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After almost a century of bloodshed and revolution,
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France was about to enter another great age of upheaval.
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This time, the greatest revolutions would take place in the mind
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and the eye. And Paris was at the centre of it all.
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Here, a group of truly extraordinary artists set about the business of
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reinventing the very language of art itself and the result was to be the
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greatest explosion of creative energy seen in the Western world
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since the age of the Renaissance.
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The art of modern France was to be exhilarating, radiant,
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adventurous.
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But above all, it was to be a conversation in which painters were
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constantly looking at each other's work,
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talking to each other, agreeing,
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disagreeing, but always forging ahead.
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Paris really was the capital city of the world,
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a place where everyone came to breathe in
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the atmosphere of the bohemian metropolis.
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Ooh, there's Picasso.
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And over there, a group of surrealists.
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Salvador Dali, twirling his waxed moustache.
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There's Monet, Degas,
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Matisse.
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The result of this conversation was a great lesson about what it looked
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like, what it meant to be alive in the modern world.
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# My pictures of you. #
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This was liberte, egalite, fraternite -
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not just for France, but the world.
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# This is the modern world that I've learnt about
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# This is the modern world We don't need no-one... #
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In the late 19th century, France, and Paris in particular, was modernising
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at a helter-skelter pace.
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# This is a modern world! #
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Paris was in the throes of a great change -
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a metropolis the like of which France had never seen before.
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New factories, new slums, new sprawling suburbs,
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new entertainments,
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new temptations, too,
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rivers of booze, an army of travelling prostitutes.
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Just one thing was missing -
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an art to record the seedy, strange wonder of it all.
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# Don't have to explain myself to you
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# I don't give two f... about your review... #
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A group of angry young artists set out to put this right.
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They met in their studios and local cafes to start the great
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conversation about art and its place in the modern metropolis.
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# No matter what this is, this is this is, this is
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# This is, this is, this is
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# Hey, we're done. #
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They were a motley group - different backgrounds, different temperaments,
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different styles, but they had one big thing in common.
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They were sick to the teeth of being excluded from the annual official exhibition -
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the Salon.
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And they were even sicker of Salon art
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with its built-in assumption that every subject had to be clothed in
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classical fancy dress.
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What this group of artists wanted to paint was not the classical past.
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What they wanted to paint was out there -
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modern Paris.
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Unable to show their work at the Salon,
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they formed an independent group and went it alone.
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I'm holding in my hands a facsimile of their very first exhibition held in 1874.
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There were 165 paintings on display.
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When you look through the names, some of them aren't that well known,
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it has to be admitted.
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Antoine Ferdinand -
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no relation to the footballer, I assume.
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Felix Bracquemond. Mulot-Durivage.
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But carry on flicking through and, suddenly - ah, Paul Cezanne,
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Edgar Degas, Claude Monet.
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Pissarro, Renoir.
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In fact, this little book is effectively a roll call of the great artists
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who were about to change the face of painting itself.
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The month-long exhibition in the Boulevard des Capucines
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was a critical and commercial flop.
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But it put the hotchpotch group of artists on the map and even gave
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them a name...
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..the Impressionists.
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That was all down to one painting.
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In 1872, Monet had come back to his hometown of Le Havre in search of inspiration.
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Monet hurried to get into position as the sun rose above the waves.
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But once there, he worked very quickly, just 46 minutes,
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to produce a really rather famous painting.
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Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise - the most celebrated,
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the most incendiary small painting of the entire 19th century.
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But why was this picture so shocking?
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He's taking a convention, an older form of painting.
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He's altering it by making it new, making it now.
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His model for this picture was the great seaport scenes of his namesake,
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Claude Lorrain,
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the great 17th-century classical depicter
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of seaport scenes in which, typically,
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we'd find a port with a beautiful sunset or sunrise at its centre.
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Monet has taken that
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and he's emptied it of all classical elements.
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So instead of classical architecture, we have gantries,
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we have factory chimneys, we have smog, we have a haze of shipping.
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The sea itself is depicted almost through the means of a cartoonist or
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a caricaturist in the form of dabs or dots to suggest its movements.
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The sun is just a... HE HISSES
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..buttery rub of pink-coloured paint.
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The sun's reflection is a sort of... HE HISSES
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..zigzag of colour.
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Impressionism was coined on the basis of the title of this picture.
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IN FRENCH: Impression.
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How can Monsieur Monet, the critics wrote,
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how can he dare to exhibit an impression, a sketch,
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as if it were a fully finished work of art?
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It's ironic now that Impressionist art is seen as so lovely and nice,
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perfect for a tea towel or a chocolate box.
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In their own time, they were after something raw and shocking.
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They didn't want to create pretty pictures.
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They wanted to plunge into the unsettling pandemonium of the modern city.
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The age of the avant-garde, with its manifestos, still lay in the future,
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but the Impressionists did have a manifesto of sorts.
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It was a text written by the great critic and poet Charles Baudelaire
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and it was called The Painter Of Modern Life.
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He's a flaneur, a wanderer, someone who walks the streets every day.
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"The crowd is his element as the air is that of birds
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"and water of fishes.
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"His passion and profession are to become one flesh with the crowd,
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"to be away from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home.
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"Amid the ebb and flow of movement in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.
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"The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an
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"immense reservoir of electrical energy.
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"Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself."
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What would the painter of modern life paint today?
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He'd probably seek out the rough edges of the city,
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the places that prick your conscience.
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And at what time would he do his work?
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"Now it is evening,
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"that strange equivocal hour when the curtains of heaven are drawn and
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"cities light up.
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"Honest men and rogues are all saying to themselves,
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"'The end of another day!'
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"And the thoughts of all, whether good men or knaves, turn to pleasure.
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"And each one hastens to drink the cup of his oblivion.
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"The painter of modern life will be the last
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"to linger wherever a passion can pose before him,
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"wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal."
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There you have it.
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That's what Impressionism is.
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The painter of modern life had to place himself at the
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heart of the modern city.
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And for Monet, in the 1870s,
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the very engine room of Paris was the Gare Saint-Lazare -
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the great new train station.
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Here's a locomotive, here's a blurred worker, here's a stop sign,
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flashing in the half gloom created by these great smokes of steam.
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And I think it's the steam that fascinates Monet above all,
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the steam that...
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..blocks half the things that we see,
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that suggests everything that Baudelaire had said about the modern city.
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It's transitory, it's fugitive, now we see it, now we don't.
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And the implication behind all this
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is that France itself is being transformed by all this motion and movement.
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He loves the way that everything in this world is changing,
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moving, altering, even as you look.
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This new technology of the train was the driving force behind
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Impressionism, even when it's not obvious.
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Renoir's movement-filled painting The Gust Of Wind
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encapsulates the experience of watching a landscape at speed through the
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window of a train carriage.
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And even Monet's Poppies,
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most chocolate-boxed of all Impressionist paintings, is also
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about an experience,
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namely city people going for a picnic in the countryside,
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that was only made possible by the railways.
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Back in the city itself, the toll taken on human lives
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by this new speeded-up jostling sense of
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existence was the great subject of the greatest urban Impressionist -
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Edgar Degas.
