Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Think of the Gothic cathedral, and you think of the austerity of stone.
00:16Rows of saints and angels, ushering the righteous into heaven and thrusting the damned into
00:22the jaws of hell.
00:26But in some cathedral towns, what the flocks of the faithful actually saw as they approached
00:34the doors of their great church...
00:43..was this.
00:48A miracle.
00:51Stone transformed by being painted all the colours of the rainbow.
01:00The teeming cast of the gospel story robed in scarlet, gold and the azure blue of heaven.
01:13Let there be light, the creator had said.
01:16And so when you walked through those heavenly gates,
01:19you were not plunged into darkness.
01:22You were lifted into the dazzling light of God.
01:32When a pilgrim came through the doors of the medieval Gothic cathedral,
01:37a miracle immediately happened.
01:41The laws of gravity were suspended.
01:45Everything, the whole of your sensibilities, were transported upwards.
01:58Everything is about light, the light of the gospel, the light of the divine force of the creator.
02:04So the whole of the architectural design was meant to optimise that flood of heavenly coloured light.
02:15Shining down on you in Chartres Cathedral were the stories of the Bible.
02:21You didn't need to be literate to be drawn into the sacred epic by the blaze of colour.
02:28Included in the story were the people themselves, the wheelwrights and the water carriers,
02:34the butchers and bakers with their boule of bread.
02:38Now, medieval man believed that jewels, rubies, sapphires, topazes,
02:44had the power not just to concentrate brilliance but actually emit light.
02:49And they had another power too.
02:51They could transport you from your earthly existence
02:55into that extraordinary immaterial world of heaven.
02:59So that all this stained glass were meant to be immense expanses of jewel-like radiance.
03:08So that when you were in here, you got a glimpse of paradise.
03:17Visions of paradise through instant photographs.
03:22Visions of paradise.
03:27Visions of paradise through instinctive, joy-giving colour,
03:32easily accessible to everyone, was not exclusive to the Christian church.
03:38For centuries, colour as the symbol of the divine
03:42was an idea common to different civilisations across the globe.
03:47But at the birth of the modern age,
03:51when religion began to lose its grip on mass belief,
03:56then a new generation of artists would reinvent the idea of divine illumination.
04:07But when the smoke of chimneys and the fog of war
04:11threatened to cast everything into the dark,
04:15was it even possible to deliver a glimpse of salvation in glowing, living colour?
04:46MUSIC FADES
05:05In the centuries following charge,
05:08there was one place in Europe where the luminous Gothic lived on most radiantly.
05:14And that was Venice, floating on the shimmering surface of its lagoon.
05:21The city had grown rich by facing east.
05:25First to the Byzantine Empire,
05:27whose glittering mosaics and iridescent silks it had plundered and copied.
05:35And then to the Islamic world,
05:37whose woven rugs, jewels and precious pigments it had brought to Europe.
05:44MUSIC FADES
05:47Here, surrounded by the luxuries of their world,
05:51the Venetians made the case for an art built with blocks of colour
05:55that challenged the more sober ideals of the Renaissance in Florence.
06:04For Renaissance theorists,
06:06it was the idea which made art a lofty, noble practice.
06:11You got the idea from drawing classical models, especially sculpture.
06:16That drawn idea then dictated composition.
06:21And it was what distinguished high art from the low, decorative stuff.
06:26Jewellery, textiles, ornaments for the house and body.
06:31And according to this theory of design, drawing always came first.
06:38And then you filled in those shapes with colour.
06:43Well, the champions of colour said they would say that, wouldn't they?
06:46Because they're all Florentines and Romans obsessed with antique ruins.
06:51And for them, colour is just cheap and cheerful.
06:54It's the gaudy entertainment for the masses.
06:58But we are Venetians.
07:01And we know that colour can model composition
07:05quite as effectively as the drawn line.
07:08They reproach us for being too much in love with fabric and with jewellery.
07:14Not only do we not apologise for that, we embrace it.
07:18Because perhaps at the heart of what we do
07:21is the translation of gem-like radiance into brilliance on canvas.
07:28The first great colourist to set Venetian art on this path
07:32and to do it with the dazzling luminousness of oils on wood
07:37was Giovanni Bellini.
07:44In his masterpiece, The Sacred Conversation,
07:47in the church of San Zaccaria,
07:50Bellini shows he can do Renaissance perspective to perfection
07:54but it's the intensity of the saturated colours
07:58that delivers what Bellini really wants.
