All language subtitles for BBC The High Art Of The Low Countries 3 of 3 Daydreams And Nightmares 2013

So far, our story of the Low
Countries has been about a tangle

of different cultures,

a hybrid world from which stemmed
huge developments in religion,

politics, economics,
but, above all, art.

From Bosch...

to Brueghel...

Van Eyck and into the golden age
of Dutch art,

this small corner of Northern Europe

produced a rich crop
of extraordinary images.

At the end of the 17th century,
if Vermeer's great vision

appeared to herald a continued
age of artistic brilliance,

it wouldn't turn out that way.

The next 200 years would see
a barren time for art,

in which the Low Countries were
perhaps too comfortable,

too contented to produce anything
daring or new.

It was a time of decline
in religious faith.

And in its place
the rise of trade, industry, money.

It was almost as if
art had gone into hibernation.

The Low Countries were awoken from
their collective slumbers

at the onset of the 19th century.

First came the great trauma
of the Napoleonic invasions,

followed by the still-greater
trauma of the Industrial Revolution,

which changed the landscapes and the
cityscapes of this region for ever.

Dutch art would be dominated
by two towering figures,

each of whom, in his own way,
attempted to fill the great voids

opened up by modern civilisation -

the dearth of beauty,
as they saw it, the death of God -

by turning art itself
into a new kind of religion.

Here in Belgium, this most
uneasy of modern nation states,

a collectively questioning,
fractured sense of identity

would be mirrored in an art
of feverish dream and nightmare.

Early in the morning on Sunday,
23rd July, 1882,

a 29-year-old Dutchman
climbed up

onto the roof of his house
in a suburb of the Hague

while his alcoholic prostitute
girlfriend and her small child
slept downstairs.

On any other day,
this young man would have had
plenty to complain about.

His parents have just disowned him,

he has had two marriage proposals
rejected, he has been sacked twice

and he has just come out of
hospital yet again for gonorrhoea.

But on this day he feels happy.

He looks out across the rooftops,
he completes a watercolour

and then he paints the scene again,

this time in the words of a letter
to his brother, Theo Van Gogh.

"You must imagine me here,"
he writes.

"Over the red-tiled roofs comes
a flock of white pigeons,

"flying between the black,
smoking chimneys.

"Behind this, an infinity
of delicate, gentle green.

"Miles and miles of flat meadow.

"And the grey sky is still and as
peaceful as a Corot or Van Goyen.

"This is the subject
of my watercolour.

"I hope you will like it."

"I have found my work," he writes,
in another letter
from around this time,

"something which I live for heart
and soul.

"I have a certain faith in art, a
certain trust that it is a powerful
current that drives a person."

Now, coming from anyone else in his
position - he had only been
studying art for two years -

that might just have been
pretentious guff, but what
wonderful art he had been creating.

Paintings and drawings
that really capture the lonely,

atmospheric feel of the flatlands
at the edge of the city.

Canals spearing towards
the flat horizon.

Skies full of fast-moving
dark clouds.

Early work, maybe,
but already it seems to hold out

the promise of another
Rembrandt in the making.

Van Gogh's life story
is the familiar tale.

The unstable genius who, in a fit
of despair, cut off his ear.

The life of the passionate misfit
has been filtered through

countless potboilers and biopics.

In Vincente Minnelli's 1950s
version,

Kirk Douglas ratchets up
the emotional volume

as a restless caged animal whose
crippling depression

turns to frenzied ecstasy
in the sunlit landscapes
of the South of France.

In his most radiant pictures,
you can see

Van Gogh's faith in nature as
a religion unstaged, uncut.

And it's impossible to appreciate
where this passion came from

without understanding his
early years in Holland and Belgium.

Van Gogh hadn't set out
to be an artist.

He started off in the priesthood,
preaching to poor coal miners

in Belgium,
but he failed spectacularly.

He had a stammer
and, despite his devotion,

his Church superiors deemed him
unfit for public speaking.

In Holland, he chose again to settle
among the rural poor,

but this time not to preach
to his subjects but to paint them.

It's a strange paradox
that Vincent Van Gogh,

who painted some of the most
radiant, light-filled paintings

in the whole history of art,
should have begun...

This is his first major ambitious
figure painting -

with a work that is so dark,
so murky, so copper-coloured.

It's called The Potato Eaters

and what you first notice about it
is this pervasive drabness.

Van Gogh himself actually
liked the effect.

