The Great Impressionist Innovators (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] is [Music] still if i asked you what the impressionists were best known for you'd probably say the painting outdoors and you'd be right who doesn't love monet's delightful fields of poppies with their unmissable smell of the summer [Music] all those dreamy water lilies of his so delicate so thoughtful or his sunny moments by the river with their perfectly captured weather [Music] it's as if monet's art hasn't got a care in the world everything in it is relaxed sleepy happy renoir's the same all those gorgeous scenes of dancing and lunching at bourgeois pretty girls flirting and jumping on swings with the handsomest chap in the restaurant pizarro's the same fields of golden corn sunny orchards happy peasants merrily at work in the fields even when he paints the winter he makes the cold look so welcoming now all these famous impressionist images will be very familiar to you you've seen them before on chocolate boxes and the postcards people send you from paris and even if you don't recognize the actual pictures you'll certainly know their mood that relaxed optimistic typical mood of impressionism [Music] so naturally you're going to assume that achieving these pleasing moods was pleasant as well and that the life of the impressionists was relaxing and contented and that's where you'd be wrong very wrong because the outdoor art of the impressionists their most famous contribution to painting the stuff we all know and love was a to paint achieving that pleasant sense of outdoor relaxation was so much harder than it looks [Music] in the last film we saw the impressionists come together for their first show in 1874. over the next decade they had seven more exhibitions that's eight shows in all eight shows that changed art and from the beginning they wanted to paint outdoors to paint what they could see what was really there [Music] in monet's case that usually involved water monet spent his entire life living next to water it was if he was born with two umbilical cords one connected to his mother the other connected to the sin [Music] it started in paris where he was born in 1840 and where the sen is all twisty and urban [Music] in the half where he grew up the river pours itself into the atlantic in a messy industrial puddle full of elusive glimmers and shimmers [Music] his final days of course were spent here at givenny by his famous lily pond which he created from scratch specifically to paint the water from every angle with every watery naughts [Music] so the whole of monet's life was spent by the water and water was the main obsession of his art as well [Music] this was just a bog when he got here all this had to be created but it was worth it because it brought him closer to this stuff the problem with painting water the difficulty the challenge is that it's constantly changing everything affects it and every moment is different water is sort of there and sort of not there i mean how do you paint that money's answer was to get right on top of it as close as he could to live it breathe it all day long in a special boat he had built for himself a floating studio custom made for exploring the river we know exactly what it looked like because he was painted working on it by his fellow boat lover eduard manney mane himself never became a proper impressionist but he shared many of monae's impressionist ambitions as well as most of the consonants in his name manet and monet were always getting confused man a shows monet painting the scene at argentoi just up the river from central paris he's in his special boat hard at work dressed from head to toe in impeccable white boating gear not you would have thought the most practical clothes to work in but monet was a bit of a dandy he had all his shirts handmade and was famous for his frills and his cuffs besides on every french river the rowers were obliged to wear a different color here on the scene they had to wear white there's something of the hercule puerto about him don't you think the neat little dandy dabbing away tidily at his view of the scene and if you look at the back of the boat in the cozy homemade cabin you'll find monet's wife camille stored away neatly like a useful sack of provisions camille would sit placidly at the back of the boat singing for money feeding him organizing his picnics i bet they had other kinds of fun as well in that cozy looking floating love nest of theirs [Music] in his earlier years when he was still trying to make it the official way monet painted camille in a gorgeous green dress and sent his portrait to the salon where not surprisingly it was a big hit it's not a revolutionary image or a painting that does anything very new but it does show how talented he was and how much he liked clothes so does this other famous portrait of camille in a blonde wig would you believe done up as a japanese geisha is this really the same sack of provisions at the back of the boat amazingly yes it is [Music] including your lovers in your art like this painting your family your girlfriends dressing them up was new michelangelo would never have done it or turner or any of the posh predecessors of the impressionists but the impressionists were trying to be true to life to paint things as they were to make everyday life a suitable subject for art besides when they started out most of them were famously