Modern Art Photoshop

Impressionism is the first movement of modern art because of its charm we forget that Impressionism is also avant-garde ISM we think Impressionism was the last time art was understandable and then there's a succession of more and more outrageous hoaxes getting higher and higher into obscurity and that's the modern art tradition that we're still in but actually this is in the same stream as this we find the shark a bit mysterious but we pretty much know what goes into its shock value it's us what we are our society what turns us on what makes us react we think this it's too nice for that what I'm going to do over the next two hours is tell the story of Impressionism partly in order to see what made this shocking in its time but also to look at the challenge it offers to our equivalent of it tonight Impressionism by its bag the two artists who open the door for Impressionism a Gustave Courbet at Edouard Manet they stand for the lead-up phase the one quintessential impressionist is Claude Monet he starts up the movement the artist who turned Impressionism into modern art his pulses and he's the one who makes Impressionism zhn iceless complicated these will be our guides for the evening they all knew each other they sometimes bought each other's paintings they went to the same restaurants and encouraged each other or gossiped and complained about each other it's like a family in a soap opera and instead of an oil dynasty it's an art family with its own distinct culture what unites them artistically is a radical idea they think art should be real and not false we think that too only we have certain fixed ideas about what reality is reality is literal and numb an artist casts his head in his own frozen blood reality is politics that seemed almost alien so the alienating sophisticated playfulness of today's political art almost makes sense reality now is a big confusion about beliefs so instead of being hungry for the old moral certainties of the culture of art its grand ambitions to tell us all how to be we're hungry for personality for confession for glamorous individualism weirdly the story of what Impressionism thought reality was begins with something like Turner Prize installation Paris the 19th century first step toward Impressionism as a clausal event the public can't miss it it's called the pavilion of the real the pavilion of the real could up here in the center of Paris in 1855 150 years ago by corbeil opposite is the biggest show of French art has ever been but corbeil is a rebel attacking the establishment there's a big building full of official art and across the road a rebel in a tent here's a sketch by corbeil of how he wanted the pavilion to look this scribble was to shake up our forever hundreds of thousands of visitors went to the universal exhibition which is what the official art show was called here it is and then they went to corbels pavilion what did they see inside it were 40 paintings it done over the previous seven years most were large some enormous like this one nearly 20 feet wide it's called the painters studio on the left of railed portraits of government people the emperor napoleon the third and other high ups in the government the emperor is shown as a poacher because he stole the empire Napoleon the third seized power illegally in a coup d'etat yet his enemies executed or exiled his government is run as a dictatorship Courbet said these are all just commercial people shopkeepers they have to be disguised here because no one can openly criticize the government no one can put themselves against the emperor the painting is an allegory of society over here is where the arty people of society are in the middle of this little crew is Prudhomme the anarchist who said property is theft on the left is the industrialist and art collector booyah whose money paid for the pavilion of the real it's a bit narcissistic because corbeil is at the center of it his handsome Assyrian profile he called it he's definitely vain but he's also realistic the reason it's so big is because it's got to fight a big institution the one has the ultimate say over what art is and that is the salon of fine art held every year at the Louvre think of the Turner Prize the Royal Academy summer show and the government all mixed up into a single totalizing entity it's been going for centuries now it answers direct to the Emperor everything in it supports the Emperor by supporting the idea that art should not be about reality of what's actually happening now but what happened long ago in an unreal idealized fictional time salon it's an institution but it's also a state of mind going to it shows your social aspiration the atmosphere of salon art is always dead that people are anemic anatomically perfect but smooth and varnished to death everything is done to a formula according to conventions which are learned by artists like recipes the Frank color in Impressionism the directness of the paint handling the open loose rough look to the way it's done is the opposite to the overcooked look of salon art you can see this kind of art reeling in horror from the impressionist kind the ordinary life kind where the mundane is made special in our time now all visual media high art TV movies ads whatever start out from the mundane they emphasize the everyday this is our pop world today it's a heaven of the ordinary not a heaven of the heavenly human the obvious the down-to-earth that's the stuff we elevate into art whether it's Turner Prize art or mass media pop culture art this is us her own needy human childish consuming selves but in the 19th century art was expected to transcend the everyday why be down in grim reality when you can be up here in the perfume clouds don't think about your real selves and real society being oppressed by a real dictator think about your fantasy selves off in an unreal classical theme park as a salon favorite you glorified the past with pageantry and teasing nudity and ancient roman evoking you weren't interested in reality the real as nearly immediate raw unfiltered life experience was not true but merely random corbeil thought this wasteland of the real had something and maybe truth wasn't up in the air but down-to-earth he himself came from a place in the countryside that no one had ever heard of the village of Hagen all in eastern France came from a family of farmers his father was a peasant who'd done well and acquired land and a couple of houses the main family home was on the side of the river that ran through the center of the village here is his house imagine the lovely welcoming kitchen parlour inside how's he gonna get from that rustic charming humbleness to being accepted by the glam salon power world he's aware of a minor salon style called realism eventually corbeil will make himself the leader and the personification of the realist style and the styles going to be huge in fact the word realism starts to acquire a capital R in writings about art in the 1850s directly because of corbeil in the meantime the realist style is known as little roughly done landscapes even though it's a style the salon doesn't take seriously core bait likes the ordinariness of this look his capital our realism comes from three big enthusiasms first this look second this look he liked the directness of the cheap popular prints at the time they got a message across very simply even if they weren't art and here comes a third enthusiasm when he was in Paris he lived in this street who