Nocturnal Creativity: Artists' Secrets | Perspective

hello this is valdemar nuschak art critic producer and presenter of documentaries thanks for watching perspective youtube's home for classical art [Music] the light the lord [Music] the night shakespeare called it the witching time it's when the ghosts come out and the imaginings begin the great american writer mark twain noted once that the human race is never quite sane in the night which is perhaps why art is so interested in it [Music] [Applause] here comes oh yes this is a film about the edgy relationship that art has with the night it's edgy because art is generally about things you can see and the night is not generally a good time for looking not in the traditional way at least actually night has turned out to be one of art's most productive times of day yes you can't see as much in the dark but what you can see has extra drama to it mystery poetry and even madness as byron once put it a glorious night thou wert not made for slumber night is too good to sleep through here comes [Applause] [Music] various excellent artists over the ages have tussled with the demanding light conditions of the night and its weighty implications and they've done it in different ways this remarkable desert sculpture here is called sun tunnels and it was made in the 1970s by the american land artist nancy holt [Music] land art is very american it's always really big and seems to have as its underlying ambition the artistic conquest of the west to find sun tunnels you have to walk through the desert in utah until eventually you stumble across them [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] here in utah the desert seems to go on and on and on there's no focus no punctuation except sun tunnels each of these huge tunnels points to a different direction in the story of the sun so this one here that points at the big summer sunrise and this one that's the winter sunrise the winter solstice you can see the sun coming down in the winter here so this is good around christmas time but the one that interests us the most is this the summer sunset from here you can see the coming of the night [Music] the sun is setting the witching time has arrived for some that means it's time for bed but not for you and me [Music] we're off exploring because there's so much we need to clear up about art and the night [Music] why was this painted for instance and what in hell's name is going on here why did this happen [Music] and this [Music] or this [Music] the big problem with painting at night obviously is that you can't see what you're doing in the days before electricity artists who wanted to paint in the dark had to rely on candles and flaming torches and the light you get from a candle or a torch is flickery and unreliable however if clear observation isn't actually what you're after that's less of a problem if you're trying to imagine things rather than look at them to see them with your mind's eye then darkness comes into its own and the night becomes your ally [Music] the first pictures that human beings ever made were night pictures cave art after all was night art down in the caves there was no natural light to rely on you needed fiery torches to help you see and when these torches flickered and spluttered in the dark they cast mysterious shadows on the cave walls shadows which suggested things [Music] deep under the ground there were no real horses or rhinos or antelope to model for you all this had to be imagined [Music] so from the beginning art had a relationship with the night that was crucial darkness art and the mysteries of the unknown seemed from the beginning to form a particularly productive threesome [Music] the dark brought drama and intensity to our divine imaginings and made them feel real it blurred the divide between the religious dimension and the earthly one one of the trickiest of the big religious scenes that art had to imagine was the nativity the birth of jesus on christmas day it was tricky because there's no description of it in the bible just one line in luke's gospel about there being no room at the end and jesus sleeping in a manger and that's it all the information we have about the most important birth in christendom [Music] nobody anywhere mentions a stable according to matthew jesus was born in a house the other gospel writers ignore his birth entirely no one tells us what baby jesus looked like or how we knew it was him with no description to help art was faced with the enormous responsibility of imagining it all from scratch [Music] [Applause] it wasn't until the 15th century a millennium and a half after jesus's death that a nativity began to emerge we can all recognize with a dark stable the shepherds gathered round an ox and an ass looking on and the baby jesus at the center of the action glowing brightly like a brazier [Music] this classic nativity the classic birth of jesus was described first by a woman saint bridget of sweden [Music] see bridget was a 14th century religious mystic who had visions and in one of these visions she saw the birth of jesus the nativity and what she saw was mary giving birth to jesus as she was praying not lying down as you'd expect but kneeling and praying [Music] but