08:01Harmony experienced physically,
08:04so that the figures, even these very still ones,
08:08seem naturally alive.
08:13Bellini has thought about how different colour tones work with each other.
08:18St Peter's Golden Age,
08:21St Peter's Golden Ochre on the left,
08:24balanced with St Jerome's Vermilion on the right.
08:30St Catherine's Rosen Green,
08:33with St Lucy's vision of blue and gold.
08:41And in the centre, the Virgin and Child, swathed in ultramarine,
08:47a pigment so precious that it was most often reserved for the Madonna.
09:01If Bellini's colour music pulls you into a devotional trance,
09:06his pupiltician would use that same glow of colour
09:10to flatter the self-admiring world of the elite.
09:17Painted when Titian was in his 20s,
09:20this isn't just a portrait of a Venetian noble,
09:23but a painterly mission statement.
09:29There, outrageously front and centre,
09:32painted in ultramarine, mixed with some rose and white,
09:36is a waterfall sleeve of Venetian colour,
09:39drowning classical stone.
09:47Ten years later, Titian would unleash this same colour
09:51with even fuller force in his stupendous masterpiece,
09:56Bacchus and Ariadne.
10:01It's a moment of supercharged romantic voltage,
10:06the helpless rush of unexpected love
10:09that takes place in a dancing twist of passion.
10:13Ariadne, abandoned by her lover,
10:16spins round to lock eyes with the god of wine,
10:20who launches himself from his chariot,
10:23jet-propelled by desire.
10:30And it's a picture that's constructed
10:32out of these two different dynamics of colour.
10:38Bacchus's riotous gang are coming from these earthy,
10:42green-brown colours of the woods on the right,
10:46and it's all moving towards this beautiful,
10:50limpid blue area in which this tragic heroine
10:54is standing there, waiting for the touch of Bacchus's love.
10:59On one side, the profane colours of animal energy
11:03and sexual love,
11:05Titian's fleshy, blushing naturalism on full display.
11:10On the other, the colour of the heavens,
11:13where Ariadne will be transformed
11:16into a constellation of stars.
11:21It's a moment of supercharged romantic voltage,
11:25into a constellation of stars.
11:32It's an irony, I suppose, that Venice,
11:34generally thought to be the most mercenary
11:37and materialist of all cultures,
11:39thought that its art was above all spiritual,
11:43that it was about looks, about gospel radiance,
11:46about the sheer weightlessness of saturated colour.
11:50Even the most pure and dazzling marble
11:54kept you on the ground,
11:56but surrender to colour and you took off,
12:00you ascended into the dizzy Empyrean
12:04of the painterly paradise.
12:10The Venetian style had a good run,
12:13but by the end of the 17th century,
12:16its intoxication with colour and the dancing line
12:19came to seem too in love with pleasure.
12:23A style that had become dominated by heavyweight empires.
12:29Now, when grandiose patrons built their Baroque mega-palaces,
12:34they wanted sober classicism to project their omnipotent power.
12:40But there was one place,
12:42the palace of a prince-bishop in southern Germany,
12:46where the Venetian magic with light and air
12:51had its last performance to deliver.
12:55The largest ceiling fresco ever painted.
12:59MUSIC CONTINUES
13:18Painted in the 1750s by the Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo,
13:23it's a vision of Apollo, the sun god,
13:26illuminating the four continents of the world.
13:32It's a standard Baroque subject,
13:35but here Tiepolo uses colour and movement
13:38to create something revolutionary.
13:43Impossible to take in all at once,
13:46he's designed it to unfold as you ascend the staircase.
13:51And it works in the opposite way from what you'd expect.
13:56If at first you're pulled into the golden light of heaven,
14:01the higher you climb, the more you are brought down to Earth.
14:08Until you come face to face not with the divine,
14:12but with all the colours of the human world.
14:17Tiepolo really reinvents what it means to look at a painting,
14:21what a painting is.
14:23You can walk all around this space,
14:25he wants you to do it.
14:27The figures move, they're endlessly animated.
14:30This is a world in motion, it is a commotion of figures.
14:37It's almost as though he anticipates movie directors
14:41in his insistence that everything floats, everything is elastic.
14:45And there's a word for that, and that word is freedom.
14:50This has to be one of the most stupendous demonstrations
14:55of the spectacular power of painting.
15:00This is meaty, earthy, sweaty humanity.
15:07We're in the company of these figures
15:10and almost none of them are looking at us.
15:14I don't think there's any other work in all of European art
15:19where we see so many backs, backs of bodies, backs of heads.
