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This series, The Shock Of The New, is about an old subject,

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almost 100 years old, the art of our own century, Modernism.

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Now in cultures, centuries don't start neatly on cue.

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Ours didn't, it began round about 1880 and it's finishing up its run now,

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leaving behind it, in my view, some of the most challenging, beautiful and
intelligent works of art

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that have ever been made, along with a great mass of superfluity and rubbish.

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Now I don't want to do a history of modern art.

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Instead I want to evoke its spirit by showing how it's acted upon society and vice
versa.

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How it stilts, for instance, with the idea of pleasure.

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How it has strived to confirm or reject the political status quo.

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How it's tried to construct utopias and so on.

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Not a history, then, and not a tour of the monument, although we do get around.

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But eight essays on eight separate themes,

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trying to look at ourselves and our century through the lens of its art.

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Through paintings, sculpture, architecture, photography to some extent,

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and cinema not at all because that's another subject.

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We're at the end of the modern era,

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and art no longer acts on us in the same way that it did on our grandfathers.

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I want to see why.

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So what can one put in eight programmes?

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Well, quite a lot, but not everything.

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You may not see all your favourite artists.

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This is television and not an encyclopaedia.

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And above all, I don't offer it as a substitute

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for the real experience of art, which can only take place one on one,

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face to face, you and the work without me or my talking shadow.

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The key word of the new century was modernity.

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Modernity meant believing in technology and not craft,

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in human perfectibility, not original sin,
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and above all, in a ceaseless consumption of things and the images of things.

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If you were a Parisian alive in 1890,

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and you wanted to show a visitor what modernity meant,

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you pointed to this structure,

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the tallest man-made object on earth,

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the Tower of Babel of the new machine age.

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Since the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London,

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the powers of Europe had taken to holding world fairs

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to show off their industrial strength.

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Paris scheduled one for 1889,

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the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.

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This was its emblem, a huge act of propaganda,

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designed not by an architect but by an engineer, Gustave Eiffel.

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The tower was the static totem of the cult of dynamism,

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a colossus planted with spread legs in the middle of Paris.
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Its shape alluded to the human body, and to the colossi of the past.

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It was the guardian of the future.

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It summed up what technological progress meant

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to the men who ran Europe at the end of the 19th century -

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the promise of unlimited control over the world and its wealth.

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It was praised by one of the key figures in the French avant-garde,

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the cosmopolitan poet, once a Catholic, Guillaume Apollinaire.

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At last you are tired of this old world.

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Oh, shepherd Eifel Tower, the flock of bridges bleats this morning.

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You are through with living in Greek and Roman antiquity.

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Here even the automobiles seem to be ancient.

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Only religion has stayed brand new.

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Religion has remained simple, as simple as the airport hangers.

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It's God who dies Friday and rises again on Sunday.

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It's Christ who climbs into the sky better than any aviator.

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He holds the world's altitude record, pupil Christ of the eye.

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20th pupil of the centuries, he knows what he's about.

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And the century, become a bird, climbs skyward like Jesus.

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To these capitalist romantics, the machine was good.

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They saw it as a giant slave, an untiring steel negro,

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obedient, mindless, controlled by reason, in a world of unlimited resources.

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Only very unusual sights like a rocket launch can give us the emotion

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with which people in 1889 contemplated heavy machinery.

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The machine also meant the conquest of horizontal space.

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The railroad stations were the true cathedrals of the late 19th century.

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The machine on wheels began to change people's experience of place.

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More of the world became available in less time,

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at first to a little elite of inventers, crackpots, and the adventurous rich.

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Because it promised to telescope more experience into the conventional frame of
travel,
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and finally to burst the frame altogether,

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the avant-garde of engineering had something in common with the avant-garde of art.

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The most visible sign of the future was the automobile,

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and this is the first public sculpture ever set up in its praise.

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It commemorates the great road race of 1895 from Paris to Bordeaux and back,

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which was won by an engineer named Emile Levassor

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in the car that he designed and built himself, the Panhard-Levassor 5.

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It could do about the same speed as a jumping frog, but not very much more.

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Nevertheless, Levassor's victory was of tremendous social consequence

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because it persuaded Europeans, both manufacturers and public alike,

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that the future of road transport lay with the internal combustion engine

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and not, as many had thought before, with either electricity or steam.

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In all justice there ought to be a replica of this thing

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set up in every oil port from the Persian Gulf to Houston,

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but if it looks somewhat ludicrous to us as sculpture today,
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that's because of difficulties between sculpture and the new convention of the
machine.

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A stone car,

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the idea seems surrealist to a modern eye, it's simply incongruous.

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Stone is immobile, mineral, brittle, cold.

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Cars are fast, metallic, elastic, warm.

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The human body is warm too, but we don't think of statues as stone men

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because we're used to the conventions of representing flesh with stone.

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There were no such conventions for depicting machinery, it was too new.

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But the conditions of seeing were also starting to change,

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and the Eiffel Tower stood for that too.

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What counted was not so much the view of the tower from the ground,

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it was seeing the ground from the tower.

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Nobody except a few men in balloons had ever seen this before.

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There were individual pilots who saw the sight from their planes,

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but it was the Eiffel Tower that gave a mass audience a chance

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to see what you and I take for granted every time we fly -

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the earth on which we live seen flat as pattern from above.

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The Eiffel Tower was therefore a pivot in human consciousness,

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and that view of the city as seen by those hundreds of thousands of visitors

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was as significant in 1889,

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as the sight of the earth from the moon would be 80 years later.

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Through the medium of technology, culture was reinventing itself everywhere.

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In 1877 Thomas Alva Edison came up with the most radical extension of cultural
memory

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since the printed book. He invented sound recording,

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the first human utterance ever retrieved.

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I designed my original tinfoil phonograph in cylinder form,

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and gave it to my faithful chum Kruesi to make.

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He made fun of it.

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I was almost as surprised as he was
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when the first model produced "Mary had a little lamb", which I'd shouted into it.

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'Its fleece was white as snow.

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'And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.'

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In 1879, Edison invented the incandescent filament bulb.

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The fairy electricity was now let loose upon the world...

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..thus amazing people who had, up to now, depended upon gas and whale oil to see at
night.

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In 1895, the Lumiere brothers made the images of a magic lantern move.

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They invented the movie camera and the projector.

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In 1898, Marie Curie discovered radium.

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In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio message

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along the virgin airwaves from Cornwall to the east coast of America.

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In 1903, two home inventors, Wilbur and Orville Wright, observed the wind,

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put wings on a bicycle, scrambled into it, started their motor,

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and to the stupefaction of the world took off,

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achieving man's first powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine.

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In 1905, an obscure physicist named Albert Einstein developed the special theory of
relatively,

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the basis of the largest change in man's view of the universe since Isaac Newton.

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He ushered in the nuclear age with one formula.

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E is equal to MC square,

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in which energy is put equal to mass,

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multiply it with the square of the velocity of light,

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showed that very small amount of mass

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may be converted into a very large amount of energy.

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Very few people understood it, and nobody could foresee its implications.