the most interesting thing about bridget's vision of the nativity was what was happening to jesus himself according to bridget he was glowing giving off his own light just like this campfire here the bible doesn't say jesus was born in the night but the image of him glowing giving off his own miraculous light suggested a surrounding darkness and thus the nativity became a night picture [Music] bridget's visions were amazingly helpful to artists not only did they have an image at last of what the nativity looked like but they no longer had to come up with clever ways of illuminating the baby jesus because according to bridget jesus illuminated himself [Music] my favorite among the masters of the night scenes that followed was georges de la tour a 17th century frenchman with an appetite for candles and mysterious light effects [Music] but the lessons of the nativity weren't confined to religious art once the nativity had been invented it had a phenomenal impact this image of a group of figures hunched around a miraculous light source seemed to infiltrate the artistic imagination and popped up in such unexpected places look at this great rembrandt for instance the anatomy lesson of dr tulp a doctor and his pupils are hunched over a corpse in the dark dr tulp is dissecting a body so why has rembrandt borrowed the composition from a nativity and why is this corpse glowing so spookily in the dark it's partly a way of getting around the lighting problems in the picture having a handy corpse as your light source in the middle but i think there's something more than that i think rembrandt is also trying to convey a sense of the miraculous taking place before us in this eerie nocturnal moment because science and magic have not yet sorted out their differences and when joseph wright of derby painted his famous family of nocturnal scientists hunched over a deadly experiment with a dying cockatoo and an air pump he borrowed from the nativity too [Music] another of the compelling things that happens at night of course is that the stars come out let it fade away catch a falling star and put it in your pocket save it for a rainy day stars are irresistible aren't they shakespeare called them the blessed candles of the night and since we're in america we should also quote that mighty yankee poet henry wadsworth long longfellow who wrote stars are the forget-me-nots of the angels the forget-me-nots of the angels what a lovely thought [Music] it for the most devoted painter of the stars was that hardened lover of the witching hour vincent van gogh [Music] van gogh was obsessed with the night a large chunk of his art is set in it mind you not all of vincent's night pictures look immediately like night pictures these famous chairs for instance this one is vincent's and this one is gogans and both were painted at night you can tell they're night pictures because if you look above gogan's chair you can see burning gaslight throwing strangely colored shadows around the room van gogh and gogan have been smoking their pipes and reading and now perhaps they've gone to bed but their empty chairs are still full of their departed spirit blunt and earthy vincent with his peasant chair smart and cultured gogan with his posh one the mood of the empty chairs belongs to the night as well it's an imaginative mood contemplative exploratory and not all together sane [Music] van gogh's chairs were painted inside the famous house he shared with gogan in the little french town of all the yellow house [Music] vincent also painted the outside of it and if you look carefully at the road in front of the house you can see a big mound going down the middle road works van gogh is painting road works why because these roadworks are special they're putting in the gas just after he arrived in all the town was connected to gas and gas lighting was put in for the first time suddenly all was lit up at night this twinkling cafe exterior shows the new gas lighting in action conquering the night [Music] gas lighting was an interesting challenge to paint of course but the most significant thing about it was that it allowed vincent to paint all night long if he wanted to not that he was a practical man by inclination he wasn't that type what van gogh liked about the night is that it affected him here where it counts [Music] if you look up from this famous cafe to the sky above you'll see that it's full of glorious stars painted so deliriously so excitedly [Music] that's where van gogh's heart really lay up there in the starry starry night [Music] there are actually two paintings by him called starry night one is the famous one that don mclean sang about you can find that in the museum of modern art in new york [Music] this starry night was painted in the asylum at san remy where he was sent after his breakdown after he cut off his ear and there's definitely a sense of craziness about it a drunken feeling as if he's staring up at the stars and hallucinating [Music] but i like van gogh's other starry night as well the one in the musee d'orsay in paris it's quieter more romantic he painted it before the breakdown when the night was still full of dreams [Music] the river roan twinkling atmospherically beneath the gas lights and those