Original subtitles

MUSIC: Piano Concerto no.2, F minor, by Geza Anda

"We went for a walk in the garden."

"It's a perfect garden.

"A panorama of the flowers whose beauty is deeply moving.

"They are so tall on their stems that they seem to walk along with us."

"Today, for the first time, Monet took me across the road

"and the railway line, beyond which the garden extends,

"but where the landscape changes its appearance completely.

"There is Monet's pond, where his water lilies float.

"Surrounded by his pale willows,

"a pond which he has created as God created the caprices of nature."

MUSIC CONTINUES

I think we love to try and compartmentalise artists

so they have singular disciplines.

You've got the painter, you've got the sculptor, no sense that,

as Michelangelo was, a great sculptor can be a great draughtsman

or that a great painter can also be a great sculptor

and Monet was clearly a great sculptor, because in his garden,

he's sculpting nature.

He is making sure that there are larger flowers, smaller flowers.

There are darker tones, there are lighter tones.

There are colours that are fighting against one another

and dragging you through the scene.

It's a great natural sculpture and I don't think you should undermine

quite how important that kind of creativity is in our world,

so every person who goes out into their own garden and creates a space

for them is building something that can have the same effect on you

as a wonderful painting, that can allow you to immerse yourself,

to retreat, to find solace in beautiful things.

Artists have always had a fascination with gardens,

because artists can't help but have a fascination with nature.

You know, Jura, Botticelli, Charles Rennie Mackintosh,

Monet, Matisse, these are people who find in a simple flower

a whole universe, you know, in the structures, in the engineering,

in the elegance and beauty and simplicity of a flower,

you really can find a whole world,

and that's what you're doing when you're mixing up colours

on a pallet.

You're finding whole new opportunities to express yourself

in very simple acts.

And nature expresses so much, gardens can express so much,

even in a space that we just seem to take for granted so often.

Monet was trying to experiment with colour all the time and so,

flowers gave him this opportunity,

and we can see by the sorts of colour combinations in the garden

that he would be taking,

he would be using the oranges, the reds and yellows.

He'd mix them all together.

But you'll see in his paintings, that when he does a colour scheme,

then even if it's a bluish scheme,

there will always be touches of yellow or touches of pinks and

you have touches of colours which set off the colour

that he's working with.

The other thing is that Monet was always looking for new varieties,

looking for new colours.

If he could find better varieties, new varieties,

he would put them into his garden.

So, a garden isn't a museum.

A garden is a living tribute to Monet,

combining harmonious colours and then waking this up with an opposing colour.

The purples would be with the oranges,

the blues with the yellows.

And this is very striking in the garden.

Strong colours which shake you a little bit

and it's the opposite of the good taste of English gardens.

The story of modern art is told in many different ways.

We know that the development of photography is central to it.

We know that the re-exploration of so-called primitive cultures

or non-Western cultures is also a driving force.

But I think what this exhibition starts to make clear

is that the garden has been a very underrated site in the development

of the evolution of modern art.

In a way, it's modern life, it's the painting of modern life,

as well as a kind of abstract force, or power of nature

that gets combined in so many of these paintings.

There was always a danger that an exhibition focusing on

garden as subject matter veered towards the schmaltzy,

the saccharine, the chocolate box-y.

But actually, the exhibition was very clear from the beginning that

it wanted to affirm the importance of gardens for artists of the avant-garde,

the broad avant-garde,

and I think exhibition makes that case very clearly.

Never been a major exhibition to my knowledge looking at the role of

the garden in the evolution of modern art and, certainly,

familiar artists like Monet and Matisse are reconfigured, I think,

in an interesting context.

I think the premise of this exhibition,

the linkage between art and gardens is really interesting and timely.

Partly because of the low cultural status of gardens in the hierarchy

of the arts, which is sort of somewhere down with knitting, say,

or embroidery and other, what you might call, applied arts nowadays.

But I think as this exhibition shows,

many of the greatest artists of the early 20th century were interested,

if not obsessed, with their gardens and the different effects,

chromatic effects, the effects of atmosphere and place,

they were really interested in exploring garden -

first of all as subject matter for their own work, but in some cases,

most notably in Monet's case, of course,

the garden itself becomes an artwork in its own right.

Monet's primary stimulus was, I think he just loved gardening

and he loved plants.

His gardening and his art are so closely related.

I think there is a unique symbiosis between the two.

And I think he created his garden as an artist.

You know, saw the blocks of colour that he was planting,

like pigments on a pallet.

He once said,

"Aside from painting and gardening, I'm good for nothing."

And so, these two passions completely dominated his life

and shaped his career.

I think there is something heroic in the idea of the artist/gardener

up to the level which Monet took it and I think all of these things,

the garden and his art,

they've all woven together to create an extremely powerful and strong

public identity for him.

We think Monet may have been the greatest painter of gardens

in the history of art, but he wasn't alone.