15:23Everybody is oblivious to our presence almost,
15:26they're just getting on with what they have to do
15:29and decisions are playing.
15:31The merchants are making money.
15:33And this sense of coming across a world
15:36gives us the feeling that this is all real.
15:40And you put those two qualities together, Tiepolo,
15:44his astonishing, exhilarating freedom
15:48and his instinct for the earthiness of human life
15:52translated into painting,
15:55and you know you have something that's radically fresh.
16:02And the more you look, the more subversive it becomes.
16:08In Tiepolo's anthem to all the flora and fauna of the world,
16:12Christianity has been reduced
16:15to two insignificant figures carrying a cross.
16:20And the ruling prince-bishop of Würzburg
16:23into just an image of an image being carried off into the clouds.
16:32Tiepolo's world of motion and light
16:35no longer belongs to rulers or gods, but to us.
16:43MUSIC FADES
16:56If in Europe, Tiepolo's colour drama
16:59was taking art away from a world of Christian devotion
17:03and into the material world of goods and man,
17:06then at the far end of European trade routes
17:10another culture's rapturous embrace of colour
17:13would take it increasingly into the mystical and the divine.
17:21This is the ancient Hindu festival of Holi.
17:29One of the most sacred festivals in the Indian calendar,
17:33every spring revelers drown themselves in clouds of pure pigment
17:38as a symbol of the joyous resurgence of life.
17:47In the early 18th century, this festival became the subject
17:51of a striking set of images commissioned by the Maharaja of Jodhpur.
17:57In them, colour becomes the symbol of karma, sensory and sexual pleasure,
18:05which in Hindu faith was one of the essential, sacred goals of human life.
18:16In the 1770s, the paintings then left the world of courtly pleasure behind
18:23to illustrate the ancient tales of the Hindu epics,
18:27the people's stories and adventures of the Hindu gods.
18:35Designed to be held up at court to illustrate the epic poems
18:39read alongside them, these immersive images
18:42drew their inspiration from the folk art of the people.
18:47Together with the stylisation of line,
18:50these pictures seethe with fantastic animation,
18:55literally the dynamic life of animals,
18:59and to contain all these rollicking adventures.
19:03The format of the paintings had now to be a landscape,
19:07a landscape of life and death.
19:11They had this great bolt of intense, radiant colour.
19:17But above all, these pictures become, like the epics themselves,
19:21massively populated.
19:23Casts of thousands of maidens, of rabbits, of flocks of deer.
19:28They are the epics of life and death.
19:31They are the epics of life and death.
19:34They are the epics of life and death.
19:37Casts of thousands of maidens, of rabbits, of flocks of deer,
19:42and armies of monkeys.
19:44There are elephants running under the great rolling clouds
19:49of the monsoon.
19:52CHANTING
20:04These aren't realistic landscapes, of course.
20:07Here, we are in the dreamscape storyland of the Hindu epics,
20:11where gods like Rama come in sacred blue...
20:16..and where fantasy colours convey the verdant wonders of nature.
20:30By the 1820s,
20:32both courtly playtime and epic animation had been left behind.
20:39In this image, one artist used colour
20:42to illustrate nothing less than the metaphysics of the universe.
20:48Depicting it not as a black hole, but as sheets of shimmering gold.
20:56This is the nothing, the absolute of Hindu metaphysics,
21:00out of which, eventually, the world will be created.
21:04So the first panel is that nothing, and yet there is something.
21:08You can see the brushstrokes there,
21:10and the brushstrokes give a sense of the pulse of the ether.
21:14It's not just emptiness, it's not just absence at all.
21:18And in the second panel, we have the Mahasiddha,
21:23the nearly perfect person,
21:25in whom consciousness is dawning,
21:28the second stage of the great moment of primordial creation.
21:33And this exquisitely painted figure is holding a little flower,
21:38so the world is starting to bud and bloom.
21:44And in the third panel, finally,
21:47the physical material of the world resolves into earthy matter,
21:52which is silver, so all we have are silver and gold.
21:57Now, nothing like this had ever been seen before in Indian painting.
22:03Actually, nothing like it had ever been seen before
22:07in all of the history of art.
22:11What we've got here is the nearest visualisation you can get to
22:17of a trance.
22:20MUSIC PLAYS
22:35If in India, colour was seen as the sacred source of divine energy
22:40from which all life flowed,
22:43in 18th-century Europe,
22:45the loss of faith in a divinely ordered world
22:49would lead one painter from the light into the dark.
