Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00In the 19th century, the world was transformed by a powerful idea, a belief amongst Europeans
00:14that their civilization alone represented the pinnacle of human progress.
00:21It was an idea driven by the modernizing forces of science and industry.
00:27Scientists tried to make sense of it all, the exhilarating dreams of a brighter world,
00:35the nightmares about where it might lead, and the real impact of progress on ordinary
00:41human beings.
00:45As the frontiers of European civilization advanced, cultures across the world were either
00:51decimated or learned to adapt and survive.
00:57Some artists fled the forces of modernization by turning to so-called primitive cultures.
01:04Others sought a primal energy that they believed was lacking in the industrial world.
01:11For me, as a historian of empire, art is key to help us understand these profound tensions
01:18between the idea of inevitable progress and the fear of what it might cost.
01:25One that helped shape the world of the 19th century and foreshadowed the catastrophe to come.
01:55In the 18th century, man learned to harness the power of nature in radical new ways.
02:25In the end, virtually no civilization on Earth would remain untouched by the changes.
02:35The Industrial Revolution first emerged in the English Midlands.
02:43Its most potent symbol was a new kind of architecture, the factory.
02:54This cotton mill, hidden away in the Derbyshire countryside, was the world's very first fully-fledged modern factory.
03:01It was built in the 1770s by the entrepreneur Richard Arkwright, and it was designed around his greatest invention,
03:08the water frame, a machine that used the power of flowing water to drive looms
03:13that produced cotton yarn cheaper and faster than anybody ever had.
03:19It makes this factory the birthplace of mass production.
03:23Here, industry forced nature to bow before the ambitions of mankind.
03:31But from now on, industry would also demand that human beings submit to the needs of the machine,
03:40working in shifts around the clock.
03:47Arkwright was so proud of his cotton mill, he had it painted by the artist Joseph Wright of Derby,
03:53in an apparently idyllic, deceptively peaceful landscape.
03:58There's no hint here of the whirling, clanking machines and the sheer, relentless energy of the coming age.
04:08Yet Wright, the artist, was intrigued by the changing world around him,
04:13and it was much by the new science and technology as their effects on humanity.
04:20What really fascinated Wright of Derby was not all the machinery and the hard labour of the Industrial Revolution,
04:26but the ideas that drove it, and these were the great ideas of the Enlightenment,
04:31a faith in reason, an in-scientific method, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge,
04:35and an unshakable belief in progress.
04:41It was this idea, that science believed it was creating a brave new world,
04:46that lay at the heart of one of Wright's most celebrated paintings.
04:52A travelling scientist has placed a bird in a glass bell jar and begun to pump out the air.
05:00Deprived of oxygen, the bird begins to suffocate.
05:04The onlookers respond with a mix of fascination and horror.
05:09This is science as the new religion, with the power over life itself.
05:16But Wright also hints at the great fear of the age, that science, the machine and progress all come at a cost.
05:28Would those who dared to stand in the way of progress be sacrificed, like the bird in the air pump?
05:38As the 18th century drew to a close, one momentous event would mark the start of a new,
05:44zealous export of Enlightenment ideas to other cultures.
05:58In the summer of 1798, a French army, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, invaded Egypt.
06:06In military terms, Napoleon's objectives were clear,
06:09to gain strategic advantage over the British and expand France's imperial ambitions.
06:18But the invasion of this ancient land was about much more than just military strategy.
06:24Many Europeans regarded Egypt as the birthplace of civilisation.
06:29They believed that ideas that had first been nurtured here, under the pharaohs,
06:33had been passed down through ancient Greece, through the Roman Empire, through the Renaissance,
06:38all the way down to modern Enlightenment France.
06:42So, by invading Egypt, Napoleon was leading France back to the source of civilisation.
06:50To uncover the secrets of ancient Egypt,
06:53Napoleon brought with him 167 of France's most brilliant scientists,
06:59mathematicians, engineers and artists.
07:05They set about studying every aspect of the country they'd conquered,
07:09especially the ancient ruins that lay half-buried beneath the sand.
07:16They would publish their findings in a monumental, multi-volume work,
07:20The Description of Egypt.
07:23It documented this lost world and its as-yet undeciphered hieroglyphics
07:28for the tantalisation of the West.
07:33Napoleon's team of experts also fuelled an archaeological race
07:37to unearth the treasures of the ancient world.
07:46Many of those treasures ended up in the new museums of Europe and North America,
07:52displayed in the Enlightenment spirit of learning for the betterment of a wider public.
08:01In the capitals of Europe,
08:03Napoleon's mission spawned a new fascination with the art of ancient Egypt.
08:09But Napoleon's invasion had had another purpose,
08:13not only to uncover the secrets of ancient Egypt,
08:16but also to impose European civilisation on the living contemporary Egypt.
08:22Armed with a library of books and a printing press,
08:26Napoleon wanted to re-educate the people of his country.