He said, "My subject is potato
eaters and I want to paint them."

In the colours of a muddy potato,
unpeeled, of course.

He said he wanted the picture to
smell of potato steam and bacon.

I can also smell the thick,
malty aroma

of this peasant brew
the old lady is pouring.

It's a viscous form of
chicory coffee, quite disgusting

but all that they could afford.

The picture was greatly criticised.

The hands were said to be too
gnarled, the arms too long,

the faces too caricatured,
the eyes too bulging,

the noses too much like potatoes.

But it was all intentional.

Van Gogh wanted us to feel that
those hands reaching into

that plate of cubed potatoes had dug
those potatoes up from the earth.

Those hands have been shaped,
misshapen

by all that manual labour.

Although it's such a visually
unappealing, unappetising,

literally copper-coloured murk
of a picture,

Van Gogh did continue to regard it
through his life as "one of the
best things I have done".

And I do think it is an extremely
significant picture

in the context of his whole
career, because it establishes,

right from the outset,
what he's all about as a painter.

What mattered to Van Gogh
throughout his life

was not sophisticated technique.

He wanted to re-make in paint
the intensity

and violence of his own feelings.

And to arouse those feelings
in his audience.

Van Gogh's later French pictures
might look very different

from his early work,
but they, too, use a form

of self-conscious exaggeration,
an ecstatic version of caricature.

It's an attempt to forge a kind of
new religion for the common man,

for the potato eaters of this world.

Everyday experiences of field
and flower

become visions of divine beauty.

And it would reach a climax
in his most famous subject of all.

Van Gogh had left Holland simply

because it was too gloomy
for an artist trying to find God,

trying to find some sense of
transcendence in the natural world.

Too much rain, too much shadow,
too much darkness.

That's why he went
to the South of France.

In the South of France,
he felt illuminated by the sun.

He said, "Suddenly, nature's
colours sing to me."

He felt that he had never seen
the colours of nature before.

He felt that he'd found what
he was looking for

and I think the sunflower
was so important to him because...

it was a plant that seemed to him
to have somehow taken into itself,

kept, preserved, all that radiance,
all that colour.

It was as if he was
looking at the sun itself when he
looked at these blooms

and he painted these pictures
in a kind of storm of enthusiasm.

He wrote to Theo, his brother,

to say that, "I am painting with
the energy of a Marseillais
eating bouillabaisse."

Always the food metaphors.

And this is almost a picture
that you could eat.

It's as if it's been painted

in that Provencal mayonnaise
they call aioli,

that hot, peppery,
garlic-infused mayonnaise.

Van Gogh also said that
"the sunflower is mine, in a way".

Why was it his?

Well, I think he knew...

he knew that this life, his career
was going to be a short one,

and, my goodness, how short it was.

His career was like a comet
flashing across the sky.

He compressed into just five years
of a career

what most other artists would spend
perhaps 40 years creating

and I think that is what he's
depicting when he depicts
the sunflower.

He's depicting his sense
of himself, this rapid rise.

This one seems anthropomorphised.

It could be an outraged eye
staring into space.

And these others, these are
cut flowers. We see them falling.

It is as if the whole of
Van Gogh's life

is encapsulated
in this one picture.

He's signed it "Vincent"...

in that wonderful mauve colour,

"Vincent" on the vase, as if to say,
"This is me, this is who I was."

Van Gogh's message was always
destined to fall on stony ground.

In the early years
of the 20th century,

Holland became a nation of ever more
practical people.

They weren't looking for God.

They were looking for market
opportunities.

In a fragile sea-level world,
nature had always been something

to be conquered and tamed,
rather than swooned over.

The Dutch were carving out
their own space in the modern

global economy by pioneering what's
now called agribusiness,

leading the way in the export of
lucrative farm produce
and flower bulbs.

Almost half the world's cut flowers
are still sold

from their great flower auctions.

Everything that made
Van Gogh despair

of his fellow countrymen
is still true of Holland today.

But Van Gogh wouldn't be
entirely without influence

in 20th-century Holland.

The seeds he had sown
would bear fruit - at least,

in the rarefied arena of modern art.

In the summer of 1905, 16 years
after his death, the Dutch paid

belated tribute to Van Gogh with
a vast exhibition of his work.

Among the visitors was a
little-known Dutch landscape artist

called Piet Mondriaan.

Until now, Mondriaan hadn't been
thought a huge talent.