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By 1913, Henry Ford had so developed the idea of mass production that the car,

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running on Mr Dunlop's pneumatic tyres,

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ceased to be a toy for the rich, and became every man's chariot.

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The Wright Brothers had only got a few yards off the ground,

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but within six years, a French aviator named Louis Bleriot
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managed to pilot his buzzing wooden dragonfly

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from one country to another, from France to England,

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across the vast cultural divide of the English Channel.

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In 1913, the French writer Charles Peguy remarked...

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"The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last
30 years."

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He was right, and it was a widespread feeling,

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for the essence of the early modernist experience

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was not the specific inventions - most people weren't affected by

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a prototype in a lab or an equation on a blackboard, not yet.

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No, the important thing was the sense

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of an accelerated rate of change in all areas of human discourse.

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It provided the feeling of an approaching millennium, a new order of things,

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as the 19th century clicked over into the 20th,

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the end of one kind of history, and the start of another.

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Soon after Bleriot flew the Channel,

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his monoplane was carried in procession through the streets of Paris

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and installed in a church, for all the world like the relic of an Archangel,

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and such was the early apotheosis of the machine.

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But to have a cult does not mean that the images automatically follow.

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The changes in man's view of himself and the world between 1880 and 1914

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was so far reaching that they produced as many problems for artists as they did
stimuli.

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For instance, how could you make paintings that would reflect the immense shifts in
consciousness

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that this changed, technological landscape implied?

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How could you produce a parallel dynamism to the machine age

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without falling into the elementary trap of just becoming a machine illustrator?

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And above all how, by shoving around on a canvas,

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sticky stuff like paint on a static surface,

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could you produce a convincing record of process and transformation?

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Now the first artists to come up with a sketch for an answer to this were the
cubists.

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Since the Renaissance, almost all painting had obeyed a convention.

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It was that of one-point perspective.

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Perspective was a geometrical means for producing an illusion of reality,

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for showing things in space in their right sizes and positions.

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Nevertheless, it was an abstraction.

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It was a view seen by a motionless, one-eyed person

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clearly detached from what he sees.

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Perspective gathers the visual facts, and it stabilises them.

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It makes a god of the spectator,

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who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges,

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the unmoved onlooker.

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Cubism argued that reality includes the painter's efforts to perceive it.

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Both the viewer and the view are part of the same field.

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The first artist to explore this idea, and finally to base his work on it, was Paul
Cezanne.
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The question of why the paintings that Cezanne made in his old age

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were to have such a vast effect upon the history of art can't be answered in terms
of style.

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What they proposed was more radical than style,

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it was a fundamental argument about the way that we actually see.

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He wanted to show the process of seeing, not just the results, and he takes you
through this process.

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You share his hesitations about the position of a trunk or a branch.

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Or the final shape of a mountain and the trees in front of it.

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The statement "this is what I see"

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becomes replaced by a question "is this what I see?"

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Relatively is all.

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The idea that doubt can be heroic if it is locked into a structure

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as grand as the paintings of Cezanne's old age,

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that is one of the keys of our century and a touchstone of modernism itself.

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Cubism would bring it to an extreme.
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The idea began here at 13 Rue Ravignon in Paris in 1907,

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in a warren of cheap artists' studios called the Bateau Lavoir or laundry boat.

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It was set off by a Spaniard, Pablo Picasso, then aged 26.

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Picasso's partner in inventing cubism was a slightly younger

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and rather more conservative Frenchman, Georges Braque.

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In the public eye these men didn't exist.

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The audience for their paintings might have been a dozen people,

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and this meant they were free, as researchers in some very obscure area of science
are free.

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Nobody cared enough to interfere.

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They wanted to paint the fact that our knowledge of an object

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is made up of all possible views of it - top, sides, front, back.

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They wanted to compress this inspection, which takes time,

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into one moment, one synthesised view.

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One of their experimental materials was the art of other cultures,

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Oceanic and African, as despised as they then were.

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At the time, there were no museums of tribal art, like this one, to consult.

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One of the mild ironies of cubism is the extent to which it was helped by the
French empire in Africa.

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Picasso and Braque both owned African carvings, but they have no anthropological
interest in them.

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They didn't care about their ritual uses, they knew nothing about their original
tribal meanings,

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or about the societies out of which they came.

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They simply used them formally, and in that regard cubism was like a small parody
of the imperial model,

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the masks were simply raw material from the darkest Congo, like copper or palm oil,

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and Picasso's use of them was in effect a kind of cultural plunder.

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But then why use African art at all?

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The cubists were just about the first artists to even think of doing so.

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130 years before, when Benjamin West admired the cloths, the clubs and the carvings

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that had come back from the Pacific with Captain Cook,

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no Royal Academicians then took the cue and started painting Tahitian style.

232
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When Picasso started to produce what was in effect white art in black face,

233
00:18:33,520 --> 00:18:39,520
he was saying what no 18th-century painter would ever have imagined himself saying.

234
00:18:39,520 --> 00:18:43,120
He was proposing that the tradition of the human figure,

235
00:18:43,120 --> 00:18:48,080
which had served Western art so well over the preceding centuries, had at last run
out,

236
00:18:48,080 --> 00:18:51,720
and that in order to renew its vitality you had to look elsewhere,

237
00:18:51,720 --> 00:18:54,800
in effect to look to those folks in Africa with rhythm.

238
00:18:54,800 --> 00:18:59,760
This was not so much a gesture of homage in the direction of the blacks though,

239
00:18:59,760 --> 00:19:02,880
as it was a successful raid on them by the whites.

240
00:19:03,680 --> 00:19:08,080
What Picasso did care about was the formal vitality of the carvings,

241
00:19:08,080 --> 00:19:09,680
the freedom to distort.

242
00:19:12,560 --> 00:19:16,920
And something else, they were to him in the most literal sense

243
00:19:16,920 --> 00:19:18,520
emblems of savagery,

244
00:19:18,520 --> 00:19:22,480
of violence transferred into the sphere of culture.

245
00:19:22,480 --> 00:19:26,800
But this did produce the painting whose shock value provoked cubism,

246
00:19:26,800 --> 00:19:30,200
and this was Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
247
00:19:40,680 --> 00:19:46,240
No painting ever looked more convulsive, and none signalled a faster change in the
history of art,

248
00:19:46,240 --> 00:19:49,480
and yet it was anchored in the tradition of the new.

249
00:19:49,480 --> 00:19:52,680
Picasso began it the year Cezanne died,

250
00:19:52,680 --> 00:19:56,600
and its nearest ancestor was Cezanne's Bathers.

251
00:19:56,600 --> 00:20:00,440
It also descends from Picasso's Spanish heritage.

252
00:20:00,440 --> 00:20:04,640
Those unstable twisting bodies are like El Greco,

253
00:20:04,640 --> 00:20:08,000
and so is the angular, harshly lit space.

254
00:20:15,920 --> 00:20:20,960
The five nudes are chopped into planes and arks, as though the brush were a butcher
knife.

255
00:20:20,960 --> 00:20:25,080
Their mass is breaking up, and even today you'd think of dismemberment.