08:30Ultimately, Napoleon's occupation would fail at the hands of the British.
08:41But in a country like Egypt,
08:43it was only a matter of time before the British came to power.
08:47And it was only a matter of time before the British came to power.
08:52And it was only a matter of time before the British came to power.
08:58But in a curious twist,
09:01Europeans became increasingly obsessed with the very culture Napoleon had tried to change.
09:09Or, more accurately, their imagined fantasy of what that culture was.
09:14Soon, artists began to travel throughout the Islamic world
09:19to paint the exotic places and people they encountered.
09:28This is the painting that inspired an entire genre
09:32of 19th-century European art, Orientalism.
09:36It's the work of the French artist Eugène Delacroix,
09:40who painted it in the 1830s after he'd actually gone on a visit to Algeria,
09:45which had recently been conquered and colonised by France.
09:49And this is the first real serious attempt
09:53to portray ordinary life in the Islamic world.
09:57But like many of the Orientalist paintings that were to follow,
10:01not everything about this is what it seems.
10:04Now, Delacroix claimed to have based the composition
10:07on a visit he'd made to an Arab household in Algeria,
10:11but it would have been extremely unusual for a male stranger
10:15to be given access to the women of an Arab household.
10:18So there's every chance that these women are, in fact, Jewish.
10:23And there are other elements of this painting
10:25which were either fabricated or embroidered by Delacroix.
10:29So the painting was completed in Paris using exotic costumes,
10:33and the models are Parisian models.
10:36And this figure of the black servant, or perhaps black slave,
10:40was of Delacroix's invention.
10:47So what seems like a real scene is in fact a Parisian reverie
10:52of a supposed exotic, sensuous world that didn't exist in Europe.
10:59Yet in Delacroix's gifted hands, there is a subtlety of shade and colour
11:04that was rarely achieved by the generation of Orientalist painters he inspired.
11:12Many Orientalists invented scenes that revelled in the decadence and despotism
11:17that Europeans considered to be Oriental qualities.
11:22Concubines languishing in hidden harems.
11:26Naked female slaves for sale in busy markets.
11:32Orientalist themes became so popular that Ingres, master of the classical nude,
11:37set one of his greatest works in an imagined women's bathhouse,
11:42even though he'd never been to the Middle East.
11:46These were European fantasies,
11:49and they suggest a desire to escape the turmoil of life in industrial Europe.
12:01As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace,
12:04Europe's cities began to change beyond all recognition.
12:08To begin with, few saw the emerging factory landscapes
12:12as a worthy subject for art.
12:15But the British painter Turner did.
12:18In his view of Dudley, in England's industrial heartland,
12:22he juxtaposed the old town on the hill, its ruined castle and church steeple,
12:27symbols of tradition and faith,
12:30with the blazing fire of the 19th century.
12:34The great thinker and art critic John Ruskin saw in the picture
12:38an indictment of how the old way of life
12:41was being destroyed by the factory and the machine.
12:46Because, as manufacturing cities mushroomed in size,
12:50they became a social disaster.
12:55In the late 19th century,
12:58overcrowded and rife with poverty and disease,
13:01this was the human cost of mechanisation.
13:21In America, the frontiers of progress began to be broken.
13:25In America, the frontiers of progress pushed inexorably westwards,
13:29into territory as yet unspoilt by industry.
13:37The United States was a young country,
13:40forged like France out of revolutionary and Enlightenment idealism.
13:49To its pioneers, the entire American wilderness, from east to west,
13:54seemed like virgin territory.
13:58Artists translated these vast landscapes onto canvas
14:02and filled them with divine light.
14:05They conveyed the idea that God himself blessed not only the land,
14:10but also the new nation being forged from it.
14:17The great pioneer of American landscape art
14:20was the British-born Thomas Cole.
14:25MUSIC FADES
14:31Thomas Cole regarded the American landscape
14:34as being what he himself called the undefiled work of God.
14:38In this young country that just didn't have
14:41what Europeans recognised as a history,
14:44mountains and canyons and waterfalls
14:47were to replace the classical ruins
14:50so beloved of European landscape artists.
14:53In America, natural history was to stand in the history itself.
15:06In his landscapes, Cole often included America's indigenous peoples.
15:16But they are invariably dwarfed by the vastness of the scene,
15:20though they themselves are merely features of the natural world.
15:29The embodiment of the Enlightenment idea of the noble savage,
15:33an idealised, uncorrupted people living a pure life connected to nature.
15:42But underpinning Cole's work was a fear that the American wilderness
15:46and its inhabitants would inevitably be tamed,
15:50even destroyed, in the process of creating a new nation.
15:59In his masterpiece, An Allegory Of Civilisation In Five Paintings,
16:04Cole fused landscape with an imagined history
16:08to challenge mainstream ideas about America's future.
16:13These five paintings tell an epic story,
16:17the story of the rise and the fall of a great civilisation.
