The Dying Years Of Impressionism (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] this is the last film in the series it's where we explore some complex technical issues about color wheels and optics so i'm just testing all the equipment making sure it's working [Music] the magic wheel of light yep that's working perfectly [Music] monet's glasses are perfect can't see a thing [Music] good that's all working so we're ready to go with the final film and the story of impressionism [Music] is [Music] still [Music] this is the ecole de bozar in paris france's most prestigious art school it was established in 1648 by louis xiv so this is one of the most historic locations in the story of art [Music] usually i wouldn't bring you anywhere near here in a film about the impressionists impressionism was modern and this place isn't [Music] perversely though the ecole de bozar played a huge role in the story of impressionism because this grandest of art schools is where surah studied [Music] ah yes surah king of the dots he painted some of the best known pictures in the chronicles of impressionism but the man himself was a mystery the only photograph you'll ever see of him is this one and the only real evidence of his thinking is his art with its strange stiffness and those puzzling dots this is a film about the final days of impressionism how it ended and what it became so of course surah has to feature sura was invited to show with the impressionists by pizarro he was completely unknown then but when this famous picture a sunday afternoon on lagrange popped up in the last impressionist exhibition of 1886 everybody noticed it [Music] impressionism was obviously onto something new here but what the hell was it if you ask 10 art critics about surah you'll get 10 different opinions he was such a private and elusive painter kept it all locked away stored in here until surah arrived impressionism had been happy to capture the moment and to live for the present remember all that joad aviv you saw in the earlier films renoir's boating parties monet's beautiful days suddenly none of it seemed enough anymore sura's pictures are looking for something deeper less fidgety more permanent surah was a student here at the poche cal de bozar from 1878. he was here for two years surrounded by the past his parents were very well off so he never had to work and by right he should have become a very traditional and conservative painter the kind of artist who does this but he didn't instead surah became this sort of artist and this these were are and always will be strange pictures and the first of them the bathers at any was begun when he was just 23. his first masterpiece and already so puzzling [Applause] i reckon it was painted about here see that bridge there that's the railway bridge at anya and you can just about make it out way in the distance of suraj's bathers it's a sunny day by the river probably a sunday that was when working men in paris generally had their day off and all the bathers at anya are you can tell from their overalls and they're battered bowler hats perhaps they're workmen from the factories you can see in the distance at cliche had become a busy factory district so all the chaps by the river here could be workmen taking time off together in a blokish fashion as blokes don't bathing was traditionally a feminine subject in art an excuse for naughty old masters to paint beautiful young women naked and wet so by confining his picture to men is already being revolutionary and confrontational one of the boys in the water the one with his back turned to us is clearly based on a famous painting by anger that hangs in the louvre the valpance song bather a mysterious oriental odelisk who's naked back would drive men wild actually hanging in the chapel at the ecole de bozar where surah studied was a set of copies of piero della francesca the calmest and most luminous of renaissance old masters [Music] they were hung there to inspire the students and they obviously did because surah took the pose of the man sitting on the riverbank directly from piero and if you've been watching the rest of this series you'd have seen painter after painter deliberately taking on the old masters renoir did it and now all of them set out to prove that the modern world can be just as monumental just as heroic and beautiful as the ancient world in the end it's probably the most important of all impressionism's revolutionary messages the present is just as precious as the past [Music] was so secretive that he only told his parents he had a mistress and a son the day before he died till then no one had known that the bosomy madeleine knobloch was suraj's lover and the mother of his child with a man as secretive as this you need to dig deep to break the code so sure i wasn't a student at the occult for very long was he no he had been a student for two years only he was admitted with bad marks and his marks were worse and worse because he was not a conventional student the other thing that was very important for sure when he was here at the ecole was his exposure to lots of scientific books i mean the there's a famous book called the grammar of art by charles blanc who was actually director here wasn't he at the time yes charles brown wrote this book grammar of the art of drawing it means that charles bland discovered laws for colors and for lines warm colors and lines going up convey a feeling of joy of pleasure happiness of happiness