He had spent his early years
creating

a group of intriguingly stylised...

symbolically charged...

moody, rather murky landscapes.

Now, if you want to understand
the incendiary effect

that Van Gogh's art
had on the young Piet Mondriaan,

there's no better place to start
than here. This is his early work.

Low-toned, slightly melancholic,
slightly mystical landscapes

painted 1905, 1906, 1907,
but then, look!

HE IMITATES BURST OF FLAME

It's as if someone has lit a match
and set fire to the world.

This is how Mondriaan sees reality

after he's seen
Van Gogh's paintings.

Skies that seem to be alive

with some kind of strange
electrical charge,

but what's
interesting about Mondriaan

is that he is different
from van Gogh.

He's fallen under the influence
of the philosophical ideas

of a movement known as Theosophy.

He has come to believe that matter
is the enemy of spirit,

so, for example, while van Gogh
might have said,

"Oh, I want to paint sunflowers
that feel like you could eat them,

"like a blob of mayonnaise,"

that's not at all
Mondriaan's ambition.

He would never have compared
one of his paintings to food.

What he's looking at,
what he's looking for,

is some kind of mysterious
spiritual essence of reality

that he feels lies
beyond the visible appearance.

So his visual adventure will take
him to completely different worlds.

Like Van Gogh before him,

Mondriaan felt
he had to get out of Holland.

In 1911 he set up studio

at the heart
of the international art scene.

Paris.

In the early 20th century,
the city was a magnet for artists

wanting to be
part of the avant-garde.

Instability in Europe had fuelled
a mood of creative rebellion,

with radical breakthroughs
in all forms of artistic expression.

In this heated atmosphere,
Picasso and Braque created Cubism

and Mondriaan fell completely
under its spell.

From now on,
Mondriaan would still paint nature,

but his individual tree
starts to dissolve

into a Cubist kaleidoscope
of muted forms.

To express the universal,
abstract nature of "tree".

As he squares off his environment,

Mondriaan moves closer
to grid-form abstraction,

but he's not there yet.

That style-defining revelation would
come not from Paris,

but almost by accident,

from the weather-battered dunes
of Holland's North Sea coast.

When the great breakthrough came,
chance played a large part.

Mondriaan was actually
living in Paris,

to be at the centre of modern art.

He got word that his father was ill
and he came to Holland

on what was supposed to be a short
visit, but then the war broke out.

He couldn't leave the country,
so what did he do?

He came here to Domburg beach.

He had almost no money,

just a stump of charcoal
and a sketchbook.

But he spent day after day
looking at the sea,

studying the sea, studying the sky,

studying the stumps of these piers.

And the result was the art
that he considered the great change.

Mondriaan would sometimes
sketch by moonlight,

or even with his eyes closed,

so determined was he
to find the essence of his subject.

Mondriaan returned from the sea,

like a beachcomber,

with this.

It's an astonishingly
abstracted, distilled,

reduced vision of the pewter disc
of the North Sea

beneath the pewter disc
of the grey Dutch sky.

I think we can sense
Mondriaan's rapture

before the glitter and the dazzle
of light on the ocean breakers.

We can feel the motions,
the relentless motions, of the sea.

We can sense mists, fogs,
coming in across the ocean.

It's an extraordinary image,

and it's one that takes us
to the heart of the difference

between Mondriaan and Van Gogh.

They start from exactly
the same position -

the Church is gone,
it's no good to them any more,

but they're looking for some
sense of the spiritual,

some mystery,
some sense of deeper meaning.

And they're going to a new Church,

the cathedral of nature.

But whereas Van Gogh is essentially
helpless before nature,

Mondriaan takes control.

It's the artist's job,
in his opinion,

to see the structures,
to see the patterns,

to see the deeper meaning
of the world

behind the visible appearances
of the world,

hence he distils, he purifies,

he reduces, he purges.

Now, he sees himself as the pioneer

of a new spiritualised vision,
but...

..how Dutch.

How very Dutch this art seems

with its insistent
horizontals and verticals

echoing the Dutch landscape,
but not only that.

Mondriaan was the son
of Dutch Calvinists.

I look at this picture and I'm
instantly transported back 300 years

to those very first images
of the purged Protestant church

painted by Pieter Saenredam
in the 1600s.

A white space.

Lines, lines, structure.

Nothing left in the church any more
but a cross.

Mondriaan,
all he sees in the end...

..a cross.