16:21And they're influenced by an historical theory
16:24that saw the past as an endless cycle of rises and falls
16:28that was popular in the 19th century.
16:31It begins with what Thomas Cole called the Savage State.
16:35This is a primordial earth.
16:40There's a hunter chasing a stag across the landscape.
16:44In the background is his village,
16:47which is a cluster of animal-skin tents
16:50which look almost exactly like the tipis of the Plains Indians.
16:54And this supposedly savage state was the level of civilisation
16:58that many Americans thought that the Native Americans
17:01had reached before the arrival of Europeans.
17:04But it's the next stage, the Arcadian, the pastoral state,
17:08that in many ways is Thomas Cole's ideal.
17:11In this painting, mankind has discovered agriculture.
17:16There's a farmer ploughing his field.
17:19There's a shepherd with his flock.
17:21And because food is now plentiful,
17:24the men and the women of this society have the chance to discover the arts.
17:29There's music and there's dancing, there's poetry.
17:32But there's also a hint of the direction of travel
17:36in which this society is moving,
17:38because on the beach is a longboat being constructed.
17:42And the hint there is that the men of this society
17:45are going to go out into the world and forge an empire.
17:49And centuries later, in the centrepiece,
17:52literally the centrepiece of this series of paintings,
17:56is the consummation of empire.
17:59This is mankind's greatest achievement.
18:02There's classical architecture, there's great civic statues.
18:05This is a society with fleets of ships engaged in trade and in war.
18:10It's also a civilisation that has given birth to democracy,
18:15and that's not led to a flowering of republican values.
18:18That democracy has been corrupted, Thomas Cole is telling us, by the emperor,
18:23the figure who's marching into his great city
18:26ahead of a column of horses and elephants.
18:28This is a demagogue who has sowed the seeds of the fall of his civilisation.
18:35The fourth painting, Destruction, is the moment of the fall of an empire.
18:40The city has been invaded.
18:42We don't know who this army is.
18:44They could be these forces of a stronger, more morally virile empire.
18:49They could be the slaves of this empire who have risen up in revolution,
18:54or this could be a civil war.
18:56All of those eventualities are hinted at here.
19:00But what is clear is that this society has brought its fall down upon its own head
19:06because of its own moral corruption.
19:09What is missing from this city is nature.
19:12All the trees have been expunged.
19:16And in the final painting, Centuries Have Passed.
19:19This is desolation.
19:21From thousands of people, we have a scene completely empty of human beings.
19:27Nature has re-colonised.
19:31The course of empire isn't really about the classical world.
19:35These paintings aren't about Rome in the 5th century.
19:38They're about the United States of America in the middle of the 19th.
19:42Because Thomas Cole was one of many figures
19:44who believed his society stood at the crossroads.
19:47It would either stay true to its original founding principles
19:51or become a commercial, industrial, urbanised society,
19:55and one that would expand on a continental scale.
19:58And perhaps not surprisingly, Thomas Cole, the painter of landscapes,
20:02the painter of nature, also profoundly believed
20:05that any society that lost touch with nature also lost its moral compass.
20:18But many did not believe, like Cole, in the cyclical nature of history.
20:25In fact, by the mid-19th century, most white Americans believed
20:29they had what became known as a manifest destiny.
20:34To take what they saw as their superior civilisation
20:38to the furthest edge of the continent.
20:42From the 1830s, it became official US policy to drive Native Americans
20:47from their traditional lands and into poorer, harsher environments.
20:54Those who resisted were deliberately starved, hounded out or massacred.
21:01One artist, more than any other,
21:03made it his life's work to record those disappearing cultures.
21:07George Catlin.
21:11Over the course of five trips to what was then the western frontier,
21:15Catlin met and painted the portraits of hundreds of Native American men and women.
21:29Together, they formed a unique collection that Catlin called the Museum of American History.
21:37It was called the Indian Gallery.
21:41He would tour them around the country and later around the world.
21:48George Catlin was by no means indifferent to the sufferings of the people
21:53whose faces appear in these paintings.
21:56And unlike some artists, he went out of his way to accurately name his sitters.
22:01These are individuals, they're not types.
22:04And through his art, Catlin demonstrated to anyone who cared to look
22:08that there were numerous, different, distinct Native American nations,
22:12all of them with their own traditions and cultures,
22:15and all of them under threat as the United States pushed ever westwards.
22:20But Catlin didn't produce these paintings
22:23in order to take part in some campaign to save the Native Americans,
22:27as we might like to think.
22:30Catlin accepted that these people were, as he said, doomed and must perish.
22:40Catlin's portraits have undoubtedly preserved a rich cultural record for posterity.
22:46Yet for many Native Americans, they are troubling, romanticised images
22:51of the vanishing Indian that Catlin put on display for white, fee-paying audiences.
22:58After all, there is another perspective,
23:02the art of the Native Americans themselves,
23:05because even the nomadic Plains Indians
23:08recorded key events on their portable belongings.