22:57In 1788, the Spanish court painter Francisco de Goya painted this,
23:04the annual festival of San Isidro, Madrid's patron saint.
23:10Airy with colour and light,
23:12it's an exercise in that quintessentially 18th-century occupation,
23:16the pursuit of happiness.
23:20The heaviness of church and state are banished to the horizon above,
23:25while the people and their pets are dancing and drinking below.
23:31Night would never fall, but it did.
23:4330 years later, Goya painted the same scene, the same day,
23:49but the ordered world is now disordered,
23:52dancing instead to the tune of a madman on a discordant guitar.
24:05Someone has turned the lights out.
24:09In place of all that brightness and light of the festival of San Isidro,
24:14we have this.
24:15The sky has turned to the colour of tar, pitch, sludge.
24:20In place of liveliness, we have a rolling freak show here,
24:25a great clump of the gibbering, the psychotic, the unhinged,
24:29glassy-eyed, their mouths open.
24:33In the corner of the painting, there is a figure seen in profile.
24:40He seems to sum up everything that's going on in Goya's head.
24:44The figure has an open mouth,
24:47and that open mouth seems to be emitting a terrible howl of pain.
24:55So how did Goya get from colour and life
24:59to this particular pit of sorrow?
25:04The clue is in the painting.
25:07There, in the centre of the clump of the crazed,
25:11is the unmistakable face of Napoleon,
25:16the author of all this woe.
25:23Between 1810 and 1820,
25:25Goya witnessed the violence unleashed by Napoleon's invasion of Spain.
25:32Here, in graphic detail,
25:34are the unspeakable crimes triggered by the French invasion
25:38and prolonged by the civil wars that pitted Goya's beloved liberals
25:43against the reactionary forces of church and state.
25:48In the place of colour and light,
25:51the horrors of war are laid bare in scratched images of black and white.
26:02And in his 70s, Goya came to paint his black paintings,
26:0814 images daubed directly onto the walls of his home.
26:18The black painting seemed to me to be an endgame for Goya,
26:22not just in his own life and career in his 70s,
26:25but also his feeling about an endgame for art,
26:30art that aspired through beauty to ennoble the spirit of civilisation.
26:36One of the most terrifying of all these paintings,
26:39perhaps the most famous one,
26:41shows Saturn devouring one of his children.
26:45That's what it's come to,
26:47this huge tradition of classical mythology
26:50reduced to a mad, antic, capering monster
26:54chewing on the stump of a small body.
26:58But look at that body. Not a child at all.
27:02It's the body miniaturised of a female nude.
27:05Two millennia of looking at the nude,
27:09of seeing it as a symbol of art's perfection,
27:13is reduced to this horrifying image of sadistic cruelty.
27:21In one of the paintings, he puts the lights back on.
27:25We're able to see something, but what is it we're seeing?
27:28The light is given to us to reveal another kind of horror.
27:33These two huge peasant-like figures
27:36beating the living daylights out of each other.
27:39Blood is streaming down the head of one of them,
27:43even as they sink deeper and deeper
27:47into a kind of sandy quagmire.
27:51This is what Spain has become.
27:55Endless, relentless, mutual slaughter.
28:02Now, all these monsters and horrors and demons and dragons,
28:07of course, they'd appeared all over European art before,
28:11but where had they appeared?
28:13They'd appeared in images of the Last Judgement, of the apocalypse,
28:17and they were always balanced
28:20by a sense of the optimism of salvation.
28:24But Goya has come to the conclusion
28:27that God is absent without leave,
28:30and there's one painting which, in a sense,
28:33is least likely to have that horrifyingly pessimistic eloquence,
28:38but it does.
28:40There are no figures, there's just a dog, a mutt.
28:44The dog, the master, is gone, dead, slaughtered, missing.
28:49He's no longer going to be fed.
28:52He's simply faced with drowning
28:56inside this formless, brown vacuum.
29:03It's all come down to this, then.
29:06A dog without a master.
29:09Spain without its God.
29:12Humanity absolutely without civilisation.
29:17DRAMATIC MUSIC
29:40Eventually, a new generation of Western artists
29:44would, quote, put colour back into European art.
29:51But their inspiration would come from another culture
29:54on the other side of the world.
29:58Japan.
30:01After a century of civil war,
30:03Japan's capital had been moved to Edo, now modern Tokyo,
30:07and by 1700, it had become the world's largest city,
30:11with over one million people.
30:20Driving the city's spectacular growth
30:23had been a new class of hard-working merchants
30:26who'd grown rich supplying luxuries to the aristocratic elite.