But while Mondriaan
was embedded in tradition,

it's also important to remember
that he was enmeshed

in a very particular catastrophic
moment of modern history.

This picture was painted in 1915,

shortly after the outbreak
of the First World War,

and if you look at this painting,
created in 1917,

I think you can sense
the shadow of that war

hovering over Mondriaan's spirit.

Look at the way
in which the cross forms

have become heavier, darker,
more oppressive.

It's an image that, to me,

very much evokes the mass graves
of the First World War.

Mondriaan might not have had
a conventional belief in God,

but he did believe in art
as a kind of divine force

capable of reordering chaos
after the war.

He was sure that he could change the
objective conditions of humanity,

if only he could commit to canvas

the perfect arrangement
of block and line.

Mondriaan's stark grid compositions
are his trademark.

The Dutch landscape
distilled, purified,

into something that he felt
improved upon nature.

It's impossible to overstate
Mondriaan's extremism.

As far as he was concerned,

he had invented the ultimate
language of art,

perfectly abstracted,

reduced to the perfect
combination of colours and forms.

But for him
that was just the beginning.

His pictures were blueprints
for the world.

And if the world took up the message
embedded in the pictures

then art itself
would no longer be necessary.

We would have entered
the final millennium

of absolute understanding
and enlightenment.

Sensing that most of his fellow
Dutch countrymen

were too level-headed
to take to his dogmatic idealism,

Mondriaan sought out
like-minded artists

and formed an extremist group.

He took up the role
of theorist-in-chief

and in the summer of 1917

the group published a brazen
manifesto of their faith

under the banner Die Stijl.

Their new world order
would be one of pure abstraction,

a rigid aesthetic
of angular austerity.

In 1924 one of the members,
Gerrit Rietveld,

attempted to turn
the group's hard-edged theory

into a family home.

So here we are,
the famous Schroder House.

So this is the entrance.

'Rietveld's Schroder House
is the dogma of Die Stijl made real.

'It's got more straight lines
than a chessboard.'

Everything framed as if
in a Mondriaan composition.

When you open the window
in the maid's room

you get a double benefit.

Light from outside,
and a kind of abstract composition

like Malevich's
Black Square painting.

The house was designed
nearly 90 years ago

for a very forward-thinking client -
Truus Schroder.

She loved it,
even while her children

refused to admit
that they lived in the crazy house.

I love this.

Look, this is how you open the door
that takes you to the upstairs.

It's like a constructivist sculpture
that you can activate.

Here...we go.

Whoops.

(Up we come.)

The floor's a painting.

Or an arrangement of form
in Mondriaan primary colours.

Primary colours
plus black and white,

so red, yellow, blue, black, white.

Here's the famous Rietveld Chair.

I'm not allowed to sit in it.

But I'm not sure that I mind.

I think, um...

HE CHUCKLES
There is something about this house

that you feel you somehow need to
evolve yourself as a human being,

you need to evolve
into a higher form,

perhaps something
a little bit more Cubistic,

something a bit more angular,
you know?

When the day comes that human beings
have evolved cubical buttocks

then we can all sit
on chairs like these.

Ah!

So there is one concession

to the organically rounded shape
of the human form.

The toilet. Bodily functions
are allowed in the Rietveld House.

And what I love about the space
is it's totally modernist,

it's totally original,
it's stark, it's extraordinary,

there's a window that opens,
if I can master the mechanism,

like a cantilever.

It goes straight out into space,

thrusting another pictorial,

Rietveldian rectangle
into the world.

Although it's so modern, although
it's so cubistic, futuristic,

Mondriaan-ist, it's also very Dutch

because the whole space
has the feeling of a ship,

of the boat, where one thing
folds out into another,

maximum use is made of space,
and what is a boat to a Dutchman?

A boat is something
you embark on an adventure in.

It's wonderful.

Today the great Die Stijl house
has a slightly sad air,

marooned as modern Utrecht
passes noisily by.

The movement broke up in the 1930s.

And sensing that his own ideas
were too extreme

truly to enchant
the pragmatic people of Holland,

Mondriaan took his dreams elsewhere.

New York thrilled Mondrian.

He saw it as a miraculous city-sized
realisation of all his ideals.

A whole living environment
modelled on grid-form composition,

skyscraper and block, clean, sharp
opposing verticals and horizontals.

But it was different
from his paintings, too.

More mobile. More jazzy.

A city constantly on the move.

And this is the result
of that bombardment of energy.