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Absinthe is his bitter masterpiece,
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a fly-on-the-wall depiction of a moment of urban desperation -
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two drunks together but quite alone.
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It's a picture that invites you to fill in the gaps.
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How did they come to this?
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How low will they go?
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This way of seeing and feeling the truth of ordinary lives would sow many seeds -
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documentary films, street photography, even reality television.
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Degas didn't just paint down and outs.
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He also depicted those struggling to rise up in the snakes and ladders
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game of Paris...
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..above all, ballet dancers, working-class girls,
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dreaming of bettering themselves.
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Ballet wasn't posh at the time and ballerinas were often called the rats
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of the opera. But Degas saw more to them than that.
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During the course of his life, Degas created more than 1,500 drawings,
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pastels, paintings and sculptures of ballet dancers.
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I think it's fair to say that his preoccupation with dance and dancers
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was really an obsession.
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What was he looking for? What did he see in their movements,
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in the gaslit spectacle of the ballet?
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A number of things, I think. It's sometimes said he was, um...
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..he was a voyeur but I don't have any sense of that
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in his depictions of the ballet.
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I think, if anything, he actually identified
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with the hard-working young women who spent their lives dancing.
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He saw them, in a sense, as images of himself.
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He was always...
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involved in repetition, rehearsal, endlessly sketching and drawing,
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trying to create some form of beauty in the modern world, and I think he
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saw that that's what they were doing, too.
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In the ballet and its spectacle, he found some sense of enchantment.
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It's almost as if the dancers were...
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..the only goddesses...
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..he could see to enchant the place that he knew as modern Paris.
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Arguments were also part of the Impressionists' conversation.
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Was the city the be-all and end-all?
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Not everyone thought so.
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Impressionism was never really a movement and
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its two greatest artists
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occupied, if you like, the opposite ends of its spectrum.
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On the one hand, Degas, the painter of modern life,
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the painter of the city - he hated flaneur painting.
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He said all flaneur artists should be shot. And at the other end of the
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spectrum, Claude Monet,
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who very rapidly departed from the idea of painting the modern city and
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plunged instead into nature.
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He was the very epitome of the flaneur artist,
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setting out to try and capture the transient effects of light on water,
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light on rock.
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He believed that it was the job of the artist to try somehow
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to encapsulate the grandeur, the majesty of nature itself.
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The natural beauty of Etretat in Normandy
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inspired more than 50 of Monet's paintings.
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His adventures en plein air were made possible
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by a revolution in 19th-century technology.
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Leo.
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Etretat - Monet's subject.
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Well, what I'm trying to do here is paint in the style of Monet,
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which is like trying to write a play in the style of Shakespeare.
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- Not easy.
- Yeah, well, that's what I'm here to talk to you about, really,
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because this was all new, wasn't it?
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The sight of a painter working in oils outdoors.
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And what made it possible was this kind of equipment -
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a portable collapsible easel. Tube oil paint first came in, I suppose,
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in the 1850s and '60s and became sort of popular at that period,
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bang on Impressionism.
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- We've got them here, look.
- Yep, yep.
- That's a lovely one.
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- That's one of my... That's cobalt blue, isn't it?
- Yeah.
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Can I squeeze a bit on there?
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Go for it, yeah.
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Tell me a little bit more about the science that actually made this possible.
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There was a huge explosion of invention and of synthesis of new
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pigments all through the 19th century, and so you have various pigments
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like cadmium yellow, lead white, magnesium violet.
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Yeah. The fact is, when you look at an Impressionist painting,
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the colours are much fresher than the colours of an Old Master painting,
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and that's not just cos of the passage of time.
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It's because the colours are more different and they're more stable
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because they're created through this new metallurgy, this new chemistry.
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Precisely.
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Now, you've just got the one canvas set up here.
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But Monet sometimes worked out of doors, I think,
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with as many as four or five canvases all on the go at the same time.
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He more or less invented the idea of series paintings, done outdoors,
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so, as the weather changed, the light changed, the time of day changes,
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he'd move onto another canvas and get that particular effect at that
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- particular moment.
- Great, well, I will let you carry on.
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- Thank you.
- And I'm sorry I've interrupted you.
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I hope I haven't lost your moment.
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- It's fine.
- Cheers.
- Cheers.
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From this point onwards, Monet's great obsession would be nature.
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And while he'd remain part of the French conversation,
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he would look at anything, from Turner to Japanese prints
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to Chinese scroll paintings,
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for the essence of sky, water, reflection.
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There was something else which made the Impressionists modern and different.
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The sniffy art critic Albert Wolff spotted it.
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There's also a woman in the group, as in most notorious gangs.
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She's called Berthe Morisot.
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The Musee Marmottan in Paris is the best place to see her work.
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Morisot was a founder member of Impressionism but she's been unfairly overlooked.
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From a well-to-do background,
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she combined being a wife and mother with painting.
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But she became just as authentic a painter of modern life as any of her contemporaries
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by focusing on her own bourgeois existence.
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Morisot celebrated the simplicity of ordinary life and her paintings turn
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home into a kind of dream -
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a lush, green idyll, a blissful state of innocence.
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But just as Degas found tragedy in Absinthe drinkers,
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Morisot saw that, even if you had money in 19th-century Paris,
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it didn't always buy you happiness.
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Now, this is when of Berthe Morisot's most tender pictures.
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It's called Au Bal - at the ball.
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The young woman is radiant but also vulnerable,
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her beauty shot through with a sense of self-deprecation and doubt.
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Look at the way she holds her fan.
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She's not cooling herself with it.
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She's using it almost as a guard or a shield against the eyes of those
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who would look at her.
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Going out can be an ordeal as well as an entertainment.
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Her dress, her glove, her hair, her face, her skin, the background -
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Morisot has painted it all with wonderfully subtle attention to texture
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and detail. But this is really a form of internalised Impressionism.
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What she sought to catch is not a glamorous apparition, a vision,
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but a mood, the texture of a thought or a feeling.
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What Morisot brought to the conversation was a portrayal of
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a woman that perhaps only a woman could have created.
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But the sad truth is that Paris was - sh, it still is! -
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a phallocentric society.
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And at its centre in 1889, the largest phallic symbol ever erected -
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the Eiffel Tower.
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In the very same year,
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the city's infamous cabaret, the Moulin Rouge, flung open its doors.
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This was a den of unbridled ogling, where women's bodies,
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high-kicking legs and all, became a form of mass entertainment.
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The only return for the dancers was the hope of fame.
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Enter the next artist to join the conversation -
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, painter to the stars of the Moulin Rouge.
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So Toulouse-Lautrec, like Degas, came backstage, he met the girls,
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he talked to the girls, but he never painted this part.
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He was never interested in repetition,
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the awkwardness of the backstage moment.
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The only thing that really caught his imagination was the show itself.
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It was the moment when the girls went on stage.
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And there they go.
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And it was that curtain-up excitement that Lautrec set out
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to capture - another kind of Impressionist moment,
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but with the flash of leg rather than the flash of sunlight on water.