owed Fay above a cafe called the Brasserie on Blair a notorious hangout of anarchists and Bohemians he was the center of the crowd here he is in his twenties a looker but not yet a great artist it's the left-wingers talk about politics that gives corbeil that Eureka moment that makes his artistic career take off don't you take off though because in a minute Paris is going down in flames and corbeil is going to swell up to twice the size welcome back lovely Impressionism full of dappled sunlight nothing could be further from politics you'd think but how true is that let's go back to Paris and find out in 1848 there was a series of left-wing rebellions all over Europe one in Paris was called the 1848 commune like the others it was quickly crushed but it made an enormous impact Courbet didn't take part in it because it was violent 3,000 people died and he was a pacifist but it gave him the idea that politics was important and that by being in the art world he could be politically active Courbet draws himself in the Brasserie ond lair in 1848 he's thinking about bringing down the government you can see his look as he thinks it the others around the table saying yeah why not let's go for it peasant world once you get intellectuals and Bohemians and anarchists in there too anything can happen Courbet started painting enormous group portraits of his own people from his own region peasants at the end of the day returning from an agricultural fair what is a salon audience make of this it's not just oh the charming life of peasants a much lower class than me they don't quite know how to gauge what it is they're being shown for one thing it's 9 feet wide big peasants the salon audience is fed up with that because peasants should be humble creatures Corby's heroic scale seems wrong what's this new handling paint is mashed scraped corbeil does a lot of it with a knife instead of a brush it's not Impressionism yet it's nothing like salon paintings glassy smoothness its mottled and heavy it's like rocky cloudy textured solid world Corday's looking at you can't tell who's in charge these people are grotesque but then why isn't the mood entirely comic why is it thoughtful beautiful quiet how can the salon audience get its emotional bearings but there's no one they can obviously look down on a class of this guy is identifiable by his exaggerated getup he's a member of the new rising rural bourgeoisie salon audience might be expected to identify with him but he's out to his Pig for a walk what's really going on in the French countryside what is it that the salon audience in Paris doesn't want to think about when it's thinking about art well the political issues are too many people and not enough land exploitation of poorer country people by richer people and oppression of everyone by the government in Paris there's misunderstandings on both sides there's a big fear in the city of the country they think it's all red France out here and the right wing in the countryside think that Paris is full of anarchists and what do people think of corbeil he was often caricatured in the papers they drew him as a fat peasant in fact he had got quite fat from his drinking but was caught BAE's big talk really targeting it was incredibly confident it got a great act the emperor recognizes the power of it Courbet is invited to join in with the Emperor's Universal exhibition that year 1855 a salon is going to be incorporated into it Salim director says to corbeil but Tania stuff down remember the salon represents the government club' says it seems to me that the government is only really like a person so in that case I can be a government then he proceeds to act like one he puts on the pavilion of the real paints the studio especially for the pavilion supposed to be the key to all the other paintings the landscape round ordinal corbeil comes from his painting are painting with inner painting brightest light comes from that spot illumination comes from the thing he knows best his own region Courbet said you should paint the truth paint your own time from your own point of view this was absolutely staggering to his audience that never heard that one before the audience at the time thought it was terrible and obscure and just a bloated homage to himself but to history it's like a sign saying this way moderns the artists private reality this is hot the story of corbeil and politics is an up and down ride sometimes he's full-on about socialism sometimes it's a bit cynical after the pavilion of the real core BAE's art became less socialist more sensationalist by the 1860s that political regime was too entrenched for corbeil to attack it head-on instead of menacing the bourgeoisie with images of a world of political reality that they didn't want to face he gave them what they wanted nudity oniy he did it oddly give them nudes cob a thought but make them solid peasant types don't make the mysterious goddesses make them lesbians he painted the sources of the rivers around his hometown the unmistakable feminine symbolism of flowing water gushing from dark caves when with the other type of imagery he was producing at the same time his earthy nudes poorni paintings he was mostly doing for private collectors he didn't politicize his stuff anymore but he did still philosophize it as corbeil lost his mojo politically speaking he became a sensualist for the sake of sensuality truth doesn't come from convention he knew so it must come from within what is it that produces it there he thought it must be nature the cliffs and pine forests where he came from yet a homemade philosophy of earth and rocks and water and femininity somehow equating with creativity and art and his own self Courbet got these paintings into the official annual salons where they were seen not just by the dainty audience for art but also by the future Impressionists the Impressionists were not interested in Corby's metaphysical musings about where everything comes from but they did respond to its all-over brightness and roughness in a few years time based on this kind of thing Impressionism will challenge salon sentimentality with real sensuality sensuality isn't just human nudity it's the sensuality of paints of materials of the surface of the painting this is what Impressionism says yes to in corbeil in other hand it says no to the violence corbeil also expresses the salon audience liked hunting scenes in the woods but when cor baited them they were real who was savage the extra brutality is cor Bay's realism in his 1867 painting of a stag being attacked by hunting dogs everything's violent even the glare of the snow is like an explosion and the dogs like blasts in the white period painting it in a shop now button from the time only the doomed stag is in place meaning is about to rush in everywhere else today people assume Impressionism because it's lovely comes from lovely times in fact the world was just as horrible then cities now in 1870 after 20 years in power the Emperor foolishly decided to start a war with Prussia which France quickly lost the Emperor abdicated and a new French government was elected it was based in Versailles about 40 miles outside of Paris this government surrendered to the Prussians but Paris refused to give up and as the next year came round it went on refusing it formed its own breakaway government the Paris Commune this was the 1871 commune as opposed to the 1848 one but at the same left-wing aims an end to exploitation democracy equality and no more