of course with cold colors and dark colors it's impression of sadness well you've got here the actual books that surah could have looked at in the library i mean this is one of i know the most important for him this is chevrolet with his theories of color um the first thing of course you see about it is that most of the illustrations are these beautiful arrays of dots yes there's lots of of experiences about colors in those books that of course it's rather scientific but it was meant to to to help the painters but it certainly helped surah didn't it because if you're looking for the origin of sura's dots i think you don't need to look much further than here do you it's complicated why did surah paint the dots it's the first thing we need to clear up what were the dots supposed to do to find out i've transformed the old chapel at the ecole de bozar into a surah laboratory where we're going to carry out some experiments with color okay it's not state of the art but then i'm not sure that surah or his dots ever were quite as dauntingly scientific as he made out what's certain is that this is the great period of color exploration various theories are being proposed to explain the behavior of color and the first thing to grasp here is the difference between color as a pigment and color as light pigment and light have different properties if i mix blue red and green as pigment i end up with a dark brown mess but if i mix them as light the opposite happens blue red green become white or at least a luminous grey what surah decided to do was to put down his pigments in blobs or dots so that instead of mixing on the canvas they would mix in your eye in a manner that was luminous and full of light [Music] so the culmination of surah's investigations into dottie-ism his masterpiece was this unmistakably mysterious scene of a sunday afternoon on lagaanjatt [Music] it's such a strange strange picture i've come here to chicago to see it maybe a dozen times now and i still don't really get it what a thing to come up with in 1884 [Music] here in america buffalo bill was still shooting at chief sitting bull but in more mart in his mysterious scientific studio sura was concocting this it reminds me of those frescoes in pompeii that were trapped under the ashes of vesuvius history has been frozen a moment in time has been turned into something eternal [Music] laconja was a tiny island on the scene upon which parisian leisure seekers would descend in droves on a sunday to stroll about parade and flirt [Music] these days it's a dump frankly fashionable society doesn't come down here anymore they've left the banks of lagrange to the junkies and the joggers [Music] but in sura's day in the 1880s this was the place to go particularly if you were a fashionable chap looking for an unattached girl because lagrange was full of them it was known as the island of love and a good many of the fashionable ladies strolling around lagrange in their sunday best were working girls fishing for clients everyone looking at this picture in the eighth impressionist exhibition of 1886 would have known immediately what surah was implying i mean this girl over here the one fishing on the riverbank she doesn't look like an angler to me what's she really fishing for and the big couple over here to us they seem terribly respectable so tall and stately but suraj's audience would have known at once that he was a client and she was a prostitute in the middle of the picture so central and important looking surah has placed a mother and her angelic daughter dressed all in white they seem to be looking straight at us straight at the future as it were what does that future hold for them surah seems to be asking what does it hold for all the little girls running around like ganjat so innocently lagoon jat was inspired by another painting that's also here in chicago the sacred grove by puvi de chavanne pouvi was the elder statesman of french art his pale mysterious symbolism was much admired by various impressionists especially surah that sense of being frozen in time is something that surah definitely took from puivi but puti's picture isn't set in the modern world it's set somewhere way back in time on an idyllic mythological island where the nine muses of art have gathered to stroll and think and look lovely [Music] so what sur has done is to update the sacred grove to show us what such a place might look like in 1884 aed rather than bc la conjac shows us what the modern world has become niggles us to compare it with what it used to be [Music] there's something else that's important i'm absolutely certain that lagrange here was painted as a deliberate parallel to the bathers at any the two pictures were meant to work together a deliberate call and response between posh parisian society on the right bank with its parasols and its smart folk and the world of the workers on the left bank with the belching factories and the smoking chimneys [Music] look at the way the boy here the one in the water is calling over to the other side of the river where the people on the opposite bank watch him so silently and glumly on this side of the river something massive and threatening has cast a huge shadow across lagaan jat but not on the other side even though the sun is in the same place on this side of the river people take their shirts off and sit in the sun [Music] on the other side everyone hides under their parasols and keeps their tops on so sura has