poor they couldn't afford other models camille cost nothing and for monet one of the attractions of the river i suggest one of the chief reasons he kept coming back here to watch the paddling and the people is that the river too was free [Music] [Applause] [Music] mind you boating across france to reach all the landscapes they wanted to paint would have taken the impressionists many lifetimes and that's where the train comes in the french were actually very slow to take up train travel water was more their thing they just engineered themselves the best canal system in the world connecting the mediterranean to the atlantic the north of france to the south so when the train came along all the water authorities and everyone had put any money into canal building which was an awful lot of people felt almighty threatened and wished the train would just go away in fact until 1842 even building a train line in france was illegal in that year though the law was changed and the conquest of rural france by the iron horse could begin in earnest [Music] in 1842 there were no miles of national rail track in france by 1892 there were 30 000 miles of it a crazy expansion connecting paris to its suburbs the capital to the coast but it's no good just getting to places quickly you also need the right painting gear when you get there all sorts of gadgets were invented to make artistic travel easier the entire painting kit was rethought and miniaturized so it could all be carried around in this handy little box a few clicks of the latch and hey presto one minute yeah this in the next minute you're this now when you see pictures of the impressionists in their full painting gear you might think they look a bit silly and they're just trying to achieve a fashionable painterly look but actually all this has a purpose [Music] the silly smock is obviously handy for carrying your brushes and things but the really important thing about it is its color it's deliberately dark black or blue that's because if you're trying to catch subtle nuances in the landscape the last thing you should be wearing is bright coloured clothes which would throw bright coloured reflections if this smock were pink it would throw pink reflections back onto the picture [Applause] and these big hats they all wore and the tweed parasols they weren't there just to keep the midday sun off your head more threatening to the committed impressionist than sunstroke was the damage done to your colour values by direct sunlight it just messed them all up if i paint something bright green in the hot sun and then take it home afterwards it'll look completely dark so the very worst time to paint an impressionist picture is on a hot and sunny afternoon that really is a challenge [Applause] [Music] so the parasols and the wide-brimmed hats were there to ensure that when you took your impressionist masterpiece home at the end of the day you could still see the glorious field of poppies you'd spent all afternoon painting or that sunny boating view you'd worked on so sweatily by the banks of the sen painting landscapes outdoors is hard enough but for really problematic outdoor painting there's nothing quite as tricky as painting people unlike landscapes people need to be persuaded to sit for you they get bored fidgety one day they turn up the next day they don't you know what french girls are like renoir had developed a fiendishly difficult ambition he wanted to capture the mood of modern paris the bonner me the relaxation the laughs and he wanted to paint it all outdoors as it was happening to do that he got himself a studio up here in montmartre at the top of the hill in montmartre nobody watched what you were doing so you just did more of it [Music] this was where the poor people lived and where the most fun was had away from the authorities away from the old rules [Music] renoir's new studio was along here in the rue courteau it had a handy garden in which he persuaded some of montmart's prettiest girls to pose for him renoir needed to be at his most dangerously persuasive to charm this 16 sixteen-year-old mon mart blonde jean-margot into his garden she was up for it but her mother a wise old bird wasn't perhaps she knew that renoir was deliberately trying to update this risque old master the swing by fragonar painted in the naughty days before underwear was invented renoir was stealing himself for something big a statement an encapsulation of this new parisian mood and this big picture was going to be painted outdoors in situ with all the models around so he ordered himself an extra large canvas and every day for the whole of the summer he lugged it around more mart with a pal [Music] down here along here up here and finally over here to the infamous mulan de la galette the mulan was renoir's favorite playground it was everyone's favorite playground a bar a restaurant a dance floor it really came to life on sunday afternoons at the end of the working week when the flirting and the dancing reached its climax [Music] this is a galette by the way it's a cheap and popular cake they sold in there but people didn't come to the mulan for the cakes they came for the opportunities the adventures the juarez and that's what renoir set out to paint as well he worked on it for months inside the mulan on the dance floor using the montmartre girls and their friends as models john margot is in there somewhere having fun [Music] so