After almost a century of bloodshed and revolution,
France was about to enter another great age of upheaval.
This time, the greatest revolutions would take place in the mind
and the eye. And Paris was at the centre of it all.
Here, a group of truly extraordinary artists set about the business of
reinventing the very language of art itself and the result was to be the
greatest explosion of creative energy seen in the Western world
since the age of the Renaissance.
The art of modern France was to be exhilarating, radiant,
adventurous.
But above all, it was to be a conversation in which painters were
constantly looking at each other's work,
talking to each other, agreeing,
disagreeing, but always forging ahead.
Paris really was the capital city of the world,
a place where everyone came to breathe in
the atmosphere of the bohemian metropolis.
Ooh, there's Picasso.
And over there, a group of surrealists.
Salvador Dali, twirling his waxed moustache.
There's Monet, Degas,
Matisse.
The result of this conversation was a great lesson about what it looked
like, what it meant to be alive in the modern world.
# My pictures of you. #
This was liberte, egalite, fraternite -
not just for France, but the world.
# This is the modern world that I've learnt about
# This is the modern world We don't need no-one... #
In the late 19th century, France, and Paris in particular, was modernising
at a helter-skelter pace.
# This is a modern world! #
Paris was in the throes of a great change -
a metropolis the like of which France had never seen before.
New factories, new slums, new sprawling suburbs,
new entertainments,
new temptations, too,
rivers of booze, an army of travelling prostitutes.
Just one thing was missing -
an art to record the seedy, strange wonder of it all.
# Don't have to explain myself to you
# I don't give two f... about your review... #
A group of angry young artists set out to put this right.
They met in their studios and local cafes to start the great
conversation about art and its place in the modern metropolis.
# No matter what this is, this is this is, this is
# This is, this is, this is
# Hey, we're done. #
They were a motley group - different backgrounds, different temperaments,
different styles, but they had one big thing in common.
They were sick to the teeth of being excluded from the annual official exhibition -
the Salon.
And they were even sicker of Salon art
with its built-in assumption that every subject had to be clothed in
classical fancy dress.
What this group of artists wanted to paint was not the classical past.
What they wanted to paint was out there -
modern Paris.
Unable to show their work at the Salon,
they formed an independent group and went it alone.
I'm holding in my hands a facsimile of their very first exhibition held in 1874.
There were 165 paintings on display.
When you look through the names, some of them aren't that well known,
it has to be admitted.
Antoine Ferdinand -
no relation to the footballer, I assume.
Felix Bracquemond. Mulot-Durivage.
But carry on flicking through and, suddenly - ah, Paul Cezanne,
Edgar Degas, Claude Monet.
Pissarro, Renoir.
In fact, this little book is effectively a roll call of the great artists
who were about to change the face of painting itself.
The month-long exhibition in the Boulevard des Capucines
was a critical and commercial flop.
But it put the hotchpotch group of artists on the map and even gave
them a name...
..the Impressionists.
That was all down to one painting.
In 1872, Monet had come back to his hometown of Le Havre in search of inspiration.
Monet hurried to get into position as the sun rose above the waves.
But once there, he worked very quickly, just 46 minutes,
to produce a really rather famous painting.
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise - the most celebrated,
the most incendiary small painting of the entire 19th century.
But why was this picture so shocking?
He's taking a convention, an older form of painting.
He's altering it by making it new, making it now.
His model for this picture was the great seaport scenes of his namesake,
Claude Lorrain,
the great 17th-century classical depicter
of seaport scenes in which, typically,
we'd find a port with a beautiful sunset or sunrise at its centre.
Monet has taken that
and he's emptied it of all classical elements.
So instead of classical architecture, we have gantries,
we have factory chimneys, we have smog, we have a haze of shipping.
The sea itself is depicted almost through the means of a cartoonist or
a caricaturist in the form of dabs or dots to suggest its movements.
The sun is just a... HE HISSES
..buttery rub of pink-coloured paint.
The sun's reflection is a sort of... HE HISSES
..zigzag of colour.
Impressionism was coined on the basis of the title of this picture.
IN FRENCH: Impression.