produced a stereo image of modern paris a heads under tales two sides of the modern world confronting each other across the river [Music] right this is another crucial aspect of sura's optical theory about the importance of the after image in a moment this screen you're watching is going to go blank completely white but please don't turn over to another channel keep watching if you want to understand sura's color theory you need to keep looking at this screen so you ready here we go right see the red rectangle just keep staring at it don't look away keep looking at it one two three don't look away four keep staring five now look what do you see a green shape right did you see it the green after image that wasn't really there that was just a retinal memory in your eye and sura with his dots was trying to control that sensation he knew that when he put down a color you would also see it's complementary so when he put down red you would also see green next to it and if in his painting he actually put green next to red he knew that the green would seem greener there and the red would seem redder in theory he was trying to turn painting into science to control your vision but he never quite pulled it off in reality there were just too many things to juggle with too many optical issues too many dots [Music] working on these giant masterpieces was exhausting and demanding so when laganjat was finished surab began a set of smaller views of the sea his marine landscapes [Music] every summer he'd head for the french coast book himself into a small hotel or lodgings and embark upon a meticulous campaign the sea paintings sura's marine views are among his most accessible and delightful achievements every summer from 1885 he went somewhere else and did some more let's go and get drunk on light he wrote of his journeys to the sea [Music] interestingly though and typically surah didn't go south to the mediterranean like the other impressionists he went north to the channel coast where the sea can be bleak and austere and where these long low dunescapes alternate with rocky and craggy headlamps [Music] in 1890 he spent the summer here at gravlin it's near dunkirk in calais almost on the belgian border and beaches don't get much longer or more bare than they are here the most intriguing of the traveling paintings were done from here the key in front of the lighthouse looking out across the water to where the old signal mast used to stand showing how high the tides were in one of his views from here surah captures so masterfully the pale tonality of the sunny days you get around here there's hardly anything there it's so white so watery like the 10th cup of tea from the same tea bag then from more or less the same place on the same key he painted the same view in the evening so same place but completely different mood this time it's twilight the coast is glowing darkly night is at hand [Music] one reality two viewpoints this is impressionism becoming something else [Music] impressionism is breaching the fourth [Music] [Music] dimension [Music] so [Music] in that influential book by charles blanc on the grammar of art that surah read as a student there's a picture of a set of faces drawn by humbert de superville another of these wacky pseudo-scientists who were publishing their theories at the time and the superville's faces illustrate the emotional power of lines so this face here it's happy joyous well this one is glum and down and the one in the middle well that's calm contented composed all done with simple lines this idea that horizontal lines create sensations of calmness is one of the reasons why surah came to this coast france doesn't get much flatter or more exactly divided than it does here in his day scene from here sierra has gone for an impression of immense calmness with these clear verticals above the horizon and a stretch of sandy emptiness below but the evening scene goes for the opposite effect in the evening scene cavalin puts on its sad face the boats are scowling the anchors are downcast traveling at sunset is glum [Music] so here's an artist treating emotion as a scientific challenge manipulating your moods with carefully considered painting strategies as if he were a scientist and you were the guinea pig [Music] surah died when he was just 31. such an early departure for such a big talent particularly since his work was getting stranger and stranger i mean the marine paintings are beautiful enough but everything else he was doing in paris was increasingly eccentric [Applause] surah had developed a taste for theaters and circuses and in a set of strikingly unusual pictures but taken to recording the nocturnal pleasures of the parisian bourgeoisie his final painting surah's last masterpiece was of all things a painting of some can can dancers the kang can or chahoot as it was known wasn't really a dance at all it was a bit of late night parisian naughtiness in which provocative women would throw up their skirts expose a bit of leg and whoop [Applause] surat's painting is usually seen as one of his brainy attempts to put theory into action all these dizzy diagonals are supposed to create a sense of gaiety it's the lessons of humbert to superville again but if surah really was trying to paint a gay and happy picture he hasn't exactly succeeded has he there's a stiff and forced air to surat chapoot if this is a fun night out i think i'd rather stay at home but i don't think it was meant to be a fun