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MUSIC: "Theme 21" by Peter Howell

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One of the themes of 19th century romantic art was the world and the spirit,

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experiences that go beyond or below our conscious control.

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The grandeur of the outer world, seen as a sacred place,

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as the trace of God's creation

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and the conflicts and terrors of the inner one,

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the unsatisfied self.

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The search for these precarious images of man and nature

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was one of the great projects that the 19th century bequeathed to modernism.

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BIRDS TWEET

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From classical times, through many centuries of Christianity,

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man and nature were considered to be in the reliable, pastoral care of God.

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But in the 19th century, God died,

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and artists weren't feeling too well, either.

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Strangely enough, it was in this idyllic landscape
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that one great painter, in his last years before suicide,

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was to express his own sense of isolation in the world.

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This is the lunatic asylum at St-Remy-de-Provence

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in the South of France, near Arles.

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For a year and eight days, from May 1899 to May 1890,

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Vincent Van Gogh was under treatment here.

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Just what his illness was, nobody to this day is quite sure.

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The one aspect of its symptoms that everybody knows about

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was that he cut off his earlobe

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and gave it to a prostitute in Arles.

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He suffered, as they say, from manic depression,

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which is an opaque way of skirting an issue

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that we still don't understand.

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"Though you continually hear terrible cries and howls, like beasts in a menagerie,

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"in spite of that, people get to know each other very well

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"and help each other when their attacks come on.

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"When I'm working in the garden they all come to look,

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"and I assure you, they have more discretion and good manners to leave me alone

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"than the good people of the town of Arles."

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The garden and the asylum look much as they did in Van Gogh's time.

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Even his irises are still there.

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"There are people who love nature, even though they are cracked or ill.

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"Those are the painters.

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"Then there are those who like what is made by men's hands,

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"and these even go so far as to like pictures.

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"Though here there are some patients very seriously ill,

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"the fear and horror of madness that I used to have

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"is already much lessened."

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He suffered from agonising fits of paranoia

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and a kind of paralysis of the will, accompanied by hallucinations,

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during which he couldn't work at all.

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And these were separated by long, clear months during which he could and did,

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which were in turn punctuated

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by the most extraordinary moments of visionary insight.

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At such moments, everything he saw was swept up in a current of energy.

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Everything he sees is made from the same plasma.

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The moon comes out of eclipse, the stars blaze,

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the sky heaves like the ocean and the cypresses move with it.

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Van Gogh's cypresses are like thick, dark, lightening conductors

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grounding the energies of the sky and the earth.

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They are alive as no painted tree had ever been

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and as no real cypress could be.

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"The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts.

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"It astonishes me that they have never been done as I see them.
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"The cypress is as beautiful in line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk,

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"a splash of black in a sunny landscape."

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Outside the asylum walls, you can walk in Van Gogh's olive grove

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and measure the way that he changed it,

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inventing the form of the dry grasses and the flickering blue shadows on them

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and turning the olive trunks themselves into shapes,

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like human bodies grown old and arthritic with work.

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Again, the continuous field of energy pouring through the light

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rising from the ground, solidifying in the trunks.

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You can see his landscapes motif by motif

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without necessarily seeing what he saw.

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But Van Gogh's sense of the power behind the natural world was so strong

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that once you have seen the paintings,

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you have no choice but to see the real places in terms of them.

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CHURCH BELLS RING
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Another artist might've found these landscapes of twisted grey limestone

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formless, unpaintable.

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What Van Gogh found in them was a perfect unity

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between the shapes of those strangely distorted rocks,

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their fierce plasticity and the details within them -

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the grain of the rock, how it scooped and veined,

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how it resembles the grain of old olive roots, silvery-grey, too.

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How the far shape is echoed in the close detail

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and how both accord with the sharp linear strokes of his brush.

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One of his favourite sites was over the Plaine de la Crau,

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whose flat fields and furrows and trees were, he said,

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as infinite as the sea, only better because people lived on them.

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To draw them, he used an amazing range of notation -

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every shape suggested by a different dot or stroke or squiggle,

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everything seen, nothing generalised about.

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Few drawings have this richness of surface.

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It feels as though the life of the landscape is bursting through the paper

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so that the brown ink becomes almost as eloquent as the colour in his paintings.

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Van Gogh's paintings were not the work of a madman.

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They were done by an ecstatic, who was also a great formal artist.

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Today, the doctors would give him lithium and tranquillisers

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and we wouldn't have the paintings perhaps - we don't know.

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For Van Gogh confronted the world with a kind of insecure joy.

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Nature was to him both exquisite and terrible.

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It consoled him but it was his judge.

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It was the fingerprint of God,

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but the finger was always pointed at him.

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Sometimes the eye of God was, too,

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the yellow disc of the sun, huge and merciless,

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the emblem of Apollo.

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What Van Gogh called "the gravity of great sunlight effects"

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filled his work not only with a flood of colour

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but also with a symbolism that one can only call religious,

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the idea that human life is lived within an immense exterior will

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and that work like sewing and reaping is not simply work

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but an allegory of life and death.

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"I saw in this reaper

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"a vague figure, struggling like a devil in great heat to finish his task.

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"I saw then in it the image of death,

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"in the sense that humanity would be the wheat one reaps.

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"So it is, if you like, the opposite of the sewer I had tried before.

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"I find it strange that I saw like this

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"through the iron bars of a cell."

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Such things did not come by chance.
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Van Gogh knew what he was looking for when he came South and, of course, he found
it,

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bringing the high spiritual ambitions of a northern romantic from Holland

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into a landscape of the senses.

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He went there, he wrote...

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"Because not only in Africa but from Arles onward,

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"you are bound to find beautiful contrasts of red and green,

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"of blue and orange, of sulphur and lilac,

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"and all true colourists must come to this,

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"must admit that there is another kind of colour than that of the north."

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There was, and he fixed it as no artist has done before or since.

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Van Gogh was 37 when he shot himself,

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but in the last four years of his life, he changed the history of art.

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The freedom of modernist colour, the way emotions are worked upon directly by
optical means

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was one of his legacies, as it was Gauguin's, too.

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But Van Gogh had taken this even further than Gauguin

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because he had opened up the modernist syntax to pity and terror

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as well as to formal research and pleasure.

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He was the hinge upon which 19th century romanticism

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turned into 20th century expressionism,

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and as he lay dying, another artist -

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ten years younger and many hundreds of miles to the north -

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was preparing to take this process a step further.

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In Van Gogh's work, you can see the self scratching to be let out.

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But in Edward Munch's, the self is out.

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And if that bony Norwegian face, which he scrutinised and painted for 70 years,

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starting like a young pastor and going through the stages of bohemia and middle age

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to finish like a paranoid old Viking,

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if that face still haunts us,

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it is because Munch was the first modern painter
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to explore the idea of the self as a battleground.

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25 years ago, there was not a general agreement about Munch's greatness.

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People who should've known better

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kept on thinking of him as a sort of gaunt, psychotic troll

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whose obsessive self-inspection didn't make much sense below the Arctic Circle.

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But today he seems in every way as universal an artist as Ibsen or Strindberg.