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APPLAUSE
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It's the interval -
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a good opportunity to have a look at some of the posters they've got in
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the foyer of the Moulin Rouge.
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The Troupe of Mademoiselle Eglantine - famous depiction of the cancan,
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almost a cartoon of it.
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Jane Avril -
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look at this wonderful detail of the musical instrument in the foreground.
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Toulouse-Lautrec down here, seeing the scene obliquely,
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and here,
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one of his most famous posters, La Goulue, whose favourite trick, apparently,
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was kicking off the top hat of a gentleman
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who annoyed her in the front rows.
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Lautrec did make his own singular contribution to the culture
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of the modern world.
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He participated in the creation of a new phenomenon - the celebrity.
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He thrust them into the firmament of fame through the mass reproduction
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of the poster.
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He is one of the few artists who didn't just depict the world,
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they also literally changed it.
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CANCAN MUSIC
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AUDIENCE CLAPS ALONG
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CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
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After so much talk of the fleeting and the ephemeral,
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what had happened to the old ideals of art - the quest for truth,
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stability, permanence?
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00:25:02,240 --> 00:25:07,160
Well, they made a return in the work of a group of artists now known as
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the postimpressionists.
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In 1889,
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George Seurat painted the Eiffel Tower
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using his pointillist technique,
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dots of paint that freeze the image and make the tower itself seem as
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eternal as the Great Pyramid.
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He painted workers on their Sunday off at a suburban bathing place,
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but made them look like figures being baptised
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in an early Renaissance fresco.
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The search for a truth beyond mere modern life also lay behind
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the journeys of Paul Gauguin,
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who travelled to Tahiti in search of primitive reality - true being.
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But the reality he found
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was a far cry from his fantasy.
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Although he went through the motions
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of living out his dreams,
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the art he created on Tahiti amounts, I think,
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to a long-drawn-out confession of the fraudulence of it all.
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Whether he meant to or not,
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what Gauguin painted was the distance
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between coloniser and colonised,
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between the tourist
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and a reality that he never truly grasps,
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00:26:34,960 --> 00:26:38,520
and standing here, surrounded by these paintings,
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I'm struck by how unidyllic they actually are.
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The colours might be bright, but they're also livid and dyspeptic.
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And how sullen, how remote, how removed the women seem.
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I think, collectively,
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Gauguin's South Pacific paintings convey a profound sense of alienation.
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Another painter in search of timeless truths also abandoned Paris.
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He returned to his native Aix-en-Provence
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in the south of France - here,
380
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to his country house, the Jas de Bouffan.
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00:27:40,240 --> 00:27:44,720
So many great French painters working at the cusp of the 20th century,
382
00:27:44,720 --> 00:27:49,720
but none would be more influential than Paul Cezanne.
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He was a difficult,
384
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volatile individual with a tremendous sense of ambition
385
00:27:55,840 --> 00:27:59,440
and his great subject was to be nature.
386
00:27:59,440 --> 00:28:01,160
However, he turned away
387
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from Impressionism.
388
00:28:02,720 --> 00:28:06,720
He felt Impressionism was too ephemeral, too mutable.
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00:28:06,720 --> 00:28:09,000
He wanted to create a new language
390
00:28:09,000 --> 00:28:12,320
that would somehow possess the monumental ambitions
391
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of the art of the distant past, and said,
392
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"I want to redo nature after Poussin."
393
00:28:19,360 --> 00:28:20,840
But the great paradox is
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00:28:20,840 --> 00:28:25,040
that he did so by inventing a new form of
395
00:28:25,040 --> 00:28:28,240
pictorial language, a new way of seeing
396
00:28:28,240 --> 00:28:31,200
completely rooted in instability,
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00:28:31,200 --> 00:28:32,280
impermanence,
398
00:28:32,280 --> 00:28:35,680
a sense of nervous energy.
399
00:28:35,680 --> 00:28:38,360
What, in the end, did Cezanne bring to the great
400
00:28:38,360 --> 00:28:40,080
conversation of French painting?
401
00:28:40,080 --> 00:28:44,160
Well, I think Picasso said it best of all.
402
00:28:44,160 --> 00:28:48,880
"Why do we love Cezanne?" he said. "We love him for his anxiety."
403
00:28:51,320 --> 00:28:53,280
The paintings of the Jas de Bouffan reveal
404
00:28:53,280 --> 00:28:56,920
the conflicting energies in his work.
405
00:28:59,280 --> 00:29:02,240
He makes the house more honey-coloured than it is in reality.
406
00:29:02,240 --> 00:29:05,320
He makes it look almost like an ancient Roman monument
407
00:29:05,320 --> 00:29:06,880
in a painting by Poussin,
408
00:29:06,880 --> 00:29:10,360
something that's been there for ever and will be there for ever,
409
00:29:10,360 --> 00:29:14,520
and yet he can't help destabilising the picture at the same time.
410
00:29:14,520 --> 00:29:18,240
He tilts the house so that it might almost be falling over.
411
00:29:22,800 --> 00:29:24,760
Thankfully, it is still standing today.
412
00:29:32,720 --> 00:29:36,200
It's almost as if no-one has touched it
413
00:29:36,200 --> 00:29:40,840
since Cezanne himself moved out.
414
00:29:40,840 --> 00:29:43,400
It's melancholic,
415
00:29:43,400 --> 00:29:48,160
a bit strange, a bit eerie, but I think it's also a very good place
416
00:29:48,160 --> 00:29:54,680
to think about Cezanne's dark and murky origins as a painter.
417
00:29:56,120 --> 00:30:01,960
He'd begun as an artist of peculiar, dark sexual fantasies,
418
00:30:01,960 --> 00:30:08,120
in which he depicts subjects like murder, or rape,
419
00:30:08,120 --> 00:30:12,040
using paint almost as if it were a form of slime,
420
00:30:12,040 --> 00:30:15,960
modelling his figures from a kind of plasma -
421
00:30:15,960 --> 00:30:18,920
they almost look like dumplings.
422
00:30:18,920 --> 00:30:20,960
Very strange work.
423
00:30:20,960 --> 00:30:22,760
I think when you look at the later work,
424
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it's very important to remember the seething fantasies of the earlier paintings.
425
00:30:28,040 --> 00:30:32,840
It's as if Cezanne was trying to find a way to contain
426
00:30:32,840 --> 00:30:35,840
and discipline those unruly passions.
427
00:30:45,160 --> 00:30:46,480
When his parents had died,
428
00:30:46,480 --> 00:30:48,880
Jas de Bouffan was sold in 1889
429
00:30:48,880 --> 00:30:52,240
and Cezanne tried to focus these passions
430
00:30:52,240 --> 00:30:53,520
at his new studio.
431
00:30:54,560 --> 00:30:58,120
He worked here every day for the final four years of his life.
432
00:31:02,120 --> 00:31:05,640
I think Cezanne's studio preserved as it is,
433
00:31:05,640 --> 00:31:09,200
almost like a kind of shrine to his memory,
434
00:31:09,200 --> 00:31:15,320
does give us a wonderfully vivid museum of his preoccupations and
435
00:31:15,320 --> 00:31:18,080
obsessions, the things he loved to paint.