How can Monsieur Monet, the critics wrote,
how can he dare to exhibit an impression, a sketch,
as if it were a fully finished work of art?
It's ironic now that Impressionist art is seen as so lovely and nice,
perfect for a tea towel or a chocolate box.
In their own time, they were after something raw and shocking.
They didn't want to create pretty pictures.
They wanted to plunge into the unsettling pandemonium of the modern city.
The age of the avant-garde, with its manifestos, still lay in the future,
but the Impressionists did have a manifesto of sorts.
It was a text written by the great critic and poet Charles Baudelaire
and it was called The Painter Of Modern Life.
He's a flaneur, a wanderer, someone who walks the streets every day.
"The crowd is his element as the air is that of birds
"and water of fishes.
"His passion and profession are to become one flesh with the crowd,
"to be away from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home.
"Amid the ebb and flow of movement in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.
"The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an
"immense reservoir of electrical energy.
"Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself."
What would the painter of modern life paint today?
He'd probably seek out the rough edges of the city,
the places that prick your conscience.
And at what time would he do his work?
"Now it is evening,
"that strange equivocal hour when the curtains of heaven are drawn and
"cities light up.
"Honest men and rogues are all saying to themselves,
"'The end of another day!'
"And the thoughts of all, whether good men or knaves, turn to pleasure.
"And each one hastens to drink the cup of his oblivion.
"The painter of modern life will be the last
"to linger wherever a passion can pose before him,
"wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal."
There you have it.
That's what Impressionism is.
The painter of modern life had to place himself at the
heart of the modern city.
And for Monet, in the 1870s,
the very engine room of Paris was the Gare Saint-Lazare -
the great new train station.
Here's a locomotive, here's a blurred worker, here's a stop sign,
flashing in the half gloom created by these great smokes of steam.
And I think it's the steam that fascinates Monet above all,
the steam that...
..blocks half the things that we see,
that suggests everything that Baudelaire had said about the modern city.
It's transitory, it's fugitive, now we see it, now we don't.
And the implication behind all this
is that France itself is being transformed by all this motion and movement.
He loves the way that everything in this world is changing,
moving, altering, even as you look.
This new technology of the train was the driving force behind
Impressionism, even when it's not obvious.
Renoir's movement-filled painting The Gust Of Wind
encapsulates the experience of watching a landscape at speed through the
window of a train carriage.
And even Monet's Poppies,
most chocolate-boxed of all Impressionist paintings, is also
about an experience,
namely city people going for a picnic in the countryside,
that was only made possible by the railways.
Back in the city itself, the toll taken on human lives
by this new speeded-up jostling sense of
existence was the great subject of the greatest urban Impressionist -
Edgar Degas.
Absinthe is his bitter masterpiece,
a fly-on-the-wall depiction of a moment of urban desperation -
two drunks together but quite alone.
It's a picture that invites you to fill in the gaps.
How did they come to this?
How low will they go?
This way of seeing and feeling the truth of ordinary lives would sow many seeds -
documentary films, street photography, even reality television.
Degas didn't just paint down and outs.
He also depicted those struggling to rise up in the snakes and ladders
game of Paris...
..above all, ballet dancers, working-class girls,
dreaming of bettering themselves.
Ballet wasn't posh at the time and ballerinas were often called the rats
of the opera. But Degas saw more to them than that.
During the course of his life, Degas created more than 1,500 drawings,
pastels, paintings and sculptures of ballet dancers.
I think it's fair to say that his preoccupation with dance and dancers
was really an obsession.
What was he looking for? What did he see in their movements,
in the gaslit spectacle of the ballet?
A number of things, I think. It's sometimes said he was, um...
..he was a voyeur but I don't have any sense of that
in his depictions of the ballet.
I think, if anything, he actually identified
with the hard-working young women who spent their lives dancing.
He saw them, in a sense, as images of himself.
He was always...
involved in repetition, rehearsal, endlessly sketching and drawing,
trying to create some form of beauty in the modern world, and I think he
saw that that's what they were doing, too.
In the ballet and its spectacle, he found some sense of enchantment.
It's almost as if the dancers were...
..the only goddesses...