23:14It was a traditional art form
23:16that began to show the influence of European contact.
23:21This image, painted onto an animal hide,
23:25was produced by people of the Cheyenne Nation.
23:28It's a depiction of the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876,
23:32one of the few major Native American victories in the so-called Indian Wars.
23:37And through artefacts like this,
23:40the Native Americans recorded their plight in their own artistic traditions,
23:46and there are, inevitably, many more images of defeat than victory.
23:51This is the work of people who were the victims,
23:55not the beneficiaries of manifest destiny.
23:58This is art from the other side of the frontier,
24:01art that records how the West was lost.
24:16While George Catlin was trying to preserve
24:19the culture of Native Americans on canvas,
24:22on the far side of the world,
24:24another artist would take a very different view
24:27of the indigenous people he met on the frontiers of empire.
24:33In 1874, Gottfried Lindauer,
24:36a Czech artist from the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
24:39arrived in New Zealand.
24:41Known to its original inhabitants as Aotearoa.
24:46Lindauer arrived after decades of warfare
24:49in which the Maori had lost much of their land to the British.
24:55The Czech painter suddenly found his skills much in demand,
24:59producing portraits of Maori men and women.
25:03To begin with, the portraits were commissioned by European settlers,
25:07eager to preserve a record of Maori culture for posterity.
25:14They believed that the Maori, like the Native Americans,
25:18were a dying race.
25:22The portraits were a testament to the fact that
25:25the Maori were a dying race.
25:27But the Maori didn't regard themselves as a doomed people.
25:31And by the 1890s, their population was on the increase
25:35after decades of decline.
25:37And they were absolutely determined to forge a new future
25:41in which their culture, their traditions, their language
25:45and the memories of their ancestors
25:47were all to be kept alive and kept vibrant.
25:50And one of the ways they did this was by using a technique
25:54And one of the ways they did this was by
25:57co-opting the talents of Godfried Lindauer
26:00and commissioning him to paint their portraits,
26:03but on terms dictated by them, to their tastes,
26:07and according to how they wanted to be seen and to be remembered.
26:17For Lindauer, it didn't matter whether his commissions
26:20came from Europeans or from the Maori elite.
26:23He treated both as he would any paying customer.
26:28Artistically, the style was always resolutely European.
26:33But for his Maori patrons and their families,
26:36Lindauer's paintings began to assume
26:38an entirely new level of meaning.
26:43As a people who would always venerate their ancestors,
26:47many Maori came to regard the portraits of Lindauer
26:50not just as memorials to their ancestors,
26:53but as almost living icons
26:55that kept their spirit alive in the present.
26:58Now, today, Lindauer's portraits are scattered all over the world
27:02in museums and galleries, but some, including this one,
27:06have remained within a single family,
27:08passed down through the generations.
27:11This is Te Rangiotu, a Maori chieftain,
27:14but also a successful businessman
27:16who had the wealth and the foresight
27:19to commission this portrait from Lindauer in 1884.
27:23Now, what's really significant
27:25is that when Lindauer was painting portraits of Maori
27:28for European customers,
27:30he tended to paint them in traditional costume.
27:33But many Maori patrons who had their portraits painted by Lindauer
27:37demanded that they be shown in a hybrid mixture
27:40of European and traditional dress
27:42to show that they were people
27:44who could freely move between the two cultures.
27:50It's through this portrait of Te Rangiotu,
27:53adorned with the symbols of his status,
27:56that his descendants feel they are still able
27:59to connect with their illustrious ancestor.
28:04His picture is given pride of place in the clan's meetinghouse,
28:08a sacred space in Maori culture.
28:19The traditional Maori meetinghouse is itself designed
28:23to embody an ancestor, both spiritually and physically.
28:29From the head and the outstretched arms
28:32to the backbone and the ribs.
28:37Each of the semi-abstract designs and swirling patterns
28:41represents specific qualities,
28:44from courage and strength
28:46to health and prosperity.
28:50These patterns are mirrored
28:52in the most dynamic of all Maori art forms.
28:56Tamoko, the art of the tattoo.
29:05Face and body tattoos link Maori not only with their ancestors,
29:10but also with other cultures across the Pacific
29:13who practise it in different forms.
29:16The Maori almost certainly brought it with them
29:19when they first settled in Aotearoa, New Zealand,
29:22over 700 years ago.
29:26For centuries, tamoko carried specific cultural meanings.
29:30They denoted social status or family connections,
29:33and it's said that no two designs are ever alike.
29:37While today, perhaps inevitably,
29:39the designs of tamoko have been appropriated
29:42as a global fashion accessory.
29:46For many Maori, they've been reclaimed
29:49as a highly visible symbol of cultural pride and identity.
29:56Throughout the 19th century,
29:58art in many forms was changed
30:00by the spreading European cult of progress,
30:04not only on the furthest edges of empire...
30:08..but also in the capitals of Europe.