436
00:31:18,080 --> 00:31:19,960
I think it became
437
00:31:19,960 --> 00:31:24,240
a kind of laboratory of perceptual experiment.
438
00:31:24,240 --> 00:31:27,960
He once said - perhaps the most radical thing he ever said -
439
00:31:27,960 --> 00:31:32,000
that he wanted to stun Paris with an apple.
440
00:31:34,480 --> 00:31:37,840
For the first time in the history of Western art, a painter is declaring -
441
00:31:37,840 --> 00:31:41,960
quite literally - that what he paints doesn't matter,
442
00:31:41,960 --> 00:31:44,360
it's HOW he paints that counts.
443
00:31:45,720 --> 00:31:50,200
Cezanne was fascinated by the truancy of vision,
444
00:31:50,200 --> 00:31:53,480
the fugitive nature of the experiencing self
445
00:31:53,480 --> 00:31:56,920
and his great device for expressing this
446
00:31:56,920 --> 00:31:58,960
is the doubled outline.
447
00:31:58,960 --> 00:32:02,200
You see it again and again in his Provencal landscapes.
448
00:32:02,200 --> 00:32:04,720
The trunk of a tree has a doubled outline,
449
00:32:04,720 --> 00:32:06,480
the branch of a tree has a doubled outline.
450
00:32:06,480 --> 00:32:08,760
The Mont Sainte-Victoire has a doubled outline.
451
00:32:10,560 --> 00:32:12,280
What does it mean?
452
00:32:12,280 --> 00:32:14,000
Well, I think I can demonstrate it.
453
00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:16,800
If I hold up my finger to you,
454
00:32:16,800 --> 00:32:21,960
what you will see on your screen is a single, static finger.
455
00:32:21,960 --> 00:32:26,920
But if I look at it, with MY eyes, and I close one and then the other,
456
00:32:26,920 --> 00:32:29,640
then one, then the other - my finger -
457
00:32:29,640 --> 00:32:31,800
you can try it at home with your own finger -
458
00:32:31,800 --> 00:32:35,120
my finger is jumping from side to side,
459
00:32:35,120 --> 00:32:37,520
because my angle of perception is shifting.
460
00:32:37,520 --> 00:32:39,000
He's making the point
461
00:32:39,000 --> 00:32:43,760
that nothing, nothing we ever see is still,
462
00:32:43,760 --> 00:32:46,320
because WE are never still.
463
00:33:07,200 --> 00:33:11,480
While Cezanne was working on his last pictures in Aix-en-Provence,
464
00:33:11,480 --> 00:33:15,080
the pace of change continued to accelerate here in Paris.
465
00:33:15,080 --> 00:33:20,400
The great event of 1900 had been the Exposition Universelle,
466
00:33:20,400 --> 00:33:26,480
a triumphant celebration of Paris as the great city of the modern age.
467
00:33:26,480 --> 00:33:28,000
The Grand Palais and the Petit Palais,
468
00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:30,800
those huge structures of steel and glass,
469
00:33:30,800 --> 00:33:35,600
were created as temples to the achievements of French art.
470
00:33:35,600 --> 00:33:39,360
And drawn by all this, on his 19th birthday,
471
00:33:39,360 --> 00:33:42,040
a young Spaniard arrived in the city.
472
00:33:42,040 --> 00:33:46,320
His name was Pablo Picasso and this was a watershed moment.
473
00:33:47,760 --> 00:33:52,360
A new generation of artists was about to transform the conversation.
474
00:33:55,120 --> 00:33:57,080
As an ambitious young Spanish painter
475
00:33:57,080 --> 00:33:58,680
working in Paris in the early 1900s,
476
00:33:58,680 --> 00:34:02,720
Picasso asks himself one burning question.
477
00:34:06,000 --> 00:34:11,600
How can I, in the wake of so much originality, how can I make my mark?
478
00:34:11,600 --> 00:34:15,600
How can I be even more original than this great generation of French
479
00:34:15,600 --> 00:34:17,840
artists who preceded me?
480
00:34:17,840 --> 00:34:20,920
And I think he looks at Cezanne,
481
00:34:20,920 --> 00:34:23,680
he looks at his geometrically harsh,
482
00:34:23,680 --> 00:34:25,720
angular brushstrokes, and he creates
483
00:34:25,720 --> 00:34:30,280
something even harsher, even more dramatic, even more flattened.
484
00:34:30,280 --> 00:34:31,640
And, like Gauguin,
485
00:34:31,640 --> 00:34:35,440
he draws on the languages and cultures of societies
486
00:34:35,440 --> 00:34:39,880
that he presumes to be primitive, instinctive - not the South Pacific,
487
00:34:39,880 --> 00:34:42,400
but the culture of African art.
488
00:34:42,400 --> 00:34:44,040
Picasso started looking,
489
00:34:44,040 --> 00:34:45,840
buying, dealing -
490
00:34:45,840 --> 00:34:49,040
he was in the habit of going to the Museum of Ethnography in Paris -
491
00:34:49,040 --> 00:34:52,000
he used to say to his friends, "Can I pick something up for anybody?"
492
00:34:53,280 --> 00:34:58,000
Here, we've got one of the great masterpieces of this phase of his career.
493
00:34:58,000 --> 00:35:01,480
It's called Three Women and, yes,
494
00:35:01,480 --> 00:35:05,720
it draws on this neo-primitive language of African art
495
00:35:05,720 --> 00:35:07,280
but at the same time,
496
00:35:07,280 --> 00:35:10,080
Picasso is looking back to the ghosts of the French past.
497
00:35:10,080 --> 00:35:13,360
He's thinking of Delacroix's masterpiece Les Femmes d'Alger,
498
00:35:13,360 --> 00:35:17,840
a scene of women waiting outside a harem.
499
00:35:19,440 --> 00:35:23,120
But the culminating masterpiece of this phase of Picasso's career would
500
00:35:23,120 --> 00:35:26,360
not depict a harem, but something similar.
501
00:35:26,360 --> 00:35:27,920
It would depict a brothel.
502
00:35:31,360 --> 00:35:35,880
It's a disturbing vision of a corrupt modern Arcadia,
503
00:35:35,880 --> 00:35:38,920
showing angular, harridan-like whores.
504
00:35:38,920 --> 00:35:41,800
They inhabit a broken world.
505
00:35:41,800 --> 00:35:45,680
It's as if Picasso has thrown a stone and shattered the mirror-like
506
00:35:45,680 --> 00:35:49,320
reflection of traditional representational art
507
00:35:49,320 --> 00:35:51,080
into a thousand pieces.
508
00:35:52,280 --> 00:35:55,400
You have the sense they're looking at something you can't see -
509
00:35:55,400 --> 00:35:59,440
that their way of seeing is not like yours.
510
00:35:59,440 --> 00:36:01,960
What was that way of seeing?
511
00:36:01,960 --> 00:36:04,760
Well, that's what Picasso shows us next.