religion the Prussians seized the city they bombarded it and colourful supplies food ran out bombs are falling people are eating cats and dogs and rats and then the Versailles government decided to send in the French army to break up the company Paris is burning it's a civil war what's corbeil doing down there he's made a commune leader he says artists will now run all art institutions he abolish is the judges and juries at the salon blimey what an ass he going to do next we still don't know if it was his idea as commissioner of art under the commune to pull down the Vaughn Dome column in PLAs Vaughn dome something like Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square somebody ordered it and it was assumed to be him enormous chunks of the column fell neatly in a line the old order coming down the comm unit ill the end of May and then what became known as the week of blood began Versailles troops retook Paris street-by-street massacring as they went the Communist killed about a thousand people the government troops killed thirty thousand communist and suspected communists men and women lined them up behind public buildings and in cemeteries and parks and gardens and they executed them they ran out of ways to do it they ended up using Gatling guns it was a massacre of the poor by the powerful and incredible slaughter it really gave anyone who wanted to ask for a bit of equality and democracy from now on a lesson in what to expect Courbet was arrested everyone knew he'd been agitating for a while for the Vaughn Dome column to be pulled down because he disagreed with its symbolism it stood for France's military victories in the past so he must have led the revolutionary rioters who destroyed it no that's wrong Courbet claimed in his defense and this photo really does show core BAE's actual trial he said he'd been busy protecting artworks in the Louvre from being looted by conservative art administrators had been sacked by the commune it was given six months in prison and fined 500 francs this doesn't seem too bad but two years later and even more right-wing government comes in and corbeil is retried and this time is punishment is to pay the full costs of reconstructing the bond I'm Colin which he knows will ruin him and make him a state slave for the rest of his life he exiled himself to Switzerland and lived there in 1877 at the age of 58 Courbet died of alcoholism his body retains so much liquid in the months before he died but at his death his waist measured 55 inches that enormous body rotted in Switzerland for a hundred years before the bones were brought back here to the cemetery in our non-core bade gives to Impressionism rough surfaces and being against the salon being for truth and against lies but you can't have Impressionism without color which is the force our next artist Edouard Manet stands for prepare to be colorized after the break welcome back Impressionism is coming along now Courbet and MANET or it's too big precursors there are some paintings by MANET Corby's reality is his own sensuality Manas take on the sensual is color MANET releases color from being an add-on and makes it something in itself not only something but the main thing this is black but its shape its dominance its relation to the other shapes means black is not just an absence but a positive force Manny never allows you to think oh it's a painting of so-and-so he's always waking you up to how the component parts of a painting operate how they work MANET is high-class he's cool not passionate pushed not from the country he couldn't be more opposite to corbeil to tell man a story we have to go back to the 1860s when the polling the third was still Emperor Manet's career only lasted 20 years from the early 1860s to the early 1880s in that time Paris was modernized it was completely transformed from a stinking load of winding medieval streets with a few staggering palaces rising up out of the muddle so a gleaming streamlined modern city the rules of bourgeois life are set up in mayonnaise time we still obey the main one now which is but the compensation for never asking for true freedom and true happiness is great lathering zuv escapism and consumerism this all started with Napoleon the third in the 1860s the Emperor knows that he can't just aristocratic Li ignore the workers on the new rising bourgeoisie has to skillfully manipulate them and subtly oppress them instead so as well as new architecture new avenues and squares and new venues of grand spectacular events like the brand-new Opera House which is the great cultural achievement of the new regime there's a new attitude as well a new spirit one a pleasurable consumerism where you're encouraged to stop worrying about politics and learn to buy things and be entertained authoritarian ISM rains but is masked by economic prosperity the look of progress and new types of modern fun it's the age of the arcades newly-built pleasure places passages of the main streets we can go and buy things new consumer objects new fashion gear MANET is excited by the modern too but he doesn't want it to be all lies he thinks the truth of color is the answer the poets Baudelaire calls MANET the painter of modern life give us a sense of the beauty of the art of the past with the gods and so on in their robes Baudelaire says but give us vivid modernity instead of misty classicism show everyone how beautiful we are in our boots and Kratts that's exactly what mani comes up with modern going by in a beautiful luminous transparent liquid blur what are you if you're a describer of the new a flaner this is the French word meaning stroller that Baudelaire employ to describe a new modern sensibility that went with the new modern city the flaner goes around regarding modern life keeping his distance not getting involved he's a voyeur as well as a planner he's a sampler of experience at one remove he's always smiling ironically Buffett gray thinks our own contemporary trendy art world that's exactly what we are really how does irony work in conversation it's a mark of intelligence means being able to think of more than one thing at a time for MANET it's thinking about pictures and the stuff that pictures are made of he can do both this is Manny's portrait of the realist novelist Emile Zola but it's also a painting about yellow and black it's a fantastic visual object this kind of thing influences our moment but in a perverse way the genius of our Turner Prize art is the way pinpoints and vivifies our modern desire not for visually marvelous objects but for ironic ideas that hover disembodied nearby to visually straight forward objects it's 1862 MANET is 30 he's a dude and a dandy and a planner everyday strolls down to the boulevard does Italian and lunches at the cafe tortoni and then in the afternoons he comes down to the gardens of the tulip a Palace Palace used to be over there we're back now 10 years before it gets burned down by rioting commune ours it does not have drawings the gardens are full of the great in the good of the Paris world of the Arts in the early 1860s poets art critics art writers authors heads of art galleries imagine them all milling here then he gets back to the top tonyia five or six and receives compliments from the drawings as they pass from hand to hand people like Baudelaire who encouraged him back in the studio based on the drawings MANET puts together his first painting of modern life it's called music in the tweeny gardens here's the fleeting glance of me