is her older sister estelle the girl at the front renoir's mulan was shown at the third impressionist exhibition of 1877 where everybody noticed it it's a fabulous fabulous picture but to see it only as a record of fun and frolicks in my mart would be a mistake the mulan de la galette is also a big impressionist statement about social change the new heroes of renoir's art aren't priests or emperors or generals though there's probably a few of those in there somewhere everyone came to the mulan but the real heroes here are the working girls and the young chaps with attitude the modern parisians in whose boisterous grasp the future now lay something else that's revolutionary about the ball at the mulan de la galette is the way it's painted it's often true of impressionist art the closer you get the more revolutionary it seems all renoir's art all money's art and pizarro's is a tribute to the crucial contribution to art history made by this fine animal here this excellent brush in weighting porky the pig brushes were the key to impressionism without the latest brushes applying the latest colors in the latest ways impressionism couldn't have happened traditionally brushes were made out of this little chappie here out of different members of the weasel family various types of weasel hair were used the most precious of which came from the kolinsky sable which lived in siberia and to protect itself from the cold the kolinsky had developed this special fur that trapped the air bubbles when it was used in artists brushes it kept the paint very well and released it slowly so artists who wanted to use glossy surfaces shiny surfaces they used the sable in the 19th century however a crucial switchover occurred in techniques ambitions and animals instead of smooth silky sable hair landscape artists began to use the hair from little piggy here hog's hair was stiffer thicker than in the wrong hands clumsier and messier but in the right hands hands of the impressionists made your brushes sick hogs hair brushes didn't glide around the canvas they dug and scraped across it in exciting furrows of paint and color a new language is being invented and its ambition isn't to fool you or pretend something is there that isn't its ambition is to speak to you through paint and excite you so that's the superb contribution to progressive art made by this fine creature here the best friend the impression it's ever had the river scent is 776 kilometers long it flows all the way from the swiss alps to the english channel but as far as art is concerned it only really gets interesting when it gets to paris [Music] in paris the sun grows complex and devious twisting back on itself toying with the geography by the time it comes out the other side it's become such a fascinating river apparently the word sen comes from the ancient celtic and actually means sacred river the impressionist certainly worshiped it they kept painting it and repainting it until they'd made it the most painted river ever anywhere they saw it in all weathers in summer and in winter in mysterious mists and terrifying floods [Music] and the sun was much too useful as a watery motorway from paris to the sea to remain pretty for 776 kilometers sometimes the new satanic mill was cluttering its banks coughed horrible things into the air and filled the sky with darkness but most of the time it was delightful all these happy parisians enjoying their new leisure time in new outdoor ways boating sailing having fun and one thing you can rely on in the story of impressionism is where there's fun there's renoir in the old days in france sundays were for going to church for communing with your creator and feeling guilty but in these new secular sundays that renoir paints the weekends are for fun and sundays are now for relaxing and looking beautiful for parading in your finery for flirting lunching and above all the dancing apparently renoir was a fiend on the dance floor a really good mover marvelous dancer and his love of polkas and waltzes is unmissable in his favorite paintings of mine renoir's dance pictures come on how can anyone resist these twirling evocations of couples having fun renoir's is surely contagious [Music] the most ambitious of renoir's dancing pictures the dance at bourgeois features suzanne valador an outrageously gorgeous monmart model who turned many a fine artistic mind to jerry [Music] baladon pops up here and there in renoir's art sometimes with her clothes on often without them she's the modern girl as the new venus elbowing out the imaginary goddesses of the greeks and elbowing in the living breathing girls of montmartre even renoir who was hardly a prober of people's character found something deep to notice in susan valadon where he painted her dancing here [Applause] renoir saw something far away in valadon's eyes a doubt a dream a regret as characterization it's not in the rembrandt league but it is deeper than we usually expect of renoir these sensuous pleasure pictures of renoirs painted on location outdoors are deliberately blowing raspberries at the old masters their message is that the modern world and the things modern people do are a fitting subject for great art today we tend to look down on renoir's party paintings and accuse them of superficiality as renoir himself once complained people don't take you seriously if you smile the world was opening up places that had been so