512
00:36:09,960 --> 00:36:12,160
Spring, 1912.
513
00:36:12,160 --> 00:36:13,720
He paints this picture.
514
00:36:13,720 --> 00:36:15,600
It's called Bottle Of Pernod.
515
00:36:15,600 --> 00:36:21,760
This is a mature example of what's come to be known as Cubism.
516
00:36:21,760 --> 00:36:24,120
He wants to convey the fact that
517
00:36:24,120 --> 00:36:27,160
when he experiences a bottle of Pernod,
518
00:36:27,160 --> 00:36:32,280
and an absinthe glass on a table, he wants to give you the sense -
519
00:36:32,280 --> 00:36:33,600
it's rather dizzying -
520
00:36:33,600 --> 00:36:38,600
of actually moving around the objects as you look at the painting.
521
00:36:38,600 --> 00:36:43,040
It's almost as if he's painted lots of little details of the objects,
522
00:36:43,040 --> 00:36:46,360
and placed them in a kaleidoscope, click, click, click.
523
00:36:46,360 --> 00:36:49,720
At each click, you get a different plane, a different angle,
524
00:36:49,720 --> 00:36:52,200
a different perspective on the object.
525
00:36:52,200 --> 00:36:54,640
It's profoundly destabilising.
526
00:36:55,640 --> 00:36:59,720
Into this, he then adds another layer -
527
00:36:59,720 --> 00:37:03,080
these words floating in space,
528
00:37:03,080 --> 00:37:08,200
which I think are Picasso's way of reminding his audience that urban
529
00:37:08,200 --> 00:37:11,840
experience itself is fundamentally fragmented.
530
00:37:11,840 --> 00:37:17,640
As we pass through the city, we see billboards, we see signs on buses,
531
00:37:17,640 --> 00:37:20,320
we see newspaper headlines.
532
00:37:20,320 --> 00:37:24,640
Ultimately, of course, Picasso is going back to Baudelaire,
533
00:37:24,640 --> 00:37:28,400
and he's thinking about the painting of modern life.
534
00:37:28,400 --> 00:37:32,360
Well, this is about as extreme as the painting of modern life gets.
535
00:37:37,080 --> 00:37:41,640
Cubism itself was a dialogue between Picasso and its other inventor,
536
00:37:41,640 --> 00:37:44,120
George Braque,
537
00:37:44,120 --> 00:37:46,880
who met each other every day for four years,
538
00:37:46,880 --> 00:37:50,160
taking the language of Western art to pieces,
539
00:37:50,160 --> 00:37:51,640
as if it were a jigsaw puzzle.
540
00:37:56,280 --> 00:37:58,760
At the same time, another great painter -
541
00:37:58,760 --> 00:38:00,480
yet another great painter -
542
00:38:00,480 --> 00:38:03,600
was taking art in an altogether different direction.
543
00:38:04,720 --> 00:38:06,920
His name - Henri Matisse.
544
00:38:08,400 --> 00:38:13,920
If Picasso worked with line, Matisse was the great colourist.
545
00:38:13,920 --> 00:38:15,120
Look at this picture!
546
00:38:16,360 --> 00:38:18,240
Colour has been set free -
547
00:38:18,240 --> 00:38:20,480
the result is the invention of
548
00:38:20,480 --> 00:38:22,680
a new language for painting.
549
00:38:22,680 --> 00:38:27,360
A language that expresses mood, a language that expresses idealism,
550
00:38:27,360 --> 00:38:30,160
a new sense of beauty.
551
00:38:30,160 --> 00:38:33,800
The critics of the early 20th century simply didn't know what to make of
552
00:38:33,800 --> 00:38:35,360
this painter, of this art.
553
00:38:35,360 --> 00:38:38,560
They called him a fauve, a wild beast.
554
00:38:39,760 --> 00:38:41,960
Here, I think Matisse is paying
555
00:38:41,960 --> 00:38:47,120
a kind of distant homage to Cezanne, but my goodness!
556
00:38:47,120 --> 00:38:48,880
If this is a Cezanne,
557
00:38:48,880 --> 00:38:52,400
it's a Cezanne, as it were, reimagined by a man taking opium.
558
00:38:55,080 --> 00:38:57,120
The subjects are never that much.
559
00:38:57,120 --> 00:38:58,920
Goldfish in a bowl -
560
00:38:58,920 --> 00:39:01,080
it's what Matisse makes of them.
561
00:39:01,080 --> 00:39:05,120
He weaves them into these beguiling textures.
562
00:39:09,320 --> 00:39:14,360
And this, for me, is the great masterpiece of this room.
563
00:39:14,360 --> 00:39:18,520
Matisse has just ripped up the rule book of representation and he's
564
00:39:18,520 --> 00:39:21,200
transfigured the colours altogether.
565
00:39:21,200 --> 00:39:25,040
It's like a kind of swimming pool of visual pleasure
566
00:39:25,040 --> 00:39:27,360
into which he invites you.
567
00:39:27,360 --> 00:39:31,000
I suppose that yellow carpet could almost be the diving board.
568
00:39:32,400 --> 00:39:38,200
And I think what he's saying in this work is that the old idea of
569
00:39:38,200 --> 00:39:42,520
Arcadia, the idea of a paradise that we can inhabit away from the troubles
570
00:39:42,520 --> 00:39:45,800
of this world, away from its violence, away from history,
571
00:39:45,800 --> 00:39:48,600
that old idea of paradise,
572
00:39:48,600 --> 00:39:52,520
has compressed and paradise now
573
00:39:52,520 --> 00:39:55,080
is the studio of the artist.
574
00:39:55,080 --> 00:39:58,720
It's not an image OF paradise - it IS paradise.
575
00:40:05,360 --> 00:40:09,280
But Matisse's vision of paradise came at a time when the world was
576
00:40:09,280 --> 00:40:10,600
descending into hell.
577
00:40:16,240 --> 00:40:20,680
The outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914 brought
578
00:40:20,680 --> 00:40:22,640
la belle epoque to a crashing end.
579
00:40:26,000 --> 00:40:30,480
The new technology behind the steam train and the impressionists' paint
580
00:40:30,480 --> 00:40:34,400
in tubes now gave opposing armies their mustard gas,
581
00:40:34,400 --> 00:40:39,040
their machine guns, and millions lost their lives on the battlefields.
582
00:40:52,640 --> 00:40:57,240
All the while, the most radiantly peaceful works of art were being
583
00:40:57,240 --> 00:41:01,880
created less than 100 miles from the front by Monet - still alive,
584
00:41:01,880 --> 00:41:07,040
believe it or not, and still painting at his home in the countryside at Giverny.
585
00:41:12,680 --> 00:41:15,760
There, he'd created a Japanese water garden,
586
00:41:15,760 --> 00:41:18,400
the muse for some of his most hypnotising work.
587
00:41:29,680 --> 00:41:35,560
The day after the war ended, on the 11th of November 1918, Monet,
588
00:41:35,560 --> 00:41:37,480
now in his late '70s,
589
00:41:37,480 --> 00:41:41,160
offered a series of his water lily paintings to France.