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He was almost literally raised in the family sick room

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in a dreadful atmosphere of whispers, silences, vomit and carbolic acid.

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"Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle.

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"In my childhood, I felt always that I was treated in an unjust way,

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"without a mother, sick

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"and with threatened punishment in hell hanging over my head."

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A great deal of Munch's creative life was spent exorcising the demons of childhood
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the sick room, the praying faces,

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the small twisting hands of anxious women,

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the terrible apprehension that went with Munch's use of illness

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as a central metaphor of visionary insight -

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these surface in the paintings over and over again.

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So does the fear of women.

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Munch thought they were vampires, forces and not social beings.

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They meant jealousy, misery, tension and the loss of precious bodily fluids.

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He imagined love as the losing struggle of the male against the female mantis.

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He felt that men only had two choices - to be castrated by a femme fatale

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or get rejected by a virgin.

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This painting, "Puberty", carries the clearest of messages -

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sex is ominous and hateful.

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Munch's work oscillated between fantasies of rape

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and visions of woman as an invincible devourer.

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In his "Madonna", you can almost see the feet sticking out of her mouth.

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When Munch was at the height of his powers,

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this was his summer studio at Asgardstrand,

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a couple of hours by car today outside Oslo.

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Before Van Gogh, cypresses were just trees

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and before Munch, this was just a stony provincial beach

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with a grey horizon and a pier

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and rocks and trees coming down to the water.

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But what he made it into was one of the emblematic landscapes of the modern mind.

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In his hands, it came to stand for alienation and loss and yearning.

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"My whole life has been spent

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"walking by the side of a bottomless chasm,

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"jumping from stone to stone.

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"Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path

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"and join the swirling mainstream of life,

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"but I always find myself drawn inexorably back
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"towards the chasm's edge,

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"and there I shall walk

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"until the day I finally fall into the abyss."

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"For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety

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"which I have tried to express in my art.

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"Without anxiety and illness,

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"I should've been like a ship without a rudder."

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Munch was one of the fathers of expressionism,

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which was less a style or a unified movement than an attitude of mind.

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The idea that reality was so distant and somehow ungraspable,

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that great leaps of emotion must bridge the gap

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and that the only secure point in a hostile or indifferent world

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was the artist's self.

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Munch's sense of estrangement in the crowd filled his images of the city.

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"I can see behind everyone's masks.
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"Peacefully smiling faces,

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"pale corpses who endlessly wend their torturous way

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"down the road that leads to the grave."

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This feeling of anxiety and helplessness in the face of big cities

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was not confined to Munch or to Oslo.

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Since the mid-19th century, the image of the metropolis as the devourer of souls,

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a place of lonely crowds and artificial distractions,

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had been seeping into art and poetry.

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Soon it would be the main backdrop for European culture.

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Charles Baudelaire addressed Paris as his "ant-swarming city,

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"city full of dreams, where in broad day the spectre tugs your sleeve."

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MUSIC: "Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra Opus 12" by Kurt Weill

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From the crowded boulevards and cafes of Paris,

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a peculiarly ironic view of life was emerging

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based on disposable style, dandiest display,

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fleeting encounters.

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The grimy eddies of social mixture replaced the ordered pyramid of rural France

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and they found their painter in Henri de Toulouse Lautrec.

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In Lautrec's scenes of lowlife at the Moulin Rouge,

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the face literally becomes the mask.

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The Belgian painter James Ensor also picked up that image,

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using it to convey the idea that society was not only unreal

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but a sort of demonic carnival, a collective of threatening masks.

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Art is less spontaneous than we think

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and there is no such thing as serious art without a formal language.

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But the question was, where did one go for the language of extreme emotion,

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the human shapes of loss and fright?

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Actors? Medical textbooks?

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Where?

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Well, curiously enough,

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one of the solutions that Munch found

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would seem to have been archaeology.

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The cultures that Spain had destroyed in South America in the 16th century

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were beginning to acquire a certain amount of popular glamour in Paris in the late
19th -

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Incas, gold, lost cities and the jungle, all that kind of thing.

242
00:17:03,400 --> 00:17:08,320
Now, one of the minor sensations of the great Paris Exposition of 1889

243
00:17:08,320 --> 00:17:10,800
was this Inca mummy,

244
00:17:10,800 --> 00:17:13,360
which had been dug up in Peru.

245
00:17:13,360 --> 00:17:15,200
It was buried in the foetal position,

246
00:17:15,200 --> 00:17:17,800
which is to us - I don't know about the Incas -

247
00:17:17,800 --> 00:17:23,400
the archetypal emblem of fright and the desire for security.

248
00:17:23,400 --> 00:17:26,120
Paul Gauguin saw it at the Exposition

249
00:17:26,120 --> 00:17:29,240
and he was so moved by it that he copied it.

250
00:17:33,080 --> 00:17:35,400
Munch was also very moved by it,
251
00:17:35,400 --> 00:17:38,000
as so it is to this withered foetus that used to be a man,

252
00:17:38,000 --> 00:17:43,760
that we owe probably the most famous image of neurosis in the history of art -

253
00:17:43,760 --> 00:17:46,600
The Scream.

254
00:17:46,600 --> 00:17:51,360
"I stopped and leaned against the railing, half dead with fatigue.

255
00:17:51,360 --> 00:17:54,800
"Over the grey-blue fjord the clouds hung,

256
00:17:54,800 --> 00:17:58,600
"red as blood and tongues of flame.

257
00:17:58,600 --> 00:18:01,200
"Alone and trembling with fear,

258
00:18:01,200 --> 00:18:05,040
"I experienced nature's great scream."

259
00:18:06,400 --> 00:18:08,800
BRAKES SCREECH

260
00:18:13,200 --> 00:18:16,000
This theme of the city as a condenser of anxiety

261
00:18:16,000 --> 00:18:18,480
also ran through German expressionism

262
00:18:18,480 --> 00:18:21,200
in the years between the turn of the century and WWI,

263
00:18:21,200 --> 00:18:25,680
especially in the work of as group of artists which called itself Die Brucke,

264
00:18:25,680 --> 00:18:29,560
the bridge, meaning a bridge to the future.

265
00:18:29,560 --> 00:18:33,000
Their leader was a young painter named Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

266
00:18:33,000 --> 00:18:36,600
who transposed Munch's pessimism into Van Gogh's colour,

267
00:18:36,600 --> 00:18:39,000
added the influence of African carvings

268
00:18:39,000 --> 00:18:41,400
and took Berlin as his favourite subject -

269
00:18:41,400 --> 00:18:45,800
its streets, its dandies and its prostitutes.

270
00:18:45,800 --> 00:18:50,200
Kirchner's style, with its hatchings and sharp angles and harsh colour,

271
00:18:50,200 --> 00:18:52,400
was jittery and highly strung,

272
00:18:52,400 --> 00:18:55,600
a visual analogy to cocaine nerves.

273
00:18:55,600 --> 00:18:58,960
It was also rooted in a specifically German past -

274
00:18:58,960 --> 00:19:01,760
German gothic without the religious content,

275
00:19:01,760 --> 00:19:05,560
full of skinny unrepentant Mary Magdalenes.