strolling dandy in the blur of the three days modern entertainment goes on here outdoor concerts for the posh near the Emperor's Palace on the extreme left is MANET and then it's a monocle dart writer this weird shape is Baudelaire a modern blur he's persuading these other writers that art sole purpose now is the creation of aesthetic experience Courbet hates hearing stuff like that but many agrees with it he says yes esthetic creation but base it on what you see all around you to that extent he agrees with corbeil but here's the departure because then it's even more aesthetic it's even more visually unpredictable and lively the painters superiority over the objects of his gaze that's mayonnaise painterly version of dandyism how does the painting work visually a green spread against a spread of pinky orange black clothes of the men in the jumble through the orange line of black hats and the unreal seeming tree trunks cutting through the jumble then the accents of bright color blue red and the grays whites and creams and peaches it was shown at a private gallery in Paris in March 1863 no one liked it couldn't he finish anything couldn't he draw an a strides through our history like a colossus at the time it was just thought to be pretentious became an art shocker but a one-off art event called the salon of the refused it's an official show of artists rejected by the salon here are all their pathetic thrown out canvases why share with a lot of rejects Manet's case people thought it was to be deliberately scandalous this is what a scandal looked like in 1863 the future Impressionists saw this they recognized its power it became an icon it stood for change why though when it looks like hardly anything to us now a few unlikely poses some arty nudity we have to unpack it shock value in terms of what it was different to at the time salon arts polished illusions it's careful stagings of nudity what is the salon audience want from art it gets dressed up and it ghosts see something morally elevated not something disgusting doesn't want to see Tracy amines bed it wants to see sexuality carefully contextualized in terms of what is known and accepted at the time goddesses and damsels in distress' white slaves may be kidnapped by exotic Arab slave traders and made to live in Hari instead MANET does unmistakeable modern sexuality the painting is now known as the des initial herb the picnic the pose recalls classical goddesses in art buy old masters like Titian social activity connects to is prostitution prostitutes were available for hire a lot of locations all along the banks of the river sin prostitution was naturally connected in anyone's mind with bathing in the sin there is a woman bathing and in fact the paintings original title when it was first shown was the bath you don't mention prostitution you cover it up with prudery but mayonnaise exposing it and connecting it to art MANET is seen by his audience is a great assaulter of the old masters but it's really only the dullness of the pseudo old mastery of a salon that is assaulting actual old master art he thinks is great Titian is its God he's competing with Titian on Titian zone painting he turns the glow of the still life the glow of the body and the whole arrangement of those high colors within the grays and greens and blacks he's modeling Titian up Manny gets the overall setup clothed men and nude women from a painting by Titian he gets the precise poses of the main figures from a renaissance engraving after a painting by Raphael those people in the corner become Manny's people in the Titian there's no eye contact with the audience I write the audience fields but with MANET she's looking directly out at you perfectly relaxed cocky that's the attitude of the whole painting very wrong but something worse was coming the response to this painting when it was shown in the salon two years after the DES initial air was so furious guards at to be posted to stop it being physically attacked its title is Olympia Olympia is the kind of name high-class Parisian prostitutes sometimes took so there's no doubting what the scene is a prostitute receives a caller but it's also a painting that looks at itself being a painting upfront modern sex is tied to a new rough bold handling that curtain is as much real brushstrokes as it is fabric the real flowers here the flower pattern here she's not really a prostitute she's a model acting a part which is actually what she has in common with the nudes and the old masters they're not really goddesses either because goddesses don't exist man eyes model is Victorine new home she's his collaborator she acts different types in an amazingly relaxed way the thoughts have been lovers he met her in the street she was 17 he asked her to come by for modelling work she agreed because she'd heard of him she appears throughout men his paintings of the 1860s MANET is assumed to be a sexy guy always picking up women from high-class brothels and cafes were an extraordinary complicated system of prostitutes and courtesans and kept women was available his wife once surprised him following a woman in the street I'm sorry said I thought it was you man they did paint several portraits of his wife but Victorine is his main model she's got the look that initially draws the audience in then MANET refuses to draw it in any further with any intelligible meanings or with any surface polish the audience is pushed away by the rough scrawling the deliberate disconnections seems to be all fragments in fact it's a unity of color relationships who the personalities are what the scenes are isn't the point the point is colors relating to other colors looking at his stuff on TV now it's hard to think of it as unclear it looks like art but Prez audience it didn't look like art and that's why they didn't like it this one the lunch in the studio is really about making black glow the black of that jacket as a scene it's kind of incoherent nobody looks at anybody else they've all been assembled from different worlds there are ice stirs ready to be eaten and coffee is being served they'd never be in the room at the same time nobody knows who modeled for the maid the man might be MANET actually it isn't the boy could be anyone actually he's mayonnaise illegitimate son a woman glimpsed on the street a random encounter white is the steam from the trains coming out of the Sun Lazar station man a studio overlooks a station white makes the black railings striking the contrast of black and white seems to be the main meaning there's no story offered the title is just the railway doesn't give anything away because of art scholarship we do know something about the woman in the painting it's Victorine new home Manos old model she walked out of his studio one afternoon in 1867 and disappeared for six years turned out she went to America now she's returned a few years should be dead from alcoholism but for manners purposes none of these meanings behind the scenes matter he just wants the visual objects it's a resting power man a wanting to be visually striking sounds a bit tame compared to corbeil wanting to bring down the government but Manny's visual freshness it's profound it says something for a corbeil truth is peasant experience for man it's visual perception the world isn't really perceived as a collection of polished details but as a collection of glimpses of color patches and tone core Bay's Melia in the 1850s was working-class bohemian mayonnaise in the 1860s was middle-class