night out i think suraj's motives were deeper and darker these days we think of the kang can as a seedy tourist attraction something to go and watch in the place pigao but in sura's time it was genuinely dangerous and decadent so decadent that the anarchists actually blew up a notorious cancan club in lyon because they saw it as the embodiment of bourgeois decay [Music] for me all of sura's paintings have this niggling insistent sense of politics about them as if they're trying to comment in secret on the world around them it's phoniness and silliness and hypocrisy the more i look at syrah's art the more firmly i'm convinced that under this cloak of color theory and the lines of emotion what we really have here is a very pessimistic observer of modern life impressionism had grown cynical disillusioned with the illusions having set out to see the modern world properly it was now seeing it all too well art was changing moods an old dutch proverb that says if the sky is blue it'll be grey tomorrow the dutch alas are not a cheery bunch amazingly though holland and the dutch played a big role in the story of impressionism monae came here on several productive visits and painted glorious flower scenes of the tulip paradise in miraculous bloom but holland's greatest gift to impressionism was a redhead small and wiry beady-eyed and grumpy it's that brilliant little dutch gnome vincent van gogh or as his own people call him fan cough if you think van gogh was cuddly think again he was dark driven obsessive his father was a dutch pastor and a gloomy world view was van gogh's inheritance as another gloomy dutch proverb puts it a frog will always jump back into the pool even if it sits on a golden throne you can never escape your past a frog will always be a frog [Music] van gogh's energetic attempts to escape the pond took him to england then belgium and finally to paris where he arrived in 1886 just in time to see the eighth and final impressionist exhibition [Music] van gogh's younger brother teo was an art dealer in paris who'd been supporting the impressionists so when vincent suddenly turned up here the good news was that he could get up to speed quickly on the latest developments in art the bad news was that he had nowhere to live and was moving in with taylor these days we think of van gogh as a soulful warm-hearted genius a fragile soul too brittle for the modern world he was a genius all right but he was also the last person on earth you'd want moving into your flat [Music] disruptive decrepit difficult van gogh had no personal hygiene whatsoever and drank like a fish after a couple of absence he could start a fight with a buddhist monk his health was shot too when he arrived in paris he was already suffering from syphilis and in belgium where he just dropped out of art school again his teeth had rotted so badly he had to have ten of them taken out in one go [Music] that's why you never see vincent smiling in any of the fierce and brooding self-portraits he began churning out in paris in his troubled vision of himself van gogh always kept his mouth shut in real life it never was particularly after a drink or two [Music] 54 ruler peak up on the third floor where vincent soon made sure the rooms were so squalid that taiyo was embarrassed to invite anyone around [Music] the ruler peak was just a stone's throw away from the mulan de la galette once a windmill now a kang can joint [Music] by the time vincent arrived in montmartre most of the old windmills had been turned into bars and cabarets but from the outside at least this still looked like home [Music] if anyone was ever handing out prizes for the least familiar views of impressionist paris then van gogh's gloomy cityscapes would surely win with all these rickety windmills dotted about van gogh's paris looks more like holland than france in those days more march was still a messy scrub land of working gardens and scruffy allotments [Music] exiled in this pretend holland a lonely dutch frog was missing its pond apart from walking painting and arguing vincent's other great hobby was drinking he did a lot of that some of it in here or agile rabbit is the only bar in montmartre that remains more or less as vincent would have known it [Music] to get vincent out of the house teo enrolled him at an art school on the boulevard de cliche the atelier como where the head boy was a small chap called tuluz vincent wasn't the art school type he was studying mostly at the bar and it wasn't for a law degree one of vincent's most striking paris pictures is actually a portrait of a glass of absanth sitting daintily on a cafe [Music] they called it the green fairy because when you poured in the water absent would go milky green pretty and dangerous and that's what vincent's painted a glass of absinthe sitting on its own in a bar like a pretty girl waiting to be chatted up it was about now that he got himself involved in a grubby little love affair with a local bar owner called agustina segatori agustina was in her mid-40s when she met van gogh she was from naples originally and had come to paris like so many italian girls to pose for artists she was dark and fiery and much in demand among those salon painters who specialized in middle eastern slave scenes by taking her clothes off agastina saved enough money to open a small restaurant on the boulevard de cliche called le tambaran because the tables there were all shaped like tambourines her affair with vincent was