the only product, as far as art was concerned,

was silence.

Beside these horrors

there were only two sources of uncontaminated images open to art -

one was complete abstraction, the other was the natural world.

Artists had been combining and recombining these for 30 years.

MUSIC: "Phaedra" by Tangerine Dream

Just before the First World War

a group of German artists that called itself the Blue Rider

had looked to pure nature for transcendental images.

One of them was the painter Franz Marc.

"I tried to heighten my feeling for the organic rhythm of all things,

"tried to feel myself pantheistically

"into the trembling and coursing of the blood in nature,

"in trees, in animals, in the air.

"I see no happier means to the animalising of art,

"as I like to call it, than the animal picture."

"Very early in life, I already found man ugly

"and animals seemed to me cleaner and more beautiful.

"But even in them, I discovered much that was unacceptable and ugly,

"so that my art instinctively and out of inner compulsion

"became increasingly schematic and abstract."

Marc wrote that from the trenches in 1915.

By then, he believed that abstraction was the only route to spiritual knowledge,

and certainly it seems to have had a prophetic quality for him.

In 1914, he painted this image called "Forms In Battle".

Two years later, at the age of 36,

he was killed at the Battle of Verdun.

Paul Klee had been one of Marc's closest friends.

He survived the war and went on to teach at the Bauhaus,

and for another 20 years

he would produce some of the most exquisite visions of nature in modern art.

Small, witty, delicate and mysterious,

his idea of the natural world was like the image in this watercolour "The Open Book",

page after page opening backwards into the centre,

disclosing another world of growth and form.

MUSIC: "Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky (Part 1)

He loved to invent odd little hieroglyphs that signified unfamiliar corners of nature.

He was drawn to structures so small that the normal eye misses them -

plant cells, seeds, plankton, diatoms.

MUSIC: "Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky (Part II)

He loved whimsy and the grotesque, as long as they weren't too scary.

Seeing a man with a barrel organ at a fair led to this watercolour

entitled "Dance You Monster To My Soft Song".

But for all its waywardness,

Klee's imagination was connected to deep strands in German romantic art,

a vision of nature as sacramental,

a gift of God, mysterious and benevolent.

Hence his liking for subjects which had long been part of the romantic repertoire,

icy mountains, for instance, with a stand of jagged pines.

He used abstraction as a way of sharpening his perceptions of nature

and ours, too.

In fact, the central theme of Klee's work,

to which his watercolours and paintings return over and over,

is the garden of paradise -

all life composed under the eye of natural order.

Klee taught painting at the Bauhaus in Germany in the '20s

and one of his colleagues there was the first artist

to try to paint transcendental images that were completely abstract.

His name was Wassily Kandinsky.

Kandinsky was Russian. He came to art late.

He didn't begin until he was past 30.

Folk art and the Russian icon were his early influences

and they showed in his bright patterns of flat colour.

Of course, he'd looked at Fauve paintings, too,

as you can see in this Kandinsky from the early 1900s.

But gradually, the patterns become more abstract.

These shapes are not immediately recognisable as women.

But there they are,

in the midst of a pastoral scene with animals.

In the landscapes he painted at Murnau, near Munich, in 1908,

the forms are broader and freer,

the colour more localised and specific.

"Colour directly influences the soul.

"Colour is the keyboard - the eyes are the hammers,

"the soul is the piano with many keys.

"The artist is the hand that plays,

"touching one key or another with purpose, to create vibrations.

"So it follows that colour harmony must rest ultimately

"on intentional playing upon the human soul.

"This is one of the guiding principals of internal necessity."

So the next step was pure abstraction.

Kandinsky was a theosophist

and he believed that the sins of man came from too much material reality.

He thought an age of the spirit was coming

and was sure the right art for it would be totally abstract,

ideal and immaterial.

MUSIC: "Syrinx" For Solo Flute by Claude Debussy

Although Kandinsky painted his first abstract pictures around 1911,

the natural world continued to offer images of another sort

to both painters and sculptors.

Some of the greatest images in modern art come from the tranquil assurance

that however abstract you may get,

there is no break between human culture and the natural order.

The high priest of this feeling was the son of a Carpathian peasant.

His name was Constantin Brancusi.

He lived in Paris and died here in 1957.

This was his studio, a place visibly sacred to tools

and to the beauty of the marks that they make.

Coming out of a strong craft background,

Brancusi knew the nature of his substances very well -

the qualities of bronze, timber, marble, limestone, plaster.

He wanted his sculpture to have as substance

the same perfection that his subjects had as organisms.

What this rapturous feeling for the skin of materials produced

was sculpture that declared itself in mass and in contour and surface

but not in detail.

It began to look as timeless and as perfect as a new laid egg.

MUSIC: "Syrinx" For Solo Flute by Claude Debussy

Brancusi wanted to find the most compressed form that still contained the subject.

Not geometrical, always organic,

like this stone fish, whose shape makes you see it slipping through layers of water.

Or the minimum form repeated, as in his endless columns,

composed of units that, in theory, could keep going up forever.

In every piece, the tightest possible image.

Whereas for Brancusi nature was pure and clearly defined,

there was an alternative tradition running through American painting

that had its roots in grandeur and the mysteries of landscape.

MUSIC: "Quiet City" by Aaron Copland

In the 19th century, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River

had come to typify what the American wilderness meant to artists.

It represented the designs of God, his unedited manuscript.

There was no question of painting a place like this as a metaphor of the human soul.

Human beings don't enter into it. No soul is that vast.

To paint what you saw was enough,

and this, I think, is the underlying reason why so much American romantic art

from the 19th century to the mid 20th

was less a description of the troubled self

than a sustained homage to vastness and antiquity.

