British Masters - We Are Making a New World (Episode One)

it was 1914 the first world war had just begun as Britain's boys enlisted to fight for king and country one young man was enjoying the attractions of his local fairground his name was mark Gertler and impoverished but precocious painter so it comes the fair for some light relief to escape the hardships of his everyday life and all the incessant talk of the war but on this visit he wouldn't find any relief he would actually be confronted to the dark and brutal vision of the future as Girdler stood watching the fairgrounds carousel he had a premonition of Britain trapped in the insanity of a never-ending war a war that will consume both soldiers and their families that would transform their hope into horror and would then spin desperately out of control but the painting he made was much more than a vision of the Great War it was a prophecy of the entire 20th century the ride we couldn't get off Wow and mark Gertler was just one of a new breed of British artist who would help us make sense of the catastrophic century that lay ahead in the early years when new challenges new technologies and new conflicts shattered all our certainties they taught us how to survive in the modern world as our empire collapsed and the nation itself was under threat they created an image of britain in which we could believe and for which we could find and in the nuclear age they were nude our faith in a human spirit and gave us hope again for the future as the rest of the world was out exploring abstraction Expressionism and all these other new isms our painters were doing something far more interesting they took the best bits of Modern Art and infused them with our own great painting traditions the result was a uniquely British take on modern art a glorious take on Lotte Mart and I think it was one of the finest artistic movements in all of Western culture once life rarely was to turn up in the morning and then for ride in the park after their teeth EPS of gum fell somewhere scrumptious little paste cakes and strawberry issues for the privileged few the Edwardian era was one long and lavish tea party the table always had a beautiful white tablecloth on it and lovely silver and flowers the largest empire in history brought them luxuries from all corners of the globe and high society frolicked in wealth splendor and decadence soup in silver plates a fish of some beautiful soul to the lovely sauce I must say that they have to get a little cold by the time it came round theirs was a fantasy life a fantasy that our painters were only too happy to endorse this is a typical example of Edwardian art it was painted by sol lawrence alma-tadema and he became immensely rich peddling lurid fantasies like this now you can see why it was so popular it's well painted it's elegant its vaguely intellectual but not too intellectual and of course it's filled with naked women but don't be fooled by its charms because the truth is this is really really really bad art its reactionary it's elitist its sexist it's motivated by money alone and what's more it was completely out of touch with the realities of modern Britain the realities were not so pretty and in a grubby corner of North London British art would finally start to confront them and all because of a murder it was the morning of September 12 1907 a railwayman had finished his late shift and was making his way through the back streets of camden town he arrived home to greet his wife but on this morning he was greeted with a shock this brutal killing became known as the camden town murder the killer was never found but that night in September 1907 was a seminal moment in the history of British art and that's because one painter dared to shock the whole country and paint it that painter was Walter Sickert a man dedicated to taking art out of the Edwardian drawing-room and into the real world for years he'd been painting the insalubrious lives of Britain's underpass a drunkard heads off to the pub a singer plies her trade in a grubby Music Hall and the rowdy crowd heckle from the cheap seats but inspired by the camden town murder he would make his most audacious statement yet this isn't really a painting it's a crime scene indeed at first it looks like a rather touching portrait of a wife or a girlfriend dozing away in bed one morning but when you look closer you begin to notice that Sickert has planted all these little clues throughout the painting that gradually and together reveal something horrific why for instance is the woman wearing lipstick when she's asleep why is she wearing jewelry when she's asleep why is she sleeping naked and why of the bedsheets being pulled down and then you get revelation number one she's not a wife she's not a girlfriend she can only be a prostitute and then you begin to notice more things strange things her cold yellow-green flesh the twisted neck and that's when you get revelation number two maybe she's not sleeping at all maybe she's dead and then you've only got one question left who could have done this and that's when you discover the final clue this a man's overcoat is on the chair next to her bed and that means only one thing the killer is still in the room and that's when the most awful and devastating revelation of them all strikes you you have a person in the room you of a client you have a killer and this painting is your viewpoint of a crime you've just committed your