256
00:20:25,080 --> 00:20:27,680
Even the melon looks like a weapon.

257
00:20:27,680 --> 00:20:31,120
The space is flattened like a squashed box,

258
00:20:31,120 --> 00:20:33,080
as solid as the figures.

259
00:20:34,640 --> 00:20:39,160
And in the midst of all this violent abstraction, the masks.

260
00:20:39,160 --> 00:20:42,760
The three on the left are derived from archaic Spanish sculpture.
261
00:20:46,680 --> 00:20:49,680
The two on the right from African carvings.

262
00:20:49,680 --> 00:20:52,800
All of them staring with the hypnotic fixity

263
00:20:52,800 --> 00:20:55,760
that Picasso would always give to the eye.

264
00:20:55,760 --> 00:20:58,520
Picasso never liked the title.

265
00:20:58,520 --> 00:21:04,000
He called his painting The Avignon Brothel because there had been a whorehouse on
the Carrer d'Avinyo,

266
00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:06,880
or Avignon Street, in Barcelona when he was a student.

267
00:21:06,880 --> 00:21:11,960
His original idea was to paint an allegory of venereal disease called The Wages Of
Sin,

268
00:21:11,960 --> 00:21:16,000
a man carousing in a brothel, and another man coming in at the left

269
00:21:16,000 --> 00:21:20,560
with what was going to be a skull, that very Spanish reminder of mortality.

270
00:21:22,880 --> 00:21:26,200
In the final painting though, only the nudes are left,

271
00:21:26,200 --> 00:21:30,560
archaic and aggressive, and their cult is the fear of women.

272
00:21:30,560 --> 00:21:35,880
No painter ever put his anxiety about castration more plainly than Picasso did
here,

273
00:21:35,880 --> 00:21:41,400
and the combination of form and subject was alarming to the few people who saw Les
Demoiselles.

274
00:21:41,400 --> 00:21:45,200
Georges Braque was horrified by its ugliness and intensity,
275
00:21:45,200 --> 00:21:49,680
but he painted a relatively timid and laborious response to it,

276
00:21:49,680 --> 00:21:55,280
and from then on Braque and Picasso would be locked in a partnership of questions
and responses,

277
00:21:55,280 --> 00:21:59,040
"roped together like mountaineers" as Braque memorably said.

278
00:21:59,040 --> 00:22:01,920
Picasso cleared the ground for cubism,

279
00:22:01,920 --> 00:22:07,200
but it was George Braque who, over the next two years, 1908 and 1909,

280
00:22:07,200 --> 00:22:09,760
did the most to develop its vocabulary.

281
00:22:09,760 --> 00:22:14,040
They say the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

282
00:22:14,040 --> 00:22:17,800
Now Picasso was the fox, he was the virtuoso.

283
00:22:17,800 --> 00:22:23,120
Braque was the hedgehog, and the one big thing that he knew was Cezanne,

284
00:22:23,120 --> 00:22:26,160
with whom he identified to the point of obsession.

285
00:22:26,160 --> 00:22:32,280
He admired Cezanne, as he put it, for sweeping painting clear of the idea of
mastery.

286
00:22:32,280 --> 00:22:36,720
He loved his doubt, his doggedness, his concentration, his lack of eloquence.

287
00:22:36,720 --> 00:22:40,920
Well, Braque wanted to see if Cezanne's way of building a painting -

288
00:22:40,920 --> 00:22:44,560
that fusing of little tilted facets, that solidity of structure
289
00:22:44,560 --> 00:22:47,520
and ambiguity of reading - could be pushed further,

290
00:22:47,520 --> 00:22:52,200
which he did with the landscapes he painted in two places where Cezanne himself had
worked.

291
00:22:52,200 --> 00:22:56,520
First at L'Estaque in the South of France in 1908.

292
00:22:56,520 --> 00:23:00,000
The Estaque paintings began as almost straight Cezanne.

293
00:23:00,000 --> 00:23:04,000
This is one view that Braque looked at that summer.

294
00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:05,880
This is what he made of it.

295
00:23:05,880 --> 00:23:09,840
Every scrap of detail edited out - prisms, triangles.

296
00:23:09,840 --> 00:23:13,040
Yet the shading no longer gives you a feeling of solidity.

297
00:23:13,040 --> 00:23:17,800
Some of the corners could either be sticking out of the picture, or pointing back
into it.

298
00:23:24,840 --> 00:23:29,160
In the summer of 1909, Braque went painting closer to Paris

299
00:23:29,160 --> 00:23:32,280
in a village in the Seine valley called La Roche-Guyon.

300
00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:39,640
The valley is lined with chalk cliffs, and there's a castle built into them.

301
00:23:39,640 --> 00:23:43,680
It belongs to the La Rochefoucauld family, and Braque made it his motif,

302
00:23:43,680 --> 00:23:49,600
that jumble of plains and gables and spires stacked up against the cliff.

303
00:23:49,600 --> 00:23:53,360
Moreover, on the top, there's a 13th-century Norman tower,

304
00:23:53,360 --> 00:23:56,800
and it was in ruins when Braque saw it, as it is today,

305
00:23:56,800 --> 00:24:01,440
but it gave him another part of his motif, a big strong cylinder on top.

306
00:24:01,440 --> 00:24:04,960
So there was this, from his point of view, nice rhyme

307
00:24:04,960 --> 00:24:11,080
between the actual forms of the landscape and the shapes that he wanted to put in a
painting,

308
00:24:11,080 --> 00:24:15,760
between those plains ascending the cliff going in and out,

309
00:24:15,760 --> 00:24:21,520
pressed forward by the cliff itself which blocked off the perspective.

310
00:24:21,520 --> 00:24:23,680
This was what he painted.

311
00:24:53,880 --> 00:24:56,840
He then scrambled up the chalk bluff to the side,

312
00:24:56,840 --> 00:24:59,960
and looked at the castle from an angle which gave him

313
00:24:59,960 --> 00:25:05,120
an even more complicated geometry of gables and turrets coming down into the town.

314
00:25:44,240 --> 00:25:47,400
So would Braque have invented cubism on his own?

315
00:25:47,400 --> 00:25:51,640
Probably, but it would have lacked the power that Picasso brought to it.

316
00:25:51,640 --> 00:25:55,160
This was his unequalled ability to realise form,

317
00:25:55,160 --> 00:25:59,600
to make you feel the shape and the weight and the silence of things.
318
00:25:59,600 --> 00:26:02,960
This is the plastic power of a sculptor, but in paint,

319
00:26:02,960 --> 00:26:06,400
and distorted as they are, you're made to feel them so strongly

320
00:26:06,400 --> 00:26:10,320
that you can imagine them picked off the canvas in three dimensions.

321
00:26:12,160 --> 00:26:16,520
For the moment, Picasso's portraits, like this one of the dealer Vollard,

322
00:26:16,520 --> 00:26:18,480
was still recognisable,

323
00:26:18,480 --> 00:26:20,760
but any reality was bound to alter

324
00:26:20,760 --> 00:26:24,280
once it was thrust into the shifting abstract space

325
00:26:24,280 --> 00:26:26,560
that he and Braque had invented.