..he could see to enchant the place that he knew as modern Paris.
Arguments were also part of the Impressionists' conversation.
Was the city the be-all and end-all?
Not everyone thought so.
Impressionism was never really a movement and
its two greatest artists
occupied, if you like, the opposite ends of its spectrum.
On the one hand, Degas, the painter of modern life,
the painter of the city - he hated flaneur painting.
He said all flaneur artists should be shot. And at the other end of the
spectrum, Claude Monet,
who very rapidly departed from the idea of painting the modern city and
plunged instead into nature.
He was the very epitome of the flaneur artist,
setting out to try and capture the transient effects of light on water,
light on rock.
He believed that it was the job of the artist to try somehow
to encapsulate the grandeur, the majesty of nature itself.
The natural beauty of Etretat in Normandy
inspired more than 50 of Monet's paintings.
His adventures en plein air were made possible
by a revolution in 19th-century technology.
Leo.
Etretat - Monet's subject.
Well, what I'm trying to do here is paint in the style of Monet,
which is like trying to write a play in the style of Shakespeare.
- Not easy. - Yeah, well, that's what I'm here to talk to you about, really,
because this was all new, wasn't it?
The sight of a painter working in oils outdoors.
And what made it possible was this kind of equipment -
a portable collapsible easel. Tube oil paint first came in, I suppose,
in the 1850s and '60s and became sort of popular at that period,
bang on Impressionism.
- We've got them here, look. - Yep, yep. - That's a lovely one.
- That's one of my... That's cobalt blue, isn't it? - Yeah.
Can I squeeze a bit on there?
Go for it, yeah.
Tell me a little bit more about the science that actually made this possible.
There was a huge explosion of invention and of synthesis of new
pigments all through the 19th century, and so you have various pigments
like cadmium yellow, lead white, magnesium violet.
Yeah. The fact is, when you look at an Impressionist painting,
the colours are much fresher than the colours of an Old Master painting,
and that's not just cos of the passage of time.
It's because the colours are more different and they're more stable
because they're created through this new metallurgy, this new chemistry.
Precisely.
Now, you've just got the one canvas set up here.
But Monet sometimes worked out of doors, I think,
with as many as four or five canvases all on the go at the same time.
He more or less invented the idea of series paintings, done outdoors,
so, as the weather changed, the light changed, the time of day changes,
he'd move onto another canvas and get that particular effect at that
- particular moment. - Great, well, I will let you carry on.
- Thank you. - And I'm sorry I've interrupted you.
I hope I haven't lost your moment.
- It's fine. - Cheers. - Cheers.
From this point onwards, Monet's great obsession would be nature.
And while he'd remain part of the French conversation,
he would look at anything, from Turner to Japanese prints
to Chinese scroll paintings,
for the essence of sky, water, reflection.
There was something else which made the Impressionists modern and different.
The sniffy art critic Albert Wolff spotted it.
There's also a woman in the group, as in most notorious gangs.
She's called Berthe Morisot.
The Musee Marmottan in Paris is the best place to see her work.
Morisot was a founder member of Impressionism but she's been unfairly overlooked.
From a well-to-do background,
she combined being a wife and mother with painting.
But she became just as authentic a painter of modern life as any of her contemporaries
by focusing on her own bourgeois existence.
Morisot celebrated the simplicity of ordinary life and her paintings turn
home into a kind of dream -
a lush, green idyll, a blissful state of innocence.
But just as Degas found tragedy in Absinthe drinkers,
Morisot saw that, even if you had money in 19th-century Paris,
it didn't always buy you happiness.
Now, this is when of Berthe Morisot's most tender pictures.
It's called Au Bal - at the ball.
The young woman is radiant but also vulnerable,
her beauty shot through with a sense of self-deprecation and doubt.
Look at the way she holds her fan.
She's not cooling herself with it.
She's using it almost as a guard or a shield against the eyes of those
who would look at her.
Going out can be an ordeal as well as an entertainment.
Her dress, her glove, her hair, her face, her skin, the background -
Morisot has painted it all with wonderfully subtle attention to texture
and detail. But this is really a form of internalised Impressionism.