rival is painting innocent and you leave it guilty for Sickert the entire Edwardian elite stood guilty guilty of neglecting the poverty and violence that simmered in Britain's streets but Sickert had one young devotee who wanted to go even further he didn't just want to accuse that audience Society he planned to overthrow it it was a diabolical plot dreamed up by one of the most poisonous minds of the 20th century this is the brain of Percy Wyndham Lewis and it only survives because of a very rare tumor he developed in his pituitary gland that sent him blind and eventually caused his death but it's a suitably gruesome relic - a very gruesome man Wyndham Lewis was a misogynist fascist and anti-semite who had the dubious honour of writing the very first biography of Hitler and was described by Ernest Hemingway no less as having the eyes of an unsuccessful rapist he was not a nice man but bad men can be great artists and Windom Lewis's twisted mind was the secret of his genius Windom Lewis was born in 1882 on a yacht somewhere off the coast of Nova Scotia his mother was English his father a bigamist and a veteran of the American Civil War as a young man Windom lewis lived an itinerant life but in 1908 he made London his home he was entranced by the vitality of the city it's dazzling electric light it's roaring motorcars and it's towering buildings together they offered the possibility of a mechanical paradise and Wyndham Lewis began to fantasize about how a new society governed by machines could overthrow the stuffy world of the Edwardian elite in every way conceivable he was the enemy really of the existing status quo of the time he's attacking everything he thinks is complacent can't hypocrisy people who are idle and lazy in their thought and were frightened in the modern world frightened of modern ideas he considered himself to be extremely revolutionary I suppose and in Wyndam Lewis's Revolution the secret weapon would be art in 1912 he embarked on a blistering series of breakthrough works that first announced his vision of the future at the heart of them all was the human figure but has never seen before violent robotic humanoids are trapped in an angular wilderness they look like nightmares but they were Windham Lewis's dream of a mechanical world order but Windham Lewis knew he couldn't realize that dream alone to succeed in revolutionising Britain he needed to create a movement in July 1914 he published a manifesto it was a call to arms a work of art in its own right and its name was blast blas quack english drug for stupidity and sleeping impossibility for englishman to be grave and keep his end up psychologically in pause the years 1837 to 1901 abysmal inexcusable luxury sport the famous it was less a manifesto more a vitriolic and incoherent ran odd in cape bless the hairdresser he attacks mother nature for a small fee less england industrial island machine pyramidal workshop its apex at Shetland it stinks of his personality the aggression the violence the megalomania all of that squeezes through every single page every single word is windham lewis taking up assault against britain point one we hear all sorts of disagreeable things about england be unmusical aunty artistic unfill Asafa country we quite agree windham lewis is not pulling his punches here he's really going for the jugular he's really attacking england and i think this for me is the most revealing image of them all it's a wrecking ball and that's precisely what blast was the big giant angry violent wrecking ball that was let loose on Britain and its cultural conventions a small group of artists rallied to Windham Louis's cause and they called themselves the vortices Edouard wodsworth imagined industrial Britain a scene from the air Cuthbert Hamilton's or steel girders rise up from a building site and Lawrence Atkinson plotted a cathedral for the Machine age they remain some of the most radical artworks ever made the extraordinary about Fortis ISM is that it still looks revolutionary avant-garde today whereas most so-called a vanguard today is this tailors old man and the greatest vortices painting of them all was made by the mastermind himself it is a bold and terrifying vision of the mechanical metropolis of his dreams this is a very special picture because it's one of Wyndham Lewis's only waters his paintings to have survived most of them were burnt in fires or destroyed in explosions or ruined in floods and some just disappeared and we're never seen again you've got this vast prison like city of skyscrapers and streets but the most alarming thing I think of all is his treatment of the figures but they're all dehumanized they're all turned into little soulless robots and they're fighting each other they're waving flags and they're shouting on to their comrades you know this painting now is almost a hundred years old but I just can't believe how truly prophetic it is it really does prefigure a whole disastrous century of wars and revolutions of fascism of ideology of class struggle it prefigures a whole century of ever-expanding cities an unsustainable developed and it prefigures a whole century where individuals were isolated to humanized and alienated and you know something if you think this painting doesn't have anything to do with you just look through the window and you can see these little people working away at their desks Windom Lewis failed to turn Britain into his own mechanical dystopia it became