326
00:26:27,560 --> 00:26:32,400
By 1911, Picasso and Braque were painting like Siamese twins.

327
00:26:32,400 --> 00:26:35,720
This painting of a guitarist is by Braque.

328
00:26:35,720 --> 00:26:40,560
This one, of another guitarist, is by Picasso.

329
00:26:45,640 --> 00:26:52,560
Their paintings of this period are virtually indistinguishable except for fine
differences of handwriting.

330
00:26:52,560 --> 00:26:55,960
Without the labels on the gallery wall, you could hardly guess

331
00:26:55,960 --> 00:26:58,600
which painting is by which of the two painters.

332
00:26:59,560 --> 00:27:04,240
All this break up and shuffling - nobody had ever painted more baffling images.

333
00:27:04,240 --> 00:27:08,760
Nothing is constant, every shape is a report on multiple meanings.

334
00:27:08,760 --> 00:27:14,760
It's an attempt to set out the world as a field of shifting relationships that
include the onlooker.

335
00:27:14,760 --> 00:27:17,840
They were trying to paint process.

336
00:27:20,840 --> 00:27:23,560
Braque and Picasso were not mathematicians,

337
00:27:23,560 --> 00:27:26,160
and certainly they weren't philosophers.

338
00:27:26,160 --> 00:27:30,200
But their art was part of the same great tide of modernist thought

339
00:27:30,200 --> 00:27:34,880
that included Einstein and the philosopher Alfred Whitehead.

340
00:27:34,880 --> 00:27:39,280
The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries

341
00:27:39,280 --> 00:27:42,360
is the notion of independent existence.

342
00:27:42,360 --> 00:27:44,840
There is no such mode of existence.

343
00:27:44,840 --> 00:27:48,480
Every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which

344
00:27:48,480 --> 00:27:51,280
it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

345
00:27:54,760 --> 00:27:57,280
As Gertrude Stein remembered it,

346
00:27:57,280 --> 00:28:00,000
the cubist game of hide and seek with reality
347
00:28:00,000 --> 00:28:02,320
fed back into the world in odd ways.

348
00:28:06,720 --> 00:28:12,520
The first year of the war, Picasso and myself were walking down the Boulevard
Raspail.

349
00:28:12,520 --> 00:28:15,800
All of a sudden, down the street came some big cannon,

350
00:28:15,800 --> 00:28:19,680
the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged.

351
00:28:19,680 --> 00:28:22,880
Pablo stopped, he was spellbound.

352
00:28:22,880 --> 00:28:25,400
"C'est nous qui avons fait ca," he said,

353
00:28:25,400 --> 00:28:28,320
It is we that have created that.

354
00:28:28,320 --> 00:28:31,200
And he was right, he had.

355
00:28:35,160 --> 00:28:40,640
Camouflage was cubism at war, and ever since the cubists' delight in ambiguity,

356
00:28:40,640 --> 00:28:44,920
what is seen and not seen, has had its ominously practical uses.

357
00:28:55,920 --> 00:29:00,560
Picasso's next step was to stick a piece of oilcloth to one of his still lives.

358
00:29:00,560 --> 00:29:05,640
It was printed with a design of chair cane, and so collage began.

359
00:29:05,640 --> 00:29:11,640
Collage, which simply means gluing, was a way of strengthening the link between
cubism and the real world.

360
00:29:11,640 --> 00:29:15,000
It gave Picasso and Braque bigger and bolder shapes to play with,
361
00:29:15,000 --> 00:29:19,640
and these shapes were real things, emblems of the industrial present -

362
00:29:19,640 --> 00:29:23,720
newspapers, packets, wallpaper and the fake woodgraining

363
00:29:23,720 --> 00:29:27,360
that Braque learned as an apprentice house painter in Normandy.

364
00:29:27,360 --> 00:29:31,800
They were recoiling from the abstractness of those pictures of 1911,

365
00:29:31,800 --> 00:29:35,080
and in that they were joined by the third musketeer,

366
00:29:35,080 --> 00:29:38,560
a more classical artist than either of them, Juan Gris.

367
00:29:38,560 --> 00:29:43,640
In him, cubism found a mind of the coolest analytical weight.

368
00:29:43,640 --> 00:29:47,720
To Gris, the world of cheap mass production and reproduction

369
00:29:47,720 --> 00:29:51,760
was a sort of arcadia, a pastoral landscape, as it was to Apollinaire.

370
00:29:51,760 --> 00:29:56,680
You read hand bills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud,

371
00:29:56,680 --> 00:29:58,600
"Here's this morning's poetry."

372
00:29:58,600 --> 00:30:01,000
And for prose you've got the newspapers,

373
00:30:01,000 --> 00:30:05,440
sixpenny detective novels full of cop stories, biographies of big shots,

374
00:30:05,440 --> 00:30:07,280
a thousand different titles.

375
00:30:07,280 --> 00:30:09,720
Lettering on bill boards and walls,
376
00:30:09,720 --> 00:30:13,760
door plates and posters squawk like parrots.

377
00:30:20,880 --> 00:30:23,760
Cubist Paris is receding now.

378
00:30:23,760 --> 00:30:28,320
But it's still there, the glass and iron city of small arcades,

379
00:30:28,320 --> 00:30:30,640
the marble city of cafe tables,

380
00:30:30,640 --> 00:30:35,680
the place of zinc bars, dominoes, dirty chess boards,

381
00:30:35,680 --> 00:30:41,240
crumpled newspaper, the brown city of old paint and pipes and panelling,

382
00:30:41,240 --> 00:30:46,440
history to us now, but once the landscape of the modernist dream.

383
00:32:26,600 --> 00:32:30,600
The fourth major cubist was Fernand Leger.

384
00:32:30,600 --> 00:32:33,240
He wanted to make a public style of cubism,

385
00:32:33,240 --> 00:32:37,160
a popular art, images of the machine age for the man in the streets.

386
00:32:39,800 --> 00:32:43,040
He was the son of a Normandy farmer, an instinctive socialist

387
00:32:43,040 --> 00:32:47,320
who became a practising one in the trenches of World War I.

388
00:32:47,320 --> 00:32:51,320
I found myself on a level with the whole of the French people.

389
00:32:51,320 --> 00:32:57,280
My new companions in the Engineer Corps were miners, navvies, workers in metal and
wood.

390
00:32:57,280 --> 00:33:00,400
Among these I discovered the French people.

391
00:33:00,400 --> 00:33:04,600
At the same time, I was dazzled by the breach of a 75mm gun

392
00:33:04,600 --> 00:33:08,080
which was standing uncovered in the sunlight,

393
00:33:08,080 --> 00:33:10,520
the magic of light on white metal.

394
00:33:10,520 --> 00:33:13,440
Metal or flesh, it made no difference.

395
00:33:13,440 --> 00:33:18,120
Leger painted the body as though it were made of interchangeable parts, like
machinery.

396
00:33:18,120 --> 00:33:23,360
The soldiers' insignia on these card playing robots might as well be factory
brands.

397
00:33:29,480 --> 00:33:34,320
To him, society as machine meant harmony, an end to loneliness.

