Original subtitles

(soft instrumental music)

- The nude is the most enduring subject in art.

For more than 20,000 years,

images of the naked human body

have been at the very center of a long and complex saga.

It's hard to understand

any of the major developments in art

without an understanding of the key role

played by changing depictions of naked men and women.

In this series, I'm going to explore

the ongoing significance of the nude,

what it tells us about various civilizations,

and what it tells us about ourselves,

and the world in which we live.

(soft instrumental music)

The story of modern art begins with this great nude,

"Olympia," painted by Edouard Manet,

and shown in 1865, causing an absolute furor.

So much so that a rail was built in front of it

and two policemen were put on permanent guard.

Some critics said it was beneath their dignity

to even talk about it,

but most of them went absolutely off the deep end,

said it make a mockery of art, that it was depraved,

and should never be shown.

Why?

Why were they getting so hot under the collar though?

'Cause when we look at this, I think,

we see something that looks rather classical in its pose,

something that maybe is not so offensive.

But look again, and you realize there's a brashness

and a confidence about this painting that unnverves.

The format is very classical,

and in fact Manet had been to Venice,

and seen Titan's great "Venus of Urbino,"

and used that as the format for this painting.

But whereas Titan's Venus and many other nudes

painted in the history of art,

the women look demure, they looked away, they look chaste,

Manet's figure is absolutely there in our face.

As we look at her, she looks back.

More confident, she returns our gaze,

she's absolutely unmoved.

In fact, she has a beauty and a sexuality

that she's confidently flaunting at us.

And the Parisians of the day who saw this, saw a prostitute.

They saw a woman of a certain social class,

who brashly knew what she was and proclaimed it.

And prostitution was legal in Paris, but hypocritically,

people tried to push it under the carpet.

Manet brought it out into the open.

And as a consequence of this painting,

Manet became a rebel, a reluctant one,

but nevertheless, a figurehead for a group

of radical young artists, the Impressionists,

who later became the touchstone, if you like,

or the trigger for modern art.

But it all begins here.

(romantic violin music)

- The usual way for artists of the period

was to give it a sort of golden glow,

and paint it in a way that we would seem

as rather a sort of chocolate box type image.

The way Manet painted had that rawness of reality,

which was what he was trying to reflect,

so the critics were horrified by how rawly,

how raw the paint was applied, as well as being horrified

by the very modern nature of the subject matter.

- 20th century art was dominated

by two towering and contrasting geniuses,

who both used the nude as the central subject

for developing their radial approaches

to painting and sculpture.

The Spanish-born Pablo Picasso,

and the Frenchman, Henri Matisse.

(upbeat orchestral music)

This painting is, for many,

the most dramatic image that Matisse ever produced.

A pulsating picture of five naked figures

cavorting with total abandonment,

and called "The Dance."

Matisse sprang to prominence in Paris, in 1905,

when a series of dazzling Mediterranean landscapes,

and idyllic beach scenes depicting languid nude bathers

startled viewers and led one critic,

a man called Louis Vauxcelles,

to describe the work of Matisse and his friends

as "An orgy of colors," and likening them to wild beasts,

les fauves, in French, and it was from this term

that Fauvism was born, as the first radical art movement

of the 20th century.

What Fauvism embodies,

and what Matisse's art above all embodies,

is color in un-modulated exuberant,

expressive, dynamic power,

and here in "The Dance," that's supremely evident.

The picture is life-sized,

but the nudes aren't naturally painted.

They're an intense blaze of orangey-pink,

perfectly balanced by the background

of complementary blue and green,

to create a vivid but harmonious image.

Matisse's image of the nude is expressive,

imaginative, idealized, and totally hedonistic.

A celebration of humanity, liberated,

and totally alive.

And an image which incites us to feel the same.

Even more immediate and radical in its impact

was this painting, called "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,"

by Matisse's friend, but great artistic rival,

Pablo Picasso.

It was painted around 1907,

a couple of years before "The Dance,"

but not seen publicly for a few years,

because even the bold Picasso

couldn't quite come to terms with what he'd produced.

It also features five nude female figures,

painted in striking pinks,

but there's nothing celebratory about the picture.

It's set in a brothel called The Avignon,

in the city of Barcelona,

where Picasso had lived at the beginning of the century

before moving to Paris.