What she sought to catch is not a glamorous apparition, a vision,
but a mood, the texture of a thought or a feeling.
What Morisot brought to the conversation was a portrayal of
a woman that perhaps only a woman could have created.
But the sad truth is that Paris was - sh, it still is! -
a phallocentric society.
And at its centre in 1889, the largest phallic symbol ever erected -
the Eiffel Tower.
In the very same year,
the city's infamous cabaret, the Moulin Rouge, flung open its doors.
This was a den of unbridled ogling, where women's bodies,
high-kicking legs and all, became a form of mass entertainment.
The only return for the dancers was the hope of fame.
Enter the next artist to join the conversation -
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, painter to the stars of the Moulin Rouge.
So Toulouse-Lautrec, like Degas, came backstage, he met the girls,
he talked to the girls, but he never painted this part.
He was never interested in repetition,
the awkwardness of the backstage moment.
The only thing that really caught his imagination was the show itself.
It was the moment when the girls went on stage.
And there they go.
And it was that curtain-up excitement that Lautrec set out
to capture - another kind of Impressionist moment,
but with the flash of leg rather than the flash of sunlight on water.
APPLAUSE
It's the interval -
a good opportunity to have a look at some of the posters they've got in
the foyer of the Moulin Rouge.
The Troupe of Mademoiselle Eglantine - famous depiction of the cancan,
almost a cartoon of it.
Jane Avril -
look at this wonderful detail of the musical instrument in the foreground.
Toulouse-Lautrec down here, seeing the scene obliquely,
and here,
one of his most famous posters, La Goulue, whose favourite trick, apparently,
was kicking off the top hat of a gentleman
who annoyed her in the front rows.
Lautrec did make his own singular contribution to the culture
of the modern world.
He participated in the creation of a new phenomenon - the celebrity.
He thrust them into the firmament of fame through the mass reproduction
of the poster.
He is one of the few artists who didn't just depict the world,
they also literally changed it.
CANCAN MUSIC
AUDIENCE CLAPS ALONG
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
After so much talk of the fleeting and the ephemeral,
what had happened to the old ideals of art - the quest for truth,
stability, permanence?
Well, they made a return in the work of a group of artists now known as
the postimpressionists.
In 1889,
George Seurat painted the Eiffel Tower
using his pointillist technique,
dots of paint that freeze the image and make the tower itself seem as
eternal as the Great Pyramid.
He painted workers on their Sunday off at a suburban bathing place,
but made them look like figures being baptised
in an early Renaissance fresco.
The search for a truth beyond mere modern life also lay behind
the journeys of Paul Gauguin,
who travelled to Tahiti in search of primitive reality - true being.
But the reality he found
was a far cry from his fantasy.
Although he went through the motions
of living out his dreams,
the art he created on Tahiti amounts, I think,
to a long-drawn-out confession of the fraudulence of it all.
Whether he meant to or not,
what Gauguin painted was the distance
between coloniser and colonised,
between the tourist
and a reality that he never truly grasps,
and standing here, surrounded by these paintings,
I'm struck by how unidyllic they actually are.
The colours might be bright, but they're also livid and dyspeptic.
And how sullen, how remote, how removed the women seem.
I think, collectively,
Gauguin's South Pacific paintings convey a profound sense of alienation.
Another painter in search of timeless truths also abandoned Paris.
He returned to his native Aix-en-Provence
in the south of France - here,
to his country house, the Jas de Bouffan.
So many great French painters working at the cusp of the 20th century,
but none would be more influential than Paul Cezanne.
He was a difficult,
volatile individual with a tremendous sense of ambition
and his great subject was to be nature.
However, he turned away
from Impressionism.
He felt Impressionism was too ephemeral, too mutable.
He wanted to create a new language
that would somehow possess the monumental ambitions
of the art of the distant past, and said,
"I want to redo nature after Poussin."
But the great paradox is
that he did so by inventing a new form of
pictorial language, a new way of seeing
completely rooted in instability,
impermanence,
a sense of nervous energy.
What, in the end, did Cezanne bring to the great
conversation of French painting?
Well, I think Picasso said it best of all.
"Why do we love Cezanne?" he said. "We love him for his anxiety."