There are many other artists who are invested in this subject deeply.

Artists you might expect are the Impressionists,

because they're obviously interested in the natural world,

but I think other artists that people will be surprised to learn

were also active gardeners, fascinated by gardeners

and you see a wide range of them in the exhibition.

They are dedicated to the project of modernity.

The garden, I think, has a very wide context in the 19th century.

We have to remember that this is the century of Darwin.

After all, his Origin Of Species in 1859 draws people's attention to

the possibility that the world wasn't created just in seven days,

but has a longer history going back to fossils and the evidence that

And of course, in a sense, he is therefore exploding Darwin,

the whole concept of Paradise and of the garden of Eden and these places

of perfection that have underpinned so much of Western cultural thought

and tradition.

There are depictions of the Garden of Eden and ancient manuscripts.

Of course, it becomes really crucial subject during the medieval period.

You have depictions of the Virgin and they're all kind of in a garden

and there are conventions about that.

She's in an enclosed garden, which is symbolic of her virginity.

During the Baroque era, gardens were a significant aspect, actually,

of royal power, because you have great kings,

Louis XIV, and others, creating magnificent enormous gardens.

Most people know the gardens at Versailles,

but this occurred in many places in Europe and these were actually

an expression of the king's power.

This whole culture began to change in the 19th century,

when you have the rise of the middle-class

and more people could have time to do private pleasure gardening

as opposed to practical gardening just for growing vegetables.

Now, they're doing this for personal pleasure.

There's a lot of feelings about this,

that it contributes to the health of family life,

to the health of the culture and you also have, at the same time,

new varieties and species of flowers and plants being imported

from around the world.

From Asia, Africa, the Americas and, of course,

we have science intersecting here, and they are taking these imported

varieties, they're creating new hybrids

and artists get involved with this new floriculture,

an attempt to really create new types of species and varieties.

And that is all facilitated by technological developments,

because, for the first time also, from the 1820s,

there is a very effective way of carrying plants and not just seeds

back from foreign lands.

These include the Wardian case, invented by a British doctor,

Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward,

and then we have also the greenhouse being developed,

the conservatory and that enables these exotic plants

to be overwintered,

also enables them to be brought on and then planted out and, in a way,

people are having, I think, to rethink the relationship

they as individuals have with nature.

I think there are certain plants which are recurring within these

canvases that, when you garden with them,

you understand why they're here.

Dahlias, for instance, are an extraordinary thing in themselves.

They're incandescent when they flower.

They break all the rules of what goes with what.

The dahlia grower is fascinated in the flower, and that juxtaposition

of two things creates often this tremendous tension and clash.

There are poppies which appear again and again which also have that

amazing ability to jump out of a landscape.

There are chrysanthemums for the same reason.

And they are things which in a way are larger-than-life flowers.

Peonies.

There are things which take over a moment

which make a particular time of year.

As a colour exercise, it's a wonderfully freeing thing.

With this rise of, you know, modern gardening as we know it today,

it's often referred to as the great horticultural movement.

One aspect of it was these great horticultural shows,

rather like the Hampton Court Flower Show today or shows put on by

the Royal Horticultural Society,

and we know that Monet was an enthusiastic visitor to these shows.

Horticulture is an amazing thing, because it links art with science,

perhaps more than almost any other practice.

So it's inevitable really, that people like Monet,

who becomes seriously interested in gardens,

then get seriously interested in the technical side of things

at a very advanced level.

So, we're talking Claude Monet,

and Gustave Caillebotte.

I'm sure there are one or two more, but they're the main ones

and they were great gardening buddies.

And they were interested in going to the flower exhibitions,

seeing the water lilies bred by Latour-Marliac

or the great nurseries, like French nurseries at this time,

breeding chrysanthemums and dahlias in new forms and we know that Monet,

like many a keen gardener, was really obsessed by novelty.

He orders these special new hybrid species of water lilies,

largely produced by a grower which still exists in France today,

called Latour-Marliac.

What was new at the time,

there were these bright pink and even red and, I believe,

sometimes scented water lilies,

whereas the more common variety were white or yellow.

I think Monet was very keen on having these accents of pink and red

in the overall grey, green, watery environment of the pond.

So he's creating a garden with an artist's eye and he's also creating

a garden for an environment as a subject for him to paint

over which he has a great deal of control.

A really important development that contributes to the great

horticultural movement is the crossing of one species of plant

with another - hybridisation - which begins in earnest, really,

from the 19th century and gathers momentum and enables ever bigger,

ever more colourful,

ever more scented varieties to be developed and we have things like

200 different species of irises developing by the late 19th century.

There are crosses made similarly with gladioli, roses,

another hugely important development, where different colours, types,

varieties are all coming to the fore.

So, there is this feeling for nature,

that YOU are controlling nature, that you're organising,

but also nature that is itself and through the garden bubbling up and

always surprising you perhaps with new growth, looking to the future,

looking beyond the present through that growing process.