He was nearly 70
when he turned away from nature

towards Manhattan
and its taxi-cab buzzing grid.

It was to be Mondrian's
very last composition.

His funeral march.

But how full of life!

He called it
Victory Boogie-woogie.

Mondriaan was the great exile.

But his spirit does live on
throughout Holland,

sometimes in surprising places.

Dutch commerce in particular
operates like a well-oiled

Mondriaan machine.

In Rotterdam's vast
international port,

each colour-coded unit
is wedged with perfect economy

into an ever-shifting chequerboard
of transaction and exchange.

It is a Mondriaan but with
the spirituality stripped out.

Container boogie-woogie.

But what of modern Holland's
neighbour?

We mustn't forget Belgium, though
it seems, over the years, many have.

Until nearly 200 years ago,

this region of north-west Europe
wasn't even a country.

And the question has often been
asked, what's the point of Belgium?

Well, there was one once.

The kingdom was created
as a strategic buffer between France

and Germany
and to keep Holland in its place.

But its inherent internal
differences have made Belgium's

cultural identity almost impossible
to define, if easy to mock.

The French poet Baudelaire
started the ball rolling

with his caustic remark
that Belgians

are the stupidest race on Earth

and the ball
has rolled on ever since.

Now, the result of last week's
competition

when we asked you to find
a derogatory term for the Belgians.

Monty Python made them

and those who mocked them the
subject of a Flying Circus satire.

Some very clever entries.
A Mrs Hatred of Leicester said,

"Let's not call them anything,
let's just ignore them."

APPLAUSE

And a Mr Singin of Huntingdon said
he couldn't think of anything

more derogatory than "Belgians".

APPLAUSE

Belgium has long been
the butt of jokes

and I think those jokes
stem from frustration.

A desire to pin down this
un-pin-down-able country.

This nation, if it truly is one,

was brought into being
at the Conference of London in 1830

and it was a birth
by Caesarean section,

carved into existence by
the three superpowers of the day,

the Prussians, the French
and the British.

But, if you look back at the history
of this whole region,

it used to be a patchwork
of fiercely independent mini states,

and that sense of local,

regional loyalty continues to
pull the place apart.

The people of Antwerp famously hate
the people of Brussels,

who detest
the people of Bruges in turn.

It's not even a nation
united by a common language -

they speak at least three,
and counting.

If ever a people really didn't know
who they are, it's the Belgians.

Ever since this nation was invented,

it has been crippled by
its catastrophically complicated

political structure
and the larger chasms of language.

400 years the dispute has
gone on between the Flemish

and the Walloons about who should
speak what language when and where.

Even now, Belgium excels at making
everything as complex as possible.

The only bilingual bit
is Brussels Central.

The Flemish region is monolingual
in Dutch,

although there are administrative
services for the French-speaking.

Wallonia is a pure
French-speaking territory

except for where they speak German.

So it follows that the most
famous Belgian painting

of the 20th century
should be a joke

on the slipperiness of language.

"This is not a pipe,"
said Rene Magritte.

Of course it's not,
it's a painting of a pipe.

At least we can all agree on that.

This cultural knot explains
why Belgians are

so drawn to the European project.

It's a way of ironing out
the crumpled quilt of overlapping

internal divisions.

Opting instead for the appealing
fantasy of a united Europe.

Belgians dream of being
part of a greater whole.

They dream of not being Belgian.

Could this be why the most
distinctively Belgian creation

of the 20th century should
be a universal character

of no identical personality?

A fictional embodiment
of the European dream.

Tintin.

The Adventures Of Tintin,
what are they?

Well, I think they are the one good
dream produced

by this nation of insomniac
nightmare sufferers.

The curiously sexless young
cub reporter in knickerbockers

accompanied by his faithful
white dog Snowy

goes on many different assignments

but his real job is to make Belgium
feel better about itself.

Never more so
than in one of the first books,

Tintin In The Congo,
which has been the site of perhaps

the dirtiest of all of Belgium's
colonial exploits.

But you'd never know it
from this book.

Tintin arrives, he is
greeted by a sea of happy, smiling,

somewhat caricatured, black African
faces. He makes everything better.

There is a nice touch
at the beginning of the book

where he is accosted by agents
working for

all the major newspapers
of the world.

New York wants him,
London wants him, Lisbon wants him.

He's the one Belgian that the whole
world hangs on his every last word.

He's a one-man -
one-teenager - United Nations.