The women stare at the viewer,

rather as Manet's Olympia had done,

but this time much more confrontationally,

and with violent and erotic undertones.

The faces of the nude figures are soulless, empty,

like masks, and in fact, Picasso had looked at

various African and Iberian masks for inspiration.

This idea of using non-Western or so-called primitive art

was very important in the birth of modern art.

Picasso tried to use tribal art as a way of starting afresh,

as if from some primordial source.

Likewise, the nude body was humankind

in its most primitive state.

But the real power and shock of this painting, still,

is in the way that Picasso (melancholy music)

has pulled the bodies

of the figures apart, ripping them around

in contorted poses in a way that's both violent,

and profoundly important in the history of art.

Instead of showing a body from one fixed viewpoint,

which Western art had done for centuries,

Picasso shatters that convention,

and gives us a multiperspectival view of the human body,

as if we or the figures have been in constant motion.

And it was here, in this monumental nude painting,

with its fractured bodies and background,

that what became known as Cubism was born.

Arguably the most radical approach to picture-making

over the last 1,000 years,

and certainly one which shatters most of the conventions

which govern how pictures are painted

and how figures are represented.

"The Demoiselles d'Avignon" is still hailed

as the most important painting of the 20th century,

the place where the experimental obsessions

of 20th century art really begin,

and where the shock of the nude

is so much more profound than its sexuality.

(upbeat orchestral music)

What we're witnessing with this procession of ism's,

Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism,

is artists coming to terms with the realism of photography.

Painters and sculptors,

in very different and individual ways,

now sought to show new kinds of reality.

The nude was at the forefront of this experimentation,

this reinvention and reexamination

of the very purpose of art.

European art changed dramatically

after the Second World War,

and the nude was center stage.

The Swiss-born sculptor Alberto Giacometti

had been a surrealist in the 1920s.

He'd made cage-like sculptures,

but in the middle of the 1930s,

he decided to work from the model again.

He booked a model to come to his studio

in Paris for a week,

and ended up working with her every day

for the next five years.

Now what we see when we look at Giacometti's sculptures,

particularly these in the aftermath of the Second World War,

these, in fact, are from the late '50s,

but the style had been established

by 1948, '49, (eerie instrumental music)

is Giacometti's way of seeing the world.

You can't get away from the fact, looking at these,

that the surface is extraordinarily violent, it's gnarled.

He works with wet clay, he gouges with his fingers,

he scapes with a knife, the eyes seem almost poked out,

and the woman's sex is almost denied.

Women are very passive in Giacometti's sculpture.

Men walk and point.

Women stand hieratically like goddesses,

and Giacometti said that he wanted to depict

an image of woman as potentially fertile,

and the redemptive force, if you like, for humanity,

whereas man had been responsible as the active being

for the cataclysm that had just happened.

Giacometti was very close to writers like Jean Genet,

and philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre,

in Paris on the Left Bank,

where the philosophy of existentialism

was being put forward.

Essentially, a Godless view of the world,

where man was isolated, alienated.

It was pessimistic view.

But also, one can't get away from the fact

that these were produced in the late '40s and early '50s,

in the aftermath of the most horrendous human conflict.

And although Giacometti denied it, these works,

it seems to me, and they were certainly be read

by many people at the time,

are an extraordinary indictment of humanity post-Holocaust.

The bleak view of humanity

found in the sculpture of Alberto Giacometti,

had parallels in the painting of Francis Bacon.

He often worked in triptych form.

In other words, three panels,

that echoed the altarpieces in medieval cathedrals.

And here, in this work, done in 1972,

that religious triptych is taken on board,

but it's very much a personal image, this picture,

because in fact, Bacon's had another triumphant show,

in Paris, at the Grand Palais, but his boyfriend,

and his model of the previous seven years,

a man called George Dyer, dies.

Bacon comes back to London,

is distraught by the death of his friend,

and paints a series of images that commemorate

and ruminate on the death of Dyer,

and this is the first,

and in some ways, the most monumental.

Critics have said that the black background

is symbolic of death, but Bacon says,

"It's also the best way of showing

"the forms in the foreground."

On the left, the figure is clearly recognizable

as Dyer himself, but we see,

almost as if his flesh is melting.