"Paint upon a pallet, delighting our eyes with so satisfying pictures.

"A treasure of well-set jewels, sympathy with growing things,

"fashioned into a dream of beauty.

"A place of perfect rest and refreshment of mind and body.

"This sense of beauty is a gift of God."

There were many writers who were discussing the importance of gardening

to family life.

This is a place where French civilisation could be reborn,

where this was a healthy place for...

To be with children and families,

and that is seen actually in the Impressionist paintings,

that there's paintings by Monet when you see a couple in the background,

and it's a reference to the garden of love.

So it becomes part of sort of everyday bourgeois life

and that really is a primary subject for the Impressionists,

but other artists working in this period.

It's all about a sort of quiet domestic idyll,

or very often that becomes a popular subject with artists.

So, I think the garden, the small private garden,

fits very well into that general view of the world.

And so, the need to escape to nature and to the restorative powers

of nature and gardening become very strong.

We begin the exhibition with two very interesting paintings.

One is by Monet,

of his dahlia garden in the house he was renting at Argenteuil,

which is just outside of Paris, in the early 1870s.

Here, he's a poor struggling artist.

This is just the moment when the Impressionist group

is beginning to emerge.

He couldn't afford his own house.

He's just living in rented properties, but wherever he went,

he made a garden and next to it,

we're very happy to get the loan of a painting by Renoir painting Monet,

painting the dahlia garden.

These two pictures together tell us quite a lot.

First of all, they tell us that dahlias were very popular flower.

It also sort of shows the companionship and this sort of camaraderie

between these young impressionists,

when they were a fringe avant-garde group.

There we have Monet standing before his easel.

He's got his brush extended,

he's putting a touch of colour on the canvas.

We don't see the picture he's painting.

Renoir leaves that to our imagination,

but we can see that it must be the great mass of dahlias alongside,

and it's as though Monet is taking his colours from those dahlias

and transferring them with the brush to the canvas.

The garden is obviously an outdoor studio.

You can use it as an extension of your house in order to get at, first-hand,

the effects of light and atmosphere that become increasingly important

with the rise of Pleinairisme, painting out of doors,

and those elements of modern life can be found,

can be situated in a garden and that, in a way, is a means of

merging the modern life theme with the outdoor painting theme

and the garden is a useful meeting point for the two.

Monet most famously,

but so many other artists were additionally also equally interested

in gardening.

They had their own gardens,

they had greenhouses and gardeners and they were really invested

in this... this new culture and, importantly,

this served as a major source of inspiration for their art.

I mean, Monet had a particularly close relationship with certain

horticulturalists and gardeners and plants people,

particularly Latour-Marliac, who bred a new species of colourful water lilies,

but also another man called Georges Truffaut.

The way that Monet planted the Clos Normand, I think,

particularly if you look at the paintings of irises,

where you get these wonderful drifts of colour,

I think he is aware of the great English designers

of the late 19th century,

particularly William Robinson and also Gertrude Jekyll,

who advocated this kind of lucid drifts of colour,

which is very different from the sort of planting that we see

in a painting right at the beginning of the exhibition,

of Monet's aunt's garden at Sainte-Adresse, which has,

you know, a round bed of geraniums with standard rose in the middle.

It's very much more sort of formal geometric planting.

He's doing something very different, Giverny.

He's still planting in blocks of colour but with this much,

much looser sense and I think that is an influence

that is coming either directly or indirectly

from these great English garden designers.

The great gardening guru of the period, William Robinson,

the author of The Wild Garden.

Robinson wasn't actually promoting the wild garden as we might think

of it, like a garden that's completely left to rack and ruin,

almost, but his idea of a wild garden was allowing plants

to express themselves in a natural way.

In his day, Robinson was a household name, a really influential writer.

He started gardening in Ireland in a couple of gardens and then came over

to London in the 1860s to become a gardener at the new botanic gardens

at Regent's Park. It was there that he started writing and went on to

become a phenomenally successful garden writer and wrote some really

influential books. English Flower Garden,

which was the first book really to detail how we use mixed borders.

The other very important one is The Wild Garden,

which really is probably one of his most influential works,

which was all about naturalistic planting and a bit of a revolution

against the static Victorian horticulture.

Basically, we're talking about welcoming nature into the garden and

naturalising plants but within that, we're still gardening,

we're still exercising an amount of control over what we are growing and

how it's growing and also,

we're looking at how we are using colour and form still but in a very

subtle way, and we're trying to enhance what we find in nature.

A wild garden could be naturalised, bulbs in a meadow,

it could be self-sown annuals running through a mixed border.

It could be some exotic shrubs that have been planted in a woodland.

It's about enhancing what we've got from nature and developing it into a

garden. It's much easier in a garden if things are neat and tidy and

clean and simple. In a wild garden,

it's a fine line between a beautiful naturalistic planting and a tangled

mess and the management of that becomes quite a challenge.