30:12Here too, artists were being challenged by rapid social change
30:17and by the emergence of new technology.
30:21Like Lindauer's portraits,
30:23it would transform the way human beings perceived themselves.
30:29The age of the camera and the age of the photograph
30:32began on the day Louis-Jacques Daguerre
30:35made an image using his new daguerreotype process
30:38of a Parisian street.
30:40Now, the exposure time for those early primitive cameras
30:44was ten minutes, far too slow to capture images
30:48of the people on the horses and carriages
30:50rushing up and down the street.
31:00But one man, who stayed still long enough to have his shoes shined,
31:04became, as far as we know,
31:06the first person ever to appear in a photograph.
31:12What this picture doesn't reveal
31:14is the disastrous effects of rapid industrialisation on the city,
31:19the overcrowding, dirt and disease.
31:24But thanks to an ambitious urban planner called Eugène Haussmann,
31:28Paris was about to be transformed out of all recognition,
31:32and the evolving art of photography would be there to capture it.
31:39From the 1850s, Charles Marville
31:42photographed the city's narrow medieval streets,
31:45just as they and the communities who lived in them
31:48were being swept away.
31:51They were replaced by Haussmann's grand, spacious boulevards
31:55and lined with uniform terraced apartments.
31:59The reborn city was Europe's acknowledged capital of culture,
32:03and it was the genius of another pioneer photographer,
32:07known simply as Nadar,
32:09to capture the celebrated figures of Parisian high society.
32:18These were the world's first great portrait photographs,
32:22each one documented with a realism no painter could ever achieve.
32:29For a younger generation of Parisian artists,
32:32the camera was both a challenge and an inspiration.
32:36They turned their backs on the art establishment
32:39and its obsessions with grand historical themes and classical mythology.
32:43What they wanted to paint was everyday, modern life,
32:47and rather than compete with the camera,
32:49they set out to explore what the camera couldn't,
32:52our human, subjective experiences of the world
32:56and how they were affected by light, colour and emotion.
33:13The work of the artists who became known as the Impressionists
33:17is so familiar to us today that we forget its original power to shock.
33:26When Renoir painted a popular outdoor dance
33:29that attracted crowds every Sunday,
33:31he was celebrating modern life and the new leisure time it made possible.
33:37Compared with traditional academy paintings,
33:40his style would have seemed rough and incomplete.
33:46But it is this impression of the effects of light
33:49that has helped define our image of 19th-century Paris.
33:57Monet is best remembered for his natural landscapes,
34:01but he was also fascinated by the modern city.
34:07He painted Paris's first train station, the Gare Saint-Lazare,
34:12filled with clouds of smoke.
34:16Barely visible through the haze,
34:19we glimpse the terraces of Haussmann's reinvented Paris.
34:26The art of the Impressionists is today regarded
34:29as endlessly and effortlessly optimistic,
34:32a portrayal of France in a golden age of success and self-confidence.
34:37And it is true that the Impressionists did love to paint
34:40the Paris middle class at play,
34:43picnicking in the parks and boating on the lakes.
34:46But they also sometimes did try to capture
34:49that strange sense of dislocation, of isolation,
34:53a new and a troubling feature of the modern city.
35:03In Caillebotte's vision of a rain-soaked Paris,
35:07Haussmann's grand boulevards loom oppressively,
35:11as though distorted by a camera's wide-angle lens.
35:18Pedestrians hurry privately about their business.
35:21Nobody makes eye contact with anybody else,
35:24not even the couple walking towards us.
35:27People are cocooned from each other,
35:30not only by their umbrellas, but by the anonymity of city life.
35:36Even the bourgeois world of Paris at play had its shadowy side.
35:43Mary Cassatt, an American artist living in Paris,
35:47painted an elegantly dressed woman at the opera,
35:50peering at the performance.
35:53Yet she herself does not escape the attention of a distant male viewer,
35:58as he stares through his opera glasses and studies her,
36:02just as we the viewer study her.
36:05It's a sly comment, perhaps, on the objectifying male gaze
36:09that produced so many of 19th-century art's female nudes.
36:15Although Edgar Degas came from a bourgeois background,
36:19the son of a middle-class banker,
36:21he focused increasingly on those alienated by modern society.
36:28In Absinthe, he paints two dishevelled figures in a café,
36:33their lives apparently destroyed by the infamous drink of the title.
36:37They sit side by side, yet are utterly disengaged from one another.
36:44And from the world that has rejected them.
36:50But it is one of Impressionism's most enigmatic works
36:53that most powerfully encapsulates the paradox at the heart of the city.
37:02A Bar At The Folies-Bergère, by Edward Manet, from 1882.
37:06This is a glimpse into the glamorous,
37:09glittering world of Parisian high society,
37:12but it's not a world that we get to see directly.
37:15We only see it in reflection, on a mirror, behind a bar.
37:20And from the moment this painting was put on display,
37:23it was seen as controversial.