blessed candles of the night van gogh didn't worship the stars only because they're so beautiful they had a particular significance for him as well he wrote about it in a letter to his brother teo the stars wrote vincent are the souls of dead poets [Music] this is a portrait of the belgian poet eugene block a friend of vincent's and as you can see to show that he's a poet vincent has surrounded him with stars when van gogh looked up at the night sky he saw shakespeare up there byron milton longfellow all shining among the stars and he wanted to be up there with them but to do that he had to die first so in this startling letter to his brother teo van gogh announces that there's no point hanging around waiting for death the quickest way to become a star and join the other poets is to commit suicide and of course that's what he did he killed himself to get to the stars [Music] another of van gogh's finest night paintings is this spooky cafe interior the night cafe at all the night cafe never closed the drunks and the prostitutes would hang about in there all night long and vincent would often join them a grim little billiard table in a terrible red interior that's throbbing with nocturnal anxiety van gogh stayed up three nights running to paint his night cafe but i don't think his neurotic cafe interior is the most famous all-night dive in art not quite even better known is this moody picture the nighthawks by edward hopper the nighthawks is a view of an all-night diner somewhere to go when everywhere else is closed it's supposed to be a real place in greenwich village new york near where hopper lived but no one's ever been able to locate the actual diner so i suspect it never really existed i reckon it's an imaginary diner thought up in the dark and based on the real ones that hopper remembered [Music] hopper was a voyeur by instinct he used to travel to work on the l train the elevated one that's high up in the street and as it went past the buildings you'd catch glimpses of people's rooms flashing by offices bedrooms private spaces inside which complete strangers would be going about their daily lives unaware they were being watched i suppose part of it must have been erotic a peeping tom atmosphere but by the time he painted nighthawks hopper was in his sixties so i don't imagine there were huge erotic fires burning in him by then i think he was super sensitive to atmospheres and emotionally nosy hopper admitted he was influenced by van gogh's night cafe and also by a spooky short story by ernest hemingway called the killers the killers is set in chicago during prohibition the gangster era two hitmen walk into an all-night diner and ask about a retired boxer who usually eats there they're obviously here to kill the boxer but why we never find out perhaps the boxer didn't throw a fight he was supposed to throw hemingway tells us nothing so you start to imagine everything and that's what hopper does in his painting as well [Music] we're on the outside looking in we're the voyeurs again inside are four people in the diner three men and a woman two of the men are customers gangster types one has his back to us in a sinister fashion the other guy gave the picture its name his hooked nose reminded hopper's wife of a bird of prey the broad who looks as if she's seen plenty of life is eating a sandwich and behind the counter the guy who works in the diner is making the coffee or something in the hemingway story the owner of the diner is actually the hero because he knows where the boxer lives but doesn't tell the two hitmen beaknose over here seems to be with the broad and he's looking tough smoking a cigarette but it's the other man the one with his back to us who feels most sinister and dangerous [Music] nighthawks is like a still from a gangster movie even the shape of the canvas is cinematic but where films have beginnings middles and ends this painting doesn't it's a movie still without the movie a screen grab that says nothing and everything who is the broad who's the guy with her who's the man with his back turned and what are they all doing we'll never know and we'll never stop wanting to know either hopper had a thing about architecture about american buildings and their moods in nighthawks the people are tiny but the setting is big and it's the setting that creates that disturbing atmosphere hopper as i said was a late developer the first picture that got him noticed was painted when he was already 43 the house by the railroad it was called the first picture ever bought by the museum of modern art in new york in 1925. it shows an eerie gothic mansion standing on its own looming over a passing railroad it's just a building but it's strangely unforgettable when hitchcock who very much admired hopper's art was making his most disturbing movie psycho he modeled the spooky bates mansion where all the slashing and murdering takes place on hopper's house by the railroad [Music] and then later that classic tv ghost series the adams family was also set in a house inspired directly by the hopper house [Music] architecture played a crucial role too in the nocturnal imaginings of the surrealists surrealism is packed with spooky buildings and eerie rooms really famous pictures like that