398
00:33:35,880 --> 00:33:39,400
The Three Women, one of the paintings that best expresses this,

399
00:33:39,400 --> 00:33:42,560
is among the great didactic images of French classicism.

400
00:33:42,560 --> 00:33:46,480
This philosophical harem is Leger's vision of human relationships

401
00:33:46,480 --> 00:33:53,320
working as smoothly as a clock with the binding energy of desire transformed into
rhymes of shape.

402
00:33:53,320 --> 00:33:57,960
There were some artists to whom this mechanical age was much more than a context,

403
00:33:57,960 --> 00:33:59,840
and very much more than a pretext.

404
00:33:59,840 --> 00:34:02,480
They wanted to explore its characteristic images

405
00:34:02,480 --> 00:34:06,520
of light, structure and dynamism as subjects in their work.

406
00:34:22,160 --> 00:34:25,240
Robert Delaunay was crazy about the Eiffel Tower.

407
00:34:25,240 --> 00:34:27,880
He thought of it as a new tower of Babel

408
00:34:27,880 --> 00:34:33,600
emitting a clamour of tongues from the first radio system installed on it in 1909.

409
00:34:50,760 --> 00:34:57,200
He must have painted it 30 times, the first time for his Russian wife and fellow
painter, Sonya.

410
00:34:57,200 --> 00:35:00,160
Light seen through structure.

411
00:35:00,160 --> 00:35:03,680
It became a theme... his fundamental image of modernity,

412
00:35:03,680 --> 00:35:08,200
that great grid rising over Paris with the sky reeling through it.

413
00:36:19,080 --> 00:36:24,760
Delaunay also painted windows... landscapes of Paris seen as though through a
prism.

414
00:36:24,760 --> 00:36:28,480
And Apollinaire illustrated them with words.

415
00:36:28,480 --> 00:36:32,800
Raise the blind and see how the window opens.

416
00:36:32,800 --> 00:36:37,000
If hands could weave light this was done by spiders.

417
00:36:37,000 --> 00:36:41,080
Beauty, pallor, unfathomable indigos.

418
00:36:41,080 --> 00:36:45,400
From the red to the green, all the yellow dies.

419
00:36:45,400 --> 00:36:51,680
Paris, Vancouver, Hyeres, Maintenon, New York and the West Indies.

420
00:36:51,680 --> 00:36:54,560
The window opens like an orange,

421
00:36:54,560 --> 00:36:56,920
the beautiful fruit of light.

422
00:37:01,440 --> 00:37:05,040
Whereas Leger thought the core of modernism was structure,

423
00:37:05,040 --> 00:37:10,120
the Delaunays believed it was light, pure energy, flooding the world.

424
00:37:10,120 --> 00:37:12,400
Its emblem was the disk.

425
00:37:15,120 --> 00:37:19,600
This was the basic unit of Robert's grand allegory of newness,

426
00:37:19,600 --> 00:37:23,840
the homage to Bleriot, the "great constructor", as he called the pilot.

427
00:38:29,480 --> 00:38:34,680
One of the effects of today's museums, with their white walls and feeling of
perpetual presence,

428
00:38:34,680 --> 00:38:37,920
is to make art seem newer than it actually is.

429
00:38:37,920 --> 00:38:41,760
You have to pinch yourself to remember that when the paint was fresh

430
00:38:41,760 --> 00:38:45,480
on those cubist Picassos and Delaunays, people wore hobble skirts

431
00:38:45,480 --> 00:38:49,840
and they rode around in machines line this one, sitting up front of the driver.

432
00:38:49,840 --> 00:38:54,400
And that feeling of disjuncture, the sense of the oldness of the modern art,
433
00:38:54,400 --> 00:39:00,320
becomes acute when you reflect upon the only art movement that came out of Italy in
the 20th century.

434
00:39:00,320 --> 00:39:04,800
Futurism was the invention of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,

435
00:39:04,800 --> 00:39:07,080
part lyrical genius,

436
00:39:07,080 --> 00:39:11,360
part organ-grinder and part fascist demagogue

437
00:39:11,360 --> 00:39:15,200
and, by his own accounts, the most modern man in his own country.

438
00:39:15,200 --> 00:39:18,800
When right-minded people between the wars thought of modern artists

439
00:39:18,800 --> 00:39:22,600
as subversive buffoons, their image was formed by Marinetti.

440
00:39:22,600 --> 00:39:25,640
He was a genius of publicity and he used every trick

441
00:39:25,640 --> 00:39:28,440
to get it for himself and for the futurist painters.

442
00:39:28,440 --> 00:39:33,040
Posters, leaflets, demos, meetings, he even invented the happening,

443
00:39:33,040 --> 00:39:37,880
montage in real time, with poems and declamations, paintings and music,

444
00:39:37,880 --> 00:39:39,560
all on stage at once.

445
00:39:39,560 --> 00:39:42,720
He took his road show everywhere, even to Russia.

446
00:39:42,720 --> 00:39:45,200
Erster Akt.

447
00:39:45,200 --> 00:39:47,680
THEY CHANT IN GERMAN

448
00:39:52,640 --> 00:39:55,440
Zweiter Akt.

449
00:39:55,440 --> 00:39:58,480
THEY MUMBLE

450
00:39:58,480 --> 00:40:00,760
RAIN FALLS

451
00:40:01,560 --> 00:40:03,360
Dritter Akt.

452
00:40:03,360 --> 00:40:06,480
THEY CHANT IN GERMAN

453
00:40:13,640 --> 00:40:16,600
DISCORDANT NOTES ON PIANO

454
00:40:46,800 --> 00:40:49,960
Marinetti called himself "the caffeine of Europe".

455
00:40:49,960 --> 00:40:53,760
He was the first international agent provocateur that modern art had.

456
00:40:53,760 --> 00:40:58,360
The name futurism was a brilliant choice - challenging, but vague.

457
00:40:58,360 --> 00:41:03,360
But the central idea that Marinetti trumpeted forth in the first futurist manifesto
in 1909

458
00:41:03,360 --> 00:41:09,720
was that the machine had created a new class of visionaries, himself and anyone who
cared to join him.

459
00:41:09,720 --> 00:41:12,960
BIRDSONG

460
00:41:14,640 --> 00:41:17,440
ENGINE STARTS

461
00:41:17,440 --> 00:41:21,440
For Marinetti and his group, all the old ideas about art and artists
462
00:41:21,440 --> 00:41:23,960
were about to be blown off the cultural map.

463
00:41:23,960 --> 00:41:26,440
ENGINE REVS

464
00:41:40,280 --> 00:41:43,720
You needed to come from a technologically backward country

465
00:41:43,720 --> 00:41:46,640
to love the future as passionately as Marinetti did.

466
00:41:46,640 --> 00:41:48,840
HORN PEEPS

467
00:41:51,120 --> 00:41:53,120
Machinery was power.

468
00:41:53,120 --> 00:41:56,160
It was freedom from historical restraints.

469
00:41:57,920 --> 00:42:00,680
Manifesto Of Futurism.