The first edition of The Wild Garden didn't actually do all that well.

It wasn't until a later edition when Alfred Parsons illustrated the book,

that suddenly it really took off.

I mean, first of all, they were very beautiful wood engravings they used

and secondly by having little pictures in each page,

I think that it showed the reader that you don't need to have a grand

estate. You can actually do this in a little corner in any garden.

It sort of linked that.

It was very nice. Robinson was always very conscious about the way

the garden was captured and recorded by artists.

Of course, the photography at that time wasn't quite what it is now and

the painter could do so much more justice and he always had an artist

in residence. There was a whole heap of artists that came here to paint

and that he was in close contact with, so Sargent, Alfred Parsons,

Beatrice Parsons,

and I think it must have been a really vibrant place to come.

This painting by Tissot was one of a group that he did in his home in

St John's Wood, in London.

A wonderful garden he developed there, which was modelled partly on

the Parc Monceau in Paris.

I think there is a tremendous theme running through Tissot's work,

where we have the woman as someone who is to be admired,

almost as an object,

but also a mystery and the garden is traditionally

associated with the woman.

The woman is described as the "good genius" of gardens in some of the

19th-century horticultural journals but equally,

she is the one who in the ancient tradition of the Biblical narrative,

for example, the virgin and her hortus conclusus,

that underpins a lot of the imagery of the woman in the garden, still,

in the 19th century.

And he's maybe just blurring those boundaries so that we don't quite

know if the woman is in the traditional mode of a virgin in a garden,

or in a rather more risque mode,

because conservatories were certainly places where seduction and

all sorts of licence was happening.

It was a space, the garden itself, in turn,

where you might dispense with etiquette

that would have ruled in the drawing-room or the parlour salon,

so I think there are little hints maybe that Tissot is manipulating

the tradition and not just giving us a standard version of a woman in a garden.

Here, we've got chrysanthemums,

which were plants introduced in 1789 to Europe.

They came from the Orient, from China, Japan,

and they were an immediate sensation, really,

and developed into a whole variety of forms and shapes and there

was a great art in picking them, cutting them,

so that you would develop the best for the next year.

You could also take various other forms of growth

and make them come on.

I always find, looking at paintings of gardens or flowers,

you can usually tell fairly quickly if the person who's painted it has a

real interest in the subject.

There's something about the way they depict the flowers in particular,

I suppose the form of the whole plant, they are able to honour the plant,

they are interested enough in it as an entity, as a being in the world,

if you like, to actually spend an awful lot of time over it.

As just as much time as they might spend over a portrait of a

person but in some cases, most notably in Monet's case, of course,

the garden itself becomes an artwork in its own right.

If I could see, one day, Claude Monet's garden...

..I really feel I would see a garden

in more tones and colour than flowers.

A garden which could be less an

old flower garden than a colourist garden,

so to speak. Flowers displayed together, but not as nature,

because they were sown so that only the flowers with matching colours

will bloom at the same time.

Harmonised to the infinite in all ranges of blue or pink.

A powerful manifestation of the artist's intent to dematerialise

them of everything but colour.

Monet had been living in rented houses throughout the 1870s,

first at Argenteuil and then further out along the Seine at Vetheuil,

where he made another beautiful garden.

By this time, he was living with Alice Hoschede and between them,

they had a very large family of children,

so he needed a large house and in 1883, he rented the house,

Le Pressoir, it was called, at Giverny,

and in 1890, he borrowed money from his dealer to buy it.

But from the moment he moved there, he started working on the garden.

He was not so well off at this stage,

so he did a great deal of the gardening himself.

He got his children to help with weeding.

And gradually, the garden evolved and developed.

And then in 1893,

he applied for planning permission for a plot of land that was just the

other side of a small railway line, to make a water garden.

And he had quite a lot of trouble getting the planning permission for

that, the local residents in Giverny objected.

They were rather suspicious of Monet anyway, and the farmers thought that

these weird aquatic plants he was planning to grow would poison the

water and kill the cattle.

But finally, he got the planning permission and of course,

created the wonderful waterlily garden.

It's very interesting the way this garden was laid out when Monet got

here. It was straight lines. A very French garden.

And we know that Monet experimented with these straight lines.

He thought that by using plants in different ways and using colours in

different ways that he could exaggerate the perspective using

these straight lines and it's well-known today that Monet was

probably a precursor in this subject.

By using blues in the garden, it throws

the distance or exaggerates the distance.

By using colours, reds and strong colours,

then it brings the garden close.

So we know the main allee, that he played with these things.

I don't think that he perfected it but he was playing around,

experimenting with purples and blues.

Behind this, using oranges and reds of the dahlias.

So Monet was playing around, experimenting,

trying to give distance and to bring distance closer towards him.

Now, we would use that differently today, but Monet, as I say,

was experimenting. Hadn't quite worked that one out.