276
00:19:05,560 --> 00:19:09,000
These predatory ladies are Munch's fatal women,

277
00:19:09,000 --> 00:19:12,160
raised to a pitch of style unknown in Norway,

278
00:19:12,160 --> 00:19:15,800
and they take the image of women as castrator one step further

279
00:19:15,800 --> 00:19:18,320
towards pure glamour.

280
00:19:18,320 --> 00:19:21,000
WOMAN SINGS IN GERMAN

281
00:20:07,480 --> 00:20:12,800
In pre-war Vienna, the leading expressionist was the painter and playwright Oskar
Kokoschka,

282
00:20:12,800 --> 00:20:17,400
whose early work, including his self portraits, was more baroque than gothic -

283
00:20:17,400 --> 00:20:19,000
high strung, elaborate,

284
00:20:19,000 --> 00:20:21,800
switching between elation and misery.

285
00:20:21,800 --> 00:20:24,800
They came out of the same milieu as Freud and Schoenberg,

286
00:20:24,800 --> 00:20:28,200
that brief moment when Vienna, in the decay of its empire,

287
00:20:28,200 --> 00:20:31,640
was one of the capitals of introspective modernism.

288
00:20:31,640 --> 00:20:33,560
Kokoschka lived to 1980,

289
00:20:33,560 --> 00:20:37,160
and in his 60s he talked about his ambitions as a painter.

290
00:20:37,160 --> 00:20:42,840
Life is so short and I want to squeeze every bit out of life.

291
00:20:42,840 --> 00:20:46,200
Like, to live in the light, to live under the sun

292
00:20:46,200 --> 00:20:50,000
is such a... such a very great gift.

293
00:20:50,000 --> 00:20:51,960
We forget it today.

294
00:20:51,960 --> 00:20:53,600
I am not a spectator.
295
00:20:53,600 --> 00:20:56,200
It's not the object that I want to paint.

296
00:20:56,200 --> 00:20:59,600
It's like an opera and you can see what happens.

297
00:20:59,600 --> 00:21:03,800
I want to participate. I identify myself with the object.

298
00:21:03,800 --> 00:21:08,840
Therefore, as much in midst of life I want to be.

299
00:21:08,840 --> 00:21:12,400
I am far away.

300
00:21:12,400 --> 00:21:17,000
I am not here, a sitting onlooker, a patient onlooker,

301
00:21:17,000 --> 00:21:19,800
I am active.

302
00:21:21,000 --> 00:21:26,600
This landscape is not so much different for me.

303
00:21:26,600 --> 00:21:30,200
I wander in the face, I wander in the landscape.

304
00:21:30,200 --> 00:21:36,000
I am a wanderer. I can't stay stiff and admire.

305
00:21:36,000 --> 00:21:41,160
I have to do something. I have to mix it up with myself.

306
00:21:41,160 --> 00:21:45,000
In the twisting hands and strained faces of Kokoschka's portraits,

307
00:21:45,000 --> 00:21:47,400
the artist becomes the sitter's accomplice,

308
00:21:47,400 --> 00:21:50,600
not by giving him or her a socially useful mask,

309
00:21:50,600 --> 00:21:56,440
but by admitting a shared neurosis, a kind of mutual outsidership.

310
00:22:08,800 --> 00:22:13,000
This very private, intimate contract between Kokoschka and his sitters

311
00:22:13,000 --> 00:22:15,400
was strongest of all in 1912

312
00:22:15,400 --> 00:22:17,920
when he painted himself with Alma Mahler,

313
00:22:17,920 --> 00:22:20,240
the great love of his life.

314
00:22:25,000 --> 00:22:28,200
His affair also inspired Kokoschka

315
00:22:28,200 --> 00:22:32,440
to paint what is still the key image of expressionist love - The Tempest.

316
00:22:32,440 --> 00:22:35,000
The two lovers whirled along in a cockleshell of a boat,

317
00:22:35,000 --> 00:22:37,400
not on the sea but in space,

318
00:22:37,400 --> 00:22:41,200
the shapes turbulent and broken, all high light and darkness,

319
00:22:41,200 --> 00:22:43,720
the air, the lovers' bodies and the boat

320
00:22:43,720 --> 00:22:47,800
caught up in the same ecstatic dislocation of form.

321
00:22:47,800 --> 00:22:50,800
MUSIC: "Symphony No 9" by Gustav Mahler

322
00:23:11,440 --> 00:23:16,480
The chief expressionist in France was a Polish Jew named Chaim Soutine.

323
00:23:16,480 --> 00:23:18,520
He was wretchedly poor

324
00:23:18,520 --> 00:23:21,800
and his art became a way of stealing substance from the world.

325
00:23:21,800 --> 00:23:23,560
He was obsessed with food,

326
00:23:23,560 --> 00:23:27,200
a scraggy chicken on a hook stared at for days,

327
00:23:27,200 --> 00:23:31,000
life seen as meat and as a preparation for death.

328
00:23:31,000 --> 00:23:34,040
MUSIC: "Oxygene" (Side 2 Part 4) Jean Michel Jarre

329
00:24:01,200 --> 00:24:05,000
Soutine could give the carcass of an ox the pathos of a crucifixion.

330
00:24:05,000 --> 00:24:07,640
In painting that mass of bone, meat and fat

331
00:24:07,640 --> 00:24:11,280
he was paying homage to Rembrandt, who had painted the same subject.

332
00:24:11,280 --> 00:24:14,520
But Soutine gave it an even more intense carnality,

333
00:24:14,520 --> 00:24:18,080
as though the thick painted self were also a paste of meat

334
00:24:18,080 --> 00:24:20,440
smeared on the canvas.

335
00:24:31,720 --> 00:24:33,200
His landscapes,

336
00:24:33,200 --> 00:24:38,520
particularly the ones he painted near Ceret in the South of France in 1920 to '22,

337
00:24:38,520 --> 00:24:42,400
are even more turbulent, like an extreme distortion of Van Gogh.

338
00:24:42,400 --> 00:24:46,560
The hills rear up, the houses lean like rags in a gale,
339
00:24:46,560 --> 00:24:49,280
the horizon strains against the sky

340
00:24:49,280 --> 00:24:53,760
and the whole scene becomes one mass of tumbling visceral paint.

341
00:24:54,720 --> 00:24:57,800
Soutine's brushwork looks like chicken guts.

342
00:24:57,800 --> 00:25:01,800
Never had a landscape been so transformed by emotion.

343
00:25:01,800 --> 00:25:03,400
The violence of the paint

344
00:25:03,400 --> 00:25:07,440
predicts the violence that would later surface in American abstract painting,

345
00:25:07,440 --> 00:25:10,440
but the images are still concrete.

346
00:25:25,200 --> 00:25:28,880
After the Second World War, the English painter Francis Bacon

347
00:25:28,880 --> 00:25:31,560
took up Soutine's theme of the dismembered carcass

348
00:25:31,560 --> 00:25:34,200
to set forth his own vision of a cannibal's world,

349
00:25:34,200 --> 00:25:38,160
from which all moral relationships had been erased.

350
00:25:39,120 --> 00:25:42,240
I have tried to be...