590
00:41:48,320 --> 00:41:51,280
Monet said that he wanted to give
591
00:41:51,280 --> 00:41:53,400
the French people,
592
00:41:53,400 --> 00:41:58,600
after the war, a space of tranquillity,
593
00:41:58,600 --> 00:42:02,040
a refuge from their wounds,
594
00:42:02,040 --> 00:42:05,960
somewhere they could heal their souls
595
00:42:05,960 --> 00:42:11,000
with the spectacle of nature and eternity.
596
00:42:11,000 --> 00:42:13,560
What wonderful pictures they are.
597
00:42:16,240 --> 00:42:19,560
How did he get to this
598
00:42:19,560 --> 00:42:21,120
from Impressionism?
599
00:42:23,000 --> 00:42:29,880
I think the answer lies once again in conversation, but this time,
600
00:42:29,880 --> 00:42:34,520
he was in conversation with a dead Englishman called JMW Turner.
601
00:42:35,520 --> 00:42:37,080
He was the only man, I think,
602
00:42:37,080 --> 00:42:40,560
of the entire 19th century who really understood what Turner was
603
00:42:40,560 --> 00:42:45,520
saying - namely, that the things we think
604
00:42:45,520 --> 00:42:48,840
are solid ourselves,
605
00:42:48,840 --> 00:42:51,760
the objects with which we surround ourselves - well, actually,
606
00:42:51,760 --> 00:42:52,800
they're not real.
607
00:42:53,840 --> 00:43:00,680
The only thing that's real, is the thing that seems most transitory,
608
00:43:00,680 --> 00:43:04,640
most fugitive - namely light itself.
609
00:43:04,640 --> 00:43:08,360
And that's what Monet had struggled with but now, at the end of his life,
610
00:43:08,360 --> 00:43:13,000
finally he has at last managed to go beyond Turner,
611
00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:17,240
to take Turner's message, if you like, to another level,
612
00:43:17,240 --> 00:43:19,600
to expand it to a new scale,
613
00:43:19,600 --> 00:43:24,200
because scale is the great key to these paintings.
614
00:43:24,200 --> 00:43:26,080
Look at their enormity.
615
00:43:26,080 --> 00:43:28,600
This great arc
616
00:43:28,600 --> 00:43:32,800
of a vision of the water lily pond, the trees,
617
00:43:32,800 --> 00:43:36,960
it's as if you become one with the subject,
618
00:43:36,960 --> 00:43:41,440
one with this extraordinary hypnotic, fluid,
619
00:43:41,440 --> 00:43:44,840
perpetually moving evanescence.
620
00:43:44,840 --> 00:43:49,360
You might BE staring into some idealised pool of water.
621
00:43:51,560 --> 00:43:54,200
It's as if you're in the presence
622
00:43:54,200 --> 00:43:55,920
of eternity itself.
623
00:44:10,720 --> 00:44:15,080
But those who'd actually experienced the First World War were beyond
624
00:44:15,080 --> 00:44:17,280
being consoled by water lily paintings.
625
00:44:18,400 --> 00:44:21,400
For them, the shock of the new
626
00:44:21,400 --> 00:44:22,800
was shellshock.
627
00:44:25,240 --> 00:44:27,520
The poet and writer Andre Breton,
628
00:44:27,520 --> 00:44:31,200
who'd worked with traumatised survivors of war,
629
00:44:31,200 --> 00:44:34,880
became spokesman for a new art movement
630
00:44:34,880 --> 00:44:37,880
of bad dreams and night terrors.
631
00:44:37,880 --> 00:44:40,360
He called it surrealism.
632
00:44:44,080 --> 00:44:47,680
Surrealism drew on a far-flung sense of outrage,
633
00:44:47,680 --> 00:44:51,800
hence its multicultural cast - Salvador Dali from Spain...
634
00:44:55,040 --> 00:44:56,640
..Man Ray from America...
635
00:44:59,520 --> 00:45:01,320
..Rene Magritte from Belgium.
636
00:45:03,080 --> 00:45:08,200
Now, artists weren't having a conversation so much as interpreting each other's dreams.
637
00:45:10,520 --> 00:45:12,000
And what dreams they were.
638
00:45:14,200 --> 00:45:17,880
Of a world turned upside down,
639
00:45:17,880 --> 00:45:20,600
where the only truth is nonsense.
640
00:45:23,640 --> 00:45:27,160
The surrealists blamed the middle-class establishment,
641
00:45:27,160 --> 00:45:28,800
not just for the horrors of war,
642
00:45:28,800 --> 00:45:30,800
but the hypocrisy that had caused it.
643
00:45:32,120 --> 00:45:37,040
But the greatest scourge of the bourgeoisie wasn't a surrealist
644
00:45:37,040 --> 00:45:42,680
but a Dadaist - Marcel Duchamp, Monsieur Shock himself.
645
00:45:45,720 --> 00:45:48,080
He presented a urinal as a work of art.
646
00:45:51,800 --> 00:45:53,440
He drew a moustache onto
647
00:45:53,440 --> 00:45:58,360
a reproduction of the most famous painting in the Louvre.
648
00:45:58,360 --> 00:46:03,400
And he carried out his first great assault on bourgeois taste while the
649
00:46:03,400 --> 00:46:05,600
Great War was still at its height.
650
00:46:07,240 --> 00:46:08,560
In 1916,
651
00:46:08,560 --> 00:46:15,400
he went to a department store in Paris and he purchased this object -
652
00:46:15,400 --> 00:46:17,200
it's a bottle rack.
653
00:46:17,200 --> 00:46:21,840
It's what you use to dispose of the wine bottles in
654
00:46:21,840 --> 00:46:23,960
your cellar once you've drunk them.
655
00:46:25,240 --> 00:46:30,360
But Duchamp had the gall to put this common thing of mass manufacture in
656
00:46:30,360 --> 00:46:33,840
an art gallery and to call it a work of art.
657
00:46:35,760 --> 00:46:41,080
I think he was trying to get rid of the idea of the artist as a creator.
658
00:46:41,080 --> 00:46:46,080
He said he wanted to destroy the notion of the artist as hero.
659
00:46:46,080 --> 00:46:50,680
From now on, the artist would just be someone who chooses a thing and
660
00:46:50,680 --> 00:46:52,920
places it in the world.
661
00:46:52,920 --> 00:46:55,880
He said that the object should be ordinary,
662
00:46:55,880 --> 00:46:58,000
because if I chose something,
663
00:46:58,000 --> 00:47:01,040
he said, if I choose something that I liked, well, then,
664
00:47:01,040 --> 00:47:06,280
my taste would enter in, and once taste enters in, well,
665
00:47:06,280 --> 00:47:08,960
art becomes bourgeois again.
666
00:47:08,960 --> 00:47:11,640
"Taste is the enemy of A-R-T."
667
00:47:13,280 --> 00:47:18,600
But I think Duchamp has been a little bit disingenuous and I do think that
668
00:47:18,600 --> 00:47:21,040
the things he chose, this thing in particular, were...