An ambassador for the EU
before the EU was invented.

He lands on the moon, he saves
the world from a giant asteroid,

he plays a decisive, forceful,

virtuous role in politics of
the Cold War.

He does everything that Belgians
know they probably can't really do

or be.

There is a charming superficiality
about the Tintin books,

mirrored in the ever-so-clean
style of Herge himself.

A Belgian equivalent to the
anonymous style of American Pop Art.

Roy Lichtenstein wasn't the only one
to declare a allegiance

to Herge's work.

Andy Warhol, who once said
he was bored of emotions and wanted

to live like a machine, was a huge
admirer of the Tintin stories.

The two artists met in the '70s
at the unveiling of Warhol's

portrait of Herge as a kind
of frozen human comic strip.

A cryptic compliment.

Behind the heroic fantasies of
Tintin lurks a deep-seated fear of

having to confront the bewildering
reality of everyday Belgian life.

That job was left to
the masters of subversion.

The most sustained assault on
20th-century Belgian middle-class

existence was masterminded
in an anonymous-looking terrace

in an anonymous suburb of Brussels.

If the characteristic expressions
of Dutch modern culture

are ecstasy before nature,
spiritual affirmation

and the calm certainties
of structure and order,

the Belgian riposte to all that
is disillusionment and bad dreams.

And if there is one place that is
the great cave of Belgian dreaming,

it's this one.

Welcome to the house
of Rene Magritte.

Born in 1898, Magritte spent
his whole adult life

issuing mind-wrenching riddles

from this perfectly bourgeois
Brussels townhouse.

He didn't venture far to find
subjects for his pictures.

They are filled with the stuff
of the domestic interior.

But, as Magritte said,

he was determined to make the most
familiar objects scream aloud.

Much like those Dutch seekers
after higher truth,

Van Gogh and Mondriaan,

Magritte seems to place us
on the threshold of another world.

Everywhere you look in Magritte's
world, there is a sense of mystery

and with it, I think,

an after-echo of spiritual yearning
for transformation,

for transubstantiation, even...
HE PLAYS A NOTE

..celestial harmony?

But, whereas Mondrian
really did try to find

an alternative religion
in the everyday world,

even as Magritte recognised

the desire for transcendence
he made a mockery of it.

And, yes, in his parody visions of
paradise, eternal life is possible.

But only if you employ
a taxidermist.

The artist who had his Pomeranian
dog stuffed stayed in character.

Magritte lived the part
of the conventional Belgian

whose life he mocked.

He understood the deep uncertainty
that his contemporaries felt

in the first half
of the 20th century

and he embodied it
in picture puzzle form.

In the gloomy chambers
of the Magritte Museum

his pictures hang
like spotlit provocations.

Common sense is trifled with,
laws of gravity defied.

Everything seems
the wrong way round.

Front and back. Day and night.

Magritte painted more
than 20 versions of this image

which he called The Empire...or
sometimes The Dominion Of Lights.

It clearly obsessed him, but why?
What's it an image of?

I think it's an image of a moment,
a mood an attitude.

It's the magic hour.
It's that threshold moment.

It's that moment
when the visible world

seems to tremble
on the edge of invisibility.

Light is turning to darkness.

Mondriaan is obsessed
with this moment.

Mondriaan painting and sketching
in the dark at Domburg beach,

waiting for the world to disclose
its inner truth, its pattern.

Magritte, when he puts us
at the front of this image,

is putting us in this
same frame of mind.

We sit here or stand here
looking at this image

and we become someone waiting
for the world to reveal itself,

waiting for the miraculous
to unfold.

But Magritte keeps us
waiting a very long time.

And that's the point.

Magritte's principal weapon is to
deliver everything but the answer.

He gives us the paraphernalia
of a religion - the apparitions,

the wonders -
but without the explanation.

There's a very Flemish
particularity about his style,

so sharp and so clear that you
really do believe,

if only for a moment,
that it's raining businessmen.

For all his self-conscious
surrealism,

Magritte is the direct descendant
of the old Flemish painters

of Christian miracle,

Jan van Eyck
and Rogier van der Weyden.

But Magritte is a painter
of sabotaged altarpieces.

His wine is not the blood of Christ,

instead the bottle that carries it
turns into a phallic carrot.

But the centre of this bleak,

nihilist universe is the apple -
emblem of the Fall.

In Magritte's hands
it has become a trademark,

a brand stamped on all of humanity.