351
00:25:42,240 --> 00:25:46,400
..as realistic in my way as I can be.

352
00:25:46,400 --> 00:25:50,320
After all, you only have to think about life,

353
00:25:50,320 --> 00:25:53,760
or have experienced it in any way,
354
00:25:53,760 --> 00:25:58,800
or think about the meat on your plate

355
00:25:58,800 --> 00:26:05,560
to think how disturbing what is called reality is.

356
00:26:05,560 --> 00:26:09,880
And we are nearly... Everybody lives their life screened from it,

357
00:26:09,880 --> 00:26:15,120
and if my pictures seem to give over

358
00:26:15,120 --> 00:26:20,000
a kind of sense of violence or mortality,

359
00:26:20,000 --> 00:26:23,400
it's only in my attempt to be as realistic as I can.

360
00:26:23,400 --> 00:26:27,920
Mind you, when you talk about realism, I can only paint for myself.

361
00:26:27,920 --> 00:26:33,560
I don't paint for anybody else because you can't.

362
00:26:33,560 --> 00:26:38,000
You try to bring the thing back onto your own nervous system

363
00:26:38,000 --> 00:26:41,240
in its most poignant form.

364
00:26:43,400 --> 00:26:47,000
In Bacon, the ideal body of classical art is dismissed.

365
00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:51,240
The nude becomes a two-legged animal with addictions.

366
00:26:55,000 --> 00:26:57,080
One of his sources was photography,

367
00:26:57,080 --> 00:27:01,160
the early sequential photos of human action by Eadweard Muybridge.

368
00:27:01,160 --> 00:27:03,720
In Muybridge's book "Animal Locomotion",

369
00:27:03,720 --> 00:27:08,200
the naked body is studied with perfect detachment as a machine.

370
00:27:12,120 --> 00:27:17,560
Muybridge's are raw statements of movement.

371
00:27:17,560 --> 00:27:21,800
Because every way that a person moves, stands,

372
00:27:21,800 --> 00:27:24,400
moves their arms or anything else

373
00:27:24,400 --> 00:27:27,000
has not only its movement,

374
00:27:27,000 --> 00:27:29,000
but, you may say,

375
00:27:29,000 --> 00:27:34,120
all the implications of that movement, as well.

376
00:27:37,600 --> 00:27:41,400
In Bacon's paintings, all sexuality is turned into violence,

377
00:27:41,400 --> 00:27:44,400
a sort of dog-like grappling in closed rooms

378
00:27:44,400 --> 00:27:46,600
whose furnishings you can't identify.

379
00:27:46,600 --> 00:27:49,640
The bed suggests a cage or an operating table,

380
00:27:49,640 --> 00:27:53,600
the walls and floor are the colour of bad motels.

381
00:27:54,560 --> 00:27:57,880
Yet the fragments of a traditional lurk behind the images

382
00:27:57,920 --> 00:28:03,400
and one of Bacon's obsessive emblems was Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X.

383
00:28:03,400 --> 00:28:07,800
I was particularly obsessed

384
00:28:07,800 --> 00:28:14,000
by Velazquez's painting of the Pope

385
00:28:14,000 --> 00:28:20,760
and I was, at the same time, very interested...

386
00:28:20,760 --> 00:28:27,200
..by Eisenstein's photograph in Potemkin of the nurse.

387
00:28:27,200 --> 00:28:32,000
And I made a combination, which I think has been very unsuccessful,

388
00:28:32,000 --> 00:28:36,800
of the Pope screaming in the way of the nurse.

389
00:28:36,800 --> 00:28:41,200
Now, the scream was not to do with expressionism,

390
00:28:41,200 --> 00:28:45,280
because I am not expressionistic, I have nothing to express.

391
00:28:45,280 --> 00:28:50,600
I was absorbed by the idea of the colour of the mouth,

392
00:28:50,600 --> 00:28:52,800
the teeth, the saliva,

393
00:28:52,800 --> 00:28:55,800
you may say the beautiful red and purples

394
00:28:55,800 --> 00:28:58,200
of the interior rather of the mouth,

395
00:28:58,200 --> 00:29:03,000
rather like Monet was obsessed by haystacks

396
00:29:03,000 --> 00:29:06,720
and the light falling on them from hour to hour.

397
00:29:06,720 --> 00:29:09,280
In the face of paintings like this,
398
00:29:09,280 --> 00:29:13,440
you may well feel that Bacon has a great deal to express.

399
00:29:20,160 --> 00:29:24,200
The other important painter of the disquieting human figure in the '50s

400
00:29:24,200 --> 00:29:28,280
was a Dutchman who had emigrated to America, Willem de Kooning.

401
00:29:28,280 --> 00:29:31,800
His paintings of women came partly out of American ads,

402
00:29:31,800 --> 00:29:34,760
the white smiles and big dominating glamour girls

403
00:29:34,760 --> 00:29:38,400
in the lush pop landscape of America's post-war boom,

404
00:29:38,400 --> 00:29:40,480
Marilyn with shark teeth.

405
00:29:40,480 --> 00:29:43,800
- WOLF WHISTLE
- Hey, hey, Suzy Q,

406
00:29:43,800 --> 00:29:45,120
what's cooking with you?

407
00:29:45,120 --> 00:29:47,560
Your teeth look whiter than new, new, new!

408
00:29:47,560 --> 00:29:49,920
My teeth aren't new but my toothpaste is!

409
00:29:49,920 --> 00:29:54,400
New Pepsodent. Get with it. New package, new flavor,

410
00:29:54,400 --> 00:29:58,280
new formula, too, means brighter smile for me and you.

411
00:29:58,280 --> 00:30:00,520
# You'll wonder where the yellow went

412
00:30:00,520 --> 00:30:04,200
# When you brush your teeth With Pepsodent #

413
00:30:04,200 --> 00:30:06,120
Got the message?

414
00:30:06,120 --> 00:30:07,640
Like Kirchner's and Munch's,

415
00:30:07,640 --> 00:30:10,200
De Kooning's women are about anxiety.

416
00:30:10,200 --> 00:30:15,000
They take the expressionist fear of the fatal woman to an almost comic extreme -

417
00:30:15,000 --> 00:30:18,320
squat, broad, overwhelming and primitive,

418
00:30:18,320 --> 00:30:20,200
glimpsed but not analysed,

419
00:30:20,200 --> 00:30:24,840
the sex goddess changes into a fiercer and older kind of idol.

420
00:30:25,960 --> 00:30:31,120
It also was some kind of glimpse, like meeting one of those ladies.

421
00:30:31,120 --> 00:30:35,000
So when people say they are not really figures but they are landscapes,

422
00:30:35,000 --> 00:30:37,200
that's true to a certain extent.

423
00:30:37,200 --> 00:30:39,600
But they look fierce to me.

424
00:30:39,600 --> 00:30:44,400
Figures maybe, in a landscape, I don't know where exactly,

425
00:30:44,400 --> 00:30:47,360
not here, not there, but somewhere.

426
00:30:47,360 --> 00:30:52,000
I don't think that I'm expressing the world around me.