clever salvador dali interior made up of bits of mae west's face and look at rene magritte so much of magritte's art is set in claustrophobic spaces and mysterious nocturnal houses [Music] all this dark surrealist house symbolism was inspired by this momentous tome the interpretation of dreams by sigmund freud according to freud our dreams are the doors to our unconscious understand our dreams and you understand us and houses rooms are particularly significant i'm a little shaky on my freudian symbolism it's not a speciality but as i understand it according to freud the house represents us in our architectural form it's our little kingdom a surrogate womb in which we shelter from the world and in that house the terrors and yearnings of our childhood play out an endless game of hide and seek freud claimed that specific bits of a house have specific meanings in a man's dream a room always represents a woman because there's always an opening through which you can enter [Music] so salvador dali is having a whole lot of fun isn't he imagining mae west like this fireplaces represent women too and as for trains well what do you think going up a staircase meanwhile in a dream represents an unconscious yearning for sex with all this rhythmic climbing heaven only knows therefore what's going on in this disturbing surrealist masterpiece aina kleiner nacht painted in new york in 1943 by dorothea tanning [Music] tanning was american she was born in 1910 in galesburg illinois a quintessential small town in galesburg illinois she later complained nothing ever happened except the wallpaper her childhood was repressed and tedious and it wasn't until she fetched up in new york and discovered surrealism that dorothea tanning found her real self this is her with the cavalier top and the tendrils and that pet monster [Music] you know she's still alive 101 years old whatever it was she took to get in touch with her subconscious should be sold in chemists but she's never spelled out what her art's about never really explained what's going on in these disturbing night fantasies of hers her masterpiece einer kleiner nacht music got its title from mozart and it's mood from a nightmare we're in a hotel corridor by the staircase [Music] two young girls are on the landing or is it the same girl before and after or maybe one of them's a doll and the other one is real the only thing we can be sure of is that all the little girls are dorothea tanning [Music] the entire picture reeks of subconscious anxiety that big sunflower at the top of the stairs is particularly sinister somehow you know it's a masculine presence because sunflowers are so tall and looming something dark is being remembered here some traumatic childhood encounter these are mysteries from the deepest reaches of the feminine psyche and i'm clearly not qualified to understand them but i do know this is what the night brings out in art there's [Music] let's go [Music] as a crucial component of the night we haven't dealt with yet i've been putting it off because like a lot of people i find myself affected by it it's the moon of course when there's a big full moon i don't sleep well my thoughts get anxious and things feel problematic [Music] we've never quite decided if the moon is a good thing or a bad one on one side you get the werewolves and the witches the moon that drives you mad the word lunatic actually comes from luna meaning the moon on the other side moonlight is the perfect accompaniment for romance famously magical and seductive [Music] art has been affected by the moon as well and art too has never quite decided which moon it prefers the dark and crazy one that turns us into werewolves or the delicate and magical one that goes so well with an evening of romance personally i've had enough darkness for the time being right now i'm ready for some enchantment and beauty i'm ready for velasquez's immaculate conception [Music] i don't know how well-versed you are in the catholic mysteries so the first thing i should clear up here is what the immaculate conception actually means it's an image of the virgin mary jesus's mother that's found in catholic art particularly in spain a lot of people think the immaculate conception represents mary as a virgin because jesus was the son of god he was conceived immaculately but that's wrong mary is immaculate not because she was a virgin when she gave birth to jesus but because she herself was born without sin only the second woman in history to be born that way mary was exempted from sinfulness because she was the mother of jesus and had to be born spotless pure and that is what the immaculate conception represents [Music] that's a complicated idea isn't it so imagine if you're a painter back in the 12th or 13th centuries who's been told to paint a picture of the virgin mary as the immaculate conception as a woman born without sin how do you represent an idea as abstract as that it puzzled art for centuries and it wasn't until the baroque age that a solution was finally found and it involved the moon [Music] this beautiful image of mary was inspired by a passage in revelation the last book of the bible written by saint john the divine and there appeared a great wonder in heaven wrote saint john