37:25And at the centre of the controversy
37:28is the figure at the centre of the painting, the barmaid.
37:32Because there she is, in the Folies-Bergère,
37:35the most decadent, the most glamorous,
37:38the most joyous cabaret nightclub in Paris.
37:41And yet, she has an expression that is anything but joyous.
37:47It's said to be the face of indifference,
37:51or an expression of alienation.
37:57And the fact that Manet has included in the painting
38:00all of these luxury goods, the champagne,
38:03the very expensive imported beer, and this bowl of oranges,
38:08might have been his way of hinting
38:11that she herself might be a commodity that's for sale.
38:15That this is a young woman who works as a prostitute,
38:19as well as selling drinks.
38:21And the reflection adds to the confusion,
38:24because her reflection isn't where we think it should be.
38:28It's off to the right.
38:30And in her reflection, she's not looking at us.
38:33She's talking and leaning in to this man in a top hat.
38:38He is a customer.
38:40But I think everything in this painting is telling us
38:43that he's a man who's after more than just a round of drinks.
38:48This is a masterclass in ambiguity.
38:52This is a painting that is a reflection,
38:55in more than just one sense,
38:57of a Paris that is both real and unreal,
39:00a consumer society in which everything's for sale,
39:03a city that is a constructed reality,
39:06that doesn't bear close scrutiny.
39:16In 1889, on the centenary of the French Revolution,
39:20Paris staged the Exposition Universelle,
39:24a celebration of French culture and civilisation.
39:30The centrepiece of the exposition
39:32was an enormous new monument to industrial power.
39:41Designed to showcase French engineering,
39:45it was the tallest structure ever created by the hand of man,
39:51and would be for another 40 years.
39:55The exposition also celebrated France's expanding empire
40:00with a number of colonial pavilions.
40:04People from Asia and Africa were displayed to the public
40:08in mock villages...
40:12..along with their art...
40:14..and their architecture.
40:18In the heart of the capital,
40:21the cultures of colonial peoples were here being contrasted
40:25with the assumed superiority of France.
40:31In the view of the time,
40:33it was the sophistication of French civilisation,
40:36with its links back through the Enlightenments, the Renaissance,
40:40and to the classical world, that gave France the right
40:43to rule over the supposedly primitive peoples of her empire.
40:48And so the organisers of the Exposition Universelle
40:51imagined that visitors who came here would revel at the sight
40:55of members of these supposedly lower races on display,
40:58and that they'd do so confident in the belief
41:01that they were being guided by France and her civilising mission.
41:05What visitors were not supposed to do was to see,
41:08in the art and the culture of Africa and Asia,
41:11the potential for an escape from Europe and from Western civilisation.
41:16And yet, that is exactly the view taken by an artist,
41:20who was one of the 28 million people who passed under the Eiffel Tower
41:24and entered the Exposition in the summer of 1889.
41:30His name was Paul Gauguin,
41:32a former city trader who had lost it all in the financial crash of 1882.
41:39He'd grown to hate the stifling conventions of bourgeois society.
41:44He wanted to leave it all behind and find somewhere not yet tainted
41:49by the artificiality of modern life.
41:54The restless Gauguin had already sought escape
41:57in the quiet backwaters of France and Martinique,
42:01but each time he'd returned to Paris.
42:05Now, after visiting the Exposition and seeing its colonial villages,
42:10Gauguin decided that in order to find paradise,
42:13he should head for the South Pacific, for the island of Tahiti.
42:25As Gauguin left, he wrote to a friend.
42:28The European Gauguin has ceased to exist.
42:34To him, Tahiti represented an almost mythical Eden.
42:39The first French explorers who'd arrived in the 1760s
42:43regarded the people they found there as the most content on Earth.
42:48They seemed, to the European imagination,
42:51to be living proof of the idea of the noble savage,
42:55a simple people with an unspoiled way of life.
42:59But that is not the Tahiti Gauguin found.
43:03By the time Gauguin arrived in Tahiti in 1891,
43:06this was one of the most tragic places in the world.
43:10Because while a tiny local elite had done rather well
43:13from the arrival of Europeans,
43:15the Tahitian people had been devastated by war, disease and alcohol.
43:20The population was a fraction of what it had been
43:23and the missionaries had done their absolute best
43:26to stamp out the local culture and religion.
43:29Tahiti was no longer a romanticised alternative to European civilisation.
43:34It was a classic case study of what European civilisation
43:38could do to other societies.
43:45Once he got away from the capital, Papeti,
43:48Gauguin discovered that some parts of the old legend still survived.
43:53He found boulders,
43:55and in the villages, proof of the island's reputation
43:58for the easy availability of women.
44:03Gauguin quickly found himself a local mistress,
44:06a girl of around 13, called Tehamana,
44:10who became his model and his muse.
44:15But she was not the only woman he met in Tahiti.
44:19There are many reasons to not like Paul Gauguin.