short-lived and unhappy one of those grim urban collisions you get in the modern city joyless and lonely [Music] but it did at least inspire some fascinating art the only nudes that vincent ever painted are pictures of agastina [Music] most nudes in art pretend they have some higher purpose but not these they're shockingly direct and very [Music] physically [Applause] agastina was notoriously hard-headed she let vincent swap some of his paintings for meals but they had to be flower paintings the only pictures of his she thought she could sell if you look carefully at his glum portrait of agustina looking tough and alienated at le tambaran you can make out some fuzzy shapes on the wall behind [Music] they're japanese prince a new passion of van gogh's agastina let him put on a show of them at la tambaran and he's painted her sitting in front of [Music] it these japanese prints changed vincent's art dramatically it was as if someone suddenly threw open a door and let in color his final portrait of agustina before their squalid city romance disintegrated into arguments and name-calling is a full-color revelation agastina in her italian folk costume the sun drenched in yellow as a sunflower in august van gogh was only in paris for two years before he suddenly decided to leave for the south of france just as abruptly as he'd arrived so this impressionist phase of his was really short but the change in his work was momentous this is van gogh at the beginning of his stay in paris and here he is 18 months later once impressionism and japanese prince had got to him this isn't progress this is an identity swap the eighth impressionist exhibition of 1886 which unleashed surat on the world and transformed vangoth turned out to be the last [Music] impressionism had opened its final door and all sorts of art was rushing through it among the original impressionists the hardcore founding members pizarro had a bash at sura's new style but he wasn't much good at it in the end he went back to his first ambition of capturing the busy rhythms of modern [Music] paris [Music] renoir alas turned into something ghastly a peddler of plump and greasy nudes which he churned out like a string of pork sausages [Music] the true hero among the original impressionists the ones who started it all was monet the second half of monet's career was even more radical than the first [Music] [Applause] this is given me of course where he spent the last 40-odd years of his life and where he planted this famous garden and one of the reasons he created this garden was to make life easier for himself so he wouldn't have to travel so far to find his subjects the haystacks that unprecedented series of outdoor picturings that monet embarked upon in the 1890s were painted out here in the fields just behind the garden [Music] he'd load up a wheelbarrow with canvases paints easels get a lackey from the house to help him push it and park himself in a nearby field where he'd set up a row of easels and dart from canvas to canvas painting the different light effects as the day [Music] changed it was a simple idea but something no one had ever done before a completely new way of painting the local peasants who didn't like monet or modern art would demolish their haystacks early on purpose just to annoy him although he first came to giovanni in 1883 he actually waited a couple of decades before he began painting the most famous bit of his famous garden the pond [Music] these are the first water lily paintings that monet did they were started in 1899 so these are the last moneys of the 19th century and the first monets the 20th down at the bottom here between the house and the lily pond there used to be a railway track the cheery little train would puff up and down here six times a day and lift his spirits [Music] [Applause] monet loved trains they kept popping up in his art all through his career their smoke was an exciting challenge to paint and their symbolism seemed to trigger hope in him all that changed in 1914 when the great war broke out and the army began ferrying wounded soldiers from the front line up and down here and the cheery little train became an insistent reminder of war and death what could he do how could he help he was in his eighties now the days for practical action had long gone but the war had come to his doorstep and he had to do something the answer came to him on armistice day itself november the 11th 1918 the last day of the war when monet wrote a letter to his old friend georges clemenceau who had now become prime minister of france [Music] clemenceau had been an inspirational wartime leader the french winston churchill and unlike most politicians before and since he also understood the power of art before he became prime minister clemenceau had been a journalist and he'd actually written with great insight about monet's art they were old friends so it was to clem and so on armistice day that monet made his great offer to commemorate the end of the war he would give the french state a set of his pictures it's not much he wrote poignantly at the time but it's the only way i have of taking part in the victory he'd been dreaming for some time of something momentous unprecedented and already in 1914 he built himself this massive new studio these days it's mostly used as the given gift shop but monet built it to realize a dream he wanted to paint a set of giant water lilies and to hang them in a large round space so that they completely