chapter 12 verse 1 a woman with the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of 12 stars [Music] saint john doesn't actually say his vision was the virgin mary but that's how it came to be understood and the first painter to popularize this image of the immaculate conception was a spanish artist from seville called francesco pacheco and it was pacheco's daughter juana who posed for the beautiful young mary standing on the moon surrounded by stars the greatest of all spanish baroque painters velazquez was pacheco's pupil velazquez married juana pacheco's daughter and when he too came to paint the immaculate conception he used her as his model as well you can find her today in the national gallery in london and velasquez is saint john is there as well writing his revelations and gazing up and seeing the virgin mary on the moon so enchanting so beautiful so touchable [Music] [Music] trains at night are so haunting my father worked on the railways and i can remember lying awake at night listening to the steam trains rattling past in art 2 trains have played a huge part i can't think of a single artwork that involves a car but i can think of plenty involving trains [Music] what is it about steam trains why are they so horns [Applause] 16 coaches well that long black dream got i think it's the fact they're such an all-round experience you see them you hear them you smell them and if you add the night to the mix that sense of mystery of going somewhere you have something that sneaks into your imagination and refuses to leave [Music] here in america the greatest lover of the trainer knight was an obsessed photographer called oh winston link the rembrandt of the locomotive link trained as an engineer his father taught woodwork at a local school and when little winston was a kid he'd make things with his father's equipment and he developed an emotional relationship with machinery link loved the way that machines work and how they achieve things that human beings on their own never could in particular he loved trains and the way they made possible the conquest of america he began photographing trains in the 1950s he's trained as a commercial photographer specializing in difficult shots speeding jets droplets of falling milk but his passion was steam trains and he set out to photograph the last ones in america [Music] the steam trains final stronghold was the norfolk and western line link discovered it just in time the five years he spent photographing the norfolk and western from 1955 to 1960 were the final five years of the steam age taking his photographs at night was hugely problematic but also very necessary [Music] i can't move the sun link explained later and it's always in the wrong place but i can create my own environment through lighting [Music] lighting a moving train at night was immensely difficult link spent months and months working out how to do it in the end he rigged up a complex system of flash bulbs which he triggered in multiple sequences when the train appeared just one of these flash bulb rigs produced the equivalent of 50 000 domestic light bulbs all going off at once but that was what was needed to light a train each light bulb could only be used once so every o winston link photograph is a risk that's been taken and a risk that's paid off i met him once he came over to england for the first show of his work such a lovely old boy a 70 year old school kid in love with trains but of course the extraordinary thing about his work is how strange it is how surreal a typical small town in america with a train going down the middle of it an old man fills up a car and there's a train people get ready a couple cuddler to drive in as the train steams past in the daytime all this might have indeed added up to a record of a passing age but at night in small town america this isn't a record it's a haunting [Music] matthew chapter 27 verse 45 now from the sixth hour there was darkness all over the land and to the ninth hour and about the ninth hour jesus cried with a loud voice my god my god why hast thou forsaken me [Music] pain illness suffering they're at home in the dark aren't they when things always seem worse the imaginings begin [Music] [Music] my old mother gave me some excellent advice once she said never make an important decision in the middle of the night because you can't think clearly in the night and you start to imagine things this is the isenheim altarpiece it was painted in about 1515 by matthias grunovalt it's one of the greatest of all crucifixions and as you can see it's set in the dark [Music] christ on the cross surrounded by an impenetrable blackness violated brutalized deep in pain this isn't actually night time though that passage in the bible by saint matthew about christ's final moments on the cross describes a darkness that fell between the hours of six and nine so we're not looking at the night here we're looking at an eclipse [Music] grenaval saw exactly such an eclipse in real life in 1502 they say the memory of it haunted his art from then on and all this deep blackness gives his great masterpiece extra scariness and intensity [Music] he painted it for a religious order called the antonites the antonites were monks who specialized