And Monet with his painter's eye,

had this very special way of looking at gardens and

planting them to paint.

Impressionism often tried to eliminate too much emotion from the

way that these artists observed the world but increasingly, I think,

they found that as an individual, as an artist,

you can't help but be subjective about what you see,

and in this garden,

there is definitely the sense of Monet as a person who is moved by

enjoyment, by the great thrill and fun of nature,

by the constant curiosity,

because there is not one simple bank of flowers here.

It's change after change after surprise,

after transformation of scale and you could burrow your way into a

bush here and you would find interest for hours.

So every time, I can imagine Monet walking out into this garden,

depending on what stage of the day it was,

I suspect he would have recognised the various atmospheres,

the feelings that the different light conditions would elicit from him.

And Monet's eye was a very special eye.

He could percept the warmth of the light,

so he would be painting the series, the same subject, many,

many times and he would begin a painting in the morning and we can

see at what time of the day he started the painting

because the light would be a cool colour, a cold colour,

pinks and blues and as the light got stronger,

got warmer, he would change the painting and take the same subject

and paint it with a yellow light as the light was getting warmer and

then an orange,

and so he would change his painting as the day went on.

He would wake up in the morning, throw his windows open and

look out and if the light was good, he would go out there and paint.

And if the light wasn't good,

he would get into a rage and a depression and wouldn't come out and

wouldn't eat and wouldn't talk with people and stay indoors because the

light was everything for Monet.

It was so important.

He lived according to the light.

Your imagination isn't broad enough to encapsulate the universe of

qualities that you get in the difference between light and shade

and being outside, it's, you know, it's so inspiring,

so invigorating cos you have to look and look and look again.

Within the smallest shadows that you see, perhaps in a photograph,

where it just looks like it's purple or blue or grey or whatever it might be,

the minute you're outside, the minute you're confronted by the motif,

the subject, you see a myriad of colours and my job is to search

those out, and to reproduce them on canvas and on paper in a way that

will evoke that feeling that I have of being in the open air,

and that's very exciting

for an artist, and, for me, it's a great challenge,

because it's the light that gives the colour to everything that we see

and the challenge is not to get too

caught up in the palette of colours that you normally use,

you're used to using, but to respond to what's in front of you.

From an empty meadow,

without trees but watered by a babbling

and winding arm of the river Epte,

he created a true fairy garden.

Digging a large pond in the middle, planting at the edge of this pond

exotic trees and willows,

whose branches fell in long tears along the bank,

drawing all around the valley arches of greenery, intertwining,

giving the illusion of a big park.

Sowing on the pond, thousands and thousands of waterlilies,

whose rare and chosen species were coloured by all

the tints of the prism,

from purple, red and orange, to pink, lilac and mauve,

and placing, where the Epte met the pond,

one of his small rustic humped bridges.

Baudelaire writes of poetry being a language that uses flowers for

inspiration and there are all sorts of ways in which this concept of

colour itself as found in flowers becomes suggestive, expressive,

so I think the garden is a sort of generative place.

Ideas are sparking out of it and it's a point of focus for politics, art, science.

I think Monet was very involved in the public perception of

himself and I think that the art and the garden and the house and

everything all contributed to this, you know,

a very formidable public persona,

but he was always very pleased to welcome distinguished artists, writers,

amongst his circle of friends and acquaintances.

Stephane Mallarme went there quite often,

the writer Octave Mirbeau wrote in very colourful style,

actually wrote the first literary account of the garden.

Rodin visited, Matisse...

his great friend, the Prime Minister, Clemenceau,

they were all frequent visitors at Giverny.

He was a pater familias.

He enjoyed, I think, being head of this large family.

The studio sitting room was full of life and youth in 1886, when I went

there for the first time.

Young girls, young men, adolescents,

the children and the stepchildren of Madame Monet.

The meal finished, we returned to the studio to have a coffee,

crossing the blue sitting room which contains Monet's library.

It is here that Madam Monet,

surrounded by her children and Monet's children,

appeared in all her peaceful splendour,

her eyes sparkling under a halo of powdered hair.

Well there are both modern gardens and there's modern paintings of gardens

and there's a great variety. There's a tremendous variety.

For Monet, it's growing new types of plants, new,

more spectacular varieties of flowers,

arranging them specifically in colour harmony,

so he's orchestrating environments,

so that they're blooming in different colours at different times

of the year.

For other artists, it's the way they interpret the garden that's modern.

I think many people are aware of the role that gardens play for the

Impressionists. They become places where the effects of light and

atmosphere can be explored but actually,

gardens are so much more than that from the middle of the 19th century

onwards for artists. They become places of reverie,

they become sites of imagination,

they become laboratories of experimentation.

It's an aspect of the modern world and it's an aspect of the

natural world that are sort of fused.

Gardens become places that artists can create and then in turn,

they inform the paintings and I think also, the relationship's symbiotic.