44:22He was a man who spent much of his life wallowing in self-pity
44:25or else engaged in an endless campaign of self-promotion.
44:29And the relationships that he had with young Tahitian girls
44:33is something that we today find deeply disturbing.
44:36And yet, for all his faults, the art that he produced here,
44:40on the islands of the Pacific,
44:42was radically different from that of his contemporaries.
44:46The art here, on the islands of the Pacific,
44:49was radical, vivid and stunningly beautiful.
45:01The way Gauguin used solid blocks of colour was something new in art.
45:11And these images were no mere European fantasy version
45:15of his paradise.
45:18There is melancholy and loss here.
45:23Gauguin's paintings of the Tahitians were, in one sense,
45:27an honest account of the condition in which he found them.
45:31A people in the latter stages of contamination,
45:35by the civilising mission,
45:37a people consumed by the European society Gauguin thought he had left behind.
45:45We should not forget that Gauguin was a vocal critic
45:49of French colonialism in Tahiti.
45:52And that one particular aspect of the way he saw himself
45:56made his view of civilisation more complex
46:00than he's normally given credit for.
46:04Like most Europeans, he saw the world as being divided
46:07between those who lived civilised, somewhat artificial lives
46:11and those who had remained in a natural, savage state.
46:15But he believed he himself was mixed race,
46:18French, Peruvian, but also partly Inca.
46:21And those two states, the natural and the savage,
46:24existed within him, literally in his blood.
46:28So in Tahiti, he wasn't just looking for a lost island paradise,
46:32he was searching for a lost part of himself.
46:39But Gauguin's last great work suggests that his search
46:43for identity and meaning was never resolved.
46:52On a vast canvas, a row of Polynesian women
46:55represent the universal cycle of life,
46:59from birth to old age.
47:04Death and the beyond are represented by a blue idol.
47:08It's a Gauguin invention,
47:10based on his fascination with the myths of a lost Tahitian past.
47:21In trying to find an antidote to modern life,
47:24Gauguin had turned to the art and culture of a civilisation
47:28most Europeans would have labelled primitive.
47:32Yet in the end, perhaps he concluded that there are no answers
47:36to the universal questions about the meaning of life and death.
47:51At the turn of the 20th century,
47:53Europeans did not generally consider the cultural artefacts
47:57of the so-called primitive peoples to be art.
48:01Yet they were fascinated by these objects
48:04and by the fashionable ideas about race and savagery
48:07that were projected onto them.
48:11Pablo Picasso deeply admired Gauguin's explorations
48:15of non-European art.
48:17But unlike Gauguin,
48:19Picasso was never interested in escaping from the modern world.
48:24For him, primitive art would be a catalyst,
48:27inspiring him to shatter the conventions of the past.
48:32In 1907, Picasso visited the Trocadéro in Paris,
48:36where he came face-to-face with a display of objects and masks
48:41from the Pacific Islands and Africa.
48:45The exact date of that visit to the Trocadéro is unknown,
48:49but then the whole affair has become shrouded in mythology,
48:53most of it of Picasso's own making.
48:55But it is thought that this mask
48:59might have been one of the ones that Picasso saw.
49:02It was made by the Fang people of Gabon,
49:05but it seems that Picasso had no real deep interest
49:08in its cultural meaning or its ritual function.
49:11What he was interested in was their potential for his art,
49:15and that visit to the Trocadéro
49:17has become one of the most famous moments in the story of modern art,
49:21because it was at that moment that Picasso found,
49:24and from outside of Europe,
49:26the inspiration and the expressive power
49:28that would transform his paintings and revolutionise modern art.
49:36Picasso described the masks he'd seen as weapons.
49:40They had the power, whether supernatural or psychological,
49:44to exorcise unwanted spirits.
49:47Picasso tried to incorporate this new power into his work
49:52and created one of art's masterpieces.
49:57The curtain is drawn back on a brothel scene.
50:01We see five naked prostitutes waiting for clients.
50:06And though there was a long-established tradition
50:09of female nudes in Western art,
50:12these are unlike any nudes ever seen before.
50:16What made this picture particularly shocking and revolutionary
50:20were the images Picasso combined within it.
50:25The faces of the three women to the left
50:28are believed to be derived from archaic Iberian sculpture.
50:33But the two women on the right,
50:36their fractured, irregular, distorted faces
50:39are based on the art of Africa,
50:42on tribal African masks that Picasso had encountered in Paris.
50:47Now, there's a long debate about the extent to which
50:52Picasso was influenced by African art,
50:55and he muddied the waters considerably
50:57by making a series of completely contradictory statements.
51:01But you can see that Picasso, consciously and subconsciously,
51:06by using African art,
51:08was bringing into his paintings ideas about Africa
51:12that were current in Europe at the time.
51:15He was a product of his time, like anybody else,
51:18and he lived in an age when Africa was the focus
51:22of huge amounts of speculation and debate
51:25about the meaning of savagery and civilization,
51:29of us and them, ideas about race,
51:32ideas about exoticism, ideas about eroticism.