The paintings of the Jas de Bouffan reveal
the conflicting energies in his work.
He makes the house more honey-coloured than it is in reality.
He makes it look almost like an ancient Roman monument
in a painting by Poussin,
something that's been there for ever and will be there for ever,
and yet he can't help destabilising the picture at the same time.
He tilts the house so that it might almost be falling over.
Thankfully, it is still standing today.
It's almost as if no-one has touched it
since Cezanne himself moved out.
It's melancholic,
a bit strange, a bit eerie, but I think it's also a very good place
to think about Cezanne's dark and murky origins as a painter.
He'd begun as an artist of peculiar, dark sexual fantasies,
in which he depicts subjects like murder, or rape,
using paint almost as if it were a form of slime,
modelling his figures from a kind of plasma -
they almost look like dumplings.
Very strange work.
I think when you look at the later work,
it's very important to remember the seething fantasies of the earlier paintings.
It's as if Cezanne was trying to find a way to contain
and discipline those unruly passions.
When his parents had died,
Jas de Bouffan was sold in 1889
and Cezanne tried to focus these passions
at his new studio.
He worked here every day for the final four years of his life.
I think Cezanne's studio preserved as it is,
almost like a kind of shrine to his memory,
does give us a wonderfully vivid museum of his preoccupations and
obsessions, the things he loved to paint.
I think it became
a kind of laboratory of perceptual experiment.
He once said - perhaps the most radical thing he ever said -
that he wanted to stun Paris with an apple.
For the first time in the history of Western art, a painter is declaring -
quite literally - that what he paints doesn't matter,
it's HOW he paints that counts.
Cezanne was fascinated by the truancy of vision,
the fugitive nature of the experiencing self
and his great device for expressing this
is the doubled outline.
You see it again and again in his Provencal landscapes.
The trunk of a tree has a doubled outline,
the branch of a tree has a doubled outline.
The Mont Sainte-Victoire has a doubled outline.
What does it mean?
Well, I think I can demonstrate it.
If I hold up my finger to you,
what you will see on your screen is a single, static finger.
But if I look at it, with MY eyes, and I close one and then the other,
then one, then the other - my finger -
you can try it at home with your own finger -
my finger is jumping from side to side,
because my angle of perception is shifting.
He's making the point
that nothing, nothing we ever see is still,
because WE are never still.
While Cezanne was working on his last pictures in Aix-en-Provence,
the pace of change continued to accelerate here in Paris.
The great event of 1900 had been the Exposition Universelle,
a triumphant celebration of Paris as the great city of the modern age.
The Grand Palais and the Petit Palais,
those huge structures of steel and glass,
were created as temples to the achievements of French art.
And drawn by all this, on his 19th birthday,
a young Spaniard arrived in the city.
His name was Pablo Picasso and this was a watershed moment.
A new generation of artists was about to transform the conversation.
As an ambitious young Spanish painter
working in Paris in the early 1900s,
Picasso asks himself one burning question.
How can I, in the wake of so much originality, how can I make my mark?
How can I be even more original than this great generation of French
artists who preceded me?
And I think he looks at Cezanne,
he looks at his geometrically harsh,
angular brushstrokes, and he creates
something even harsher, even more dramatic, even more flattened.
And, like Gauguin,
he draws on the languages and cultures of societies
that he presumes to be primitive, instinctive - not the South Pacific,
but the culture of African art.
Picasso started looking,
buying, dealing -
he was in the habit of going to the Museum of Ethnography in Paris -
he used to say to his friends, "Can I pick something up for anybody?"
Here, we've got one of the great masterpieces of this phase of his career.
It's called Three Women and, yes,
it draws on this neo-primitive language of African art
but at the same time,
Picasso is looking back to the ghosts of the French past.
He's thinking of Delacroix's masterpiece Les Femmes d'Alger,
a scene of women waiting outside a harem.
But the culminating masterpiece of this phase of Picasso's career would
not depict a harem, but something similar.
It would depict a brothel.
It's a disturbing vision of a corrupt modern Arcadia,
showing angular, harridan-like whores.
They inhabit a broken world.