470
00:42:00,680 --> 00:42:04,960
One, we intend to sing the love of danger,

471
00:42:04,960 --> 00:42:07,720
the habit of energy and fearlessness.

472
00:42:07,720 --> 00:42:13,280
We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty,

473
00:42:13,280 --> 00:42:15,800
the beauty of speed.

474
00:42:15,800 --> 00:42:21,800
A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive
breath.

475
00:42:21,800 --> 00:42:27,320
A roaring car that seems to run on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of
Samothrace.
476
00:42:27,320 --> 00:42:30,720
We want to hymn the man at the wheel

477
00:42:30,720 --> 00:42:36,320
who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth along the circle of its orbit.

478
00:42:36,320 --> 00:42:39,400
We want to no part of it, the past.

479
00:42:39,400 --> 00:42:43,120
We, the young and strong futurists.

480
00:42:43,120 --> 00:42:47,080
So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers,

481
00:42:47,080 --> 00:42:49,920
here they are, here they are, come on!

482
00:42:49,920 --> 00:42:55,200
Set fire to the library shelves, turn aside the canals to flood the museums.

483
00:42:55,200 --> 00:43:02,880
Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters,
discoloured and shredded.

484
00:43:02,880 --> 00:43:06,520
Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers,

485
00:43:06,520 --> 00:43:11,880
and retch, retch, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly.

486
00:43:23,040 --> 00:43:26,280
In their art, they set out to find an equivalent for the speed

487
00:43:26,280 --> 00:43:29,640
and the movement that they worshipped in their cars.

488
00:43:52,080 --> 00:43:55,760
TYPEWRITER CLATTERS

489
00:44:05,320 --> 00:44:07,520
They kept issuing manifestos,

490
00:44:07,520 --> 00:44:12,320
operatic love letters to industry and hymns to the beauty of its products.

491
00:44:18,200 --> 00:44:21,880
Engineers live in high-tension chambers

492
00:44:21,880 --> 00:44:26,000
where 100,000 volts flicker through great bays of glass.

493
00:44:26,000 --> 00:44:30,880
They sit at control panels with meters, switches, radio stats and commutators

494
00:44:30,880 --> 00:44:36,400
to right and left, and everywhere the rich gleam of polished levers.

495
00:44:36,400 --> 00:44:42,880
These men enjoy, in short, a life of power between walls of iron and crystal.

496
00:44:44,400 --> 00:44:50,520
Nothing is more beautiful than a great, humming power station, holding back the
hydraulic pressures

497
00:44:50,520 --> 00:44:57,240
of a whole mountain range and the electric power for a whole landscape, synthesised
in control panels,

498
00:44:57,240 --> 00:45:00,880
bristling with levers, gleaming commutators.

499
00:45:22,840 --> 00:45:26,760
The artists who gathered round Marinetti before the First World War

500
00:45:26,760 --> 00:45:30,440
were the core of the futurist group and some of them would soon be dead.

501
00:45:30,440 --> 00:45:35,960
The most gifted of them, Umberto Boccioni, fell off his horse and was killed in
1916

502
00:45:35,960 --> 00:45:40,320
in the war which he and Marinetti had praised as the hygiene of civilisation.

503
00:45:40,320 --> 00:45:44,880
But in the meantime, he had produced some extraordinary images,

504
00:45:44,880 --> 00:45:49,440
none more so than The City Rises, his peon of joy to industry and heavy
construction,

505
00:45:49,440 --> 00:45:53,440
with its straining cables and draft horses and plunging figures.

506
00:45:57,760 --> 00:46:00,760
But the problem was how to represent movement.

507
00:46:02,960 --> 00:46:06,120
For that, the futurist resorted to photography,

508
00:46:06,120 --> 00:46:11,480
especially the sequential photographs published by the French pioneer, Etienne-
Jules Marey.

509
00:46:13,120 --> 00:46:17,240
By giving you the successive positions of a figure on one plate,

510
00:46:17,240 --> 00:46:21,040
these photos introduce time into space.

511
00:46:24,120 --> 00:46:27,560
The body left its own memory in the air.

512
00:46:27,560 --> 00:46:32,320
400 years before, Leonardo had bought birds in the Florentine market

513
00:46:32,320 --> 00:46:36,040
and let them go to study the beat of their wings for a few seconds.

514
00:46:36,040 --> 00:46:42,000
Now the cameras of Marey and Edward Muybridge could describe this world of unseen
movement.

515
00:46:42,000 --> 00:46:46,840
Some of Giacomo Balla's paintings were almost transcriptions of their photographs.

516
00:46:46,840 --> 00:46:51,680
This one, for instance, is entitled Swift Paths Of Movement And Dynamic Sequences.

517
00:47:08,480 --> 00:47:12,320
Dynamism Of A Dog On A Leash was a glimpse of boulevard life

518
00:47:12,320 --> 00:47:16,320
with a fashionable lady, or, at any rate, her feet, trotting her dachshund,

519
00:47:16,320 --> 00:47:21,520
a low-slung, modern animal, that sports car of the dog world, along the pavement.

520
00:47:21,520 --> 00:47:24,280
FOOTSTEPS

521
00:47:25,720 --> 00:47:27,600
DOG BARKS

522
00:47:34,600 --> 00:47:40,960
Watching a virtuoso's rapid fingers, gave Balla the clue for Rhythms Of A
Violinist.

523
00:47:48,040 --> 00:47:51,520
As well as movement, they wanted to paint noise.

524
00:47:51,520 --> 00:47:56,520
This painting of Boccioni's is called The Noise Of The Street Penetrates The House.

525
00:47:56,520 --> 00:48:02,400
Futurism loved any noise that was dissonant, loud or made by a machine.

526
00:48:02,400 --> 00:48:06,400
The most ambitious effort to paint equivalents for sound and movement

527
00:48:06,400 --> 00:48:09,800
was Gino Severini's picture of a cabaret in Paris,

528
00:48:09,800 --> 00:48:14,320
where he and the cubists used to go, the Bal Tabarin.

529
00:48:14,320 --> 00:48:18,280
Like them, Severini loved common, popular entertainment.

530
00:48:50,480 --> 00:48:54,920
But not every artist had that kind of straightforward optimism about the machine.

531
00:48:54,920 --> 00:48:58,720
There were some that viewed it with more irony and detachment...

532
00:48:58,720 --> 00:49:01,000
more like voyeurs than participants,
533
00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:04,520
because they perceived that the thing was more than a tool...

534
00:49:04,520 --> 00:49:07,560
more than simply an extension of the manufacturing self.

535
00:49:07,560 --> 00:49:14,000
Having been made by man, it had become a perverse but substantially accurate self-
portrait.

536
00:49:14,000 --> 00:49:18,600
Such was the implication of Francis Picabia's work, and of Marcel Duchamp's.

537
00:49:18,600 --> 00:49:24,040
The machine, as Picabia put it in one of his titles, is the daughter born without a
mother,

538
00:49:24,040 --> 00:49:29,440
a modern counterpart to the Virgin birth in which Christ, the son, was born without
a father.

539
00:49:29,440 --> 00:49:32,640
Machinery parodied both sex and religion.