There's an image of humanity and the human body

in constant mutation.

On the right hand side,

the panel is sometimes thought to be Francis Bacon,

and sometimes thought to be Dyer.

I read it as a fusion of the two,

and I think that image is amplified

by this central panel,

where there are clearly two male figures entwined.

Bacon also said,

it's an image that came from his unconscious.

In other words, through the application of paint,

which Bacon did using house brushes, rags,

combs, sometimes he threw it,

sometimes he made wild gestures, sometimes the paint,

as here with the white, is mixed with sand,

but somehow losing a certain amount of control

means that images from the depths of our unconscious

sometime come to the fore.

I think this is clearly sexual, and I think in some ways,

it's Bacon reminiscing or luxuriating

in the sexual relationship that he's had with Dyer.

A fusion, if you like, of the two figures on either side.

Bacon's image of the human body is often described

as violent and sexually charged,

and that's because his own sexual makeup was violent.

He was a sadomasochist, and in his chaotic studio,

he had images of decaying and diseased human bodies

pinned to the wall.

In some ways, he's a man who luxuriates in putrefaction.

There's almost a stench of the human flesh decaying

in these paintings, but at the same time,

I think there's great beauty.

He luxuriates in human flesh.

He finds it very tactile and conveys that

by the way that he smears paint onto the canvas.

And my own personal opinion is

that he's without doubt the most powerful painter

of human flesh in the 20th century.

The Yorkshire-born sculptor, Henry Moore,

had a more defiant, redemptive view

of the human figure in the postwar period.

In works like this, called "Reclining Figure Number 3,"

he shows the human form fused with that of landscape

Now, when you first look at this,

it's not immediately apparent it's a human figure.

But look closely, there's the head,

it has these curves, the fertile curves of the female body.

But the crucial thing of course, is that it's in two parts.

It's abstracted.

It's the human figure, abstracted,

but it's also fused with the idea of the landscape.

There's something ancient and primordial about this.

And Henry Moore is a great assimilator.

He fuses the nudes

of the past three, four, 5,000 years.

In fact, he goes back to ancient fertility goddesses,

he looks at the art of Mexican goddesses,

he looks at the classical reclining figures,

and then he fuses it all in a modern way.

He works in plaster, in the postwar period,

originally he'd carve directly into wood and stone,

but here, you can see the way he's hacked away

at the surface of the plaster,

and then he cast it in bronze.

And bronze can be done in a number of editions.

Most of his works were done in editions of six,

which meant that they could be put in public places,

like this housing estate in Suffolk, in South London.

And the idea is that the nude human form,

or the reclining human form, somehow,

is there as a decorative embellishment.

It is a way of staving off the isolation of modern life.

For some though, of course,

this figure reinforces that isolation.

(dramatic orchestral music)

Also here, if you want to be Freudian about it,

this could almost be the womb,

but it's a space into which you can project yourself.

You can go, you can feel,

but you have to complete the body.

The reclining figure is finished off in your mind.

Some said that this idea of fragmentation

was a violent way of showing the human body,

but I think in the end, now,

we see Moore having anticipated the way that art and society

became fragmented at the end of the 20th century.

Over the past three or four decades,

there's been no one dominant style in art,

just as there hasn't been in music or fashion,

and that's made very evident here in North London,

in the gallery of Charles Saatchi, the advertising mogul,

who's collected voraciously international art

in the last two decades, but particularly,

he's put British art on the map,

contemporary young British art.

And here, there are numerous examples of how

different artists approach the subject of the nude.

This work is by Ron Mueck, who began his career

as a model maker for advertising and television,

and then he became a sculptor, and this is the result.

(soft jazz music)

Mueck's skill is supreme, but what we see

is not the cherub of a Rubens or a Raphael,

or even the Heavenly host of Giotto.

We see the angel as the man next door,

as grumpy or as pissed off as the rest of us.

Another example is the young Scottish-born painter,

Jenny Saville, who paints voluptuous, in fact,

blatantly fat female figures.

For Jenny Saville, fat is a feminist issue,

but she's also interested in extreme bodies,

and she had a mother and daughter,

who were the two bottom figures in this painting,

trussed up and lying on top of each other.

She photographed them, then she photographed herself,

and she's the third figure at the top.