51:36So by placing the faces of African masks onto prostitutes,
51:42Picasso was detonating two powerful sets of ideas
51:46about race and savagery, civilization, empire,
51:51with older ideas about female sexuality and prostitution.
52:00In one painting, Picasso had turned Western ideas about art on their head.
52:06He sought to express not simply aesthetic beauty,
52:10but frightening, primal feelings about sex, violence and even death.
52:17And that worked partly because of the masks' associations
52:21in the minds of those who first saw this painting
52:24with civilisations they considered primitive.
52:28It was the apparent threat of these objects that made them so shocking,
52:33and the perceived barbarism of the cultures that produced them,
52:37which reinforced the assumed superiority of European culture.
52:46And so, when Europe went to war in July 1914,
52:50few ordinary people questioned the prevailing view
52:53of Western civilisation as sophisticated, rational and humane.
53:06Yet the horror that was unleashed by new weapons
53:09that could slaughter human beings on an unprecedented scale
53:13was a product of the same industrial revolution
53:16that had forged the railways and built the Eiffel Tower.
53:24Now it seemed Europeans were reduced to the same irrational barbarism.
53:31That they'd convinced themselves
53:33was the hallmark of other supposedly primitive peoples.
53:38In the German trenches of the First World War
53:41was an artist who, perhaps more than any other,
53:44created a graphic visual record of the new barbarism.
53:51Otto Dix was one of the millions of young European men
53:55who enthusiastically rushed to enlist at the outbreak of fighting in 1914.
54:00And he went on to spend three years in the mud and the slime of the trenches,
54:06serving on both the Western and the Eastern fronts.
54:09At one point, he served in a machine gun unit,
54:12wielding the ultimate industrial weapon,
54:15the literal fusion of the gun and the machine.
54:18And throughout all of this, Otto Dix produced sketches,
54:22hundreds of them, that graphically recorded what these new weapons did
54:26to the flesh and the bone of his doomed generation.
54:35Dix drew the broken faces, the mud and the misery.
54:40He chronicled how industrial warfare
54:43had transformed the soldier from warrior to victim.
54:55It is perhaps fitting that it was a German artist
54:58who most clearly captured the horror of industrial warfare.
55:05After all, Germany did not have the consolation of victory
55:09behind which to conceal the inhumanity that had been unleashed.
55:17Her war cemeteries, like the art of Otto Dix,
55:20are austere, frank and bleak.
55:29In Dix's work, a new type of mask took root in European art.
55:34The gas mask.
55:36The icon of total war, otherworldly, hyper-modern.
55:41This was the face of Europe's own home-grown barbarism.
55:50But these masked faces, haunting and visceral though they are,
55:54were, in a sense, merely preparatory sketches
55:58for Otto Dix's definitive statement on war
56:02and on where European progress had led.
56:07It's a work that turns another European artistic tradition,
56:11the religious triptych, completely on its head.
56:18In the far panel, the soldiers are marching onto the battlefield
56:23through the smoke.
56:25In the panel opposite it, we can see the results of that battle.
56:31A soldier is dragging a wounded comrade off the battlefield
56:35through the broken bodies, but that soldier is Otto Dix himself,
56:40his face utterly traumatised.
56:44But it's the central panel that's the most powerful and the most shocking.
56:49This is the wasteland of the Western Front.
56:53It is the great putrid scar of mud and decaying, rotting flesh
56:59that's been cut across the face of Europe.
57:02This skeletal figure leering over the battlefield
57:06is a reference to the crucifixion.
57:09This is the work of a man who was trapped
57:13inside his own recurring nightmare.
57:16Otto Dix and his generation had borne witness to these horrors,
57:21but they'd also been witness to the death of the 19th-century faith
57:25in inevitable, unstoppable progress.
57:28What they'd learnt in the trenches was that savagery and barbarism
57:32weren't external to be found only in the colonies, but inside all of us.
57:38They had seen that industry and progress
57:41and the supposed triumph of Enlightenment rationalism
57:44did not guarantee the survival of civilisation.
57:48And it was them, the poets and the artists and the painters of the trenches,
57:53who best understood what Europe had been through
57:56and who best foresaw the horrors that lay ahead.
58:07The Open University has produced a free poster
58:10that explores the history of different civilisations through artefacts.
58:14To order your free copy, please call 0300 303 3553
58:20or go to the address on screen and follow the links for The Open University.
58:30Investigating the goddess of excess, Bacchus Uncovered,
58:33Ancient God of Ecstasy is available now on BBC iPlayer
58:36and the history of China is explored weekdays at 1.45 on Radio 4.
58:40Catch up on this week's episode so far on iPlayer Radio.
58:43Tomorrow night back on BBC Two and Mary Beard discusses musicals.
58:47I'll definitely be there. Front row late at five past eleven.