in caring for the sick and particularly for those poor poor wretches who suffered from one of the most terrible of all medieval diseases saint anthony's fire since antony's fire or ergotism to give it its technical name is a wicked wicked illness caused by a fungus that grows on wet rye so it erupts when the world is damp and moldy and hungry the symptoms of saint anthony's fire were really scary the victims would feel as if their skin was burning and sometimes the pain of this fire inside them was so terrible they'd chop off their own fingers to get rid of it [Music] their flesh would erupt as well in mysterious sores like the ones that grunov depicts on christ's body there's no mention in the bible of jesus suffering from saint anthony's fire it's an invention of grunovats added especially for the antonites so anthony's fire didn't just attack your body the rye fungus that caused it got to your mind as well its chemical composition was almost identical with lsd so you started to hallucinate with it and see things [Music] some thought they could fly others felt they were drowning terrible monsters would appear before their eyes burning flesh gangrenous skin the darkest imaginings all this grunoval sought to evoke here [Music] but he hasn't done it to scare us that's not the point the thing to grasp about this momentous and darkly magnificent altarpiece is that it wasn't produced to terrify all those poor sufferers burning with saint anthony's fire who came here to look at it this was painted to give them all hope [Music] grunovau's message is that no one's suffering will ever be a match for christ's no one however ill they are will ever go through what christ had to go through when he came down to earth and suffered so much to save us from our sins and to give us hope it's a big big message and big messages always feel bigger still in the dark the morning sticks its nose above the horizon the witching time is nearly ended it's been a busy old night but we're nearly there there's just one more thing we need to clear up before the day breaks we need to work out when this picture was painted it's one of art's most iconic images impression sunrise by claude monet the picture which gave its name to impressionism [Music] i did a series recently about the impressionists and this picture puzzled the hell out of me not because it gave its name to impressionism that's all fine but because i was never completely certain what time of day it actually shows [Music] in the first impressionist exhibition of 1874 when it was unveiled it was called impression sunrise as you'd expect but in later exhibitions where it popped up often it was called impression sunset a title which many believed was the right one [Music] so what do you think sunset or sunrise here at sun tunnels the sunrise is just a few moments away so let's sort it out once and for all shall we did monet paint a sunrise or a sunset [Music] it was painted in the half the french port where monet grew up somewhere on the docks and this is a map of the location so obviously that's east and that's west so it's either painted about here looking that way or it was painted about here looking that way [Music] to settle it once and for all i went back to the hearth down to the docks and i set up two cameras in the two places from which impressionism's most famous picture might have been painted so camera one over here recorded the sunset camera two over here the sunrise and then we watched it all unfold as money must have seen it so let's see what happens [Music] 6 30 in the evening and on the sunset camera the port is closing down [Music] on the sunrise camera it's 6 30 in the morning and a red glow tells you the sun is breaking back at the sunset camera the sun's descent has speeded up on the morning camera a great big ship has parked itself in the middle of the view but you can still see the sun rising behind it 7 15 pm and on the sunset camera the poor old sun just about makes it round a big skyscraper hurrah on the sunrise camera it's 7 15 am and the sun is pretty much where monet painted it and everything here looks very familiar [Music] it was definitely the sunrise wasn't it the color the proportions that glow in the sky it all feels right so irrefutable tv proof at last that impression sunrise actually shows a sunrise so here at sun tunnels the moment has also arrived as well the night's finally over the day's upon us just look at it someone once called this the stonehenge of the aquarian age because it's so elemental so basic and sacred you know that book a thousand and one things to do before you die trust me watching the night coming to an end at sun tunnels should be one of them

Channel: Perspective

Views: 244,664

Keywords: Hopper at night, Magritte at night, Perspective, Van Gogh at night, art and darkness, art at night, art creativity, art culture exploration, art exploration, art symbolism, artistic challenges, artistic mysteries, documentaries on artists, drama in art, exploring art at night, exploring artistic visions, night artistry, night sky paintings, night time art, nighttime inspiration, painting techniques

Id: r-OZaZEi6FE

Length: 59min 40sec (3580 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2022