30:32But in Japan's strictly hierarchical society,
30:35it was unthinkable that mere businessmen
30:38would have any claim of a share of power.
30:41Instead, they created a new urban culture of their own.
30:48They were a very clubbable lot.
30:51They wanted poetry, haiku reciting societies,
30:54they wanted the kabuki theatre, they wanted music,
30:58they wanted comedy clubs, and they got them.
31:01And when you have all that,
31:03what's the next thing that comes along?
31:06A new kind of art.
31:12This art would take the form of an ancient Japanese craft,
31:16the woodblock print,
31:18which from the 1760s became available
31:21in over ten layers of blazing colour.
31:27Made by a community of artisans,
31:29from artists and publishers to woodcarvers and colour printers,
31:33this was mass-produced art.
31:36Not for rulers or religion, but for the people.
31:42Sold on every street corner
31:44for the price of a double helping of noodles,
31:47what came with it was a shot of pure metropolitan pleasure.
31:53These prints glowing with this intense, spectacular colour
31:57are what we think about when we think about the greatest things
32:00that Japanese art ever produced.
32:02This is not an art made by some starchy official academy
32:06laying down rules.
32:08No, this essentially was generated spontaneously
32:12by the hungry consumerism of a bustling city like Edo,
32:17and it wanted to be entertained.
32:23And these pictures had to play their part.
32:26They were called ukiyo-e,
32:28meaning both floating, but also uki-uki,
32:32excited or feeling bouncy.
32:36And their subjects were Edo's ukiyo,
32:39its licensed entertainment districts.
32:44Here were the stars of the kabuki stage.
32:49Here too were the city's most famous showgirls
32:52and courtesans wearing the latest fashions.
32:58These prints were like Playboy meets Vogue,
33:01and they put you in the front row of the catwalk.
33:06And then, of course, there was sex.
33:11Awaiting those who could afford it was the Yoshiwara Pleasure District,
33:15and there, ready to make the most well-heeled clients happy,
33:19were the exquisite oiran courtesans.
33:24These women became immortalised in pornography.
33:29Which, at its most graphically inventive,
33:32managed also to be genuinely beautiful.
33:38Designed for women as well as for men,
33:41it was called shunga, literally spring pictures.
33:45Though you won't find much in the way of daffodils here.
33:59And if they were surprisingly egalitarian
34:02in their depictions of male and female pleasure,
34:05their beauty also papered over the exploited lives
34:09many of these women unquestionably led.
34:24But it's not all hardcore.
34:27All of this beautiful, these images of love,
34:30are very delicate and tender.
34:33Passion indicated by the curl of toes,
34:36or the touch of hands,
34:38or by the nape of a woman's neck.
34:42And we feel almost as though we're in the room.
34:46And that happens because of what woodcuts are.
34:48They can't model light and shade very well.
34:51But what they can do with these swooping, serpentine lines,
34:56filled with this extraordinary glowing colour,
35:00is make us dive right into this lovely amorous universe they present.
35:07This was an art everybody could afford that gave you pleasure.
35:12And if it's all a fantasy, so what's wrong with that?
35:15We can all use a fantasy now and then.
35:19MUSIC FADES
35:24By the 1830s, coinciding with a boom in domestic tourism,
35:29Edo's printmakers expanded their subject matter
35:33to include the most famous vistas in the Japanese landscape.
35:41The artist behind this shift was Katsushika Hokusai,
35:45who at the same time, at the age of 70,
35:48turned his eye almost exclusively to a single landmark...
35:57..Japan's most sacred mountain.
36:04In his 36 views of Mount Fuji,
36:07Hokusai pitted the restless working lives of Japan's common people
36:12against the ever-present cone of the mountain.
36:21Close up and far off in every season
36:24and under every condition of weather and light.
36:30Combining brilliant colour
36:32with a breathtakingly experimental manipulation of space,
36:36Hokusai created some of the most thrilling images
36:40in the history of art.
36:44And here is the masterpiece.
36:47This is about as perfect a picture as any mortal would ever make.
36:53If my hand's shaking a bit here,
36:55it's because this is the original thing.
36:58The colours are so intense, it's so fresh, it's so clean.
37:03And this heroic, epic figure pulling on the line
37:07as stylised waves roll towards him,
37:10with Mount Fuji all the time there as a guardian.
37:17You feel, if you want to talk about where modern art begins,
37:20it begins right here in Edo,
37:22because nature has been translated as if into a different language,
37:26into pattern, into abstract design.