427
00:30:52,000 --> 00:30:55,400
You know, this real world, this so-called real world

428
00:30:55,400 --> 00:30:59,000
is just something you put up with, like everybody else.

429
00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:04,800
I am in my element and I... am a little bit out of this world.

430
00:31:04,800 --> 00:31:07,360
I'm in the real world.

431
00:31:07,360 --> 00:31:09,800
I'm on the beam.

432
00:31:09,800 --> 00:31:13,400
Because when I'm falling, I'm doing all right.

433
00:31:13,400 --> 00:31:16,400
When I'm slipping I say, "Hey, this is very interesting."

434
00:31:16,400 --> 00:31:20,200
It's when I'm standing upright that bothers me.

435
00:31:20,200 --> 00:31:23,720
I'm not doing so good. I'm stiff.

436
00:31:23,720 --> 00:31:28,200
As a matter of fact, I'm really slipping most of the time into that glimpse.

437
00:31:28,200 --> 00:31:33,040
That's a wonderful sensation, to slip into this glimpse.

438
00:31:33,040 --> 00:31:35,920
I'm like a slipping glimpser.

439
00:31:35,920 --> 00:31:39,800
This spontaneity of touch and looking, the slipping glimpse,

440
00:31:39,800 --> 00:31:43,800
ran all through De Kooning's work, both figurative and abstract.

441
00:31:43,800 --> 00:31:46,120
But he and Bacon were among the few artists
442
00:31:46,120 --> 00:31:49,720
who could handle expressionist distortion after WWII,

443
00:31:49,720 --> 00:31:54,160
because reality had now outstripped art.

444
00:31:54,160 --> 00:31:57,200
MUSIC: "Alpine Symphony" by Richard Strauss

445
00:32:35,320 --> 00:32:37,960
By the end of the war, the entire world knew

446
00:32:37,960 --> 00:32:40,520
what had been done in the death camps of Nazi Germany

447
00:32:40,520 --> 00:32:43,400
and there was no testimony that art could give

448
00:32:43,400 --> 00:32:46,080
that could rival the evidence of the photograph.

449
00:32:49,400 --> 00:32:53,000
Today, places like Dachau are their own monuments.

450
00:32:53,000 --> 00:32:57,680
But any distortion of the human body that an artist might make after 1945

451
00:32:57,680 --> 00:32:59,960
was going to have to bear comparison

452
00:32:59,960 --> 00:33:02,440
with what the Nazis had done to real bodies,

453
00:33:02,440 --> 00:33:06,400
and very few expressionist paintings could stand this strain.

454
00:33:06,400 --> 00:33:09,200
Here, photography was enough.

455
00:33:09,200 --> 00:33:12,480
Anything else would've seemed gratuitous.

456
00:33:24,520 --> 00:33:29,160
In the face of this, there seemed to be very little that art could say.
457
00:33:29,160 --> 00:33:33,480
What we understand about the Holocaust, we get from writing and photography.

458
00:33:33,480 --> 00:33:35,800
But art had very little to contribute,

459
00:33:35,800 --> 00:33:38,200
almost nothing of importance.

460
00:33:38,200 --> 00:33:41,200
The effects of this failure are still with us.

461
00:33:41,200 --> 00:33:45,160
After the war, there were very few people who believed that art could carry the
burden

462
00:33:45,160 --> 00:33:47,960
of major social meanings any more.

463
00:33:47,960 --> 00:33:51,720
There would be no more Goyas and Courbets.

464
00:33:51,720 --> 00:33:56,000
In the death camps, the only product, as far as art was concerned,

465
00:33:56,000 --> 00:33:57,640
was silence.

466
00:34:11,320 --> 00:34:13,000
Beside these horrors

467
00:34:13,000 --> 00:34:17,200
there were only two sources of uncontaminated images open to art -

468
00:34:17,200 --> 00:34:20,800
one was complete abstraction, the other was the natural world.

469
00:34:20,800 --> 00:34:24,800
Artists had been combining and recombining these for 30 years.

470
00:34:24,800 --> 00:34:27,880
MUSIC: "Phaedra" by Tangerine Dream

471
00:34:45,040 --> 00:34:47,080
Just before the First World War

472
00:34:47,080 --> 00:34:50,200
a group of German artists that called itself the Blue Rider

473
00:34:50,200 --> 00:34:54,160
had looked to pure nature for transcendental images.

474
00:34:54,160 --> 00:34:57,240
One of them was the painter Franz Marc.

475
00:34:58,200 --> 00:35:02,240
"I tried to heighten my feeling for the organic rhythm of all things,

476
00:35:02,240 --> 00:35:04,960
"tried to feel myself pantheistically

477
00:35:04,960 --> 00:35:07,960
"into the trembling and coursing of the blood in nature,

478
00:35:07,960 --> 00:35:11,360
"in trees, in animals, in the air.

479
00:35:11,360 --> 00:35:14,800
"I see no happier means to the animalising of art,

480
00:35:14,800 --> 00:35:18,520
"as I like to call it, than the animal picture."

481
00:35:44,640 --> 00:35:48,800
"Very early in life, I already found man ugly

482
00:35:48,800 --> 00:35:53,000
"and animals seemed to me cleaner and more beautiful.

483
00:35:53,000 --> 00:35:56,960
"But even in them, I discovered much that was unacceptable and ugly,

484
00:35:56,960 --> 00:36:01,000
"so that my art instinctively and out of inner compulsion

485
00:36:01,000 --> 00:36:04,960
"became increasingly schematic and abstract."
486
00:36:04,960 --> 00:36:08,200
Marc wrote that from the trenches in 1915.

487
00:36:08,200 --> 00:36:12,200
By then, he believed that abstraction was the only route to spiritual knowledge,

488
00:36:12,200 --> 00:36:15,560
and certainly it seems to have had a prophetic quality for him.

489
00:36:15,560 --> 00:36:19,800
In 1914, he painted this image called "Forms In Battle".

490
00:36:19,800 --> 00:36:22,280
Two years later, at the age of 36,

491
00:36:22,280 --> 00:36:25,440
he was killed at the Battle of Verdun.

492
00:36:30,040 --> 00:36:34,200
Paul Klee had been one of Marc's closest friends.

493
00:36:34,200 --> 00:36:37,880
He survived the war and went on to teach at the Bauhaus,

494
00:36:37,880 --> 00:36:39,320
and for another 20 years

495
00:36:39,320 --> 00:36:43,320
he would produce some of the most exquisite visions of nature in modern art.

496
00:36:43,320 --> 00:36:46,000
Small, witty, delicate and mysterious,

497
00:36:46,000 --> 00:36:51,000
his idea of the natural world was like the image in this watercolour "The Open
Book",

498
00:36:51,000 --> 00:36:54,400
page after page opening backwards into the centre,

499
00:36:54,400 --> 00:36:57,600
disclosing another world of growth and form.

500
00:36:57,600 --> 00:37:00,640
MUSIC: "Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky (Part 1)

501
00:38:02,240 --> 00:38:07,360
He loved to invent odd little hieroglyphs that signified unfamiliar corners of
nature.