bohemian Impressionism is more or less a middle-class movement Courbet went to Anika's beer cellar dives but Manny went to more expensive joints in the 1860s when most of the artists who were to become the Impressionists already knew each other they went to the cafe Dubois in the who the better not now Avenue de Clichy and now the Dubois has a shoe shop instead of a cafe to hear MANET talk about art he lived in the same streets at number 34 and he held meetings here every week Cheers obviously we hate the Impressionists being middle-class we think art should be edgy and a bit dangerous the weird thing about Impressionism is that it was known to have come out of both mayonnaise and Corday's examples so thought to be both a revolutionary menacing art and a relaxed leisure type of art this is mayonnaise last major painting a bar at the folies-bergere dandy solicits a barmaid there she is as the bar everything else is a mirror reflection the model really did work at the folies-bergere man they based the painting on sketches done on the spot and then he posed her back at the studio a painter friend of mayonnaise modeled for the man you got the painting into the salon of 1882 got a medal for it the same year he got the Legion of Honor he wrote to the government to thank them and to the salon jury for the medal he said it was too ill to collect it and he wished he got it 20 years ago it would have made his fortune man I knew he could never paint anything this ambitious again his time was up he was suffering the consequences of all his life not only being mr. color man but mr. lover man when he moved himself and his family here 39 who'da st. Petersburg in 1878 it was already suffering from a nervous disorder late product of syphilitic illness he contracted when he was young an experimental treatment was prescribed for Manny's illness which turned out to be disastrous it led to circulation problems in one of his legs and then to gangrened the leg had to be amputated and then on the 30th of april 1883 aged only 51 and the upstairs apartment suffering convulsions MANET died what matters in Manet's art is the sense of modern life conveyed in the liveliness of the painting other types of sensor no longer the business of painting for this one to feel right it doesn't matter that all sorts of logics are wrong the bottles on the bar here should be reflected on the near side of that marble top and not the far side the position of the man is where we are now looking at the painting but we shouldn't be able to see his reflection because they'll be blocked by her body there's an audience above and one below there's an apéritif bottle with Manny's signature on him remember MANET is dying the bottle is flame red maybe it's healthy the flickering look of the surface is MANET being influenced by his influence ease the Impressionists thought we hadn't got there yet but in fact they're on the scene in a minute meet the big one Claude Monet that man who makes your eyes wobble welcome back the main Impressionists was Claude Monet reality sensuality color Monet's inheritance from MANET and Corby Ronis directness painting outdoors in nature this is what money brings to the mix it was money who founded the impressionist group there are about 12 members but it was money who most stood for its main principles movement spontaneity and light interestingly money didn't go looking for Impressionism he stumbled on it by accident areas in his twenties this is his story it was a classic out of control artist who would be embarrassed by if he behaved today like he did in the 19th century he was born lower middle class in 1840 in Paris it was brought up on the coast in Normandy his mother died when he was seventeen as a teenager he did caricatures of well-known locals and sold them and he used his earnings to buy himself art lessons at cheap little shabby private art schools one of the easier CAD amis Suisse was just near here on the Cade as off F on the city Island in Paris it was at the Suisse that money met Renoir they went around together they did a few portraits Monet did a few more caricatures and they lived on sacks of beans money claimed later when he was rich and he wanted to sentimentalize the past but it's true that he never did have any real money until he was in his late middle age he would get money but squander it he had expensive tastes and he put on airs he would tell middle-class women that he only slept with duchesses or serving girls anything in between he said would be revolting as a young man Monet's idea of success like mayonnaise and Corday's was to get in the salon here is his portrait of corbeil but it was because of mayonnaise influence that money thought color was paintings rode into the future type of color though eCopy dresses from illustrations in magazines we thought about fashion color as well as nature color painted this two years after he saw mayonnaise designates your lab in the salon of the refused he got corbeil to give him advice about it hobbies advice was to give it up because it was too big he rolled up the enormous canvas and left it with a landlord in lieu of some rent videoed when he came back years later was mostly destroyed by damp these are just the fragments that remain this one is called four figures in a garden Monet's lover Camille don't sir posed for all four of them what is it he's doing something which is very important in painting but which is very rarely discussed outside the world of art criticism he's doing something formal intuitively bit by bit he's making a style idea come to life you can see that very vividly in the way he connects the brown hair of the woman with a patch of brown at the base of that tree that's a purely visual connection he's making Wibbly edges connect the edges of the foliage and the grass the edges of the dresses the edges of the flowers he spots those flowers with white and he spots that dress with black it's very formal painting you might not know he's doing something quite so formal you might think he's coming at it completely naturally but in that natural is the form or formal in an art context doesn't mean being polite on wearing smart clothes it means visual power visual notice ability one a thought you got this from painting outdoors he always insisted he was an outdoors artist painting direct from nature money adored man a man a knew about money but he hated their names being similar hated critics mistaken them for each other he would never paint outdoors thought one a was an idiot for doing so the outdoors obsession for money was his way of being like Manny he thought he should follow where nature led maybe the way to get a synthesis of Manaen corbeil was to paint in the newly modernized outer suburbs formerly country villages because of the way daily life was organized under the new emperor they'd become weakened leisure resorts for Parisians it was the done thing now to catch the train at the Sana's are stationed in Paris and spend weekends at the semi-rural spots there was a whole string of them on the recently set up rail network out to Rouen along the bends of the river CIN families could go for walks go boating and have picnics and single man could do all those things and pick up the local women it's 1869 now Monet worked out here with Renoir Renoir was on his level not a hero like MANET Oh Courbet but a mate they each wanted to paint a big salon scene of a floating restaurant first they thought they'd better do some fast oil sketches one