37:29You could cut the painting there
37:31and this would be the most beautiful abstract painting you'd ever see.
37:37It's one of the excitements in one's life, really,
37:40to be able to hold something so close to its precious moment of creation.
37:54But these images also contained a deeper, more spiritual message.
38:00For Hokusai, a devout Buddhist,
38:03Mount Fuji was not just a sacred mountain,
38:06a source of water and life,
38:09but a talisman of immortality.
38:16So his brilliantly coloured images weren't just postcards
38:20for Edo city dwellers escaping the daily grind,
38:25but revelations of the spirituality embedded in the landscape.
38:31An antidote to the crushing materialism of modern city life.
38:40This marriage, made with colour,
38:43between the worldly and the unworldly,
38:46was destined for export to a society badly in need of that radiance.
38:55Within just a decade of Japan's opening up to the West in 1853,
39:01Japanese prints were avidly collected
39:05by a group of artists at the vanguard of their own artistic revolution.
39:13Not least by Claude Monet,
39:15whose collection of 231 prints
39:18can still be seen covering the walls of his house.
39:25What Monet and his fellow Impressionists wanted
39:28was to reinvent the process of seeing,
39:31to paint not objects in light, but the light itself.
39:36And that wasn't just scientific ambition.
39:39Trapping the radiance would be an illumination
39:43for millions increasingly caught in urban gloom.
39:48What they saw in Japanese art was what they had wanted,
39:51what they had dreamed of,
39:53what they were attempting to build up confidence to do in.
39:56It was a huge validation.
39:58It was a kind of vote of confidence in their own instincts
40:02about what modern art could do.
40:06Modern art would be, just as the Japanese artists had produced it,
40:10brilliantly, brilliantly coloured.
40:14Modern art would do dizzying things with space.
40:17The cropped mountains, the gigantic panoramas,
40:21that was another cue to the way you could reshape space and depth
40:26to overthrow the old rules of perspective.
40:34Thirdly, and very, very important, was the overspill,
40:38it was so conspicuous in Japanese prints,
40:41between the country and the town.
40:44They all looked around at the suburbs of Paris
40:46and that was happening to them.
40:48You could paint a rural and an urban population,
40:51workers, tourists looking at Mount Fuji in the same way.
40:55So they looked at a Japanese and said,
40:57it's extraordinary, but that's us.
41:00That's how we create modern art.
41:02So they took that vision and they ran with it.
41:15MUSIC CONTINUES
41:24Japanese art also introduced Manet to the infinite possibility
41:28of series, an identical subject painted at different times
41:33and in different light.
41:37Somehow, not tedious repetition, but an unfolding revelation.
41:45And so, in the 1890s,
41:47Manet turned his eye to his own version of Mount Fuji.
41:53A man-made cliff face, the façade of Rouen Cathedral.
42:00Over a period of three years,
42:03he would create over 30 versions of the same painting.
42:08Each one flooded with a different wash of light.
42:27Manet had said, there are no objective facts
42:30about a landscape or a building which we need to describe literally.
42:36There is only the sensation of looking at them.
42:41And he tries to deliver in these paintings that sensation,
42:45so that the front of the church becomes a great sponge
42:50that sucks up the light at different moments of the day
42:55and delivers extraordinary euphoria of harmony
43:01between the light, our eyes and that stone.
43:07What it builds into is a kind of symphony of colour harmony.
43:12What, in the end, Manet is painting in this series
43:16is nothing short than the colour of time.
43:20In an act of painterly transubstantiation,
43:24Manet turns the monumental masonry of the cathedral's façade
43:29into flickering stabs of brilliantly coloured paint,
43:34an immaterial vision of light and air.
43:39Of all Manet's fellow artists,
43:41it was Vincent van Gogh who'd reach most feverishly
43:46towards an even more realistic vision.
43:52He was a man who had a passion for painting.
43:55He was a man who had a passion for painting.
43:58He was a man who had a passion for painting.
44:01He was a man who had a passion for painting.
44:04He would reach most feverishly
44:07towards an even more radiant redemption in paint.
44:13Earlier in his life, Vincent had failed in his calling
44:16as a preacher to the downtrodden and the destitute,
44:20sometimes in the darkness of the coal mines.
44:25But his discovery of Japanese prints,
44:28and paint raw and straight from the tube,
44:32would make his spiritual vocation.
44:39And so in 1888, Vincent travelled south
44:42through what he called Japanese light
44:45to forge his own vision of art.