one without him but a very different dream would come from a most unlikely place 100 years ago the East End of London wasn't just a different neighborhood it was a different world London's very own badlands to get here you actually have to cross a river of blood that surged down the road from the local slaughterhouses and when you cross that grizzly threshold you've suddenly emerged into a dangerous and exotic world of criminals and prostitutes and Orthodox Jews and Eastern European asylum seekers and you might think that this kind of place was no kind of place for art but as it turned out these slums produce one of the finest painters of the 20th century his name was David Bamba and he was as tough as they come his family were Jewish refugees who'd fled brutal persecution in Czarist Russia his father was a leather worker and a gambler prone to violence Bloomberg's early life was pretty much a daily fight for survival his brothers were actually street fighters and boxers and by all accounts David could throw a mean punch himself but he had even a powerful weapon up his sleeve Bombur could draw and draw well and he became convinced that art was his only way out of the ghetto his world was different for everybody else's so domestic life went on around him but his focus was always on to my experience always on his art everybody else was going into some kind of trade and and he wanted to be a painter for God's sake what's use his a painter bamberg was determined to break into the exclusive London art world in any way he could and in 1911 he finally won a place at art school but not as an artist as a month Bombur ground the job tremendously boring and frustrating too he wanted to be an artist and not a model so one day he brought some drawings in with him to the class and when it was over he showed them to the teacher the teacher was staggered because his drawings were better than anything ever done by the students Romberg was promptly offered a scholarship of the slate London's most prestigious art school and here he is posturing proudly in his class photograph the Slade was a blessed relief from the hardships of the stand and with new confidence bomb burg began to experiment but the Slade didn't like experiments and soon he found himself in trouble on one occasion he actually smashed his professor in the head with a palliate when he dared criticize his work so you'll not be surprised to him he is branded a troublemaker and eventually kicked out it seemed that bomb bug had thrown away his one chance to make something of himself he wasn't going to be defeated already he had that determination and I think that's probably very Jewish thing but actually if you're a minority community you know especially then you get to be tough you have to be tough and bomb Berg's fortunes were to change during a visit to the local Jewish baths it was a spiritual place where the East End Jews cleansed themselves before synagogue and here during a moment of quiet contemplation bom berg had an epiphany as bom berg cleansed himself of a week's worth of filth he realized he could do exactly the same thing with his art he could cleanse it of the past he could cleanse it of all those stultifying techniques have been taught of the slate and he could cleanse it of all the boring old traditions that had held back so many British artists before and by doing so he believed he could make paintings that were pure cleaner fresher and bolder than any ever made before like Windham Lewes bomb berg broke with centuries of tradition producing fragmented paintings of psychedelic originality but his image was one of optimism Dockers unloading a cargo ship are transformed into a colorful kaleidoscope of energy and in jiu-jitsu he celebrates the dynamism of martial-arts combat but for his greatest work he would turn to his beloved bathhouse this is bomb Berg's first great masterpiece and he knew it too in fact he was so proud of this picture that when he first exhibited it in Chelsea he actually hung it outside the gallery on the street and then proceeded to decorate the whole thing with flags and apparently caused such a stir that it sent traffic jams all the way down the Kings Road and that doesn't surprise me it doesn't surprise me at all because when he made this in 1914 this was as bold and radical as any painting in the world now it's based on his own memories of the East End baths and you may not be able to notice it immediately but it is a picture of bathing this bright red rectangle that's the bathing pool and these blue and white figures around these are the bathers these are the East End neighbors of Bob Berg and you can just about make them out doing their thing so for instance here's a form of someone diving into the pool you've got lots of other figures climbing out of the pool over here swimming around inside and over here with the bent legs you just make out these bent legs here's a figure just climbed out of the pool drying himself off so this painting is all about the process of becoming clean but this isn't just about modern Londoners cleansing themselves of dirt bomb bugs all this painting is a great manifesto for the modern world and I think he's telling us that the modern world can cleanse and empower us all it can even transform the impoverished Jews of the East End into these great muscular heroes of modernity it can render everyone pure it can make everyone equal and it can set everyone free david bohm