encircled you but there was a problem a big one for some time now he'd been having trouble with his eyesight monet had developed cataracts in both of his eyes there's three types of cataract two of which he didn't get but he did get the normal age-related cataract which is called nuclear sclerosis in that the crystalline structure of the natural lens gradually changes and it happens to all of us in actual fact and it yellows with age and it kind of gets like paper yellows with age the lens yellows with age now we brought along some filters for the camera on your advice which approximate some of the effects that monet would have would have seen um i mean we can put on this filter now uh and i think what people watching will see is that uh it's not so much it's the blurring but also the color change absolutely and what yellow filters do is they take out blue light so the blues tend to go so just as your blue tie looks sort of gray now yeah all the blues would have looked grayish too they would have morphed into one sort of splodge and as the cataracts grew worse um i mean i think we brought along another filter to show what might have happened i mean it's quite a a huge difference isn't it because the eyesight actually starts going what happens then is the eyesight begins to blur as well which of course is is an added frustration because you can get quite a lot of contract before the eyesight starts blurring but um eventually of course it does blur and it blurred in his case significantly he ended up having to just rely on the labels and his paints because he couldn't really tell the blues greens and the purples and that he couldn't really tell them so you had to rely on the labels so monet attempted to solve his problems by resorting to surgery didn't he he did um the the surgery had advanced enormously by then but it consisted of taking the lens out of the eye so you had to open the eye get the lens out and then obviously you have to have spectacles to correct for the vision um which we can simulate for you if you like so when i put these on i will see the world in the way or nearly in the way that monet saw it after his operation you just need a yellow filter in that just to make it right absolutely right and have a look at your thumb lord have a look at your thumb i can't see anything my thumb ah the thumb is not one thumb but two thumbs is has a big thumb in one eye and a sort of little thumb in the other and that is and the brain is incapable of putting the large image with a small image and giving you binocular vision so i would have said that was impossible to paint with eyesight like that absolutely impossible in fact monet's appalling eyesight had a positive impact on his art it freed his vision and forced him to trust his imagination the french government found a superb location for those water lilies he'd promised a former greenhouse on the tuileries set magnificently on the place de la concord the orangery the orangery is long and thin rather than round so monet changed his plans instead of one huge circular room he designed an even more ambitious scheme for two interconnected ovals [Music] the surrealist painter andre mason once described this as the sistine chapel of impressionism but it's actually two sistine chapels laid end to end [Music] a good thing to notice about the water lilies is how few water lilies there are in here there are some of course a couple here perhaps a clump here but there's not that many and in some places there are none at all because monet's great unfolding mural is concerned not with flowers but with the shimmering reflective endlessly fascinating presence of water the darkness as it harbors the shifting reality in which it lurks and lives he's put us on an island in the middle of a lake so that the water surrounds us in every direction and when clemenza first saw this he suggested they should build a lift right here in the middle so the visitors would be deposited at the center of the experience rather than coming in through a door at the side the job of the water lilies you do see in here is to give your eyes something tangible to grasp a sense of where you are they're like coloured drawing pins holding in place this shimmering endless sublime twilight monet never saw this finished he died in 1926 the last of the surviving impressionists but he'd saved his most revolutionary moment to the end [Music] i set out in this series to take impressionism off the chocolate box to put it back into the furnace and remind us again of how brave it was how fiery and inventive but to be honest i've spent all this time making four huge films trying to convince you of how revolutionary impressionism was when all i really had to do was to bring you in here and show you that [Music] an 86 year old impressionist granddad did that it was wild art then and it's wild art now this art will never be tamed if you want you can see it as the end of impressionism but how can the end of something be so full of possibilities [Music]

Channel: Perspective

Views: 259,840

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, Georges Seurat, seurat for kids, seurat documentary, seurat paintings, impressionism, waldemar januszczak, waldemar januszczak documentary, waldemar documentary, art history, history documentary, art history documentary

Id: axf0AfL4ftI

Length: 59min 23sec (3563 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/seeriktus]

Watched the whole thing, thanks :)