669
00:47:23,240 --> 00:47:26,200
..barbed, meaningful, significant.
670
00:47:27,720 --> 00:47:33,920
Duchamp was fascinated by the idea that man is the prisoner of his sexual impulses.
671
00:47:33,920 --> 00:47:39,560
Could this be Duchamp's way of suggesting that everyone alive -
672
00:47:39,560 --> 00:47:41,920
every man, at least -
673
00:47:41,920 --> 00:47:48,160
is...caught in a state of priapic longing, for ever suspended,
674
00:47:48,160 --> 00:47:51,480
waiting for the moment of sexual union,
675
00:47:51,480 --> 00:47:54,440
conjunction with a female bottle?
676
00:47:56,040 --> 00:48:02,360
Is this his way of saying that everyone - every man -
677
00:48:02,360 --> 00:48:06,440
in France, is really just a cock?
678
00:48:09,760 --> 00:48:12,200
Talk about a phallocentric world.
679
00:48:12,200 --> 00:48:13,880
And no-one did more to prove Duchamp right
680
00:48:13,880 --> 00:48:17,760
than his fellow avant-gardists - including Picasso.
681
00:48:19,400 --> 00:48:23,320
Now, I've brought you to the Picasso Museum because I think there is no
682
00:48:23,320 --> 00:48:28,160
better place to really feel and appreciate
683
00:48:28,160 --> 00:48:31,120
the extent to which surrealism
684
00:48:31,120 --> 00:48:36,080
explored the darker sides of human sexuality than here.
685
00:48:36,080 --> 00:48:39,600
This is the room that they call the sex and death room.
686
00:48:44,880 --> 00:48:47,800
This is one of his great masterpieces.
687
00:48:49,760 --> 00:48:54,000
It's sex envisaged as a kind of feral, seething encounter.
688
00:48:55,120 --> 00:48:57,160
Look at these biomorphic figures.
689
00:48:57,160 --> 00:48:59,280
They're almost eating each other.
690
00:48:59,280 --> 00:49:01,440
Sex as violence.
691
00:49:03,000 --> 00:49:09,320
And this is Alberto Giacometti's Woman With Her Throat Cut,
692
00:49:09,320 --> 00:49:13,600
possibly the most repellent sculpture of the entire surrealist movement.
693
00:49:13,600 --> 00:49:15,240
What does it show us?
694
00:49:15,240 --> 00:49:17,560
A woman who is half turned into a scorpion,
695
00:49:17,560 --> 00:49:19,080
the victim of a sex attack.
696
00:49:19,080 --> 00:49:21,760
It's a really horrible little thing.
697
00:49:21,760 --> 00:49:26,520
It seems to encapsulate the strain of misogyny and unpleasant male sexual fantasy
698
00:49:26,520 --> 00:49:29,160
that dominates the surreal movement.
699
00:49:29,160 --> 00:49:33,240
And I suppose the question for the artists of this generation would be
700
00:49:33,240 --> 00:49:37,600
- above all, I think, for Picasso - "How do I get away from this?
701
00:49:37,600 --> 00:49:41,400
"How do I escape my own personal fantasies and create an art
702
00:49:41,400 --> 00:49:44,720
"that addresses something greater than myself?"
703
00:49:52,200 --> 00:49:55,840
Picasso would find his own answer in 1937.
704
00:49:55,840 --> 00:50:00,520
The conversation about art was moving into an even darker realm
705
00:50:00,520 --> 00:50:03,400
and Paris was still at the crux of it all.
706
00:50:06,480 --> 00:50:08,920
This is the Place Trocadero,
707
00:50:08,920 --> 00:50:13,040
one of the most seething hubs of modern tourist Paris.
708
00:50:13,040 --> 00:50:19,560
Project yourself back to 1937 and it's an altogether more sinister place.
709
00:50:19,560 --> 00:50:22,240
Flanked by the two great wings of the Palais de Chaillot,
710
00:50:22,240 --> 00:50:26,960
this was the scene of the world's exposition,
711
00:50:26,960 --> 00:50:31,520
in which twin totalitarian regimes, that of Russia
712
00:50:31,520 --> 00:50:36,280
and Germany, flexed their muscles one against the other.
713
00:50:40,160 --> 00:50:43,760
Amidst all the posturing stood one of the most powerful artworks of
714
00:50:43,760 --> 00:50:45,040
the 20th century.
715
00:50:50,120 --> 00:50:54,040
A protest against the bombing of Guernica by Luftwaffe planes
716
00:50:54,040 --> 00:50:56,400
during the Spanish Civil War,
717
00:50:56,400 --> 00:51:01,640
a graphic, gut-wrenching, flashbulb vision of atrocity.
718
00:51:08,680 --> 00:51:13,200
Just two years later, World War II had broken out,
719
00:51:13,200 --> 00:51:17,640
and a victorious Adolf Hitler would soon be standing right here.
720
00:51:20,120 --> 00:51:23,520
Picasso remained in Paris during the German occupation.
721
00:51:24,520 --> 00:51:28,280
Towards the end of the War, he created another painting...
722
00:51:30,120 --> 00:51:31,440
..the Charnel House.
723
00:51:32,720 --> 00:51:35,160
The pile of corpses in the centre
724
00:51:35,160 --> 00:51:39,200
represents Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps.
725
00:51:41,000 --> 00:51:46,560
A German officer visiting Picasso's studio took it all in and asked,
726
00:51:46,560 --> 00:51:48,600
"Why did you do that?"
727
00:51:48,600 --> 00:51:51,240
Picasso replied, "I didn't.
728
00:51:51,240 --> 00:51:52,800
"You did."
729
00:52:07,800 --> 00:52:11,720
The Second World War had a devastating impact on France.
730
00:52:11,720 --> 00:52:14,880
From the chaos and destruction came one of the last great French
731
00:52:14,880 --> 00:52:19,520
contributions to the history of art and ideas -
732
00:52:19,520 --> 00:52:20,560
existentialism.
733
00:52:30,920 --> 00:52:34,880
It's a philosophy that defined all of us as solitary individuals in
734
00:52:34,880 --> 00:52:39,440
infinite space, living life as one single moment -
735
00:52:39,440 --> 00:52:42,800
one Impressionist moment, you might say - after another.
736
00:52:46,240 --> 00:52:50,200
Its bible was written by Jean-Paul Sartre and simply called
737
00:52:50,200 --> 00:52:53,400
Being And Nothingness.
738
00:52:55,080 --> 00:52:57,840
John-Paul Sartre finished Being And Nothingness
739
00:52:57,840 --> 00:53:00,760
during the very darkest days of the Second World War.
740
00:53:01,760 --> 00:53:03,560
What he does is he places...
741
00:53:05,320 --> 00:53:09,320
..absolute central importance on the moment.
742
00:53:10,320 --> 00:53:11,560
The instant.
743
00:53:12,520 --> 00:53:15,280
That's what he says existence is.
744
00:53:16,640 --> 00:53:21,000
We're only ever alive, we're only ever conscious of being alive, at this second,
745
00:53:21,000 --> 00:53:25,240
this fractional second of our existence.