burg had found liberty in modern britain where windham lewis had seen only cruelty but together their pioneering paintings had completely transformed British art it was just one problem no one understood them at all the British people didn't understand and certainly didn't like this new modern art but something was about to change all that something that would force our artists to abandon modernism and return to tradition and that something was the First World War the declaration of war in 1914 was greeted with hysteria many were convinced that it would finally united Wardian britain that it would transform ordinary young men into heroes and then it would finally confirm Britain's unrivaled supremacy over the world and one young artist was certain it would make him a star like bomb Burgin Windham Lewis Richard Nevin s'en had trained at the Slade but unlike them he had little natural talent knocking out second-rate paintings that aped the avant-garde here he is posing proudly in front of a painting he called tongue-tied Liam tongue pom-pom the title says it all but Nevin soms mediocre prospects would change one evening when he was lured to the theatre to witness an unorthodox performance by London's most infamous celebrity a maverick Italian by the name of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Leonetti was a poser an adrenaline junkie and a veritable grandmaster of the silly idea he had for instance proposed burning down all the world's museums sinking the whole city of Venice and he thought but nothing was more fun than a good old-fashioned car crash but in this performance Marinette II reached a new low Marinette II loved war see and he declared his love in an experimental sound poem that was supposed to give the public an authentic taste of the battlefield public's reaction was divided divided between disgust horror hatred terror and outrage but Nevin s'en was entranced he too dreamed of battle of glory of heroism and on a wave of patriotism Neven son enlisted but he would be sorely disappointed in 1914 he arrived in France but was immediately deemed too weak to fight so he spent his days as a medical orderly pottering about on the lonely lanes of flanders far away from the front mine though you wouldn't have thought it from his tales of derring-do neve inton told one story that in the middle of a Zeppelin raid he got the wheels of his ambulance caught in a railway track as a train hurtled towards him and flames billowed around him and he only escaped at the very last second and on another occasion the Germans apparently fired a shell directly at him but it miraculously passed through a little hole in his ambulance and he emerged unhurt and on another occasion he was for some reason up in hot-air-balloon and an enemy aeroplane shot the air balloon down the balloon was plummeting towards the ground but once again Nevin s'en escaped now I don't know about you but I don't believe a word of it after just ten uneventful weeks Levinson made his way quietly home but back in Britain he was greeted as a real war hero so he busied himself making pictures that showed a hero's view of modern war pictures that would guarantee him public acclaim and here in the heart of the West End Nevin sandbagged his very own one-man show Levinson's exhibition was a sensation everyone who was anyone was there royalty aristocracy army generals famous painters famous writers and no less than for past present and future prime ministers and when they were all assembled together inside the gallery Nevin soon made his entrance with a limp a walking stick and in full army uniform Neven son reveled in his newfound glory but the adulation was deserved though he'd never seen a moment of combat he had managed to capture the essence of modern war he discovered a formula art that was geometrical and modern yet easy to understand art that could be appreciated by the connoisseur and laymen alike here a battalion March in unison up to the front line troops rest after the rigors of battle and an aeroplane swoops down from the clouds but the public's favorite painting was called llama tires most viewers thought this was not just Nevin 'sons best work to date it was the greatest painting of the whole conflict Walter Sickert even called it the most authoritative utterance on war in the history of painting now clearly it's a powerful and uncompromising image of war and not just any war this is modern war you can see a group of French machine gunners here they're in a dugout they're surrounded by barbed wire one of them has been killed already this one's panicking over the dead body and these two are firing blindly into the distance now this isn't a war of cavalry charges and heroism and flying flags this is a war in which scared men fight clumsily for their lives and for no apparent reason and that's what people admired about this picture they admired it for telling them an inconvenient and unpleasant truth about what was happening across the channel and they trusted it too because Nevison was a soldier Neven son had been there and Nevison had seen this firsthand in the trenches but we know that wasn't true Nevin s'en had never stepped foot inside a trench and Evanson actually painted this on his honeymoon but the real truth about the war would come from a most unlikely place this Buckinghamshire countryside was once home to a lonely young artist called Paul Nash a man whose intense emotional bond with nature would