502
00:38:07,360 --> 00:38:10,840
He was drawn to structures so small that the normal eye misses them -

503
00:38:10,840 --> 00:38:15,600
plant cells, seeds, plankton, diatoms.

504
00:38:15,600 --> 00:38:19,160
MUSIC: "Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky (Part II)

505
00:38:46,520 --> 00:38:50,400
He loved whimsy and the grotesque, as long as they weren't too scary.

506
00:38:50,400 --> 00:38:54,000
Seeing a man with a barrel organ at a fair led to this watercolour

507
00:38:54,000 --> 00:38:57,920
entitled "Dance You Monster To My Soft Song".

508
00:39:00,680 --> 00:39:02,280
But for all its waywardness,

509
00:39:02,280 --> 00:39:06,360
Klee's imagination was connected to deep strands in German romantic art,

510
00:39:06,360 --> 00:39:08,640
a vision of nature as sacramental,

511
00:39:08,640 --> 00:39:11,800
a gift of God, mysterious and benevolent.

512
00:39:11,800 --> 00:39:16,200
Hence his liking for subjects which had long been part of the romantic repertoire,

513
00:39:16,200 --> 00:39:20,800
icy mountains, for instance, with a stand of jagged pines.

514
00:39:21,760 --> 00:39:25,800
He used abstraction as a way of sharpening his perceptions of nature
515
00:39:25,800 --> 00:39:28,160
and ours, too.

516
00:39:32,360 --> 00:39:34,800
In fact, the central theme of Klee's work,

517
00:39:34,800 --> 00:39:38,720
to which his watercolours and paintings return over and over,

518
00:39:38,720 --> 00:39:40,400
is the garden of paradise -

519
00:39:40,400 --> 00:39:44,960
all life composed under the eye of natural order.

520
00:39:45,760 --> 00:39:49,000
Klee taught painting at the Bauhaus in Germany in the '20s

521
00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:51,200
and one of his colleagues there was the first artist

522
00:39:51,200 --> 00:39:55,360
to try to paint transcendental images that were completely abstract.

523
00:39:55,360 --> 00:39:58,640
His name was Wassily Kandinsky.

524
00:39:59,600 --> 00:40:02,320
Kandinsky was Russian. He came to art late.

525
00:40:02,320 --> 00:40:05,160
He didn't begin until he was past 30.

526
00:40:05,160 --> 00:40:07,840
Folk art and the Russian icon were his early influences

527
00:40:07,840 --> 00:40:11,400
and they showed in his bright patterns of flat colour.

528
00:40:11,400 --> 00:40:13,720
Of course, he'd looked at Fauve paintings, too,

529
00:40:13,720 --> 00:40:17,720
as you can see in this Kandinsky from the early 1900s.
530
00:40:17,720 --> 00:40:21,360
But gradually, the patterns become more abstract.

531
00:40:21,360 --> 00:40:25,800
These shapes are not immediately recognisable as women.

532
00:40:25,800 --> 00:40:27,400
But there they are,

533
00:40:27,400 --> 00:40:30,840
in the midst of a pastoral scene with animals.

534
00:40:35,440 --> 00:40:40,000
In the landscapes he painted at Murnau, near Munich, in 1908,

535
00:40:40,000 --> 00:40:42,200
the forms are broader and freer,

536
00:40:42,200 --> 00:40:45,600
the colour more localised and specific.

537
00:40:45,600 --> 00:40:49,200
"Colour directly influences the soul.

538
00:40:49,200 --> 00:40:53,000
"Colour is the keyboard - the eyes are the hammers,

539
00:40:53,000 --> 00:40:56,600
"the soul is the piano with many keys.

540
00:40:56,600 --> 00:40:59,120
"The artist is the hand that plays,

541
00:40:59,120 --> 00:41:03,440
"touching one key or another with purpose, to create vibrations.

542
00:41:03,440 --> 00:41:07,800
"So it follows that colour harmony must rest ultimately

543
00:41:07,800 --> 00:41:10,800
"on intentional playing upon the human soul.

544
00:41:10,800 --> 00:41:15,120
"This is one of the guiding principals of internal necessity."

545
00:41:15,120 --> 00:41:18,120
So the next step was pure abstraction.

546
00:41:18,120 --> 00:41:19,960
Kandinsky was a theosophist

547
00:41:19,960 --> 00:41:24,320
and he believed that the sins of man came from too much material reality.

548
00:41:24,320 --> 00:41:26,400
He thought an age of the spirit was coming

549
00:41:26,400 --> 00:41:29,360
and was sure the right art for it would be totally abstract,

550
00:41:29,360 --> 00:41:31,800
ideal and immaterial.

551
00:41:42,840 --> 00:41:45,880
MUSIC: "Syrinx" For Solo Flute by Claude Debussy

552
00:41:59,600 --> 00:42:03,600
Although Kandinsky painted his first abstract pictures around 1911,

553
00:42:03,600 --> 00:42:07,320
the natural world continued to offer images of another sort

554
00:42:07,320 --> 00:42:09,600
to both painters and sculptors.

555
00:42:09,600 --> 00:42:13,200
Some of the greatest images in modern art come from the tranquil assurance

556
00:42:13,200 --> 00:42:15,360
that however abstract you may get,

557
00:42:15,360 --> 00:42:18,800
there is no break between human culture and the natural order.

558
00:42:18,800 --> 00:42:23,600
The high priest of this feeling was the son of a Carpathian peasant.

559
00:42:23,600 --> 00:42:26,400
His name was Constantin Brancusi.

560
00:42:26,400 --> 00:42:29,800
He lived in Paris and died here in 1957.

561
00:42:29,800 --> 00:42:33,800
This was his studio, a place visibly sacred to tools

562
00:42:33,800 --> 00:42:37,640
and to the beauty of the marks that they make.

563
00:42:37,640 --> 00:42:40,600
Coming out of a strong craft background,

564
00:42:40,600 --> 00:42:43,920
Brancusi knew the nature of his substances very well -

565
00:42:43,920 --> 00:42:49,000
the qualities of bronze, timber, marble, limestone, plaster.

566
00:42:49,000 --> 00:42:52,000
He wanted his sculpture to have as substance

567
00:42:52,000 --> 00:42:55,800
the same perfection that his subjects had as organisms.

568
00:42:58,680 --> 00:43:02,400
What this rapturous feeling for the skin of materials produced

569
00:43:02,400 --> 00:43:06,400
was sculpture that declared itself in mass and in contour and surface

570
00:43:06,400 --> 00:43:08,600
but not in detail.

571
00:43:08,600 --> 00:43:12,560
It began to look as timeless and as perfect as a new laid egg.

572
00:43:12,560 --> 00:43:16,600
MUSIC: "Syrinx" For Solo Flute by Claude Debussy

573
00:43:29,600 --> 00:43:34,600
Brancusi wanted to find the most compressed form that still contained the subject.
574
00:43:34,600 --> 00:43:37,240
Not geometrical, always organic,

575
00:43:37,240 --> 00:43:42,200
like this stone fish, whose shape makes you see it slipping through layers of
water.

576
00:43:42,200 --> 00:43:45,600
Or the minimum form repeated, as in his endless columns,

577
00:43:45,600 --> 00:43:49,400
composed of units that, in theory, could keep going up forever.