I stood here with his easel and Wren lasted a few yards down there and they both looked out there into the middle of the set where now there is only the same they used to be the floating restaurant a lot of people dressed up or else in their 19th century bathing costumes swimming this is one of Monet's oil sketches of the scene it's called Lacan we air as the nickname of the time for this bathing place means the Frog is the prostitutes of the area who swam in the river in Renoir zoil sketch you see the individuality of the modern clothes and styles the difference between one outfit and another but with the money there's much less to write a social significance thesis about some people in the water and some silhouette figures here they painted quicker than it takes me to finish this sentence here's another of Monet sketches remember these sketches were for a larger painting one I thought they were stepping stones towards the real thing but then he realized this was the real thing this was the impressionist style the looseness that he was planning to tighten up in the big painting this was the good thing the real now is light effects alone nothing politically aggressive or sexually risque has to be in the scene as well to show that there's a challenge going on Monet is making how a picture works be the exciting thing not what it's a picture of physical star furnace changing just lling busy relating one bit against another everywhere is now the beginning and the ending the only thing Impressionism the moment we're here what's the main thing to say about it well it's the only modern art movement that most ordinary people have heard of and quite like there is something holiday like about it but that reason it's a horror style for today's officially approved avant-garde it's considered not serious enough that's because it seems optimistic being optimistic seems naive I believe that's a misconception though all money thinks about is color values he stares at color till his eyes pop out partly it makes sense because of the pressure on painting from photography photography was invented in the 1830s it's been going now for 40 years it shows a world a bit like Impressionism it shows it as it really is light hitting objects pression ism is inspired by photography but also it challenges photography wants to be scientific but at the same time emotional full of feeling it shows a world aesthetically heightened you feel heightened just looking at it that's because this isn't really how the world is but an idealized version of the world an intensified world in 1871 money dodged both Frances war with Prussia and the Paris Commune by going away to live abroad then he came back to Paris and lived with his wife Camille and their young son Jean in argent I another suburban leisure place today ours and toy is a bit of a dump in one day's time it was just beginning to be industrialized but it was pretty all this used to be poppy fields living out here six years money keeps evoking light and atmosphere through nuances of color and touch that grotty house I was just standing by beside a car park is what remains of this house at the back of a poppy field in an image of Impressionism that we know from a million posters on bedroom walls it's not the real beauty of argent I in the 1870s he's capturing here the poppy field is the taking off point for a color arrangement the blue in the parasol repeats the blue in the sky he's making everything tied together on the terms of the painterly language that he's using it doesn't bother to make this mother and child different to that mother and child both sets are Camille and John just put in different parts of the same painting hang on what happened to the salon it's still the only show in town as an artist you can't do anything else but be in it Monet says let's do something else artists with attitude get the train back to my place Monet's house in Argentina in December 1873 Renoir dick our money and a few others all gather in Monet's front room here and they officially form their own independent group the anonymous Society of artists the impressionist style exists now the movement is about to go public dente history both corbeil and MANET blatantly challenged the establishment before the Impressionists but they still strive to be accepted by the salon when the impressionist made their breakaway move in 1873 it was the beginning of the end of the salons power and then the following year 1874 in April the first impressionist show opened in Paris a few minutes walk from the studio of Edouard Manet at number 35 boulevard des Capucines it was on the second floor in the studio of a famous photographer Felix nadir tog Rafi is modern idea of the show is modern and the actual building is modern because this whole street has only just been built as part of Paris's modernization there are 39 artists in the show and 165 works there's no jury you just have to pay a subscription of 60 francs and even put your paintings in there are 12 real Impressionists plus a load of tame slightly looser artists who also can't get their works into the salon every year the show lasts one month it cost a franc to get in the same as it costs to get into the salon half a million people visit the salon every year about 3,000 come to this exhibition the newspapers say it's slovenly and subversive and just like the filthy commune all over again the impressionist lose money on the show they don't lose heart they decide to have one every year from now on a journalists writing on a funny revue called Shahi Valley a little bit like Private Eye notices a painting by Monet in the show called impression sunrise he writes a hilarious account about an imaginary visitor to the exhibition was driven insane by all the impressions that's how the name comes about Impressionism it's an insult and then it's a badge of honor here is that painting impression sunrise thin washes intense color thick orange and white making sunlight at dawn did politics just evaporate then personally I think Impressionism is political but in a deep way it wasn't that the Impressionists were disillusioned by politics because of the defeat of the commune so they turned to an art of pointless pleasure in loveliness I think they responded to a major social change by radically modifying the relationship between society and art they made a kind of art that deliberately opposed society's values from the perspective of today's official art world its arts duty to question widely accepted values that's why any one in the art world today questions Impressionism because it's widely liked ironically it's Impressionism that first kicks off this questioning attitude in art also ironically today's new artist officially supported whereas Impressionism for many years was officially despised there's a parallel with money getting high prices is a measure of an artists status today they're not really thought to be artists unless there's big money on the Steam but for many years apart from a few isolated periods Impressionism was commercially worthless one period of financial success was just before the first impressionist exhibition in 1872 one a completed a painting a week he sold a whole batch of them to a single buyer for 10,000 francs the next year is sold much more to the same guy for twice as much laborer earned about 2,000 francs a year a doctor or a lawyer about 12,000 so making 20,000 put money in a very high income bracket something like an advertising guy or a media