746
00:53:25,240 --> 00:53:31,280
In that instant, we are - all of us - in the same predicament.
747
00:53:31,280 --> 00:53:36,120
We all bear responsibility within us, a terrible burden,
748
00:53:36,120 --> 00:53:39,720
for the whole history of the universe.
749
00:53:39,720 --> 00:53:42,440
It's doesn't matter if I'm a Frenchman,
750
00:53:42,440 --> 00:53:44,560
living under German tyranny.
751
00:53:44,560 --> 00:53:47,920
It does matter if I'm a victim of the death camps.
752
00:53:47,920 --> 00:53:52,960
It doesn't matter if I'm being lined up against the wall by a firing squad -
753
00:53:52,960 --> 00:53:58,200
in the moment that I die, I am as free as the man who is killing me.
754
00:54:00,000 --> 00:54:01,720
It's a great fist of defiance.
755
00:54:01,720 --> 00:54:03,920
It's almost a Picasso hand,
756
00:54:03,920 --> 00:54:09,120
raised up against the tyranny of those who would dominate the world
757
00:54:09,120 --> 00:54:10,720
with their cruelty, their terror.
758
00:54:13,840 --> 00:54:16,840
But it's a philosophy that bears within it...
759
00:54:18,160 --> 00:54:23,520
..a pretty terrible price, because what Sartre doesn't find room for
760
00:54:23,520 --> 00:54:27,000
is the idea that one moment might connect to another,
761
00:54:27,000 --> 00:54:33,600
that a life might be made up of one person mixing with another person,
762
00:54:33,600 --> 00:54:38,080
so, on the one hand, the instant,
763
00:54:38,080 --> 00:54:43,800
the totally free individual, but on the other hand, a terrible sense -
764
00:54:43,800 --> 00:54:48,280
a nauseating sense, in his phrase - of aloneness.
765
00:54:56,640 --> 00:55:01,200
Extentialism started out as a literary movement but it made its mark on
766
00:55:01,200 --> 00:55:02,920
the art of postwar France.
767
00:55:04,120 --> 00:55:06,080
I think it's most clearly expressed
768
00:55:06,080 --> 00:55:08,640
in the later work of Alberto Giacometti.
769
00:55:14,280 --> 00:55:16,440
What do they evoke,
770
00:55:16,440 --> 00:55:21,320
these strange, emaciated figures?
771
00:55:23,120 --> 00:55:24,640
Some sense of atrocity.
772
00:55:25,600 --> 00:55:29,040
Are they Giacometti's way of remembering
773
00:55:29,040 --> 00:55:31,080
the Jews,
774
00:55:31,080 --> 00:55:35,680
struggling from their concentration camps at the end of the war?
775
00:55:36,880 --> 00:55:40,440
I think ultimately what they express
776
00:55:40,440 --> 00:55:45,600
is this profound existential sense of aloneness.
777
00:55:45,600 --> 00:55:51,320
His work marks a huge change in the whole history of French art.
778
00:55:51,320 --> 00:55:57,520
Art is a person locked up in their own sense of being.
779
00:55:57,520 --> 00:56:00,520
This is the art of solipsism - it's the art of the monologue.
780
00:56:00,520 --> 00:56:04,920
No coincidence that Giacometti was friends with Samuel Beckett.
781
00:56:04,920 --> 00:56:09,400
Giacometti even designed the set for Beckett's Waiting For Godot.
782
00:56:09,400 --> 00:56:13,000
The theatre of the absurd, the art of the absurd,
783
00:56:13,000 --> 00:56:15,280
the end of the conversation.
784
00:56:31,320 --> 00:56:33,320
While it lasted, it was the most fertile,
785
00:56:33,320 --> 00:56:36,800
febrile conversation in the history of art.
786
00:56:36,800 --> 00:56:41,280
In just over half a century, France had given the world Impressionism,
787
00:56:41,280 --> 00:56:46,800
cubism, Fauvism, surrealism, conceptual art and existentialism.
788
00:56:50,000 --> 00:56:52,680
But when it comes to the last 50 or 60 years, well,
789
00:56:52,680 --> 00:56:55,640
I can think of plenty of French film-makers
790
00:56:55,640 --> 00:56:59,320
but very few artists and no true household names.
791
00:56:59,320 --> 00:57:04,600
Yves Klein, Pierre Soulages, Daniel Buren, anybody?
792
00:57:04,600 --> 00:57:05,880
So why the decline?
793
00:57:08,560 --> 00:57:12,600
Is it because France became culturally inward-looking?
794
00:57:12,600 --> 00:57:16,720
Or is it because the bourgeoisie, target of the avant-garde,
795
00:57:16,720 --> 00:57:18,320
has actually had the last laugh?
796
00:57:20,760 --> 00:57:25,320
The truth is, France today is ruled by a petite-France mentality.
797
00:57:28,480 --> 00:57:31,760
So, if you're black or Muslim, you'll struggle.
798
00:57:31,760 --> 00:57:35,080
Hard to imagine a Barack Obama elected here
799
00:57:35,080 --> 00:57:38,400
or a Picasso wanting to come, nowadays.
800
00:57:38,400 --> 00:57:41,800
But that's just my personal j'accuse.
801
00:57:44,160 --> 00:57:46,040
In the end, the whys don't matter.
802
00:57:46,040 --> 00:57:50,080
Cultural energies do shift from one place to another.
803
00:57:50,080 --> 00:57:51,600
It's always been that way.
804
00:57:51,600 --> 00:57:53,400
Plus ca change.
805
00:57:53,400 --> 00:57:59,040
And I think every great nation's story must eventually flow like a river
806
00:57:59,040 --> 00:58:03,880
into the greater sea of civilisation as a whole.
807
00:58:03,880 --> 00:58:05,440
Everything gets mixed up.
808
00:58:05,440 --> 00:58:10,000
We all take on a little bit of each other and I think that's particularly
809
00:58:10,000 --> 00:58:15,840
true of France, as its golden age of art came to a close.
810
00:58:15,840 --> 00:58:21,280
Artists here had invented and developed the visual language by
811
00:58:21,280 --> 00:58:24,800
which we frame and understand the modern world.
812
00:58:24,800 --> 00:58:29,120
And I don't think there's anyone alive whose way of seeing hasn't in
813
00:58:29,120 --> 00:58:32,960
some way been shaped by their ways of seeing.
814
00:58:32,960 --> 00:58:36,080
You might say, we're all French now.
815
00:58:36,080 --> 00:58:37,840
Nous sommes tous Francais.
816
00:58:37,840 --> 00:58:39,280
At least, a little bit.
817
00:58:42,480 --> 00:58:47,520
# Non, rien de rien
818
00:58:47,520 --> 00:58:52,600
# Non, je ne regrette rien
819
00:58:52,600 --> 00:58:58,480
# Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait
820
00:58:58,480 --> 00:59:00,680
# Ni le mal
821
00:59:00,680 --> 00:59:04,640
# Tout ca m'est bien egal
822
00:59:04,640 --> 00:59:07,840
# Non, rien de rien... #
70457
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