It's as if Picasso has thrown a stone and shattered the mirror-like
reflection of traditional representational art
into a thousand pieces.
You have the sense they're looking at something you can't see -
that their way of seeing is not like yours.
What was that way of seeing?
Well, that's what Picasso shows us next.
Spring, 1912.
He paints this picture.
It's called Bottle Of Pernod.
This is a mature example of what's come to be known as Cubism.
He wants to convey the fact that
when he experiences a bottle of Pernod,
and an absinthe glass on a table, he wants to give you the sense -
it's rather dizzying -
of actually moving around the objects as you look at the painting.
It's almost as if he's painted lots of little details of the objects,
and placed them in a kaleidoscope, click, click, click.
At each click, you get a different plane, a different angle,
a different perspective on the object.
It's profoundly destabilising.
Into this, he then adds another layer -
these words floating in space,
which I think are Picasso's way of reminding his audience that urban
experience itself is fundamentally fragmented.
As we pass through the city, we see billboards, we see signs on buses,
we see newspaper headlines.
Ultimately, of course, Picasso is going back to Baudelaire,
and he's thinking about the painting of modern life.
Well, this is about as extreme as the painting of modern life gets.
Cubism itself was a dialogue between Picasso and its other inventor,
George Braque,
who met each other every day for four years,
taking the language of Western art to pieces,
as if it were a jigsaw puzzle.
At the same time, another great painter -
yet another great painter -
was taking art in an altogether different direction.
His name - Henri Matisse.
If Picasso worked with line, Matisse was the great colourist.
Look at this picture!
Colour has been set free -
the result is the invention of
a new language for painting.
A language that expresses mood, a language that expresses idealism,
a new sense of beauty.
The critics of the early 20th century simply didn't know what to make of
this painter, of this art.
They called him a fauve, a wild beast.
Here, I think Matisse is paying
a kind of distant homage to Cezanne, but my goodness!
If this is a Cezanne,
it's a Cezanne, as it were, reimagined by a man taking opium.
The subjects are never that much.
Goldfish in a bowl -
it's what Matisse makes of them.
He weaves them into these beguiling textures.
And this, for me, is the great masterpiece of this room.
Matisse has just ripped up the rule book of representation and he's
transfigured the colours altogether.
It's like a kind of swimming pool of visual pleasure
into which he invites you.
I suppose that yellow carpet could almost be the diving board.
And I think what he's saying in this work is that the old idea of
Arcadia, the idea of a paradise that we can inhabit away from the troubles
of this world, away from its violence, away from history,
that old idea of paradise,
has compressed and paradise now
is the studio of the artist.
It's not an image OF paradise - it IS paradise.
But Matisse's vision of paradise came at a time when the world was
descending into hell.
The outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914 brought
la belle epoque to a crashing end.
The new technology behind the steam train and the impressionists' paint
in tubes now gave opposing armies their mustard gas,
their machine guns, and millions lost their lives on the battlefields.
All the while, the most radiantly peaceful works of art were being
created less than 100 miles from the front by Monet - still alive,
believe it or not, and still painting at his home in the countryside at Giverny.
There, he'd created a Japanese water garden,
the muse for some of his most hypnotising work.
The day after the war ended, on the 11th of November 1918, Monet,
now in his late '70s,
offered a series of his water lily paintings to France.
Monet said that he wanted to give
the French people,
after the war, a space of tranquillity,
a refuge from their wounds,
somewhere they could heal their souls
with the spectacle of nature and eternity.
What wonderful pictures they are.
How did he get to this
from Impressionism?
I think the answer lies once again in conversation, but this time,
he was in conversation with a dead Englishman called JMW Turner.
He was the only man, I think,
of the entire 19th century who really understood what Turner was
saying - namely, that the things we think
are solid ourselves,
the objects with which we surround ourselves - well, actually,
they're not real.
The only thing that's real, is the thing that seems most transitory,
most fugitive - namely light itself.
And that's what Monet had struggled with but now, at the end of his life,
finally he has at last managed to go beyond Turner,
to take Turner's message, if you like, to another level,
to expand it to a new scale,
because scale is the great key to these paintings.
Look at their enormity.
This great arc
of a vision of the water lily pond, the trees,
it's as if you become one with the subject,
one with this extraordinary hypnotic, fluid,
perpetually moving evanescence.
You might BE staring into some idealised pool of water.
It's as if you're in the presence
of eternity itself.
But those who'd actually experienced the First World War were beyond
being consoled by water lily paintings.
For them, the shock of the new
was shellshock.
The poet and writer Andre Breton,
who'd worked with traumatised survivors of war,
became spokesman for a new art movement
of bad dreams and night terrors.
He called it surrealism.
Surrealism drew on a far-flung sense of outrage,
hence its multicultural cast - Salvador Dali from Spain...
..Man Ray from America...
..Rene Magritte from Belgium.
Now, artists weren't having a conversation so much as interpreting each other's dreams.
And what dreams they were.
Of a world turned upside down,
where the only truth is nonsense.
The surrealists blamed the middle-class establishment,
not just for the horrors of war,
but the hypocrisy that had caused it.
But the greatest scourge of the bourgeoisie wasn't a surrealist
but a Dadaist - Marcel Duchamp, Monsieur Shock himself.
He presented a urinal as a work of art.
He drew a moustache onto
a reproduction of the most famous painting in the Louvre.
And he carried out his first great assault on bourgeois taste while the
Great War was still at its height.
In 1916,
he went to a department store in Paris and he purchased this object -
it's a bottle rack.
It's what you use to dispose of the wine bottles in
your cellar once you've drunk them.
But Duchamp had the gall to put this common thing of mass manufacture in
an art gallery and to call it a work of art.
I think he was trying to get rid of the idea of the artist as a creator.
He said he wanted to destroy the notion of the artist as hero.
From now on, the artist would just be someone who chooses a thing and
places it in the world.
He said that the object should be ordinary,
because if I chose something,
he said, if I choose something that I liked, well, then,
my taste would enter in, and once taste enters in, well,
art becomes bourgeois again.
"Taste is the enemy of A-R-T."
But I think Duchamp has been a little bit disingenuous and I do think that
the things he chose, this thing in particular, were...
..barbed, meaningful, significant.
Duchamp was fascinated by the idea that man is the prisoner of his sexual impulses.
Could this be Duchamp's way of suggesting that everyone alive -
every man, at least -
is...caught in a state of priapic longing, for ever suspended,
waiting for the moment of sexual union,
conjunction with a female bottle?
Is this his way of saying that everyone - every man -
in France, is really just a cock?
Talk about a phallocentric world.
And no-one did more to prove Duchamp right
than his fellow avant-gardists - including Picasso.
Now, I've brought you to the Picasso Museum because I think there is no
better place to really feel and appreciate
the extent to which surrealism
explored the darker sides of human sexuality than here.
This is the room that they call the sex and death room.
This is one of his great masterpieces.
It's sex envisaged as a kind of feral, seething encounter.
Look at these biomorphic figures.
They're almost eating each other.
Sex as violence.
And this is Alberto Giacometti's Woman With Her Throat Cut,
possibly the most repellent sculpture of the entire surrealist movement.
What does it show us?
A woman who is half turned into a scorpion,
the victim of a sex attack.
It's a really horrible little thing.
It seems to encapsulate the strain of misogyny and unpleasant male sexual fantasy
that dominates the surreal movement.
And I suppose the question for the artists of this generation would be
- above all, I think, for Picasso - "How do I get away from this?
"How do I escape my own personal fantasies and create an art
"that addresses something greater than myself?"
Picasso would find his own answer in 1937.
The conversation about art was moving into an even darker realm
and Paris was still at the crux of it all.
This is the Place Trocadero,
one of the most seething hubs of modern tourist Paris.
Project yourself back to 1937 and it's an altogether more sinister place.
Flanked by the two great wings of the Palais de Chaillot,
this was the scene of the world's exposition,
in which twin totalitarian regimes, that of Russia
and Germany, flexed their muscles one against the other.
Amidst all the posturing stood one of the most powerful artworks of
the 20th century.
A protest against the bombing of Guernica by Luftwaffe planes
during the Spanish Civil War,
a graphic, gut-wrenching, flashbulb vision of atrocity.