I think the paintings then start to inform the garden, so it's this

multilayered, complex scenario

that I think is richer and deeper even than

we thought before.

We hope that people coming to the exhibition will get

great pleasure from seeing a number of spectacular works of art by

famous and well-known artists, Monet of course,

who's really the heart of the exhibition,

but also works by Matisse,

by other Impressionist artists. And then there's Bonnard's garden at Vernonnet,

which is up in Normandy on the Seine,

only about three miles from Giverny, in fact.

But it couldn't be more different from Monet's very carefully

planned and designed garden.

Bonnard really just let nature take its course.

He called it Mon Jardin Sauvage, my wild garden,

and when you go there today,

there's really very little evidence of a formal garden, certainly.

But nevertheless, this garden,

with its panoramic view out to the Seine beyond,

is the setting of many of Bonnard's paintings.

We have many paintings too,

by perhaps by less familiar names,

but artists who really responded to the

theme of the garden in many different ways.

Max Liebermann made a garden at Lake Wannsee just outside of Berlin.

Liebermann's garden follows this idea current in German design

at the time,

of constructing the garden around a series of outdoor rooms,

so there's a rose garden, there's a hedge garden,

there's a sort of kitchen garden at the back of the house and then there

are four more flowerbeds and then a long birch alley which leads as

a sort of avenue down to the lake,

providing these viewpoints and perspectives.

So there were many different ways in which gardens could be organised and

artists were really searching for something that was particular to

them and their culture, Sorolla, for example, in Spain,

laid out an interior courtyard garden in a series of rooms in his house,

and he had pools and water.

This was a place of reflection for family life but also for

spiritual thinking.

One of the questions you might ask yourself, even subconsciously,

standing in front of one these paintings is, do I believe this is a

Does this garden actually exist?

And in the case of a painting like this, it's absolutely the case,

but I think it's not... In a way, the question isn't so much

does this garden exist, it's did this moment exist?

In an earlier age, this picture would have been called a

swagger painting,

because it shows a very successful man, in his white suit,

at his weekend home on Long Island, just outside New York.

It's Louis Comfort Tiffany, the famous designer. So he's painting,

he's showing us his artistic side and his skill but this is a very

successful man, and the flowers, I think interestingly,

are used in this painting by Sorolla,

as a way of bolstering his credentials as

a man of the world. They're almost machismo, these blooms.

I think, actually, they are mainly hydrangeas,

massed behind him, in different colours but their bulbous blooms are

almost, it's almost like he's the sort of artistic Napoleon,

and this is his Imperial Guard backing him up behind,

with his dog as well, and all these accoutrements, if you like,

of the country gentleman you might see in a Gainsborough or something.

Well, I think a lot of these artists created gardens because it did in a way

make an outdoor studio for them and other artists - for example,

if you take Henri Le Sidaner, another French artist, created a beautiful garden,

a rather romantic garden in the village of Gerberoy in Picardie.

His gardens are sort of fused with a mood of poetic nostalgia and he

particularly liked the twilight hours of dusk,

because it sort of envelops the garden in the sort of dreamlike

atmosphere. So I think those paintings are actually largely done

in an inside studio,

rather than painted on the spot,

although no doubt he made sketches and

really observed the scene outside,

but he needed that kind of remove from

actually being in the garden itself, in order to create

this poetic atmosphere.

I think some gardens are quite charged psychological spaces

and certainly, certain gardens that I have in my mind or in my memory,

sometimes I don't know if I've dreamed them or they're actually

places I visited,

because the way that they sit there in your memory is so close to

a kind of dream space, or spaces you might recall.

But I love the way people plant trees.

Trees that they might never see bear fruit.

Trees that will only come to maturity long after they're gone.

I mean, that's a wonderful kind of optimistic sense of your place in

the world. And that sense of leaving something behind you, that again,

is a great privilege as an artist,

when you make a work that is permanent.

The garden itself is not the subject of my work but it's more how I'm

brought into contact with the processes of living things and the

interconnectivity in a garden,

how one thing affects another and how the rhythms of the natural year

exist beyond me, beyond all the timekeeping I do,

beyond all the kind of knowing when I'm meant to be somewhere and doing

something, there is this other rhythm, way beyond human rhythm,

and it's that that I'm brought into very,

very close contact with through the activity of gardening.

For more avant-garde artists,

flowers and gardens were a source of emotional inspiration.

They're not much interested in whether it's a hyacinth,

but for many of these artists, like Matisse or Emil Nolde,

it's really the colour.

Emil Nolde created gardens wherever he lived and they were a great

inspiration to him. I think the act of gardening was also very spiritual

and important to him.

His last garden was created in Seebull, which is

on the border of Denmark and Germany,

and he designed his garden so that the paths

created two entwined letters that are the initials of himself and his

wife, so you know how personal this garden was to him and it was the

great source of inspiration for his art, for, you know,

the last 20 years of his life or so, and it still exists today.