guy or a Turner Prize level artist today but the money wasn't regular it came in stops and starts and money was always spending so it was always broke Monet had a specially rigged up studio boat that enabled him to observe the play of light on water close hand he slept on the boats and made trips around the large s bends of the sin you are the Raphael of water man I told him in reply money who a modern person might think should really have had counseling to learn how to take responsibility for himself wrote MANET a letter in June 1873 I have no more credit with the butcher or baker could you not send me by return mail a 20 franc note welcome back an everyday tale of impressionist folk in 1874 the year of the first impressionist show an economic depression hits France freshness believe it will soon be over they are wrong it's worse and worse the big slump coincided with a big complication in Monet's love life this is the Chateau de l'otan Bourget Mancha Hall on the outskirts of Paris it's owned by Alice or shed who's a wealthy golden era Stoke rat her husband ansed owns a lot of impressionist paintings they want money to decorate the interior of the chateau and this painting is one of his decorations turkeys in one of the chateaus fields Monday stayed here eight months left Camilla Jean in Argentine it's likely that one is affair with Alice or shed began now the following year ANSTO shed goes bankrupt he tries to commit suicide he fails at that and runs away to Belgium money is not selling anything his family's virtually starving he meets Alice in Paris he tells her he's taking Camille and John out to a distant suburb where a bit cheap to live Alice says she'll join him with ends and the children she just had another baby a 6-1 maybe Monet is the father this is where they lived the village of the toy one day and Camille and their son and the whole of shared family moved here in December 1878 winter comes Camille tries to have an abortion but something goes wrong the next year she gives birth but falls ill from the after-effects of the botched abortion and then in september 1879 age 32 Camille dies Monet is devastated they've been together for 12 years he sees her lying on the bed the corpse changing color I couldn't resist they said I had to capture it she turned blue Camille is only brush strokes now she and ålesund Monet and danced that complicated drama is now going to simplify here's the house where first of all two families live now it's one family with Monet and Alice setup together as man and wife only they're not really married which makes the neighbors look down their noses at them they soon change their tune though when money started driving around in a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur and earning 200,000 francs a year it's rise 2 million airdam was caused by the successful promotion of Impressionism in America by art dealers this was in the 1880s Monet went from broke to those days equivalent of top of the rich list because of the dealer's business sense combined with his self-promotion it was like his brief period of commercial success ten years ago in the early seventies and he now he controlled success and this time it was going to last he allied himself with different art dealers and set them against each other in order to drive up his prices he painted scenes in sets to give his exhibitions a unified theme he painted series a series of Rouen cathedrals a series of haystacks different times of the day in different lights American millionaires would buy the lot he arranged for positive profiles of himself to appear in the newspapers before the exhibition opened rather than after it closed a strategy that now appears standard behavior to anyone in the art world but it was money who first set up a lot of what we now think of as standard in art Monday's paintings of Rouen Cathedral at different times of the day they're well known how good are they some are better than others as a constancy of money which produces both his good paintings and the bad ones and what goes wrong with the bad ones is that closed tonality can be slightly boring as well as exciting frankly this surface more exciting than this one his story is all about the triumph of Impressionism but it's only seen as that now in the 1910s and 20s it was sought by rich people to decorate their rooms and even by the government to decorate new official museums but the general public went on disliking it because it was too gaseous and abstract on new cutting-edge modern artists disliked it - because it wasn't abstract enough the stuff that drew the slagging Zoff and the eager buyers in equal measure was this kind of thing scenes of water lilies that money began doing at the end of the 19th century they're based on a carefully controlled reality a garden environment money created himself this is the most famous garden in art history this is where money was living when he was having all his success its place in Giverny 40 miles from Paris little way along from bateau on the road to Rouen when I came here in 1883 with Alice and the children when it was 42 yet for four more years to live they spend them all here over the years he became a grand figure visited constantly by high society and people in politics this is actually the French Prime Minister with him now he puts on dinners he has himself photographed and filmed and interviewed and accepts a role as a kind of art God which today's popular audience for art is still willing to give him this used to be a studio where money painted is profoundest stuff gigantic panoramic water lily paintings now it's now rageous Lee commercial gigantic money souvenir shop key rings jigsaw puzzles calendars money writing paper money cookbooks none of it can convey Monet's amazing ability to make the physical stuff of paint come alive that paint is an equivalent to reality this one a mouse Matt is a poor equivalent to that paint he had the studio built in order to create a group of paintings to be donated to the French government a kind of money environment working on them sometimes heard ammunition trains going by on the railway to Rouen sometimes he heard artillery firing beyond the studio it's 1917 now and first world war has been going on for three years money has completely cut off from it Monet was the main Impressionists and also the purist he controlled the impressionist brand he identified himself with it his water lilies in his old age it took the style out to its furthest extreme of pure floating atmospheric shimmer the theme of Monet's water lilies paintings is to be frankly decorative decorative is a dirty word in art today it's like the plague kills whatever it touches it kills it with shallowness which we know to be bad shallowness is confusing here though there really is no other meaning than what you're seeing what are you seeing surface the surface of the pond as a mirror to the sky no actual sky just reflections of blue broken up by reflections of trees and blasts of light that characteristic no color that you get when light hits water and then there's a surface of paint there's amazing strokes doing their stroke thing every touch and scroll and blip of color bringing to life every other touch from scroll so the whole thing seems to be constantly moving constantly changing like the thing that Monet is depicting and you get the feeling that the idea of the water lily pond is just an excuse for all this it is asking you to get into it purely visually to see it