difficult to get to were now easy this place etreta in normandy was just a train ride from paris the difficulties here started after you arrived monet knew etc from his youth he grew up in la have just up the coast from here and he was of course a beach bum by instinct when monet returned here a full-grown impressionist he'd stay in a hotel just back from the beach sometimes he was content to paint the view from the hotel window but most times he wasn't painting an etreta was anything but simple in fact it was damn difficult monet would have to lug his gear across all these treacherous boulders to get to the best rocks and then you'd have to clamber up there to that spooky tunnel you can see to his favorite beach on the other side these days it's even tougher to get down there the seas completely cut it off [Music] if he was in the money he'd get some of the local kids to carry his gear for him so you have to imagine a procession of small children overburdened with canvases easels parasols slithering across the rocks to get to monet's secret beach one day he was so engrossed in painting the sea that he lost track of time and forgot the tide as the tide rushed in he was trapped out here on the rocks his paints scattered his pants ripped his new canvases floating out into the atlantic he made it back but only just [Music] these are some of the few original fishing boats left in normandy [Music] exactly like the ones monet painted and went out on when he was feeling particularly reckless the tide is high so you can go all the way to those big rocks out there and float right underneath them but you have to be pretty brave to do that and a bit stupid [Music] another of the great impressionists we'll be looking at in this film cezanne made a famous quip once about money monet said cezanne was just an eye but what an eye [Music] suzanne was trying to say that monet was really good at looking which he was monet watched the sea more intensely than anyone else but you don't come all the way out here and float under that thing if all you are is an eye to do this you need to have a big heart as well and a mighty set of cajones [Music] dry land though isn't always a relaxing alternative not when nature decides to make it tough for you impressionists were very partial to snow they all painted it monet renoir pizarro the snow picture became an impressionist speciality part of the attraction of course was the beauty of snow scenes snow brings crispness and drama wherever it falls [Music] but there are also scientific issues to consider as they usually are with the impressionists because the one thing you get more of in the snow that in any other natural conditions is colored shadows [Music] look deeper into any impressionist snow scene and you'll usually find some brave experimentation going on with vivid blues and livid purples scornful reviewers looking at these bright purple shadows would sometimes burst out laughing and accuse the impressionists of hallucinating but of course they weren't they were just painting what they saw because snow shadows are never black they're always full of color and i'm going to show you why first i have to build myself a projection screen somewhere to show you the natural magic we're dealing with here the impressionists did it on their canvases i'm going to do it on this [Music] so that's my projection screen now these two torches are basically artificial versions of the natural light you get around here in the winter this is the sun shining down from the sky and this one here that's all the ambient light that you get reflected up off the snow that's why the snow is so good for showing this because there's so much ambient light reflected off it so sunlight snow light but to show you how these two come together to create colored shadows i need to switch off all the other lights that's better now these are two typical impressionist figures a man and a woman bourgeois types the kind you see strolling around so much impressionist art i've also got this colored cellophane so think of this yellow cellophane as an artificial version of a sunny day imagine the sun up in the sky shining lots of yellow light down and if i throw this yellow light at the impressionist couple and also this other light representing the ambient light reflected from the snow you'll see that the impressionist couple are now casting purple shadows [Music] however if i change the colors and make this a red light imagine a red sky with the sun shining at sunset and shine that at the impressionist figures and you'll see that the colors of the shadows change as well and become greenish it's basic optical science light is made up of all the colours of the spectrum so if you block off some of these colours the receptors in your eyes begin to see new things interestingly though the impressionist era wasn't just an important era for scientific experiment it was also an important era for shadow puppets puppet shows were an immensely popular entertainment in the bars and cabarets of montmartre and huge crowds would flock to see the best ones and any nosy impressionist in the audience couldn't have failed to notice the intriguing color issues that were being raised by these puppet shows if we jump ahead in this series to the sura story that's coming up we'll see coloured shadows and the magic of the puppet show combined so adventurously and brilliantly [Music] oh [Music] the