Redemption? Forget it,
especially if you're Belgian.

While Magritte played games with
the bourgeois Belgian mind,

there was another, less well-known,
more vulnerable Belgian surrealist

who actually tried to
grapple with it.

Paul Delvaux spent his life trying
to open up cracks in the psyche

to see what might lie within.

Delvaux himself began life
as a bourgeois

and ended it is a wild-haired
bohemian.

His art was a journey,

leading from the safe subject matter
of his youth,

the steam trains of
Belgium's Industrial Revolution,

to the more troubling, sexually
charged work of his maturity.

How did Delvaux get to
the destination of his later art?

Filled as it is with curiously
transfixing glassy-eyed nudes,

and ghastly reminders of death.

Well, he bought a ticket as
a young man

to a peculiar kind of fairground
attraction.

You have to imagine yourself
back to 1932,

it's the summer fair in Brussels,
the height of July,

and the star attraction is
the Spitzner horror show.

Display of skeletons,
anatomical models -

the young Paul Delvaux enters the
booth through a pair of red curtains

and he remembers what he sees
for the rest of his life,

with the force of a revelation.

Grisly displays of
syphilitic disease,

models of human genitalia that have
been deformed by illness.

As far as the Belgian authorities
are concerned,

this is a kind of government health
warning - a way of encouraging

Belgium's young men,
particularly soldiers,

to steer clear of prostitutes.

But to Delvaux,

this young man brought up by
a cosseting mother, a rather prudish
father,

the scene was like an eruption of
sexuality and death

into his hitherto rather
conservative world.

Almost overnight, the spectacle
triggered a sudden unleashing

of latent desires and anxieties onto
his canvases.

What's the deeper message behind
the strangeness of Delvaux's art?

On one level,

he's proclaiming in paint what
Freud had written in psychoanalysis.

Telling us that, no matter
how normal we like to seem, we are

all of us constantly subject to
subconscious dreams and fantasies.

Ruled by thoughts of sex and death.

That's why naked women stalk his
otherwise bourgeois precincts.

They stand, or lie, for desire.

In some of his wartime work,

Delvaux's sense that we hide from
what we don't want to know

becomes charged with even
darker meanings.

If we don't control our drives,
what might we do to the world?

In his sleeping Venus, apart from
the central nude,

everyone seems to be
looking at something

beyond the tight confines
of the architecture.

Something terrible,

to judge by their staring eyes
and agonised expressions.

The skeleton has the air of a
messenger, bringing unwelcome news

to the lady in the feathered hat.

News of the goings-on at
Belsen or Auschwitz?

After the war, and this
outpouring of anguish and guilt,

did Delvaux have anything left?

Some say he was so traumatised
that he spent the rest of his life

almost sleepwalking - retreating
into a rather safe fantasy world,

as if he couldn't bear
all that he'd uncovered.

In the early 1950s, Delvaux embarked
on his largest cycle of paintings.

'It's in a private home
in a gated enclave,

'within one of Brussels' exclusive
neighbourhoods.

'Only a handful of people have ever
seen it.'

Helena. Hi. I'm Andrew.

Nice to meet you. Come to see
the Delvaux. Yeah! Come in.

Wow, it's straight in!

I had no idea it was going to be
so big.

You really feel like
you are in Paul Delvaux's world.

I like this world, but I think
sometimes it can be strange
and weird.

You feel like there's people
watching you and observing you

and you don't know really what
they are thinking about you.

So you like it but it sometimes
makes you feel uncomfortable? Yes.

And also, like with the paintings,
most of the time the curtains,

they have to be closed to
preserve the paintings.

So it's not that easy to
live in a house like this.

So when you do throw the curtains
open to the light,

do you sometimes feel that
the figures in the paintings,

like they've been asleep
and now they've come back to life?

Exactly, they're quite happy to come
back to life!

Do you know how long it took Delvaux
to create this mise-en-scene?

It took him two years.

So at the beginning it was supposed
to take six months

and then he realised that the work
was much bigger.

Two years!

It's a cross between bourgeois
Brussels and the classical past.

You don't really know if you
are in Italy or in antique Greece.

I like the way they come from
the commissioner of the painting

and his daughter,
we come down these stairs,

we seem to go from the present day,
the 1950s, into the classical past.

Then we're into the 19th century

and then we're back into the
classical past

and suddenly all
their clothes are falling off!

But there's not really an expression
on the faces.