540
00:49:32,640 --> 00:49:37,960
It contained limitless possibilities for giving offence, which Picabia was born to
do.

541
00:49:39,640 --> 00:49:44,000
Picabia was one of those men, almost a modernist invention in themselves,

542
00:49:44,000 --> 00:49:46,720
who was locked in a struggle with the very idea of art.

543
00:49:46,720 --> 00:49:49,800
He wanted to laugh, the notion of painting to death.

544
00:49:49,800 --> 00:49:54,320
He had a strong sense of myth, and he couldn't find another outlet for it.

545
00:49:54,320 --> 00:49:57,720
The myth was that of the machine as man's counterpart.

546
00:49:57,720 --> 00:50:00,720
It obsessed Picabia. It was his main amusement.
547
00:50:00,720 --> 00:50:03,800
He married rich and he bought one fast car after another,

548
00:50:03,800 --> 00:50:07,360
as though he were trying to turn himself into a mechanical centaur.

549
00:50:07,360 --> 00:50:11,840
It was also the theme of his art, the body as machine.

550
00:50:11,840 --> 00:50:17,320
In 1914, he painted an enormous image of a sexual encounter with a dancer,

551
00:50:17,320 --> 00:50:20,880
called I See Again In Memory My Dear Udnie.

552
00:50:20,880 --> 00:50:25,560
The 19th-century novelist, Joris Huysmans foresaw it, in a way, when he wrote...

553
00:50:25,560 --> 00:50:29,800
Look at the machine, the play of pistons and the cylinders.

554
00:50:29,800 --> 00:50:34,400
They are steel Romeos inside cast-iron Juliets.

555
00:50:34,400 --> 00:50:39,320
The ways of human expression are in no way different to the back and forth of our
machines.

556
00:50:39,320 --> 00:50:44,800
This is a law to which one must pay homage unless one is either impotent or a
saint.

557
00:50:44,800 --> 00:50:47,160
Picabia was neither.

558
00:50:47,160 --> 00:50:49,360
He had a flare for the old in, out.

559
00:50:49,360 --> 00:50:51,680
Mechanical sex, mechanical self.

560
00:50:51,680 --> 00:50:55,440
No wonder Picabia's machine portrait still looks so very sardonic.
561
00:50:55,440 --> 00:50:58,040
The machine is amoral.

562
00:50:58,040 --> 00:50:59,960
Its movements are programmed.

563
00:50:59,960 --> 00:51:03,840
It can only act, and nobody wants to be compared to a mechanical slave.

564
00:51:06,080 --> 00:51:11,320
Marcel Duchamp would push the machine metaphor even further before giving up art
for chess.

565
00:51:11,320 --> 00:51:17,400
Duchamp had played with every existing art movement and predicted a number of those
to come.

566
00:51:17,400 --> 00:51:22,160
Well, when you are 15 and paint like the impressionists,

567
00:51:22,160 --> 00:51:25,560
you are experimenting with yourself, with people,

568
00:51:25,560 --> 00:51:31,120
you know what you're going to do, you don't know even if you are going to do
anything else.

569
00:51:31,120 --> 00:51:37,080
It took me ten years or more to change the style, or at least to say,

570
00:51:37,080 --> 00:51:41,760
"Well, there's nothing more in the impressionist to find,"

571
00:51:41,760 --> 00:51:45,400
and I tried to find something else.

572
00:51:45,400 --> 00:51:48,720
I first went through fauvism,

573
00:51:48,720 --> 00:51:54,280
I went through cubism, and then, only 1912, or '13,

574
00:51:54,280 --> 00:51:57,560
I found, more or less, what I wanted to do,
575
00:51:57,560 --> 00:52:03,840
which would not be influenced by movements that I had been through, you see.

576
00:52:03,840 --> 00:52:08,680
The Nude Descending A Staircase is one of the half dozen most famous paintings of
our century.

577
00:52:08,680 --> 00:52:13,240
It's a transcription of movement based, again, on Marey's photographs.

578
00:52:13,240 --> 00:52:15,560
As cubism, it's quite academic.

579
00:52:26,840 --> 00:52:31,400
When the American press saw it, it was seized on as a supreme joke

580
00:52:31,400 --> 00:52:35,800
but the cubists themselves, back in Paris, were not amused.

581
00:52:37,320 --> 00:52:40,320
When I came with my Nude Descending The Staircase,

582
00:52:40,320 --> 00:52:43,480
they didn't see that it applied to their theory.

583
00:52:43,480 --> 00:52:47,840
In other words, not an illustration of THEIR theory and, in fact,

584
00:52:47,840 --> 00:52:49,840
it had more...

585
00:52:49,840 --> 00:52:52,240
and cubism had the idea of movement,

586
00:52:52,240 --> 00:52:55,680
which the futurists had at the same time,

587
00:52:55,680 --> 00:53:00,000
so they thought it was too much, neither one,

588
00:53:00,000 --> 00:53:03,800
nor futurist, nor cubism and they condemned it.

589
00:53:03,800 --> 00:53:07,880
But it did open up the way to Duchamp's most influential work,

590
00:53:07,880 --> 00:53:11,880
The Large Glass, which he left unfinished after eight years.

591
00:53:11,880 --> 00:53:17,880
Like the Nude, the Glass treated the body as a mechanical object. Why on glass?
Duchamp explained.

592
00:53:17,880 --> 00:53:20,960
Because of, mainly, the transparency of the glass.

593
00:53:20,960 --> 00:53:25,920
I wanted to... I had always noticed that the trouble with an oil painting,

594
00:53:25,920 --> 00:53:29,520
an easel painting, is, you never know how to do the background.

595
00:53:29,520 --> 00:53:34,360
You make a portrait or you make some scene, some still life,

596
00:53:34,360 --> 00:53:38,360
and then comes the background. What are you going to do in the background?

597
00:53:38,360 --> 00:53:42,200
You put something in the background and it's always false,

598
00:53:42,200 --> 00:53:45,560
or at least, very seldom justified.

599
00:53:45,560 --> 00:53:47,920
It's just filling up the canvas.

600
00:53:47,920 --> 00:53:50,200
With the glass, you don't have to do that.

601
00:53:50,200 --> 00:53:53,880
The glass is just transparent and you put anything behind you wish,

602
00:53:53,880 --> 00:53:57,240
and you change it every day, if you wish, as well.

603
00:53:57,240 --> 00:54:00,320
And that was, for me, an element of novelty,
604
00:54:00,320 --> 00:54:02,840
to convince me I could go on.

605
00:54:02,840 --> 00:54:06,520
There's also some kind of literary part to it,

606
00:54:06,520 --> 00:54:11,240
how it was intended to have every item on the glass,

607
00:54:11,240 --> 00:54:13,320
every design on the glass,

608
00:54:13,320 --> 00:54:18,640
explained with a language... with language, with words.

609
00:54:18,640 --> 00:54:22,000
It was nothing spontaneous about it,

610
00:54:22,000 --> 00:54:26,600
which of course is a great objection on the part of aestheticians.

611
00:54:26,600 --> 00:54:30,120
They want the subconscious to speak by itself.