I was really intrigued by Emil Nolde's garden at Seebull

because he built this

jewel-like place, this fantasy realm.

He didn't really create the garden as a place to be experienced as a

series of pictures, as a tableau,

he created the garden as an intense space,

in which you were immersed and that's the feeling you have when you

go into the garden today.

There are a series of winding paths around beds,

which are absolutely chock-filled with all kinds of bright and

colourful flowers, which had not been, and we can see this in the paintings,

which were not chosen for their compatibility with each other necessarily

but chosen for the incredible colours they exhibit and which Nolde

was then able to experiment with in paint.

Emil Nolde is an artist who's very invested in the project of modernity and he

wants to paint in a certain way,

that's very basic.

It's primal. He wants to get at the most basic level of intense human

emotion and he uses a technique that is meant to convey that. For example,

if you look at his paintings from the '20s,

he paints on very rough burlap -

I mean, it's really rugged.

And he paints with incredibly heavy brushstrokes.

I mean, just caked-on paint.

And if you notice, it's very matt, and that's partly

because when you paint with oil,

the oil soaks into that.

And he leaves these very heavily encrusted surfaces.

It's very rough and rugged

and it's very shocking to many people to see a

painting in that condition, but that's what he wanted.

He wanted something that wasn't refined.

He was the enemy of the refined and he wanted that sense of rawness and

intense emotion in his paintings.

I think for many of these artists,

this was a spiritual experience for them.

It was a connection with nature.

It is kind of amazing to think that artists like Matisse or Kandinsky,

who are so theoretical, and would be interested in nature in this way,

but it was their way of connecting, and for example,

there is a fantastic painting in this exhibition that's of a garden

in Tangiers,

and Matisse had for years been painting very conceptual works,

severe in their geometry. And he said specifically, when he wrote a letter

requesting permission to see this Islamic garden, that he wanted to

reconnect with nature and he was extremely excited about this garden

that he saw in North Africa, through the wildness,

the exotic plants and he painted the first of three pictures, which the

first one is in this exhibition, in a flash of inspiration.

It's just, you know, quickly applied paint, over...

You can still see a pencil drawing.

He even took the back side of the brush and scratched into the surface

and it's just an explosion of colour and emotion,

so it was very important for Matisse and for some of these other artists,

who were thinking so theoretically, to find a way to connect with nature,

and gardens provided that opportunity.

For the Fauve artists, of course,

whose greatest contribution to modern art was arbitrary colour,

they could be inspired by the intensity of these tones and Matisse

wrote evocatively about that.

For Matisse, we know that he did have a garden at his home,

and he spent a lot of time in it.

We're told he greeted visitors wearing a gardener's smock,

he would give them flowers for presents.

He would use them for inspiration and for setting colour theory.

And then even into later life,

Matisse wrote that when he was confined to his studio or ill for

some reason, he would turn his studio into a garden and you can see

his studio with these wild-growing, sometimes exotic plants, imported

from Mexico, and it was a constant source of inspiration for him and

even if you look at

the late paper cut-outs, you can see these large paintings of bushes,

and gardens and plants and flowers and it was,

it was crucial for Matisse's artistic inspiration

and I also think just

his spiritual and mental health.

There is a very close connection between Monet the gardener and

Monet the painter and this painting of day lilies is wonderful for the

fact that he has really captured what the daylily is all about.

And there's something very vigorous about this painting,

the way that you have this explosion of leaves that are so particular to

daylilies and then this suspense with the stem that then supports the

flower that only blooms for a day.

And when it does, it peels itself back,

facing the sky, and absorbs all that light in this brilliant moment,

this flash of orange,

which he's then contrasted against

these cooler mauves and greens behind,

so you get that flare, which happens with this plant,

that's so absolutely particular to that plant and I just love how

beautifully observed this is and I can really feel how well he's

understood those plants and how they've actually made

this part of his garden into what it is.

It's probably why you go to that particular part of the garden, just

to be there with those daylilies when they're doing their thing.

From 1914, there's a major shift in Monet's work.

He remains completely engaged and obsessed with the waterlily pond as

a subject. But he starts working on a much bigger scale

and he builds a new

large studio especially to make these very large canvases

and of course,

he saw this project, he called it his Grandes Decorations -

"My great decorations".

And his idea was to make a huge decorative cycle of

the waterlily pond theme.

These great Grand Decorations happened right on the eve of the First World War.

The fact is, he had stopped painting, practically, for several years.

He was devastated by the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and then

he developed some cataracts and it was the death of one of his sons in

early 1914... And Monet was really kind of at a crossroads,

not knowing quite what to do and then that spring and summer,

he decided that he was going to do a

project that he had dreamed of for 20 years,

and that was a project of creating entire environments of paintings,

that would totally engulf and surround the viewer.

So he was about to do this,

to launch into this new project and what happened -

the First World War broke out.

Giverny was practically deserted.