make him the greatest war painter of the 20th century on his long solitary walks Paul developed the fanciful idea the trees were like people with personality as all of their own and he painted them obsessively you Oh but not even a sensitive young man like Nash could avoid the war and eventually he signed up you it was February 1917 when he disembarked at the port town of lahar he wondered what all the fuss was about this was a subdued time in the war as armies regrouped and the generals argued over strategy Lucca pausing but after a few relaxed weeks Nash finally received orders to move up to the front line but during the lull nature had reclaimed the battlefields and the trenches were in blue where his comrade saw death and destruction Nash thought this place was actually quite nice what wasn't there to like there were trees leaves Birds sunrises even the trenches were quite pretty in fact the whole place reminded him of Sussex and he couldn't resist the temptation to paint it - swallows we blow past an orchard and shrubs thrive amid the trenches but this pastoral Idul wasn't to last that spring the British Army began preparing for a massive new offensive and it was then that an accident would profoundly alter Nash's future one day Nash actually climbed out of the trench to make a sketch of some rather delightful light Cecil shining away in the distance anyway as he stepped the side to get a better look at them he lost his balance tumbled back into the trench and broke a rib now he was immediately sent back to England to recover from the injury but it was probably the luckiest thing that ever happened to him in his life there's only a few days later his whole company was slaughtered in a disastrous offensive Passchendaele the most brutal and inhumane battle of the whole war hundreds of thousands of men disappeared into no-man's land and many of them never returned after his recovery Paul Nash returned to Passchendaele but the place that he'd once found so beautiful was now a desolate wasteland Nash was utterly horrified by what he saw here and to understand how he felt you really have to hear what he wrote in a letter to his wife after he saw it because I think it's one of the most powerful things ever written about the first world war perhaps about any war and this this is what he wrote sunset and sunrise are blasphemous they are mockeries to map it is unspeakable godless hopeless I am no longer an artist interested and curious I'm a messenger who will bring backward from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever feeble inarticulate will be my message but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls and it was that horror that outraged that desire to tell the truth about the war that caused Nash to make the greatest masterpieces of his career but Nash's greatest work is the bleakest of them all it's the morning after the battle the Sun is rising and now the sunrise is typically a symbol of hope and rebirth and renewal but not this sunrise because this sunrise doesn't reveal a twinkling new morning it reveals a truly appalling scene you can see here a sky that's blood-red filled with all the blood that has been shed the night before you can see a forest all the way here a burnt and broken trees and underneath this crazy writhing ocean of mud and out of that mud these trees become metaphors for the Dead buried beneath them with their sagging limbs like yarns these become like the bodies who have fallen on the field of battle parts of this tree here looked like a like a hand imploring the heavens but heavens remain indifferent and I think this is a truly brutal an incredibly powerful attack on war and its consequences from national I think it's more powerful than any book or any poem or any film precisely because it's so silent and so empty and so wordless Oh but as war turned to peace it wasn't horror that people wanted they wanted hope and one artist was determined to provide it Stanly Spencer had given four years of his life to the war first as a medical orderly and then as a frontline soldier in Macedonia and it was in a quiet corner of Hampshire that he set about creating a masterpiece that would finally consign the war to history this is the sander Memorial Chapel few come here today but I believe this modest brick building contains one of our most neglected treasures and an artwork that completes the great reawakening of british painting in the mornings when I open up I say it good morning Chapel and tell how well it's looking as custodian you get to do everything so the gardens in the chapel in the buildings and the day-to-day cleaning and maintenance things like that you stand in the middle the chapel and you look around and that's the closest you'll ever get to being inside Spencer's mind just having all these images around you in his Chapel Spencer created an artwork on a scale of the great fresco cycles of the Italian Renaissance but he did it in his own inimitable way this is Spencer's war and Spencer's war began as an orderly in a Bristol hospital this is the first thing you see as you come in here and it shows the wounded returning from the Western Front and arriving at the war hospital in Bristol and the big iron gates are being open for them now you would think this scene would be a scene of horror and pain and suffering but not for Stanley you see the soldiers although they've got their slings and their bandages and their cast they almost