612
00:54:30,120 --> 00:54:32,400
I don't. Don't care.

613
00:54:32,400 --> 00:54:35,160
And it was the opposite in that way.

614
00:54:35,160 --> 00:54:41,160
So at the end of eight years, even not finished, I stopped.

615
00:54:41,160 --> 00:54:44,080
I decided to stop.

616
00:54:44,080 --> 00:54:47,160
So, what is this thing?

617
00:54:47,160 --> 00:54:49,120
Well, it's a machine,

618
00:54:49,120 --> 00:54:54,560
but we'd be better off calling it a project for an unfinished contraption
619
00:54:54,560 --> 00:54:57,760
that could never be built because its use was never clear,

620
00:54:57,760 --> 00:55:01,160
because, in turn, it parodies the language and forms of science

621
00:55:01,160 --> 00:55:05,400
without the slightest regard for scientific probability or cause or effect.

622
00:55:05,400 --> 00:55:08,880
Supposing that an engineer were to use this thing as a blueprint.

623
00:55:08,880 --> 00:55:10,280
He'd be in deep trouble

624
00:55:10,280 --> 00:55:13,080
because The Large Glass is never explicit,

625
00:55:13,080 --> 00:55:17,240
and looked at from the point of view of technical systems, it's simply absurd.

626
00:55:17,240 --> 00:55:19,480
The notes that Duchamp left to go with it

627
00:55:19,480 --> 00:55:24,960
are the most scrambled instruction manual that you can imagine, but they're
deliberately scrambled.

628
00:55:24,960 --> 00:55:29,400
For instance, he talked about the thing running on a mythical fuel of his own
invention

629
00:55:29,400 --> 00:55:33,840
called "love gasoline", which passed through filters into feeble cylinders

630
00:55:33,840 --> 00:55:40,320
which activated a desire motor, none of which would really have meant very much to
Henry Ford.

631
00:55:40,320 --> 00:55:46,720
But this was a meta-machine that takes us away from the real world of machinery
into that of allegory,

632
00:55:46,720 --> 00:55:51,880
with the naked bride up there perpetually disrobing herself in the top half,

633
00:55:51,880 --> 00:55:55,760
and down below, the poor little bachelors in their empty jackets,

634
00:55:55,760 --> 00:56:00,880
endlessly grinding away, signalling their frustration to the girl above them.

635
00:56:00,880 --> 00:56:05,000
In fact, this thing is an allegory of profane love,

636
00:56:05,000 --> 00:56:11,080
which, Marcel Duchamp would have us believe, is the only sort that is left in the
20th century.

637
00:56:11,080 --> 00:56:17,320
Its real text was written by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation Of Dreams,
published in 1900.

638
00:56:17,320 --> 00:56:21,160
"The imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus,"

639
00:56:21,160 --> 00:56:24,080
said Freud, "lends itself to symbolisation

640
00:56:24,080 --> 00:56:29,040
"by every sort of indescribably complicated machinery."

641
00:56:29,040 --> 00:56:33,240
But the male mechanism of The Large Glass is not imposing at all.

642
00:56:33,240 --> 00:56:36,400
The bachelors are just uniforms, like marionettes.

643
00:56:36,400 --> 00:56:41,480
According to Duchamp's notes, they try to indicate their desire to the bride

644
00:56:41,480 --> 00:56:47,280
by making the chocolate-grinder turn, and it grinds out an imaginary milky stuff
like semen,

645
00:56:47,280 --> 00:56:49,800
which squirts out through those rings

646
00:56:49,800 --> 00:56:54,120
but can't get into the bride's half of the glass because of that bar,

647
00:56:54,120 --> 00:56:57,440
and so the bride is condemned always to tease,

648
00:56:57,440 --> 00:57:00,480
and the bachelor's fate is endless masturbation.

649
00:57:00,480 --> 00:57:04,560
In one sense, the bride stripped bare is a glimpse into Hell,

650
00:57:04,560 --> 00:57:07,880
a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.

651
00:57:07,880 --> 00:57:11,000
But you could also see it as a declaration of freedom,

652
00:57:11,000 --> 00:57:17,600
if you recall the crushing taboos against masturbation that were in force when
Duchamp was young.

653
00:57:17,600 --> 00:57:20,240
It was the symbol of rebellion against parents

654
00:57:20,240 --> 00:57:23,960
and, to that extent, The Large Glass is a free machine,

655
00:57:23,960 --> 00:57:27,320
or at least a defiant machine,

656
00:57:27,320 --> 00:57:31,400
but it was also a sad machine, a testament to indifference,

657
00:57:31,400 --> 00:57:34,160
that emotion of which Duchamp was the master.

658
00:57:34,160 --> 00:57:39,080
When The Large Glass was broken in its crate while being shipped, how did he feel?

659
00:57:39,080 --> 00:57:40,760
Nothing. Not much.

660
00:57:40,760 --> 00:57:42,880
I was...
661
00:57:42,880 --> 00:57:44,760
Well, no, I was not.

662
00:57:44,760 --> 00:57:47,480
Because I'm fatalist, maybe.

663
00:57:47,480 --> 00:57:51,120
Enough to take anything else that can go wrong.

664
00:57:51,120 --> 00:57:54,680
Unfortunately, a little later, when I look at the breaks,

665
00:57:54,680 --> 00:57:56,800
I love the breaks.

666
00:57:56,800 --> 00:58:01,520
It happened to be that two panes, the glass panes on top of one another,

667
00:58:01,520 --> 00:58:03,880
with paint on it, holding a bit,

668
00:58:03,880 --> 00:58:08,400
when they break on the vibration of being transported flat, you see,

669
00:58:08,400 --> 00:58:10,760
on a...on a truck,

670
00:58:10,760 --> 00:58:17,480
the breaks take a similar direction in the two panes,

671
00:58:17,480 --> 00:58:20,160
so when you put them on top of one another,

672
00:58:20,160 --> 00:58:26,400
they seem to continue the same breaks as though I had done it on purpose.

673
00:58:26,400 --> 00:58:29,600
Duchamp's finely tuned indifference is one of the divides

674
00:58:29,600 --> 00:58:33,560
between the late machine age and the time in which we live.

675
00:58:33,560 --> 00:58:37,880
The Large Glass was a long way from the optimism and the sense of possibility
676
00:58:37,880 --> 00:58:41,600
with which greater painters but less sophisticated men than Duchamp

677
00:58:41,600 --> 00:58:46,960
greeted the machine in those long, lost days before World War I.

678
00:58:46,960 --> 00:58:50,880
The machinery was now turned on its inventors and their children.

679
00:58:50,880 --> 00:58:55,200
After 40 years of continuous peace in Europe, the worst war in history

680
00:58:55,200 --> 00:58:58,760
cancelled the playful good technology.

681
00:58:59,800 --> 00:59:02,600
The myth of the future went into shock

682
00:59:02,600 --> 00:59:07,760
and European art moved into its years of irony, disgust and protest.

683
00:59:47,600 --> 00:59:51,640
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

684
00:59:51,640 --> 00:59:55,680
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk