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One of the great projects of art is to reconcile us with the world.

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Now, of course, not all art wants to do that or tries to,

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but from time to time, some artists do give you a glimpse

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of a universe which is neither hostile or indifferent

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nor indeed in much need of change.

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And in such a place, you can move without strain,

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because, in some way, it completes in nature.

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Now, for Picasso and Matisse and for the Fauves,

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the Mediterranean was such a place.

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It was the sea that stood for a kind of timeless sensual satisfaction beyond
history

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as well as for a continuous historical tradition back to the antique past.

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This is what happened to it within 60 years of the paintings they made on the
coast.

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Endless kitsch infinitely prolonged, a terrible parody of pressure.

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No wonder their work looks like a lost paradise now.

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MUSIC: Ca Plane Pour Moi, by Plastic Bertrand

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Of course, the 19th century did not invent the art of pleasure.

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But it broadened it.

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There was some truth to Talleyrand's remarks

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that those who were not alive before the Revolution,

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meaning the French Revolution, did not know the sweetness of life.

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For the rich, it was absolutely true.

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And in fact, the pleasure principle, in 18th-century art,

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belonged to one class - the aristocracy.

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The great image of civilised pleasure in painting

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was the fete champetre,

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a gathering of people enjoying themselves in the open air.

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Culture preening itself in the presence of its opposite - nature.

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These picnics begin with Titian and Giorgione in the 16th century.

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Antoine Watteau painted them in France in the early 18th century
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and they became a staple of court art.

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Thomas Gainsborough married the fete champetre to the formal portrait -

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Mr and Mrs Andrews, contemplating nature as condensed in their own property.

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The landscape and the figures in it, their clothes, their possessions,

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all these things stand for the class that also owns the painting...

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which is normal in art.

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But within a few decades of the French Revolution,

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there was a new ruling class in France and England -

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the bourgeoisie.

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It wanted to be depicted.

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It wanted its pleasures described its life documented.

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And this triumphant middle class

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included not only the conservative painters,

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but some of the most advanced artists of its time.

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MUSIC: Pelleas Et Melisande by Gabriel Faure
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For most of the last hundred years,

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Impressionism has been the most popular of all art movements.

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The appetite for Impressionist paintings never seems to wear off.

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And at the same time,

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Impressionism seems to us to represent a lost world,

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a pre-modern world whose icons have very little to do

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with the realities of our own time and culture.

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And both these things are true for the same reason.

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Around 1870, the field of paintable pleasure dramatically widened.

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Impressionism found its subjects

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in pleasures which nearly everybody above street level could have,

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including the life of the painters themselves and of their friends.

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One thing they all had in common

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was the feeling that the life of the city and the village,

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and the cafes and the parks, the salons, the bedrooms,

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the seaside and the banks of the Seine could become a vision of Eden.

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A world of ripeness and bloom, with an untroubled sense of wholeness.

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MUSIC: Pelleas Et Melisande, by Gabriel Faure

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The Impressionists had their moment

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at the start of the longest continuous peace

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that Europe would ever know.

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44 years from 1870 to 1914,

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a lost world that you need to be very old to remember.

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By the middle '80s, the Impressionist love of spontaneity

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was being challenged by younger artists.

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They saw it as the dictatorship of the eye over the mind.

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The unit, the building block of Impressionism,

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had been the brush stroke, which was as personal as handwriting.

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The greatest of the younger artists was Georges Seurat,

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who replaced the stroke with the dot.

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Hundreds of them, thousands.

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The dot was impersonal.

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It grew in colonies, like coral.

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It stiffened the shapes and gave them the archaic, Egyptian stillness

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that Seurat contrived as the antidote to the Impressionist love of the moment.

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Above all, the dot meant control of colour, step by step.

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Seurat's eye for colour was one of the subtlest in all art history,

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and he wanted each touch to have

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the analytic clearness of scientific thought.

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His subject matter was that of Impressionism,

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but his aims were not.

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He wanted to give his images the density and permanence

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of classical art - order, system, dignity.

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He didn't want snapshots,
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he wanted to reveal the processional aspect of modern life,

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something formal and rigorous and akin to the heroic dandyism

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that Baudelaire had seen in Paris 30 years before.

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"I want to show the moderns moving about on friezes,

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"stripped to their essentials.

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"To place them in paintings arranged in harmonies of colours,

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"in harmonies of lines, line and colour fitted to each other."

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He did this in an enormous painting

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of Parisians strolling on a Sunday afternoon

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on grassy island in the Seine, called La Grande Jatte.

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Here, the middle class at play got the ceremonious nobility of treatment

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that art once reserved for gods and kings.

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Here, pleasure takes on the gravity of history painting.

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Seurat built his space like a Renaissance fresco,

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with the most exacting precision.
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It's held together by complicated rhymes and chords of shape,

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some of which you hardly notice at first.

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The woman fishing there is the twin

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of that tiny figure in the extreme distance.

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The monkey's tail emulates the hook of the dandy's cane.

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The decorum of posture and gesture,

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the distances people allow themselves on that green lawn,

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is turned into the decorum of classical art itself.

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He's a bit ironic about his middle-class moderns.

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They guide about on the grass like tin toys on wheels.

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But the irony is part of the modernity.

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Just because it is a distanced painting,

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it makes you aware of its semantics,

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and the spectacle of art as a language fascinated Seurat.

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He had grasped that there is something atomised, divided,

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about Modernist awareness.

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To build a unified meaning,

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the subject had to be broken down into molecules and fragments,

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and then reassembled under the eye of formal order.

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Hence the dots.

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You can make reality permanent

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by displaying it as a web of tiny stillnesses.

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That is what La Grande Jatte was really about.

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Infinite division, infinite relationships.

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Claude Monet had come to the same place by a different route.

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If Monet had died in the same year as Seurat, 1891,

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we'd honour him as the essential Impressionist and, sooner or later, pass on by.

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None of the Impressionists had praised the surface of landscape more eloquently.

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He was to trees and grass and wind what Renoir was to women's skin.

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But at the same time,

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not very much that Monet painted before his 50th birthday

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had the complete reflective permanence of great art.

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The problem was to deepen the game of seeing,

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to show that the eye was connected to the brain,

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with its immense powers of discrimination.

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But, to do that, one must posses the subject.

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This kind of meditation needs pleasure, and not pain.

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It has to come from the centre of the self,

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and not from its disturbed edges.

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The novelist Gustave Flaubert once remarked that,

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"Art is a luxury, it requires calm, white hands."

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And I suppose, the supreme example of this in the life of a painter

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is the garden which Claude Monet built for himself at Giverny

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about 50 miles outside Paris.
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Ten years later, in 1893,

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Monet was past 50 when he started work on the second half,

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which was a water garden across the road.

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Now, this project obsessed him for 30 years.

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At first, the authorities didn't want him to do it at all

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because he wanted to divert a little stream nearby

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and they were afraid it was going to cause a water shortage.

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Well, it didn't.

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But what it did do was supply him

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with the motifs for his greatest paintings

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for the last half of his life.

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His water garden was a work of art, and it released a stream of others.

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Pottering around in it, he was in complete control.

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He had made the subject as well as the paintings.

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It was, as one art historian rather elegantly put it,
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"His hareem of nature."

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And so, all of late Monet is right here,

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that endless inspection and contemplation of a drowned, reflected world -

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the sky in the water, the lily pads, the willows

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and this Japanese bridge.

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MUSIC: The Harp And The French Impressionist by Maurice Ravel

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The pond was as artificial as painting itself.

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It was flat, as a painting is.

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What showed on it, the clouds and lily pads and cat's-paws of wind,

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was caught in a shallow space,

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just on the surface, like the space of painting.

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The willows touched it like brushes.

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No foreground, no background -

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a web of connections.

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Monet's water lilies were a slice of infinity.

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In them, emptiness matters as much as fullness,

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reflections have the weight of things.

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To seize the indefinite, to fix what is unstable,

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to give form to sights so complex, so nuanced, that they can hardly be named.

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This was a basic project of Modernism.

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It went against the smug view of reality that materialism gives us.

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And it could only be developed in a context of visual pleasure.

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No distractions.

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Its other pioneer, but a very different one, was Paul Cezanne.

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From 1880 to the year of this death, 1906,

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Cezanne spent most of his time working here,

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in the South of France, in a studio outside Aix-en-Provence.

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This studio is one of the sacred places of the modern mind,

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a kind of reliquary.

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But the irritable diabetic ghost who haunts it still baffles us,

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partly because he spent those 25 years secluded in a small town

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and we don't know much about what he really thought,

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and partly too because so much later painting

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claimed Cezanne as its ancestor.

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In an earlier programme, I mentioned Cezanne's effect on Cubism

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as a painter looking for structures in a welter of uncertainties -

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a genius of doubt.

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Which he was.

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But he never imagined Cubism

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and he would have loathed the very idea of abstract painting.

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The one great desire of his work was to return you to the world,

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to the look and feel of things,

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to prove the coherence of what he saw

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when he looked, for example, at some onions on a table.
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MUSIC: French Music For Two Pianos by Francis Poulenc

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He took an enormous amount of time and trouble over his paintings,

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sitting after sitting.

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By the time a still life was finished,

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the onions were sprouting, the apples withered.

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The landscape could not decay

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and Cezanne made a point of trudging out to his view, day after day,

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lugging his portable easel in all weathers,

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until he died of a chill

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that he caught from painting in the open air.

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He was a Provencal,

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and his art proclaims that before it says anything else.

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This landscape was in his blood - clear, bony, archaic

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and as recognisable on an instinctive level

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as taste of olives or cold water.
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And what did he paint? Approximations.

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The art schools used to teach

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that Cezanne wanted to reduce nature to spheres and cubes and cylinders.

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This is nonsense. He was a most ungeometrical painter.

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Instead of clear forms, he set down tiny adjustments.

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You see him engaging his subject, inch by inch, minute by minute.

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Cezanne had no time for smooth generalisations.

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And by the end of his life,

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he wasn't interested in the Impressionist snapshot either -

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the one day painting that set down one scene

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under one fleeting condition of light.

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He painted the same motifs over and over again

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without ever once repeating himself.

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The hill that became his emblem was Mont Ste-Victoire, outside Aix.

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He wanted his images to be the accumulated evidence of thought,

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every painting a deposit, a sort of uneven crust of observations.

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The more he painted, the more he saw.

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And the more he saw, the more manifold and unattainable truth became.

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No painter ever achieved more in such isolation.

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Instead of facility, he had an immense scrupulousness.

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And so, he was frustrated most of the time, right up to the end.

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A few weeks before his death, he wrote a letter to his son in Paris.

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"I must tell you that, as a painter,

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"I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature.

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"But with me, the realisation of my sensations is always painful.

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00:20:05,400 --> 00:20:10,040
"I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses.

248
00:20:10,040 --> 00:20:15,440
"I do not have the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature."

249
00:20:26,040 --> 00:20:30,440
But the idea that nature is endless suggests that it is also paradise.

250
00:20:30,440 --> 00:20:34,400
And other painters than Cezanne believed so too.

251
00:20:34,400 --> 00:20:38,080
MUSIC: Printemps by Claude Debussy

252
00:21:25,280 --> 00:21:28,600
What happened was that artists were looking for the kind of landscape

253
00:21:28,600 --> 00:21:31,800
that suited the pictures they wanted to do.

254
00:21:31,800 --> 00:21:34,280
Van Gogh's disappearance to Arles was part of that,

255
00:21:34,280 --> 00:21:36,320
and so were the trips that Derain and Matisse

256
00:21:36,320 --> 00:21:38,760
made to Collioure in the early 1900s.

257
00:21:38,760 --> 00:21:42,400
What they were looking for was a greater purity of natural sensation.

258
00:21:42,400 --> 00:21:47,000
Instead of grey Paris, they wanted the blue sky and the silvery olives

259
00:21:47,000 --> 00:21:49,880
and the red earth and the lavender.

260
00:21:49,880 --> 00:21:52,880
It wasn't a question of detaching colour from nature.

261
00:21:52,880 --> 00:21:57,440
Rather the aim was to find in nature

262
00:21:57,440 --> 00:22:00,280
a special kind of chromatic intensity -

263
00:22:00,280 --> 00:22:03,400
colour that spoke directly to the psyche

264
00:22:03,400 --> 00:22:05,760
and could be concentrated on a canvas.

265
00:22:07,360 --> 00:22:10,920
The man who did most to bring in the idea of independent, symbolic colour
266
00:22:10,920 --> 00:22:12,520
and free its role in art

267
00:22:12,520 --> 00:22:16,720
was a brilliant, histrionic fugitive named Paul Gauguin.

268
00:22:16,720 --> 00:22:20,840
Now, everybody knows something about him. He was the archetypal dropout.

269
00:22:20,840 --> 00:22:23,520
The man who gave up banking to paint,

270
00:22:23,520 --> 00:22:25,840
who went half crazy with his mad friend, Van Gogh,

271
00:22:25,840 --> 00:22:29,000
trying to set up and artists' commune in the Yellow House at Arles,

272
00:22:29,000 --> 00:22:32,600
and who left his wife for the embraces of the Tahitians.

273
00:22:37,280 --> 00:22:40,080
What provoked his famous escape was the great Paris exposition,

274
00:22:40,080 --> 00:22:43,680
which had a Tahitian sideshow and travel brochures which read,

275
00:22:43,680 --> 00:22:50,960
"The lucky inhabitants of the remote South Seas paradise of Tahiti know life only
at its brightest."

276
00:22:54,800 --> 00:22:56,680
The idea of the noble savage,

277
00:22:56,680 --> 00:23:00,360
living in a blissful state of virtue in the fruitful bosom of nature,

278
00:23:00,360 --> 00:23:02,920
was one of the great fantasies of European thought,

279
00:23:02,920 --> 00:23:06,560
and Tahiti was the proof that this creature existed.

280
00:23:06,560 --> 00:23:09,640
So the myth of Tahiti blossomed very quickly.

281
00:23:09,640 --> 00:23:13,240
Moreover, Paradise was a French colony.

282
00:23:13,240 --> 00:23:17,880
So in 1891, Gauguin set off, cheered on by his friends and admirers

283
00:23:17,880 --> 00:23:20,440
who, nevertheless, wisely stayed in Paris.

284
00:23:21,920 --> 00:23:25,640
Instead of paradise, he found a trading port.

285
00:23:25,640 --> 00:23:29,240
Instead of noble savages, prostitutes.

286
00:23:29,240 --> 00:23:31,440
A culture wrecked by bibles and booze,

287
00:23:31,440 --> 00:23:33,960
its rituals dead, its memory lost,

288
00:23:33,960 --> 00:23:37,760
its population down from 40,000 in Captain Cook's time

289
00:23:37,760 --> 00:23:39,880
to 6,000 in Gauguin's.

290
00:23:41,360 --> 00:23:45,040
So the paradise Gauguin painted was deceptive, even pessimistic,

291
00:23:45,040 --> 00:23:47,840
a lost Eden full of cultural ghosts.

292
00:23:47,840 --> 00:23:50,600
And his Tahitians were like survivors of a golden age

293
00:23:50,600 --> 00:23:52,520
that they could not remember.

294
00:23:53,840 --> 00:23:56,960
"Those nymphs, I want to perpetuate them,

295
00:23:56,960 --> 00:23:59,160
"with the golden skins,

296
00:23:59,160 --> 00:24:01,640
"their searching animal odour,

297
00:24:01,640 --> 00:24:04,440
"their tropical savours."

298
00:24:04,440 --> 00:24:07,000
It was his colour that pointed to the future.

299
00:24:07,000 --> 00:24:08,960
The colours of Tahiti were brilliant,

300
00:24:08,960 --> 00:24:11,560
and Gauguin used them with a moody intensity.

301
00:24:13,920 --> 00:24:16,480
He believed that colour could act almost like words,

302
00:24:16,480 --> 00:24:19,200
that it held an exact counterpart for every emotion

303
00:24:19,200 --> 00:24:21,480
and every nuance of feeling.

304
00:24:21,480 --> 00:24:25,440
Colour became the interpreter between the mind and the world.

305
00:24:25,440 --> 00:24:29,600
It was a language made up of patches on a flat surface.

306
00:24:29,600 --> 00:24:32,760
Its job was to express rather than to describe.

307
00:24:36,120 --> 00:24:39,160
For younger painters, this was a tremendous liberty.

308
00:24:39,160 --> 00:24:41,920
But they wanted to use it inside France,

309
00:24:41,920 --> 00:24:45,320
and its natural theatre was the South.
310
00:24:45,320 --> 00:24:50,080
For colour was the sign of vitality, the emblem of well-being.

311
00:24:50,080 --> 00:24:52,920
MUSIC: La Belle Excentrique by Erik Satie

312
00:26:23,720 --> 00:26:26,240
What came out of this was a movement named Fauvism,

313
00:26:26,240 --> 00:26:28,800
which essentially meant the work of the three painters

314
00:26:28,800 --> 00:26:30,080
in the early 1900s -

315
00:26:30,080 --> 00:26:31,440
Andre Derain,

316
00:26:31,440 --> 00:26:33,400
Maurice de Vlaminck

317
00:26:33,400 --> 00:26:35,160
and Henri Matisse.

318
00:26:36,760 --> 00:26:39,000
The word "fauve" means wild beast.

319
00:26:39,000 --> 00:26:42,120
It was a tag given them in 1905 by a dubious critic

320
00:26:42,120 --> 00:26:45,920
who had been offended by the intensity of their paintings.

321
00:26:45,920 --> 00:26:49,440
And what they produced was less a movement than an episode -

322
00:26:49,440 --> 00:26:53,320
a meeting of instincts among painters who liked strong sensation,

323
00:26:53,320 --> 00:26:56,040
but had no binding theory.

324
00:26:56,040 --> 00:26:59,680
If you can imagine an aesthetic based solely on exhilaration,
325
00:26:59,680 --> 00:27:01,480
this came close to it.

326
00:27:01,480 --> 00:27:05,920
MUSIC: Traditional Folk Music Of Great Britain And France. L'Esprit De Paris

327
00:27:59,600 --> 00:28:03,600
The master of reflection within pleasure was Henri Matisse.

328
00:28:03,600 --> 00:28:06,960
He was born in 1869 and he died in 1954.

329
00:28:06,960 --> 00:28:08,600
And nowhere in the span of his work

330
00:28:08,600 --> 00:28:11,160
do you feel a trace of the alienation and conflict

331
00:28:11,160 --> 00:28:12,960
to which Modernism consigned us.

332
00:28:14,360 --> 00:28:16,360
His studio was a place of equilibrium

333
00:28:16,360 --> 00:28:19,680
that produced images of refuge for 60 continuous years.

334
00:28:21,120 --> 00:28:25,600
In 1904, Matisse got interested in Seurat's technique of pointillism,

335
00:28:25,600 --> 00:28:28,560
the coloured dots that were being used by his followers,

336
00:28:28,560 --> 00:28:31,920
among them, Matisse's friend, the painter Signac.

337
00:28:33,360 --> 00:28:35,240
Signac had a house at St Tropez

338
00:28:35,240 --> 00:28:38,400
and Matisse went there in the summer of 1904.

339
00:28:38,400 --> 00:28:42,440
The result was one of those awkward demonstration pieces of modern art,

340
00:28:42,440 --> 00:28:44,600
where Matisse's literary instincts

341
00:28:44,600 --> 00:28:47,080
merged with his fantasies about Arcadia,

342
00:28:47,080 --> 00:28:49,560
a picnic by the sea at St Tropez,

343
00:28:49,560 --> 00:28:53,320
with a lateen rigged boat and a pine tree

344
00:28:53,320 --> 00:28:55,680
and a cluster of spotty, bulbous nudes,

345
00:28:55,680 --> 00:28:58,320
and a thoroughly Baudelairean title -

346
00:28:58,320 --> 00:29:01,720
Luxury, Calm And Pleasure.

347
00:29:01,720 --> 00:29:05,800
It was Matisse's first image of the Mediterranean as a state of mind.

348
00:29:05,800 --> 00:29:08,960
A clumsy painting but a portent.

349
00:29:08,960 --> 00:29:12,400
In 1905, Matisse went with Andre Derain

350
00:29:12,400 --> 00:29:14,800
to paint in the little coastal village of Collioure,

351
00:29:14,800 --> 00:29:16,760
near the Spanish border.

352
00:29:16,760 --> 00:29:20,320
This was one of the crucial moments in the short history of Fauvism,

353
00:29:20,320 --> 00:29:22,000
because at Collioure,

354
00:29:22,000 --> 00:29:25,920
both men painted their most radical pictures so far.

355
00:29:25,920 --> 00:29:29,960
This was the point at which Matisse's colour broke free.

356
00:29:29,960 --> 00:29:33,600
Thick blobs of paint one moment, bare canvas the next,

357
00:29:33,600 --> 00:29:36,000
and the harsh glitter of local colour

358
00:29:36,000 --> 00:29:39,360
to mimic the dazzle of afternoon light on the water.

359
00:29:40,840 --> 00:29:43,280
The new Matisses were very shocking indeed.

360
00:29:43,280 --> 00:29:45,400
Their defenders were uncertain about them

361
00:29:45,400 --> 00:29:48,160
and their detractors thought them barbaric.

362
00:29:51,840 --> 00:29:55,240
Particularly offensive was Matisse's use of this new colour system,

363
00:29:55,240 --> 00:29:59,280
discordant and ragged, in the familiar matrix of the salon portrait -

364
00:29:59,280 --> 00:30:01,680
even though the victim was his wife.

365
00:30:12,160 --> 00:30:16,280
Time and again, Matisse set down an image of a pre-civilised world,

366
00:30:16,280 --> 00:30:18,160
Eden before the fall.

367
00:30:18,160 --> 00:30:21,600
Gauguin's dream, inhabited by men and women without a history,

368
00:30:21,600 --> 00:30:25,160
languid as plants or energetic as animals.
369
00:30:25,160 --> 00:30:27,880
The primitive look of these two huge paintings,

370
00:30:27,880 --> 00:30:30,880
The Dance and Music, still throws you.

371
00:30:30,880 --> 00:30:33,800
Matisse presents his image of music at its origins,

372
00:30:33,800 --> 00:30:37,680
enacted by half a dozen naked cavemen, prehistorical,

373
00:30:37,680 --> 00:30:40,880
pre-social almost, and definitely pre-technological.

374
00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:45,880
A reed flute or two, the slap of hand on skin,

375
00:30:45,880 --> 00:30:49,000
and yet, how powerful that editing down is.

376
00:30:49,000 --> 00:30:52,760
The simplest elements, Earth, sky, body,

377
00:30:52,760 --> 00:30:56,640
each allotted its own local colour, and nothing more.

378
00:30:56,640 --> 00:30:59,480
And within that simplicity, what energy.

379
00:30:59,480 --> 00:31:03,360
The Dance is one of the few entirely convincing images of ecstasy

380
00:31:03,360 --> 00:31:05,600
made in the 20th century.

381
00:31:05,600 --> 00:31:07,840
That circle of twisting,

382
00:31:07,840 --> 00:31:11,680
stamping maenads takes you right back down the line

383
00:31:11,680 --> 00:31:16,000
to the red figure vases of Greece, and beyond them to the caves.
384
00:31:16,000 --> 00:31:19,320
It tries to be as old as dance itself.

385
00:31:24,480 --> 00:31:27,600
Matisse got the idea in the summer of 1905 at Collioure,

386
00:31:27,600 --> 00:31:31,240
while watching some fishermen and peasants in a circular dance.

387
00:31:31,240 --> 00:31:36,600
TRADITIONAL FOLK MUSIC

388
00:33:16,240 --> 00:33:20,680
The other side of this coin was an intense interest in civilised craft -

389
00:33:20,680 --> 00:33:23,600
Islamic pottery, Persian miniatures.

390
00:33:23,600 --> 00:33:26,760
Matisse loved pattern, and through it, he gives you

391
00:33:26,760 --> 00:33:29,640
the illusion of a completely full world, where everything,

392
00:33:29,640 --> 00:33:33,840
background, foreground and in-between acts equally on the eye.

393
00:33:35,200 --> 00:33:39,360
One of the results was The Red Studio, which he painted in 1912.

394
00:33:41,520 --> 00:33:44,360
On one hand, he wants to bring you into the painting,

395
00:33:44,360 --> 00:33:47,400
to make you fall into it, like walking through the looking glass.

396
00:33:47,400 --> 00:33:50,960
That box of crayons is put just under your hand,

397
00:33:50,960 --> 00:33:53,400
as it was under his.

398
00:33:53,400 --> 00:33:57,400
But then, it isn't a real space, and because it's all soaked in red,

399
00:33:57,400 --> 00:33:59,920
a red beyond ordinary experience,

400
00:33:59,920 --> 00:34:02,880
it describes itself as a fiction, as art.

401
00:34:05,000 --> 00:34:08,560
Like a Persian miniature, it's all inlaid pattern.

402
00:34:12,240 --> 00:34:17,080
And more than that, everything in it is a work either of art or of craft.

403
00:34:17,080 --> 00:34:19,480
The paintings are Matisse's.

404
00:34:19,480 --> 00:34:21,160
So are the sculptures.

405
00:34:23,880 --> 00:34:26,400
The only hint of nature is the plant,

406
00:34:26,400 --> 00:34:30,000
but it's a very tame plant, a house plant trying to be a work of art,

407
00:34:30,000 --> 00:34:32,960
and it's trained to rhyme with the curves of that chair.

408
00:34:34,400 --> 00:34:37,880
And those curves are also reflected on the other side of the room

409
00:34:37,880 --> 00:34:40,120
in a pink painting of a nude.

410
00:34:43,240 --> 00:34:45,560
So the red studio is, among other things,

411
00:34:45,560 --> 00:34:48,360
a poem about how painting refers to itself,

412
00:34:48,360 --> 00:34:50,960
how art nourishes itself from other art,

413
00:34:50,960 --> 00:34:54,240
and how, to this cast of mind, art can form its own republic of pleasure,

414
00:34:54,240 --> 00:34:59,080
a Switzerland, a parenthesis within the real-world,

415
00:34:59,080 --> 00:35:00,640
a paradise.

416
00:35:02,240 --> 00:35:06,240
In 1916, Matisse moved more or less permanently

417
00:35:06,240 --> 00:35:08,360
to the south of France, to Nice.

418
00:35:08,360 --> 00:35:11,400
He found an apartment in the Hotel Regina,

419
00:35:11,400 --> 00:35:14,000
named after Queen Victoria, who had stayed there.

420
00:35:16,760 --> 00:35:19,520
When the Great War broke out in 1914,

421
00:35:19,520 --> 00:35:21,400
he was 45, too old to fight,

422
00:35:21,400 --> 00:35:24,080
too wise to imagine that his painting

423
00:35:24,080 --> 00:35:26,760
could interpose itself between history and its victims,

424
00:35:26,760 --> 00:35:30,240
and too certain of his aims as an artist to change them, anyway.

425
00:35:31,720 --> 00:35:35,200
I don't suppose that any great artist since the 18th century

426
00:35:35,200 --> 00:35:38,960
has so devoted his work to an idea of comfort and refuge.

427
00:35:38,960 --> 00:35:44,880
Matisse once said that he wanted his art to have the effect of a good armchair upon
a tired businessman.
428
00:35:44,880 --> 00:35:48,480
Now, 20 years ago, when we thought that art was going to change the world,

429
00:35:48,480 --> 00:35:51,640
this seemed, at best, rather a limited aim.

430
00:35:51,640 --> 00:35:54,120
But now that I'm sure that it can't and it won't,

431
00:35:54,120 --> 00:35:57,200
I can only admire Matisse's common sense.

432
00:35:57,200 --> 00:36:03,120
He thought that an educated bourgeoisie is the one audience that an advanced art
can claim,

433
00:36:03,120 --> 00:36:05,600
and it seems that history has shown he was right.

434
00:36:06,640 --> 00:36:09,960
Anyway, this is where he lived and what he painted -

435
00:36:09,960 --> 00:36:11,760
the great indoors.

436
00:36:11,760 --> 00:36:15,120
And how fitting it is that so many of Matisse's best paintings

437
00:36:15,120 --> 00:36:18,040
should have been done in apartments and hotels.

438
00:36:18,040 --> 00:36:23,000
The room is a metaphor of their nature - a private place,

439
00:36:23,000 --> 00:36:25,560
always fresh, signifying luxury.

440
00:36:25,560 --> 00:36:29,920
The playpen of the adult mind. A womb with a view.

441
00:36:29,920 --> 00:36:33,440
And the common theme of Matisse's Mediterranean interiors

442
00:36:33,440 --> 00:36:38,640
is that of looking out on benevolent nature from a position of absolute security.

443
00:36:38,640 --> 00:36:43,440
The filter between those two worlds is the shutters.

444
00:36:43,440 --> 00:36:47,000
MUSIC: "Concertino Pour Piano Et Orchestre" by Jean Francaix

445
00:37:01,560 --> 00:37:04,160
"My purpose is to render my emotion.

446
00:37:05,480 --> 00:37:08,920
"This state of soul is created by the objects which surround me

447
00:37:08,920 --> 00:37:12,200
"and which react in me, from the horizon to myself.

448
00:37:12,200 --> 00:37:16,800
"I express as naturally the space and the objects which are situated there

449
00:37:16,800 --> 00:37:20,480
"as if I had only the sea and the sky in front of me.

450
00:37:20,480 --> 00:37:23,640
"That is the simplest thing in the world."

451
00:38:18,800 --> 00:38:20,560
"In order to paint my pictures,

452
00:38:20,560 --> 00:38:24,360
"I need to remain for several days in the same state of mind,

453
00:38:24,360 --> 00:38:28,720
"and I don't find this in any atmosphere but that of the Cote d'Azur."

454
00:38:28,720 --> 00:38:30,600
There were other painters who believed

455
00:38:30,600 --> 00:38:33,960
their emotional temperature was always right on the Mediterranean.

456
00:38:33,960 --> 00:38:38,520
Notably, Pierre Bonnard, who, after years of painting trips to the south,
457
00:38:38,520 --> 00:38:41,960
finally moved to this house near Cannes in 1925.

458
00:38:41,960 --> 00:38:45,720
Matisse would never have lived in a garden like this.

459
00:38:46,720 --> 00:38:49,400
In some ways, Bonnard was his opposite,

460
00:38:49,400 --> 00:38:52,080
the little bourgeois against the grand one.

461
00:38:52,080 --> 00:38:55,880
A poet of unpruned domestic intimacy, rather than of the grand apartment.

462
00:38:58,600 --> 00:39:02,200
Matisse's compositions carried an air of formal grandeur,

463
00:39:02,200 --> 00:39:04,640
of declamation in the high tradition of French art,

464
00:39:04,640 --> 00:39:06,520
but Bonnard's did not.

465
00:39:06,520 --> 00:39:09,080
In still life, he took things as he found them,

466
00:39:09,080 --> 00:39:11,600
or at least he painted them to seem so.

467
00:39:11,600 --> 00:39:17,080
The arrangement of jugs and bowls and plates on that breakfast table seems fragile
and chancy -

468
00:39:17,080 --> 00:39:19,400
they've strayed into view.

469
00:39:21,400 --> 00:39:25,440
And even when the still life is more arranged, like this one,

470
00:39:25,440 --> 00:39:28,480
he vaporises it with colour and with loose brushwork

471
00:39:28,480 --> 00:39:33,520
so that it seems soft, half-formed, ready to disappear, as moments do.

472
00:39:35,280 --> 00:39:39,440
Everything in Bonnard is seen with the private eye, not the public one.

473
00:39:39,440 --> 00:39:43,120
The food about the house, the flowers around the house,

474
00:39:43,120 --> 00:39:44,520
and the woman.

475
00:39:48,960 --> 00:39:52,440
She is almost always the same woman, Marie Boursin.

476
00:39:54,240 --> 00:39:58,520
Bonnard met her in 1894, and after a liaison that lasted

477
00:39:58,520 --> 00:40:01,400
more than 30 years, he finally married her.

478
00:40:01,400 --> 00:40:04,840
They then lived together until 1942, when she died.

479
00:40:04,840 --> 00:40:09,520
Far from being the contented painter's wife in a cottage in the South of France,

480
00:40:09,520 --> 00:40:13,560
she was a nagging, jealous shrew, who made life impossible for him and his friends,

481
00:40:13,560 --> 00:40:16,520
knew nothing about painting, and couldn't even cook.

482
00:40:16,520 --> 00:40:20,000
But he was utterly and masochistically loyal to her.

483
00:40:22,960 --> 00:40:26,120
Bonnard was obsessed with the facts of domesticity

484
00:40:26,120 --> 00:40:29,880
and the memories of sexual pleasure, the privacy and the glimpsing,

485
00:40:29,880 --> 00:40:34,480
the feeling that the eye is privileged, a party to all secrets.

486
00:40:42,160 --> 00:40:46,400
The sexuality of early Bonnard is still amazing.

487
00:40:46,400 --> 00:40:51,080
At a certain point around 1920, she stops getting older.

488
00:40:51,080 --> 00:40:55,040
When she was 60, Bonnard was still painting her 30-year-old body.

489
00:41:05,440 --> 00:41:10,160
But she is always apart, self-absorbed, spied on.

490
00:41:10,160 --> 00:41:13,120
The perpetual Susanna in her bath,

491
00:41:13,120 --> 00:41:16,400
with Bonnard as the perpetually peeping elder,

492
00:41:16,400 --> 00:41:21,160
dissolving her in light, reconstituting her in colour,

493
00:41:21,160 --> 00:41:26,240
possessing her again and again from a distance.

494
00:41:26,240 --> 00:41:30,680
MUSIC: "Pavane De La Belle Au Bois Dormant" by Ravel

495
00:43:13,440 --> 00:43:19,160
The greatest painter of disciplined pleasure between the wars was Georges Braque.

496
00:43:19,160 --> 00:43:22,200
In 1915, a fracture opened in Braque's career.

497
00:43:22,200 --> 00:43:25,040
He joined the army and he was shot in the head.

498
00:43:25,040 --> 00:43:28,280
There was no brain damage, but he couldn't paint for some years.

499
00:43:28,280 --> 00:43:31,640
When he got back to the easel, he had decided once and for all

500
00:43:31,640 --> 00:43:34,600
that he could push no further towards abstraction.
501
00:43:34,600 --> 00:43:40,080
"There is in nature," he remarked, "a tactile, I almost mean manual space."

502
00:43:40,080 --> 00:43:44,920
And this is what he explored in the still lifes of the '20s and '30s.

503
00:43:44,920 --> 00:43:48,640
If ever a group of paintings made concrete the desire

504
00:43:48,640 --> 00:43:54,040
for measure, sublimation, attention and calm, it was these.

505
00:43:55,080 --> 00:43:59,040
The objects are ordinary - a guitar, newspapers, bottles,

506
00:43:59,040 --> 00:44:02,840
the routine subjects of cubism.

507
00:44:02,840 --> 00:44:05,520
But each is given its exact visual weight.

508
00:44:05,520 --> 00:44:08,480
He wanted to distribute one's attention across the painting

509
00:44:08,480 --> 00:44:10,200
as evenly as possible.

510
00:44:10,200 --> 00:44:13,920
What all this meant was an ambition different from Cubism,

511
00:44:13,920 --> 00:44:17,000
to pick up and reassemble the pieces of the French tradition

512
00:44:17,000 --> 00:44:20,760
of still life painting that Braque, as a cubist, had helped to shatter.

513
00:44:20,760 --> 00:44:24,960
The result is solider than cubism, less hypothetical.

514
00:44:24,960 --> 00:44:27,920
He even mixed sand with his paint to give it more body,

515
00:44:27,920 --> 00:44:31,240
to endow it with a more resistant surface, like fresco,
516
00:44:31,240 --> 00:44:34,680
and to insist upon a slowness of inspection

517
00:44:34,680 --> 00:44:38,080
parallel to the immense deliberation which he brought to the act of painting.

518
00:44:42,760 --> 00:44:46,840
There wasn't very much in Picasso's output over the same 25 years

519
00:44:46,840 --> 00:44:49,600
that could really equal that kind of frozen music,

520
00:44:49,600 --> 00:44:52,560
but then, Picasso had no talent for serenity.

521
00:44:53,920 --> 00:44:57,480
His whole idea of pleasure was much more prehensile than Braque's.

522
00:44:57,480 --> 00:45:02,160
He wanted to seize and touch and absorb and enter the objects of the Mediterranean.

523
00:45:02,160 --> 00:45:05,680
He liked strong, specific sensations.

524
00:46:17,680 --> 00:46:20,280
The strongest node of feeling was sex.

525
00:46:20,280 --> 00:46:25,200
Picasso never tried to hide what he felt about it, and when his fear of woman was
aroused,

526
00:46:25,200 --> 00:46:27,680
and it often was, he had to paint it out.

527
00:46:27,680 --> 00:46:29,520
So, at one end of the scale,

528
00:46:29,520 --> 00:46:32,800
he produced some of the most demonic images of women ever done.

529
00:46:32,800 --> 00:46:36,560
This isn't distortion, it's more like dismemberment,

530
00:46:36,560 --> 00:46:38,280
killing the witch.

531
00:46:38,280 --> 00:46:42,240
But on the other hand, he painted some of the most intense images of

532
00:46:42,240 --> 00:46:44,560
sexual pleasure in all modern art.

533
00:46:47,400 --> 00:46:49,800
They were provoked by his affair with a woman named

534
00:46:49,800 --> 00:46:53,480
Marie-Therese Walther, whom he met in 1931.

535
00:46:56,000 --> 00:47:00,080
In the paintings, her body becomes not so much a structure of flesh and bone,

536
00:47:00,080 --> 00:47:04,280
as a series of orifices, looped together by that sinuous line,

537
00:47:04,280 --> 00:47:08,640
tender, composed, swollen, abandoned.

538
00:47:08,640 --> 00:47:15,120
The point is not that Picasso managed to will himself into the skin of this woman -
not at all.

539
00:47:15,120 --> 00:47:17,480
He depicted his own state of arousal,

540
00:47:17,480 --> 00:47:21,120
and projected it on his lover's body like an image on a screen.

541
00:47:21,120 --> 00:47:24,600
Her body is reformed in the shape of his desire,

542
00:47:24,600 --> 00:47:26,920
and it's recognisable to anyone.

543
00:47:30,600 --> 00:47:34,920
It was about this time that Picasso began to mythologise himself

544
00:47:34,920 --> 00:47:36,960
as THE Mediterranean artist,
545
00:47:36,960 --> 00:47:40,320
with a series of etchings called The Vollard Suite.

546
00:47:40,320 --> 00:47:43,640
One part of this marvellous cycle is autobiographical,

547
00:47:43,640 --> 00:47:46,560
or, at any rate, in a loose way, self descriptive.

548
00:47:46,560 --> 00:47:50,480
The sculptor and his model, she the passive and obliging nymph,

549
00:47:50,480 --> 00:47:53,920
and he the genius of the place, a sort of river god in costume.

550
00:47:58,040 --> 00:48:01,680
These prints where Picasso's invocation of the past.

551
00:48:01,680 --> 00:48:05,080
The enabled him to place himself in Arcadia.

552
00:48:05,080 --> 00:48:08,000
The Vollard Suite was one of the most convincing parts

553
00:48:08,000 --> 00:48:09,840
of a general revival of antiquity

554
00:48:09,840 --> 00:48:13,320
seen in terms of the cult of the sun, of pleasure and the healthy body

555
00:48:13,320 --> 00:48:17,640
that went on in the 1920s and spilled over into the 1930s.

556
00:48:17,640 --> 00:48:20,960
It goes without saying that there was a much more complicated

557
00:48:20,960 --> 00:48:24,600
and doubt-ridden Picasso behind these antique simplicities.

558
00:48:24,600 --> 00:48:28,640
Picasso's image as the old man of the sea was to some extent a role,

559
00:48:28,640 --> 00:48:32,360
just as Hemingway's famous cojones were a mask worn on the groin.

560
00:48:33,720 --> 00:48:37,800
Nevertheless, The Vollard Suite remains the last major work of art

561
00:48:37,800 --> 00:48:41,920
to be directly inspired by the classical Mediterranean.

562
00:48:41,920 --> 00:48:45,960
It's the end of an immense tradition that lasted for more than 2,500 years,

563
00:48:45,960 --> 00:48:49,800
and then perished amid the historical disjuncture,

564
00:48:49,800 --> 00:48:54,480
the suffering, the physical ruin and the irony of the 20th century.

565
00:48:54,480 --> 00:48:58,800
Within 40 years of the completion of The Vollard Suite, officials in Athens

566
00:48:58,800 --> 00:49:01,920
were debating whether to remove the caryatids from the Acropolis

567
00:49:01,920 --> 00:49:06,040
and replace them with fibreglass copies, and the whole Cote d'Azur

568
00:49:06,040 --> 00:49:10,680
was one mass of pinball machines and pizza parlours from end to end.

569
00:49:10,680 --> 00:49:15,160
Of course, the more the tradition receded, the more famous Picasso became.

570
00:49:15,160 --> 00:49:17,960
He turned into a kind of living fetish object.

571
00:49:17,960 --> 00:49:20,800
He was famous as no other artist ever had been.

572
00:49:20,800 --> 00:49:23,040
But none of his later Arcadian images would carry

573
00:49:23,040 --> 00:49:25,840
quite the same conviction as The Vollard Suite,

574
00:49:25,840 --> 00:49:29,080
because World War II had killed the classical Mediterranean

575
00:49:29,080 --> 00:49:32,840
just as surely as World War I killed the Belle Epoque.

576
00:49:32,840 --> 00:49:35,760
One of the first tremors of modernism

577
00:49:35,760 --> 00:49:38,720
is in a poem by Mallarme called The Afternoon Of A Faune,

578
00:49:38,720 --> 00:49:43,160
and its very first line runs, "I would perpetuate these nymphs."

579
00:49:43,160 --> 00:49:45,480
Picasso's motto, too.

580
00:49:45,480 --> 00:49:50,920
But those nymphs couldn't survive except as a sort of dumb decor after Auschwitz
and Hiroshima,

581
00:49:50,920 --> 00:49:52,720
or even after Guernica.

582
00:49:52,720 --> 00:49:57,280
And Picasso's efforts to maintain an Arcadian art in his old age

583
00:49:57,280 --> 00:49:59,680
began to look less and less convincing.

584
00:50:00,920 --> 00:50:03,560
This didn't happen with the ageing Matisse,

585
00:50:03,560 --> 00:50:05,280
whose art in the early 1940s

586
00:50:05,280 --> 00:50:08,040
was suddenly clarified by a brush with death.

587
00:50:08,040 --> 00:50:11,320
There was long surgery, and then a long convalescence.

588
00:50:11,320 --> 00:50:14,720
"My terrible operation has completely rejuvenated
589
00:50:14,720 --> 00:50:17,160
"and made a philosopher of me.

590
00:50:17,160 --> 00:50:20,120
"I had so completely prepared for my exit from life,

591
00:50:20,120 --> 00:50:23,080
"that it seems to me that I am in a second life."

592
00:50:23,080 --> 00:50:25,880
He expressed this rebirth not with a brush,

593
00:50:25,880 --> 00:50:28,600
and with scissors and coloured paper.

594
00:50:28,600 --> 00:50:31,880
He cut out shapes and pinned them on a wall or a sheet of paper,

595
00:50:31,880 --> 00:50:34,120
and cutting straight into colour, he said,

596
00:50:34,120 --> 00:50:36,440
reminded him of the direct carving of a sculptor.

597
00:50:36,440 --> 00:50:40,120
It linked drawing and colour in one sweep of the hand.

598
00:50:47,040 --> 00:50:49,920
The images were like heraldic emblems of pleasure,

599
00:50:49,920 --> 00:50:51,920
signs for well-being.

600
00:50:51,920 --> 00:50:53,640
At an age when most painters

601
00:50:53,640 --> 00:50:56,240
are either dead or repeating themselves,

602
00:50:56,240 --> 00:50:59,720
Matisse had re-entered the avant-garde, and redefined it.

603
00:50:59,720 --> 00:51:01,760
These cut outs were the most advanced painting

604
00:51:01,760 --> 00:51:04,520
and perhaps the most august being made in Europe.

605
00:51:06,600 --> 00:51:10,480
They showed the wholeness of gesture that most abstract painting wanted,

606
00:51:10,480 --> 00:51:12,280
but didn't always reach.

607
00:51:12,280 --> 00:51:16,200
The fast coordination of hand, mind, eye and memory

608
00:51:16,200 --> 00:51:18,440
as the scissors flowed through the paper.

609
00:51:18,440 --> 00:51:20,920
One cut, the essence of decision.

610
00:51:22,320 --> 00:51:27,840
And then the pleasurable digestion - moving the shapes around,

611
00:51:27,840 --> 00:51:31,120
pinning them here and here until the harmony was reached.

612
00:51:36,080 --> 00:51:39,600
The cut-outs summed up what he had learnt about Islamic art

613
00:51:39,600 --> 00:51:42,560
over the years since his first visits to North Africa and Spain.

614
00:51:42,560 --> 00:51:46,400
One of their sources lies in Moorish tiles in the walls

615
00:51:46,400 --> 00:51:47,920
of the Alhambra in Granada.

616
00:51:50,920 --> 00:51:53,960
But they were more than decorative, because Matisse,

617
00:51:53,960 --> 00:51:55,960
more than any other artist except Picasso,

618
00:51:55,960 --> 00:51:59,480
had saturated his work in the memory of physical sensation -

619
00:51:59,480 --> 00:52:03,600
of sunshine and water, the ecstasy of healthy bodies,

620
00:52:03,600 --> 00:52:06,320
salt and wine and flowers.

621
00:52:06,320 --> 00:52:10,000
The Mediterranean world, which he evoked for the last time

622
00:52:10,000 --> 00:52:12,800
in a frieze of diving figures, The Swimming Pool.

623
00:52:16,160 --> 00:52:18,720
This was his farewell to a subject which had been

624
00:52:18,720 --> 00:52:23,520
one of the tests of an artist's virtuosity since the 15th century.

625
00:52:23,520 --> 00:52:25,840
The human animal in energetic movement,

626
00:52:25,840 --> 00:52:28,640
the body stripped of its guilt, an end in itself.

627
00:52:29,720 --> 00:52:34,800
Between 1947 and 1951, Matisse was continuously busy with

628
00:52:34,800 --> 00:52:38,200
what he called "the last stage in an entire lifetime of work,

629
00:52:38,200 --> 00:52:41,920
"and the apex of an immense, sincere and difficult effort."

630
00:52:41,920 --> 00:52:44,720
It was also probably the last major work of art

631
00:52:44,720 --> 00:52:47,680
that Catholicism would be able to evoke in our century,

632
00:52:47,680 --> 00:52:51,080
and this was the Dominican Chapel here in Vence,
633
00:52:51,080 --> 00:52:55,160
for which he designed just about everything -

634
00:52:55,160 --> 00:52:59,160
the murals, the stained-glass windows, the crucifix, the lot.

635
00:52:59,160 --> 00:53:02,800
MUSIC: "Flute Sonata" by Francis Poulenc

636
00:55:49,080 --> 00:55:51,600
It was a hard act to follow.

637
00:55:51,600 --> 00:55:55,000
In secular terms, there was everything to be learned from Matisse.

638
00:55:55,000 --> 00:55:58,600
He was the most influential painter of the third quarter of the 20th century,

639
00:55:58,600 --> 00:56:02,360
as Picasso had been of the second quarter, and Cezanne of the first.

640
00:56:02,360 --> 00:56:04,560
Especially in America.

641
00:56:04,560 --> 00:56:08,920
But, there was something in his work that wouldn't transplant across the Atlantic.

642
00:56:10,720 --> 00:56:14,120
What wouldn't transplant was its Mediterranean-ness,

643
00:56:14,120 --> 00:56:17,800
that ease and sensuous completeness that was rooted in Matisse's own youth.

644
00:56:17,800 --> 00:56:20,000
This wasn't a matter of style,

645
00:56:20,000 --> 00:56:24,880
it was a matter of a complete attitude towards life and how to live it,

646
00:56:24,880 --> 00:56:29,320
and how to sustain human relationships which came out of the 19th century,

647
00:56:29,320 --> 00:56:33,320
and, for thousands of people, was wrecked by the last world war.
648
00:56:33,320 --> 00:56:38,360
After that, you could paint Matisses, certainly, but you couldn't BE Matisse.

649
00:56:38,360 --> 00:56:41,920
That particular paradise was closed,

650
00:56:41,920 --> 00:56:45,880
especially if you happened to live in a highly utilitarian society

651
00:56:45,880 --> 00:56:50,200
fuelled by pragmatism and guilt, like post-Freudian America.

652
00:57:00,000 --> 00:57:04,240
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