They are all quite beautiful women

but there's no expressions
and that's what's weird

because we expect them maybe to smile
or to be enjoying themselves.

It's nature and it's landscape,
but there's no expression

so it feels like there's something
weird happening

but you don't know what exactly.

I often feel with Delvaux, what he
does is he takes the traditions

of the past and surrealises them,
so you think you know where you are

but you start looking closely and
you think, "No, it's not like that."

It's almost the classical past,
but not really.

Almost the modern day -
no, not quite.

Almost a mythological painting,
but no, something's strange.

But you could never get beyond
that mystery.

There's something about the dream.
Something about the dream, yeah.

While Delvaux was holding the world
at bay with those curiously numb,

stunned pictures,
this already divided country was
falling further into domestic chaos.

Since then, economic crisis has
widened the chasm separating
north from south.

Fortunes have all but reversed,
with the once-prosperous south

suffering terribly in these
post-industrial times.

Inequality is
the rule in modern Belgium.

The top 20 per cent of the
population earn almost four times as
much as the bottom 20 per cent.

And many earn nothing at all.

This is Charleroi -
once an industrial boomtown,

it now has one of the worst
unemployment rates in
Western Europe.

But against its backdrop of rusting
steel and cracked concrete

flowers this raw, mesmerising
form of surrealist dreaming.

For me, it's these yowling
walls of graffiti that speak

most nakedly about the plight of

this fractured, disillusioned
nation.

What are they images of? Hope?
Despair? Defiance?

Their chaotic co-mingling certainly
speaks of division.

While Belgium worries and looks
within,

what of its more confident,
more united neighbour?

Where do you go to find the art
that's reflected the modern Dutch
identity?

Well, the idea of art certainly
appeals to the civilised Dutch.

For a while they paid their artists
a social benefit to produce it.

'Most of it ended up here,

'in a state-owned lock-up
in the outskirts of The Hague.'

Nice big lifts.
What's the floor area?

It's almost three football pitches.

Automatic doors. Yes, sir.
Three football pitches! Yeah.

HE LAUGHS

As you can see, here is
one of the buildings.

'The social welfare scheme
was set up in 1949.

'50,000 works of art are locked
within its vaults,

'brought out on rare occasions to
decorate the offices of government
officials.'

We've got a lot of bequests,
a lot of gifts.

So if a Dutch ambassador who's got
an embassy, he's got a wall to fill,

he might come to you and say,
"Can I have one of these paintings?"
Yes, yes.

And if he is very nice, you might
say yes? Yes.

We have to say yes. OK.

Oh, fantastic.

It keeps coming.

We've got a lady in furs peeking
out, still life, leather boots...

Naked black lady reclining
on the American flag, why not.

'By the time the money ran out
in the late 1980s,

'it had subsidised a quarter of all
the artists in the Netherlands.

'Paying them up to three times the
market value for their work to be
expensively shelved.'

These are the works that are
currently waiting.

They're waiting for someone.
This is a little bit like
the orphans' home.

They're waiting for someone to
adopt them. Yes.

These poor little art children.

'This must be the largest
Euro mountain of unwanted art
in existence.

'What does it say about
a modern society

'that it's willing to pay
lip service to art

'and then manage to forget about it
almost completely?

'What would poor old
Van Gogh have made of it all?'

The quality is quite uneven.
Yeah, yeah. It is.

We have 50,000 works now here, so

not everything... Is going
to be a masterpiece! Yes, yes.

Cultures constantly change,

and it's my own personal view,
but right now I feel the Dutch

are most at home with the practical
arts of design and architecture.

And I suspect that's why their
galleries are so much more
impressive than their art.

This gallery is by Rotterdam's
Rem Koolhaas,

and what a very "cool house" it is!

More than 2,000 years ago,
Plato declared that the last thing

a republic needs is the
destabilising figure of the artist.

Someone whose individual visions
ran counter

to the communal efforts
of the state.

I think that's true
of Holland today.

What do the modern Dutch want?
Above all, I think
business as usual.

They want their banks, they want
their container ports,

they want to grow and sell
more flowers than anyone else
in the world.

And I think it's that sense of
profound,

collective enterprise that sets
modern Holland apart from
modern Belgium.

And I think it's also what defines
the Dutch attitude to art.

They know they've got to have
lots of it,

because after all it's the mark of
a modern, civilised state,

but do they really want to
look at it?

Do they really want to think about
it too deeply? I don't think so.