Just two years later, World War II had broken out,
and a victorious Adolf Hitler would soon be standing right here.
Picasso remained in Paris during the German occupation.
Towards the end of the War, he created another painting...
..the Charnel House.
The pile of corpses in the centre
represents Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps.
A German officer visiting Picasso's studio took it all in and asked,
"Why did you do that?"
Picasso replied, "I didn't.
"You did."
The Second World War had a devastating impact on France.
From the chaos and destruction came one of the last great French
contributions to the history of art and ideas -
existentialism.
It's a philosophy that defined all of us as solitary individuals in
infinite space, living life as one single moment -
one Impressionist moment, you might say - after another.
Its bible was written by Jean-Paul Sartre and simply called
Being And Nothingness.
John-Paul Sartre finished Being And Nothingness
during the very darkest days of the Second World War.
What he does is he places...
..absolute central importance on the moment.
The instant.
That's what he says existence is.
We're only ever alive, we're only ever conscious of being alive, at this second,
this fractional second of our existence.
In that instant, we are - all of us - in the same predicament.
We all bear responsibility within us, a terrible burden,
for the whole history of the universe.
It's doesn't matter if I'm a Frenchman,
living under German tyranny.
It does matter if I'm a victim of the death camps.
It doesn't matter if I'm being lined up against the wall by a firing squad -
in the moment that I die, I am as free as the man who is killing me.
It's a great fist of defiance.
It's almost a Picasso hand,
raised up against the tyranny of those who would dominate the world
with their cruelty, their terror.
But it's a philosophy that bears within it...
..a pretty terrible price, because what Sartre doesn't find room for
is the idea that one moment might connect to another,
that a life might be made up of one person mixing with another person,
so, on the one hand, the instant,
the totally free individual, but on the other hand, a terrible sense -
a nauseating sense, in his phrase - of aloneness.
Extentialism started out as a literary movement but it made its mark on
the art of postwar France.
I think it's most clearly expressed
in the later work of Alberto Giacometti.
What do they evoke,
these strange, emaciated figures?
Some sense of atrocity.
Are they Giacometti's way of remembering
the Jews,
struggling from their concentration camps at the end of the war?
I think ultimately what they express
is this profound existential sense of aloneness.
His work marks a huge change in the whole history of French art.
Art is a person locked up in their own sense of being.
This is the art of solipsism - it's the art of the monologue.
No coincidence that Giacometti was friends with Samuel Beckett.
Giacometti even designed the set for Beckett's Waiting For Godot.
The theatre of the absurd, the art of the absurd,
the end of the conversation.
While it lasted, it was the most fertile,
febrile conversation in the history of art.
In just over half a century, France had given the world Impressionism,
cubism, Fauvism, surrealism, conceptual art and existentialism.
But when it comes to the last 50 or 60 years, well,
I can think of plenty of French film-makers
but very few artists and no true household names.
Yves Klein, Pierre Soulages, Daniel Buren, anybody?
So why the decline?
Is it because France became culturally inward-looking?
Or is it because the bourgeoisie, target of the avant-garde,
has actually had the last laugh?
The truth is, France today is ruled by a petite-France mentality.
So, if you're black or Muslim, you'll struggle.
Hard to imagine a Barack Obama elected here
or a Picasso wanting to come, nowadays.
But that's just my personal j'accuse.
In the end, the whys don't matter.
Cultural energies do shift from one place to another.
It's always been that way.
Plus ca change.
And I think every great nation's story must eventually flow like a river
into the greater sea of civilisation as a whole.
Everything gets mixed up.
We all take on a little bit of each other and I think that's particularly
true of France, as its golden age of art came to a close.
Artists here had invented and developed the visual language by
which we frame and understand the modern world.
And I don't think there's anyone alive whose way of seeing hasn't in
some way been shaped by their ways of seeing.
You might say, we're all French now.
Nous sommes tous Francais.
At least, a little bit.
# Non, rien de rien
# Non, je ne regrette rien
# Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait
# Ni le mal
# Tout ca m'est bien egal
# Non, rien de rien... #