578
00:43:49,400 --> 00:43:53,120
In every piece, the tightest possible image.

579
00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:33,040
Whereas for Brancusi nature was pure and clearly defined,

580
00:44:33,040 --> 00:44:36,120
there was an alternative tradition running through American painting

581
00:44:36,120 --> 00:44:40,040
that had its roots in grandeur and the mysteries of landscape.

582
00:44:41,800 --> 00:44:45,400
MUSIC: "Quiet City" by Aaron Copland

583
00:45:28,520 --> 00:45:31,920
In the 19th century, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River

584
00:45:31,920 --> 00:45:35,800
had come to typify what the American wilderness meant to artists.

585
00:45:35,800 --> 00:45:40,280
It represented the designs of God, his unedited manuscript.

586
00:46:20,520 --> 00:46:25,640
There was no question of painting a place like this as a metaphor of the human
soul.

587
00:46:25,640 --> 00:46:30,200
Human beings don't enter into it. No soul is that vast.

588
00:46:30,200 --> 00:46:32,200
To paint what you saw was enough,

589
00:46:32,200 --> 00:46:35,880
and this, I think, is the underlying reason why so much American romantic art

590
00:46:35,880 --> 00:46:38,400
from the 19th century to the mid 20th

591
00:46:38,400 --> 00:46:41,080
was less a description of the troubled self

592
00:46:41,080 --> 00:46:45,800
than a sustained homage to vastness and antiquity.

593
00:46:46,800 --> 00:46:50,880
MUSIC: "Alpine Symphony" by Richard Strauss

594
00:47:00,000 --> 00:47:02,080
Looking for images of the sublime,

595
00:47:02,080 --> 00:47:07,200
painters went even further west than the Grand Canyon to the valley of the
Yosemite.

596
00:47:07,200 --> 00:47:09,240
MUSIC CONTINUES

597
00:48:05,200 --> 00:48:07,520
The feelings set off by such places

598
00:48:07,520 --> 00:48:11,320
had been described by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

599
00:48:12,080 --> 00:48:15,000
"I become a transparent eyeball.

600
00:48:15,000 --> 00:48:16,600
"I am nothing.

601
00:48:16,600 --> 00:48:18,480
"I see all.

602
00:48:18,480 --> 00:48:22,800
"The currents of the universal being circulate through me.
603
00:48:22,800 --> 00:48:26,200
"I am part or parcel of God."

604
00:48:36,000 --> 00:48:39,400
Much later, an American evangelist said that his idea of God

605
00:48:39,400 --> 00:48:42,280
was a sort of luminous oblong blur.

606
00:48:42,280 --> 00:48:46,680
This was the unwitting text for the paintings of the American abstract
expressionist

607
00:48:46,680 --> 00:48:50,440
Mark Rothko in the 1950s.

608
00:48:55,640 --> 00:48:57,960
Rothko kept the format of landscape,

609
00:48:57,960 --> 00:49:01,480
the soft rectangles that can be red as sky and flat plain,

610
00:49:01,480 --> 00:49:05,000
sometimes with a bar like the horizon in between.

611
00:49:05,000 --> 00:49:07,680
But he gave the colour a kind of breathing intensity

612
00:49:07,680 --> 00:49:12,840
and that, more than any reference to landscape as such, is what the paintings are
about.

613
00:49:12,840 --> 00:49:16,080
They tried to suggest that transcendence of Emerson's,

614
00:49:16,080 --> 00:49:19,280
but through light and colour alone.

615
00:49:19,280 --> 00:49:22,560
There wasn't much direct landscape imagery in abstract expressionism,

616
00:49:22,560 --> 00:49:25,200
and the general line was to deny that it was there at all
617
00:49:25,200 --> 00:49:29,600
in case the paintings looked less radical and less abstract than they really were.

618
00:49:29,600 --> 00:49:32,000
But all the same, it was there in an oblique way

619
00:49:32,000 --> 00:49:35,760
and the form that it took was a concern with giant scale.

620
00:49:35,760 --> 00:49:38,720
A painting like this one, by Jackson Pollock,

621
00:49:38,720 --> 00:49:41,000
is almost large enough to walk into.

622
00:49:41,000 --> 00:49:43,600
The space it suggests is not just an illusion

623
00:49:43,600 --> 00:49:46,760
but a physical fact, at least in two dimensions.

624
00:49:46,760 --> 00:49:52,000
In it, the web of paint takes on a completely physical look, like nature itself.

625
00:49:52,000 --> 00:49:54,200
The eye can't take it in all at once.

626
00:49:54,200 --> 00:49:57,200
It goes from knot to knot, from skein to skein,

627
00:49:57,200 --> 00:49:59,400
assembling the details into a whole,

628
00:49:59,400 --> 00:50:02,840
as one assembles a landscape by looking at it.

629
00:50:09,960 --> 00:50:14,800
Now, abstract expressionism is less the creation of cowboys but of New York Jews -

630
00:50:14,800 --> 00:50:20,200
all the same space itself, radiant, optimistic, endless,

631
00:50:20,200 --> 00:50:22,200
very much an American myth
632
00:50:22,200 --> 00:50:25,800
and bound to affect them in some degree or another.

633
00:50:25,800 --> 00:50:28,800
And on Jackson Pollock, who was not a migrant's son

634
00:50:28,800 --> 00:50:31,800
but a native American from the western states,

635
00:50:31,800 --> 00:50:34,600
its effect was very large indeed.

636
00:50:34,600 --> 00:50:39,000
Pollock was the first American artist to influence the course of world art.

637
00:50:39,000 --> 00:50:43,160
For the last 10 years of his life, until he died in a car crash in 1956,

638
00:50:43,160 --> 00:50:47,400
he lived and worked on Long Island, outside New York.

639
00:50:47,400 --> 00:50:53,000
My painting is direct. I usually paint on the floor.

640
00:50:53,000 --> 00:50:59,800
I enjoy working on a large canvas. I feel more at home, more at ease in a big area.

641
00:50:59,800 --> 00:51:05,720
Having the canvas on the floor, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting.

642
00:51:05,720 --> 00:51:11,400
This way, I can walk around it, work from all four sides and be in the painting,

643
00:51:11,400 --> 00:51:15,800
similar to the Indian sand painters of the West.

644
00:51:15,800 --> 00:51:19,600
Sometimes I use a brush, but often prefer using a stick.

645
00:51:19,600 --> 00:51:23,040
Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can.

646
00:51:24,120 --> 00:51:26,960
I like to use a dripping, fluid paint...

647
00:51:27,960 --> 00:51:31,880
..a method of painting that is a natural growth out of a need.

648
00:51:31,880 --> 00:51:35,920
I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.

649
00:51:35,920 --> 00:51:40,800
Pollock's drip technique used to be treated as a joke, as though he were out of
control.

650
00:51:40,800 --> 00:51:43,600
But he wasn't. The drips of paint were spontaneous,

651
00:51:43,600 --> 00:51:45,800
but they fell just where he wanted them,

652
00:51:45,800 --> 00:51:49,200
building the surface into a web of skeins and subtle energies,

653
00:51:49,200 --> 00:51:51,600
working across the whole canvas.

