Original subtitles

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.