seem to be having a good time at the top of this open top bus and they're these beautiful rhododendron flowers around them so the whole scene seems like some kind of Bank Holiday outing rather than some terrible traumatic scene of the First World War and this is the case of all these pictures in here this is probably my favorite and it shows the beds being made in the hospital now the best thing about it is this figure on the left because he's so cold as his beds being made that he's wrapped himself completely in his blankets and he's keeping his feet warm by standing on a hot water bottle now I remember doing that as a child when that was particularly cold in the morning and it's just amazing that a scene like this could ever make its way into a war painting but that's the great thing about Spencer you know he's not painting the horror of war he's not painting the brutality of war he's painting if anything the banality of war and you can see the banality in this picture this shows T in the ward and you can see these enormous piles like Jenga of bread and butter and Spencer's favorite meal in the world was bread and butter this is called ablutions and it shows the early morning washing up and cleaning you can see one guy polishing the taps like instead of doing a rock and roll dance with the tabs you can see another person having their back scrubbed and this person in the foreground is washing their hair in a in a sink now Spencer actually had an enormous amount of difficulty painting the soap suds on their hair so he did it himself and sketched himself in the mirror as he washed his hair everywhere you find these domestic moments but his most memorable images were drawn from his experiences of the frontline in Macedonia the culmination of the whole project is this painting 21 feet high it took Spencer almost a year to paint and it shows a battlefield an enormous battlefield in Macedonia that's filled with all the soldiers that have died during the war Spencer's friends Spencer's comrades but here they're all being resurrected they're all climbing out of the earth rubbing their eyes looking around and saying hello to their old friends the friends they thought they'd never see again towards the end of his life Spencer returned to revisit this work that meant so much to him when I did this resurrection altarpiece I wanted it to be in a particular place that I remembered and I felt the all that I hope for all the coming back home and everything could be celebrated there these places for which the men were rising from as you'll see down below but by the older are they're rising in a place which innocence they would like horizon it happy plate now that I'm thinking about the won races battlefield a happy place without or anything I'm trying to get this feeling of of the consciousness of the cross getting more and more tension to get tough and when it gets to the men above those moogles who's retiring over of crucifix and I get a feeling he's there forever I don't think anything any bombers in dropping behind this table they can take the least notice immediately about him you see Christ as just a man among the men receiving the process and partly talking to them well I sit in that way that all these things which were previously walking now having to repeat as these bringers of the happy message of the resurrection every single wound of war is being healed in this picture in this whole chapel you can see here they're shaking hairs I've got to say that I think that's one of the the greatest passages of 20th century painting that handshake because you know handshake is something we do every day but Spencer found something epic in it something momentous it is and you realize that that handshake isn't just a handshake between old friends who thought they'd never see each other again it's a handshake between the past and the future with the sander Memorial Chapel Stanley Spencer had reinvented tradition to create a timeless sanctuary amid the chaos of the modern world but Spencer had not been alone in responding to the challenges of his age the ten years or so between 1910 and 1919 the Shawnee ranked as the most remarkable in the whole history of British art because it knows he is British artists turned themselves into nothing less than the conscience of the entire nation they showed us the problems and possibilities of the modern world they told us the truth about the First World War when hardly anyone else would and with the nation in trauma they gave us hope and strength for the future you in the next episode British painters lead the country through a period of national crisis some find refuge in nostalgia some in fantasy while others search for the timeless spirit of the English countryside but in the darkest hour they come together to create an image of Britain in which we can believe and for which we can fight you you

Channel: Concerning Art

Views: 76,446

Keywords: British Masters (Recurring Event), Making, World, Artist (Project Role), Art (Quotation Subject), World War I (Military Conflict), paul nash, nash, History (TV Genre), Documentary (TV Genre), We Are Making A New World, graham southerland, francis bacon, stanley spencer, britain, British Empire (Interest), London, United Kingdom (Country), Walter Sickert (Visual Artist), wyndham lewis, david bomberg, christopher nevinson

Id: -jUsdN1HKLk

Length: 58min 30sec (3510 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 14 2015