Now, in fact, Jenny Saville isn't fat at all,

but she's distorting herself,

she's playing with her own body,

in some ways, in the manner of a plastic surgeon,

but also a fantasist.

But what you really notice about Saville's work

is the extraordinary way it's painted.

Paint is this voluptuous stuff, it's the stuff of flesh,

and as you get close up, it becomes paint,

sometimes splattered, blood-like,

and as you move further away, the nude becomes clear again.

This work is by the most celebrated enfant terrible

in British art, Damien Hirst.

He's worked with animals, but he's never shown us

an almost fully-formed human being in his work.

This piece is a 20-foot giant monument in bronze,

that's a scaled-up version of a 10-inch tall,

anatomical toy made for children,

to teach them and to entertain them.

What Hirst shows us is a partially flayed figure,

with its guts and intestines and the workings of its body

fully evident, although they're simplified.

And of course, this goes back

to 18th century anatomical drawings,

and also back to Leonardo da Vinci.

It's also very playful.

It has this list of different references and layers,

although sometimes looking at it,

I'm reminded of one of Hirst's more celebrated remarks,

"That sometimes," he says, "I have nothing to say,

"and I spend a lot of time trying to express that."

This work is by the bad girl of British art,

Sarah Lucas, who produces a self-portrait,

half-nude and half toilet.

Sarah Lucas has produced a number of works

that deal with the subject of the nude,

but she uses objects, like fried eggs, or cucumbers,

or kebabs, or kippers, to suggest genitals.

And what she's doing is re-appropriating

laddie or macho humor and prejudice

and throwing it back in our faces.

She's an artist for whom comedy

and knockabout humor are very important,

but she's also doing something more interesting or profound.

For the whole course of this series,

and for the past two and a half thousand years and more,

in art, the nude has been produced mainly by men, for men.

A reflection of a male view of the world.

Finally, at the beginning of the 21st century,

women in the international mainstream of art,

are fighting back.

I just wonder in the future, in 100-years time,

or 2,000-years time, what people might learn about us

from the images of the nude that we produce.

- I would imagine, for people looking back,

they would probably think we're coming out

of a slightly repressed era, if you like,

where nudity was seen as something that could only be female

and was very, kind of, narrow in its definition

of how it could be seen and who could see it,

and I think, you know, the late 20th century,

going to 21st century, is definitely a period of,

you know, far wider and greater proliferation

of images of nudity.

- What strikes one, I think, is the movement away

from God at the center of the image of man.

In Classical Greece, one saw in those male nudes

something of the divine, beyond.

God was still at the center, too,

of the Medieval and the Renaissance nude.

Not so much a celebration of humanity,

but a reminder of humanity's falling away from God.

The 20th century and the modern nude,

God appears to be almost absent.

Absent from the way in which one might look at the image,

and absent, too, as a force that might cause society

to cohere, to stay together as a community.

The modern nude represents the atomization

of the individual, in a world not concerned with community,

in a world that's moved away from God

and sees its disintegration written

on the naked human form itself.

- The fact is that the nude is central,

and I think that the nude will always be central,

whatever people do, and however people react

against the classical tradition,

I personally don't see how art can get away

from the central aspect of the human figure,

and in particular, the nude.

(soft jazz music)

- Over the past 25,000 years,

the nude has evolved as a mirror of human society.

We've moved a long way from the idea

as the nude as an idealized form,

and yet vestiges of that still remain.

In this piece here, called "Quantum Cloud"

by Antony Gormley, slap-bang next to the Millennium Dome

on the river in London,

we see a very faintly discernible human nude

at the center of a series of welded steel clutter.

This in a way, is a colossus, 21st-century style.

It's based on the classical model,

and it also stems from Antony Gormley's obsessions

with casting his own nude body.

Gormley explores the space of what it's like

to be inside a body, and how that body relates

to the world around it.

And in a sense what we have here in this piece,

"Quantum Cloud," is a perfect metaphor,

an emblem, of where the nude is today in art,

and in the world at large.

It's still broadly at the center of things.

It's still broadly the way

in which we measure most things, but at the same time,

it's difficult sometimes to see it,

surrounded as it is by the clutter,

the chaos, the confusion, and the complexity

of the contemporary world.

(soft instrumental music)