MUSIC: "Alpine Symphony" by Richard Strauss

Looking for images of the sublime,

painters went even further west than the Grand Canyon to the valley of the Yosemite.

MUSIC CONTINUES

The feelings set off by such places

had been described by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"I become a transparent eyeball.

"I am nothing.

"I see all.

"The currents of the universal being circulate through me.

"I am part or parcel of God."

Much later, an American evangelist said that his idea of God

was a sort of luminous oblong blur.

This was the unwitting text for the paintings of the American abstract expressionist

Mark Rothko in the 1950s.

Rothko kept the format of landscape,

the soft rectangles that can be red as sky and flat plain,

sometimes with a bar like the horizon in between.

But he gave the colour a kind of breathing intensity

and that, more than any reference to landscape as such, is what the paintings are about.

They tried to suggest that transcendence of Emerson's,

but through light and colour alone.

There wasn't much direct landscape imagery in abstract expressionism,

and the general line was to deny that it was there at all

in case the paintings looked less radical and less abstract than they really were.

But all the same, it was there in an oblique way

and the form that it took was a concern with giant scale.

A painting like this one, by Jackson Pollock,

is almost large enough to walk into.

The space it suggests is not just an illusion

but a physical fact, at least in two dimensions.

In it, the web of paint takes on a completely physical look, like nature itself.

The eye can't take it in all at once.

It goes from knot to knot, from skein to skein,

assembling the details into a whole,

as one assembles a landscape by looking at it.

Now, abstract expressionism is less the creation of cowboys but of New York Jews -

all the same space itself, radiant, optimistic, endless,

very much an American myth

and bound to affect them in some degree or another.

And on Jackson Pollock, who was not a migrant's son

but a native American from the western states,

its effect was very large indeed.

Pollock was the first American artist to influence the course of world art.

For the last 10 years of his life, until he died in a car crash in 1956,

he lived and worked on Long Island, outside New York.

My painting is direct. I usually paint on the floor.

I enjoy working on a large canvas. I feel more at home, more at ease in a big area.

Having the canvas on the floor, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting.

This way, I can walk around it, work from all four sides and be in the painting,

similar to the Indian sand painters of the West.

Sometimes I use a brush, but often prefer using a stick.

Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can.

I like to use a dripping, fluid paint...

..a method of painting that is a natural growth out of a need.

I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.

Pollock's drip technique used to be treated as a joke, as though he were out of control.

But he wasn't. The drips of paint were spontaneous,

but they fell just where he wanted them,

building the surface into a web of skeins and subtle energies,

working across the whole canvas.

Pollock once declared that he wanted to become nature.

What did he mean? That he wanted to work parallel with its variety,

its unpredictability and above all, its vitality.

He had a very light hand. Sometimes, as in Blue Poles,

you might be looking at a sort of abstract Tiepolo,

the same kind of airy, light and spritely drawing.

This nervous energy of Pollock's, expanding under strict control,

seems to refute the picture of him as a rip-roaring wildcatter from Middle America.

Only intelligence, allied to a deep sense of the natural world

can produce work like this.

Another leading figure in abstract expressionism,

both as painter and a writer, was Robert Motherwell,

the last major collagist in the tradition of George Braque,

but perhaps best known for his series of black and white paintings

The Elegies for The Spanish Republic.

He has always preferred to keep direct imagery out of his work.

A painting is, so to speak, working by indirections,

synthesising what is scanned both internally and externally,

in which the real object is not the world

but the canvas itself.

I always loved that title of Max Ernst's on one of his pictures,

The Blind Swimmer.

I think, in a way, we all worked as blind swimmers,

as quite good swimmers but quite blind.

What the black was doing

was slowly becoming, erm...

..a sombre force,

but also a brilliant force.

There's certain painters who use black as a colour

as vividly as, um,

other artists can use fire-engine red, let's say.

But in the end, it seems that, in my mind,

black is also symbolic of death.

Motherwell's Spanish Elegies were provoked by the memory of the Civil War,

though their field of suggestion is not only political.

But in the meantime, what happened to the older ambitions of abstract art,

like Kandinsky's hope that it could bring about

some kind of spiritual change in those who saw it?

The last religious commission given to a major artist is actually in America.

It's here in Houston, Texas,

where the de Mille family built a non-denominational chapel,

a space for contemplation.

They also commissioned the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko to do paintings for it.

This was in 1964

and they were installed and finished in 1971, a year after his death.

GONG ECHOES

In this chapel Rothko, who was soon to commit suicide,

took to its ultimate extreme the idea that colour,

in this case a very narrow range of colours,

from dark plummy red, through violet to black,

could carry the whole load of a spiritual experience.

This is truly the last silence of romanticism.

I can't enter this chapel without emotion,

but I never know whether I'm feeling what Rothko meant me to feel.

He wanted to be a great religious artist.

He was not only a Jew, but a Russian Jew,

and he wanted his paintings to act like icons

and to possess the full moral seriousness of the Russian novel.

He had the wrong equipment for this. He had an exquisite sense of nuance

and silence and vagueness,

but this he wanted to carry the full patriarchal grandeur of the Old Testament.

It couldn't and these paintings are the result.

These are not active images. They're more like zones of silence,

blank slates which you complete by looking at them.

What they present as sacred

is the state of receptivity, of slow looking -

in fact, the condition of being an artist, of being Mark Rothko.

The world has drained out of them. Does that makes them religious art?

Holier men than I have thought so in this chapel.

If I have my doubts, it's because they're so very withdrawn.

The horizons and storms of earlier romantic sublimities have gone

and what is left as the soul subject of contemplation

is a void.

GONG ECHOES

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