impressionist who was most fascinated by coloured shadows was camille pizarro who loved christmas scenes and winter frosts he found plenty of both here in pontoise where he moved in 1872. pizarro didn't just look like father christmas he behaved like him as well one of his best qualities was his generosity most french artists of the time had egos the size of the eiffel tower and thought only but not pizarro if you keep watching this series you'll see him helping gogan become an impressionist and then promoting surah the genius of the dots and he even made sure poor old van gogh had somewhere peaceful to die by bringing him here to ovare just up the river from pontoise [Music] back at the beginning of our story in the early days of impressionism pizarro even took an interest in an artist that no one else would touch with a barge pole a particularly stubborn and selfish downright weird painter called cezanne suzanne's early work the pictures he showed in the first impressionist exhibition are still challenging today so imagine what people thought when they saw these things in 1874. a peculiar self-portrait with a bearded cezanne leching over a shivering nude in a half-mad brothel scene a portrait of suzanne's father painted with a palette knife and looking as if it's been carved out of tar never before has anyone produced art as deliberately dark and crude and tough as these strange pictures [Music] suzanne called these early works kuya which is not a word you find in most french dictionaries it seems to mean something like ballsy an art made down there rapes mutilations big honking nudes the art pouring out of suzanne when he fell in with the impressionists were so black and strange [Music] it was pizarro who changed all that he invited cezanne to pontoise and persuaded him to stop the darkness to get out of himself more out of his black head and to start painting outdoors before the motif somewhere just about here it was like throwing a switch one moment suzanne is the creator of this the next he's gone all sensitive and rural and he's painting this when suzanne became a landscape painter his darkness seemed suddenly to evaporate into sunny shimmers [Applause] suzanne showed in three impressionist exhibitions and then fell out with pizarro which was typical cezanne fell out with everyone returning home to provence he cut himself off from the paris art world and devoted himself to painting the landscape he knew best this is the cezanne family house the jada buffa it appears in lots of paintings and hasn't really changed that much suzanne's father was a rich banker the family home was big and bourgeois [Music] suzanne enjoyed painting this posh pond here [Music] and when he finished with the grounds he started on the workforce in real life everyone at the jada bufong was constantly bickering and arguing but in the eternal game of cards that suzanne turns into one of his greatest subjects time stops still and peace takes over [Music] this is the studio suzanne built for himself just outside aches so he could paint out here in the countryside with no distractions it's been kept more or less as he left it inside here suzanne produced some of the most revolutionary pictures in the story of art using only the simplest ingredients all he needed was a bag of apples and a new way of looking the middle of the 19th century was the great era of optical discovery all sorts of remarkable things were found out about vision what actually happens to the eyes when we see something what does looking actually involve [Music] it was an englishman charles wheatstone who first described stereo vision in 1838 until then no one had bothered to ask themselves why human beings have two eyes why don't we just have one big eye right here in the middle wouldn't that be more practical more visually economical well no actually because the reason we have two eyes is that with two eyes we can see in stereo and judge distances more exactly that's why people who lose an eye have difficulty in the beginning driving they can't judge distances as well this had huge artistic implications particularly for cezanne if you stare hard at these apples i bought in the shop down the road you'll notice that each eye sees them differently the left eye sees them from over here the right eye from over here if i now combine these two views through the magic of television i'll get a crude sazanish blurring an optical tipsiness that so says anne because what suzanne realized was that traditional single point perspective where everything is arranged in a line in front of you like that was wrong what we actually do is see in stereo through two eyes each of which sees things from slightly different angles the brain then combines these two images into a single view it's a momentous discovery traditional perspective was under attack outside suzanne's studio just up here a short climb away he painted one of his famous views of the monsantoir and explored another fascinating optical phenomenon discovered by the underrated charles wheatstone who invented this contraption here the pseudoscope what this thing does is swap around all your optical information so what you usually see in your left eye is moved to the right eye and vice versa as a result of swapping your eyes around concave shapes become convex and convex shapes become concave everything is reversed unfortunately it's totally impossible for me to show