44:49Marrying Japanese pantheistic vision of nature
44:53with brushstrokes of pure colour,
44:56this art would open the eyes of everyone,
44:59from the poor to the miraculous force of life.
45:04And it would be as accessible as stained glass
45:08had been for medieval pilgrims,
45:10and as popular as a Hokusai print.
45:15With this epiphany in mind,
45:17Vincent gathered all the intensity of his spiritual longing
45:21into one all-consuming obsession,
45:24how to bring heaven to earth
45:27and how to turn it into a painting.
45:33So on a warm night in September in 1888,
45:36he comes down from his little apartment
45:39in the Place La Martine in Arles
45:41and goes round the corner and he sees this.
45:47A great expanse of the river Rhône,
45:50with the city of Arles reduced to a little rim of human activity,
45:55rather sulphurous gaslights.
45:58And somehow this amazing moment speaks to him
46:02that he can actually do this cosmic painting.
46:09And he creates a kind of compositional double trinity.
46:14The first trinity is of land and water and sky,
46:18and the land is this little spit of the bank
46:21with those very Japanese boats tied up in a harbour there.
46:24Then comes the river and then comes the burning night sky
46:29delivered in great pulsing brushstrokes
46:33of heavily loaded aquamarine.
46:38And the three of them, land, water and sky,
46:42are all melting and dissolving together.
46:47Then a second trinity,
46:49the one which really was most important, was that of light.
46:53The gas lamps are just indicated
46:56by a kind of stab of crusty, dark yellow,
47:00and then those gas lamps are reflected
47:03in the second element of the trinity lights.
47:06Beautiful reflections which soften their harshness.
47:10And these kind of fans of heavily loaded brushstrokes
47:15just fall into the water.
47:18And the third level of the lights is Ursa Major,
47:22exploding in the sky.
47:24Taking his brush, he squashes it against the canvas,
47:27and on top of that, another brush loaded with lead white,
47:31and the points go jab, jab, jab, jab, jab,
47:34and those stars and everything explodes.
47:38And he knows he's got it.
47:40He's got what he's been looking for.
47:43He's got this extraordinary sense of us in the universe
47:48and this couple of lovers are staring out,
47:52feeling what he wants us to feel.
47:55He said, you don't need to go to church.
47:58The church of today is this, this great illumination,
48:03like a burst of beauty from a stained-glass window.
48:07This is the radiance of here and now.
48:14MUSIC FADES
48:19Van Gogh didn't live to see his rapture on canvas
48:23become the new church of colour for untold millions,
48:27his own mind skidded into darkness and self-destruction.
48:33But eventually, one painter would deliver
48:36on Van Gogh's promise of art's redemptive power, Henri Matisse.
48:43But unlike Monet and Van Gogh, Matisse would look not to Japan,
48:48but to the art of other non-European traditions
48:52in his search for a people's art of instinctive colour.
48:57And it was the art of Islam that pulled him most strongly.
49:03Visiting Tangier in 1912 and 1913,
49:06Matisse saw that in Islamic culture, art was everywhere,
49:10in the mosque, on the street, in carpets and clothes.
49:17And in its sensuous embrace of decoration,
49:21long written off by the West as an inferior genre,
49:24Matisse saw the essence of a truly modern, inclusively universal art.
49:33And so while here, Matisse brought East and West together
49:37by combining Islamic colour and decoration
49:40with the iconography of Christian worship.
49:47A triptych, three paintings hung together like an altarpiece.
49:54On either side, portals to better, brighter worlds.
50:02And in the centre, in the place of a Madonna,
50:05a local girl, enthroned in luminous blue-green.
50:09Not quite the ultramarine of the Virgin, but still.
50:17When Matisse got back to France,
50:19everything he'd experienced in Tangier,
50:22the hot, glowing light, the intense, saturated colour
50:26he'd seen on the clothes of people and on the walls of houses,
50:30the graceful, flowing lines of Islamic ornamentation,
50:34it all came together,
50:36not just to make an extraordinary ensemble of paintings,
50:40but something that was completely unanticipated in his work so far,
50:45and, more importantly,
50:47which would take art into a completely new place.
50:53CLOCK TICKS
51:00No artist had ever been taken seriously
51:03before using scissors and coloured paper.
51:06But by the 1940s,
51:08Matisse saw that the deceptive innocence of the form
51:12was the key to that universal language of colour and flowing line
51:17he'd been hunting all his life.