654
00:51:51,600 --> 00:51:54,680
Pollock once declared that he wanted to become nature.

655
00:51:54,680 --> 00:51:59,000
What did he mean? That he wanted to work parallel with its variety,

656
00:51:59,000 --> 00:52:02,760
its unpredictability and above all, its vitality.

657
00:52:02,760 --> 00:52:06,520
He had a very light hand. Sometimes, as in Blue Poles,

658
00:52:06,520 --> 00:52:09,200
you might be looking at a sort of abstract Tiepolo,

659
00:52:09,200 --> 00:52:13,200
the same kind of airy, light and spritely drawing.

660
00:52:13,200 --> 00:52:17,160
This nervous energy of Pollock's, expanding under strict control,
661
00:52:17,160 --> 00:52:21,800
seems to refute the picture of him as a rip-roaring wildcatter from Middle America.

662
00:52:21,800 --> 00:52:24,960
Only intelligence, allied to a deep sense of the natural world

663
00:52:24,960 --> 00:52:28,360
can produce work like this.

664
00:52:45,840 --> 00:52:48,920
Another leading figure in abstract expressionism,

665
00:52:48,920 --> 00:52:51,720
both as painter and a writer, was Robert Motherwell,

666
00:52:51,720 --> 00:52:55,000
the last major collagist in the tradition of George Braque,

667
00:52:55,000 --> 00:52:58,560
but perhaps best known for his series of black and white paintings

668
00:52:58,560 --> 00:53:00,800
The Elegies for The Spanish Republic.

669
00:53:00,800 --> 00:53:05,080
He has always preferred to keep direct imagery out of his work.

670
00:53:05,080 --> 00:53:11,400
A painting is, so to speak, working by indirections,

671
00:53:11,400 --> 00:53:16,800
synthesising what is scanned both internally and externally,

672
00:53:16,800 --> 00:53:20,600
in which the real object is not the world

673
00:53:20,600 --> 00:53:23,600
but the canvas itself.

674
00:53:23,600 --> 00:53:27,200
I always loved that title of Max Ernst's on one of his pictures,

675
00:53:27,200 --> 00:53:28,880
The Blind Swimmer.
676
00:53:28,880 --> 00:53:32,520
I think, in a way, we all worked as blind swimmers,

677
00:53:32,520 --> 00:53:35,800
as quite good swimmers but quite blind.

678
00:53:35,800 --> 00:53:39,000
What the black was doing

679
00:53:39,000 --> 00:53:43,600
was slowly becoming, erm...

680
00:53:43,600 --> 00:53:46,800
..a sombre force,

681
00:53:46,800 --> 00:53:50,000
but also a brilliant force.

682
00:53:50,000 --> 00:53:53,400
There's certain painters who use black as a colour

683
00:53:53,400 --> 00:53:57,000
as vividly as, um,

684
00:53:57,000 --> 00:54:01,560
other artists can use fire-engine red, let's say.

685
00:54:01,560 --> 00:54:05,600
But in the end, it seems that, in my mind,

686
00:54:05,600 --> 00:54:11,080
black is also symbolic of death.

687
00:54:13,680 --> 00:54:17,560
Motherwell's Spanish Elegies were provoked by the memory of the Civil War,

688
00:54:17,560 --> 00:54:20,440
though their field of suggestion is not only political.

689
00:54:20,440 --> 00:54:24,000
But in the meantime, what happened to the older ambitions of abstract art,

690
00:54:24,000 --> 00:54:26,080
like Kandinsky's hope that it could bring about

691
00:54:26,080 --> 00:54:30,000
some kind of spiritual change in those who saw it?

692
00:54:30,000 --> 00:54:35,400
The last religious commission given to a major artist is actually in America.

693
00:54:35,400 --> 00:54:37,520
It's here in Houston, Texas,

694
00:54:37,520 --> 00:54:40,600
where the de Mille family built a non-denominational chapel,

695
00:54:40,600 --> 00:54:43,360
a space for contemplation.

696
00:54:43,360 --> 00:54:48,120
They also commissioned the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko to do paintings for
it.

697
00:54:48,120 --> 00:54:50,080
This was in 1964

698
00:54:50,080 --> 00:54:55,120
and they were installed and finished in 1971, a year after his death.

699
00:54:56,120 --> 00:54:58,720
GONG ECHOES

700
00:55:35,400 --> 00:55:38,600
In this chapel Rothko, who was soon to commit suicide,

701
00:55:38,600 --> 00:55:41,400
took to its ultimate extreme the idea that colour,

702
00:55:41,400 --> 00:55:44,200
in this case a very narrow range of colours,

703
00:55:44,200 --> 00:55:47,200
from dark plummy red, through violet to black,

704
00:55:47,200 --> 00:55:50,800
could carry the whole load of a spiritual experience.
705
00:55:50,800 --> 00:55:55,000
This is truly the last silence of romanticism.

706
00:56:15,200 --> 00:56:17,760
I can't enter this chapel without emotion,

707
00:56:17,760 --> 00:56:21,400
but I never know whether I'm feeling what Rothko meant me to feel.

708
00:56:21,400 --> 00:56:24,080
He wanted to be a great religious artist.

709
00:56:24,080 --> 00:56:27,000
He was not only a Jew, but a Russian Jew,

710
00:56:27,000 --> 00:56:29,200
and he wanted his paintings to act like icons

711
00:56:29,200 --> 00:56:34,600
and to possess the full moral seriousness of the Russian novel.

712
00:56:34,600 --> 00:56:38,600
He had the wrong equipment for this. He had an exquisite sense of nuance

713
00:56:38,600 --> 00:56:41,200
and silence and vagueness,

714
00:56:41,200 --> 00:56:47,400
but this he wanted to carry the full patriarchal grandeur of the Old Testament.

715
00:56:47,400 --> 00:56:51,400
It couldn't and these paintings are the result.

716
00:56:51,400 --> 00:56:55,000
These are not active images. They're more like zones of silence,

717
00:56:55,000 --> 00:56:58,000
blank slates which you complete by looking at them.

718
00:56:58,000 --> 00:57:00,080
What they present as sacred

719
00:57:00,080 --> 00:57:03,320
is the state of receptivity, of slow looking -
720
00:57:03,320 --> 00:57:08,000
in fact, the condition of being an artist, of being Mark Rothko.

721
00:57:08,000 --> 00:57:12,600
The world has drained out of them. Does that makes them religious art?

722
00:57:12,600 --> 00:57:15,320
Holier men than I have thought so in this chapel.

723
00:57:15,320 --> 00:57:19,200
If I have my doubts, it's because they're so very withdrawn.

724
00:57:19,200 --> 00:57:23,000
The horizons and storms of earlier romantic sublimities have gone

725
00:57:23,000 --> 00:57:26,000
and what is left as the soul subject of contemplation

726
00:57:26,000 --> 00:57:28,440
is a void.

727
00:57:35,840 --> 00:57:38,000
GONG ECHOES

728
00:57:51,560 --> 00:57:55,600
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