you that there is no way i can feed separate information to both your eyes so what you have to imagine is that with one of these the human face becomes a mask which you see like that backgrounds and foregrounds swap places the entire relationship of far to near is challenged cezanne also challenges it in his superb tussles with the mountain that obsessed him the monsantoire [Music] so did he actually use one of these i don't think so he wasn't a man for gadgets but he would definitely have known about it optical discovery was in the air and everything the impressionists did was informed by it and if you stare at this landscape as intensely as relentlessly as suzanne did and sooner or later it'll start to shimmer and coalesce until it reveals its deeper truth [Music] this is the pond de la rock ugliest sin i think you'll agree but this was one of the most inspirational art locations in paris great impressionist things were done around [Music] here manny the grandfather of impressionism had a studio up here on the rue saint-petersburg at number four up on the first floor notice the window up there that pops up again in the smoky background of a very curious mani painting set on the pond de la rock it shows a parisian nanny with a little girl who looks out across the railway tracks like a prisoner staring through the bars of a cage remember when manny was living here all this was brand new the entire area had just been dug up and laid out by the infamous baron houseman rebuilder of paris and the gosan lazar down there at which the little girl in the picture is staring that was the first railway station in paris and to emphasize the city's new connectivity to the rest of the world hausmann had given all the boulevards radiating from the pond ponderop the names of european capitals [Music] london madrid [Music] constantinople edinburgh yes edinburgh rome [Music] saint petersburg all these roads lead out of paris and that's what the little prisoner in many's painting is dreaming of as well the new freedom that she can't get [Applause] [Music] neither can her nanny trapped sadly on the wrong side of the tracks who says impressionism never had a message but the busiest impressionist around here was monet who was less interested in the pond de la hop and more interested in what was going on down there in that smokey hell of the garcia the impressionists were frequent visitors to the garcon lazar it was from here that trains left the city for the suburbs and brought all those sunny views of the sun within easy reach but in 1877 monet had a eureka moment instead of painting the sunshine and the riverbanks why not paint the station itself the fog the steam the apocalyptic belching now that would be modern renoir told him he was mad besides he'd never get in then as now you don't just waltz into a mainline station and paint it there were rules to be followed forms to be filled in jobs worth to be dealt with it should have taken months to organize monet fixed it in a day putting on his poshest clothes he demanded to see the director of the station because he was monet the great painter the director had never heard of him before of course his thing was trains not art but this posh chat turns up and tells him he wants to close down the station to delay the train to ruam and to fill the space with extra smoke the director is just about to tell him no when money piped up ah i went to see the director of the guardian law the other day and he was very welcoming and you know i can't quite decide whether to do this at the guard you know or here what do you think vascular director the next day he was in it was actually very dangerous to fill the station with all the smoke from all the engines of all the delayed trains but that was the effect monet was after he'd set out to paint the foggiest sight he could imagine a vision that out turned turner a train shed full of smoke [Music] a dozen quickly painted canvases record his battle they were unveiled at the third impressionist exhibition in 1877 and are among his most dramatic achievements man giving nature a good run for her money in the production of and fogs and apocalyptic thunder [Music] monet could have died painting his station pictures choking on carbon monoxide and smoke but he was an impressionist an impressionist don't take shortcuts these guys were determined hardcore and did whatever it took why are they trapped through fields of the coldest cold just to capture the color of shadows they trekked up mountains [Music] wherever nature impressed them the impressionists went after it and tried to capture it [Music] fox [Music] floods [Music] rainstorms and treacherous coastal black spots [Music] they were after the truth and went where it took them and that's never been an easy journey [Music] mind you not all the exploring the impressionists did was done outdoors sometimes the most interesting sights are right there under your nose as we'll find out in the next film when we investigate the impressionists indoors [Music]

Channel: Perspective

Views: 308,780

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, waldemar januszczak documentary, waldemar, impressionist, impressionist painting, impressionist waldemar, art history, art history documentary perspective, art history documentary, monet, painting history

Id: d4DMMycMphk

Length: 59min 21sec (3561 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020