They are very close to the front line,

so he could hear cannon shells, and he really decides that

he has to do this project.

There's a point at which, in 1916,

when Monet's son comes back to visit and Monet writes very poignantly

about how, "I'm alone most of the time",

except for his stepdaughter, and how

guilty he feels about his countrymen dying and suffering while he's just

painting and then he responds to that, to his own question,

when he says "Others can fight, I can paint.

"This is..." sort of "..my duty as a patriotic Frenchman."

And it's very clear from

Monet's letters that he felt that creating these paintings was a kind

of expression of his national identity and of patriotic duty.

"As for me, I'm staying here all the same.

"And if those savages must kill me,

"it will be in the middle of my canvases,

"in front of my life's work."

I think the large waterlily paintings are somewhere between

painting and cinema, almost.

They're like kind of three-screen projection.

You can't actually take them in at once,

you actually have to kind of scan them,

much the way you'd scan a Jackson Pollock, actually,

and that experience of knowing you're in front of something much

bigger than you, where there's no edges to it, almost, you know -

you can't pick the edge of the pond.

You are in it. You fall into those paintings.

And it's a rather beautiful place to be.

I mean, I've thought a lot about the oceanic as a kind of state of mind,

and whether or not art can have a kind of dialogue with that oceanic

state, where there's no difference between you and the natural world,

there is no boundary.

And I suppose, for me,

Monet's waterlily paintings do speak to that oceanic state,

where perhaps there were no boundaries

between Monet and his garden.

"I have painted a lot of these waterlilies,

"modifying, each time, my point of view.

"Renewing the subject, following seasons of the year, and therefore,

"following different luminous effects engendered by these changes.

"The effect varies incessantly.

"The essential of the subject is the mirror of the water,

"whose aspect at any one time changes itself,

"thanks to the expanses of sky, which reflect in it, and spreading

"life and movement.

"The passing cloud, the freshening breeze,

"the threatening and falling rain, the sudden gust of wind,

"the light failing and shining again -

"so many reasons elusive to the profane eye,

"which transform the tint and disfigure the body of water."

This exhibition originated with the desire to reunite the three panels

of Monet's great Agapanthus Triptych.

Monet, though, never gave those paintings away during his lifetime.

He kept them all in his studio.

He was constantly reworking them, making them more abstract and ethereal.

It's really amazing to see an artist at his age reworking these great

masterworks. And he died then in 1926, and a selection of paintings

were taken off their stretchers,

moved to the l'Orangerie and literally glued to the walls there,

but many of the great decorations remained in the studio, and in fact,

that's true of this triptych.

It remained with his family until the 1950s, when the paintings were

sent to America and bought separately by different museums in

the United States. So reuniting this triptych is a major event.

This is the first time that we know of that this has ever happened in

it's spectacular to see them together and they made us really think deeply

about not only Monet's great Agapanthus Triptych but also about

his interest in gardening and painting gardens,

because of course they depict the great water garden at Giverny,

which is one of the great accomplishments

in the history of horticulture.

So one of the things you can see is

the momentum that is set in motion for

the evolving story of modern art and the role that the garden plays in

that, and so to a certain extent,

the effects of that are still rippling down to today.

But of course, the legacy of this kind of painting is in land art.

Monet is the first great land artist of the 20th century,

as well as the last great Impressionist,

as well as the precursor of Pollock and Rothko and others.

He's many, many things.

But the idea that you divert a river,

that you create this extraordinary site over a decade or two,

certainly has overtones to what people like Robert Smithson were

doing out in the American West in the '60s and '70s and I think that's

a very interesting legacy.

"What I am becoming, you can well imagine.

"I am working and not without difficulty

"because my sight diminishes each

"day and also, I look after my garden a lot.

"This brings me pleasure.

"And with the beautiful days we have had,

"I am overjoyed and admire nature.

"With this, we never have time to be bored."

As Monet got older,

he became more concerned

with abstracting the world around us and trying

to look closer and closer and closer at how colour was shaping, in an

abstract sense, how we see the world.

So his series of paintings of waterlilies

are the most profound tests of

him as an artist,

forcing himself to look, and that's the hardest thing about an artist -

the older you get, the more you think you've looked enough to know

exactly what's in front of you.

And as he considers his great lily ponds here,

you notice through the series of paintings

that his point of view begins

to move more and more and more away from a recognisable subject,

away from a sense of a painting receding into the distance towards a

horizon where there's a neat little bridge focusing your point of view,

and increasingly, it's just about reflections.

Patterns of light and colour.

But the more I work into one of these paintings,

I become more and more intrigued by the things that are appearing in the

reflections in the water. And as Monet spent more and more time here,

I guess that's what became his passion.

He didn't need a bridge any more.

He didn't need a tree trunk.

All he needed were ripples and cascades of light.

And that's a real push in the history of 20th-century art

towards modernism.

Subtitles by Ericsson