51:23CLOCK TICKS
51:26Channelling childhood experiences of circus acts
51:30with dancing bodies and organic forms,
51:33Matisse created his cutouts,
51:36childlike images that bound and leap
51:39with the rhythms and energy of life.
51:43He's working now like a paper sculptor,
51:46almost as if he's creating
51:48the ultimate illustrated children's book.
51:53But he's carving directly into colour.
51:57He's letting this blazing colour actually build the forms.
52:01And he's working very, very fast.
52:03It's all exuberant, spontaneous instinct.
52:06These lines leap and bound and loop
52:09and somersault over the space.
52:12The space itself is filled with a kind of extraordinary animation.
52:18The speed and the freedom is such
52:21that he'd never been able to do when he was painting.
52:24And you have the sense that he feels painting
52:27is too studious and laborious.
52:30And what the cutouts are,
52:32are a great uncorking of creative energy.
52:35It's as though there's some sort of electricity
52:38that's now pulsing and surging through those old hands of his.
52:48MUSIC CONTINUES
52:58If it seems as though they were created in a wash of pleasure,
53:02the truth was very different.
53:04It was 1943.
53:06France was occupied.
53:08Matisse was distraught, his family in peril.
53:12Blazingly lit are the bombs of the Second World War.
53:17There, too, amidst the jumps for joy,
53:21the fragile bodies and bleeding hearts,
53:24allusions, perhaps, to Matisse's miraculous survival
53:28from surgery for cancer of the bowel.
53:36But this was resistance from the wheelchair,
53:39the life force in the midst of death.
53:46And so, at the age of 78,
53:49when one of Matisse's convalescent nurses turned nun
53:53came to him with a plan for a little chapel in the south of France,
53:57Matisse seized on it as the last great task of his life.
54:03Ostensibly a place for nuns to pray,
54:07it would also be a place of peace for all humanity.
54:13Something which would sum up in one space
54:16art's power to heal the wounds of a darkened, fallen world.
54:28The chapel that Matisse built here for the Dominican
54:31nuns is tiny, and yet, in some sense,
54:35it does feel an almost infinite space.
54:40He took pains that there should be no red in this chapel
54:43because red seemed to him too angry, too hot, too violent.
54:49Everything that mattered to him through his whole life was here,
54:53and it was not about obedience or submission,
54:56it was all about the marriage between nature and spirituality,
55:01human nature and the other kind of nature, too.
55:05The Virgin and Child, there they are, up above me.
55:08This is a real, live woman with an exposed breast.
55:12But the breast, of course, is Mary's exposed breast
55:15interceding for the sins of mankind.
55:17She's a mum, she's carrying baby Jesus,
55:20who's got his arms flung out, yes,
55:24in the attitude of the crucifixion,
55:26but also in the attitude of an exuberant little boy.
55:30And then there is nature absolutely everywhere.
55:38When he thought about the stone he would use for this beautiful altar,
55:43he thought, well, I need stones with seashells in them
55:47because the sea represents the beginning of creation,
55:52the primordial moment when God casts his face upon the deep
55:56and creates life, and that's what Matisse is doing here.
55:59He's translating all of life, the whole world,
56:03into this one beautiful space.
56:10Into his tiny chapel, Matisse poured an encyclopaedia of global art
56:16to make a space where the wars between cultures could be put on hold.
56:23Everything here resolves in reconciliation.
56:29The purity of line with the radiance of colour.
56:35Medieval Christian glass with the decorative abstraction of Islam.
56:42African carving with the full frontal force of Russian icons.
56:49And what sustained Matisse's sense
56:52that all these elements could work together
56:55was his conviction that they all came from the common culture of the people
57:01and shared the same universal message.
57:07What the Matisse chapel delivers is the instinctive sense
57:12that redemption and the pleasure of the senses belong together.
57:17You've actually got salvation from happiness.
57:21He thought, ultimately, that that's what art had to deliver
57:25and, of course, all of his predecessors he revered, like Van Gogh,
57:29were struggling to make that work for a very different world,
57:32for the modern world, for the world of calamity, of war,
57:36of destruction, of personal pain and darkness.
57:40Now I don't know about you, but I'm not at all sure
57:43that our own world, our own time, is any brighter now.
57:48So what we need more than ever is what only the greatest art can provide.
57:54That is, surely, the bolt of illumination.
58:13Go online to The Civilisation's Explorer on BBC Taster
58:16to learn more about the series, bbc.co.uk slash Taster.
58:20Tomorrow night here on BBC Two,
58:22Mary Beard discusses the issue of taking offence,
58:25front row late at five past eleven.