it's nothing but itself this isn't the end of the Impressionism story some much more bizarre tales are still to come but it is the end of Impressionism 'he's absolutely pure phase the story now closes in around its hero money with his visual super sensitivity excluding himself from the world not noticing that the First World War was going on just beyond his garden when money died at home in his bed in Giverny in 1926 aged 86 he'd been out of fashion for years he sold to millionaires he was a millionaire himself but his type of visually delightful drifting beauty no longer fitted without on guard ISM cubism had been invented by Picasso and Braque in fact I've been around for 20 years the Kassadin light Monet's art and ignored it all the other modern art is owns after cubism ignored it to surrealism was the big one now a totally non beauty movement then Monet came back into fashion in the 1950s when New York Abstract Expressionism came in he seemed to fit that from that boost his reputation rose and a kind of awkward staggered ascent in which Abstract Expressionism goes out of intellectual fashion so money is forgotten again by art people but because of the rise of the culture industry is loved by ordinary people to his present position where is the most popular artists in the world a total blockbuster adored because of the one a lifestyle rather than for what actually makes his paintings tick people now go to Blockbuster shows of money and they think hey what's wrong with being superficial I get involved with difficulty I know how is that wrong exactly pression ism is a much more fraught and complicated movement in arts and we perhaps usually realize it's a constant problem in modern art with what was once revered and urgent becoming anodyne difficulty is an antidote to blindness maybe that's more like it it certainly leads naturally to the last artist in our program Paul says an had an absolutely difficult personality sullen full of Tantrums smelly afraid of women couldn't bear it if they touched him if they just brushed by a fanatic Catholic obsessive solitary right-wing and paranoid enter a tortured but incredibly beautiful world of Suzanne after the break hello welcome back Suzanne is the impressionist who takes Impressionism into modern art it takes the spontaneity and movement of money and puts in structure slows Impressionism down he puts cerebral difficulty in with sensual pleasure it was Picasso who looked back at Suzanne and said it wasn't Suzanne's apples but Suzanne's anxiety that was the thing so Suzanne is an absolute blue-chip nicest but he's already giving you a bit of nasty in with his nice when he was young he was a much more horrible artist he did psycho murder scenes like this Impressionism liberated him from his own inner storms in art he could control his emotions in life he couldn't Suzanne came from the town of exon Provence in the South of France it was born in 1839 in this street rue de la pata when he was young he hated his family he feared his father his father was uneducated but wealthy he'd been a hat maker made money and then became Co boss of a successful bank when Suzanne was 21 he painted his father in his early marvelously grim style his father passed on to Suzanne his own anxious obsessive personality the father agonized that he wasn't taken seriously by polite society because he was a self-made man and because he only married the mother of his three children after they were all born Suzanne was illegitimate Susanne's youthful love object was emile zola they were a school together in X they both loved art and literature both clever grants on walks and swims together in the Provence countryside they read each other their verses Sola became the great realist novelist encouraged Suzanne was much braver than to that he didn't have a tyrannical father father wanted Suzanne to be a lawyer Suzanne wants to be an artist father finally gave in so long as he could keep a neurotic control over his sons every movement says Anne lived in a hell of the mind in fact his first home when he lived in Paris was here in who don fehr held street his father set him up in a room in this house he signed on not a cheap art class the Academy glai where he met money and the future Impressionists he kept trying to get accepted by the grand Academy of Fine Art but he kept failing so he slunk back to X and worked in his father's bank what are you doing said Zola get back to Paris so he came back to the who Don fair and this was the beginning of a double life that he was to lead for year after year partly in Paris partly annex and miserable in both every year he sent paintings to the salon which every year rejected them he tried to shock everyone the salon the Impressionists got in a shock rut the Impressionists would be at whatever hangout MANET was at in order to be near the great star Suzanne would sit in an imploded unwashed heap furiously shy and then suddenly blurt out a bit of Bon Ami shattering rudeness he once said to many I won't shake your hand mr. a many I haven't washed for eight days another time MANET politely asked Suzanne what he was preparing for that year's salon and Suzanne replied I'm preparing a load of merde interesting integrity you probably think sounds good you can imagine how tedious it probably was to have to encounter in real life and how you might want to avoid it and maybe see his paintings in a certain light the weird nightmarish things was trying unsuccessfully at this time to get accepted by the salon this is one of Suzanne's takes on mayonnaise Dez initially paradise of naked women surrounding Suzanne all our other artists in this program had sensational love lives Suzanne never had any love at all and remained a virgin until 1869 when he was 30 when he began an affair with the model our tiles VK aired a son also called Paul it was him otto's and Paul all surviving on his allowance from his father which he knew be cut off of his father ever found out he had a family 1871 sees the war with Prussia and the commune says Anne's a draft dodger hiding out here in Provence after all the burning and bloodshed in Paris but painter Lucien Pissarro invited Susanne to paint with him in the Paris suburbs Pizarro on the rights as an on the left they're about to sell out on a painting trip they look sturdy and workmen like it was from bizarro that Susanne learned Impressionism with that the violent mood inside stayed inside while on canvas Susanne started to produce something much more slow burning April 1870 for the first impressionist show invited by Monet to take part Susanne pays his 60 francs subscription and amongst the works he puts in he includes this parody of MANET it's called a modern Olympia the prostitutes client is painted in it says Anne with his bald head but wearing the dandy outfit that MANET was always photographed in clothes that Suzanne would never wear black frock-coat and cane and on the sheds long the aristocratic top hat says and draws attention to himself by identifying himself with a scandalous figure MANET at the same time he mocks many and he mocks himself a therapist today would say it's a cry for help MANET thinks it's rubbish she can't bear Suzanne one of the reasons he won't be in the first impressionist show is Suzanne digger can't bear him either no one likes him what's the problem trouble at home this is the Jaster Buffon says and family estate just outside of ex suzanne paints of the Jass as the top floor room his father had converted into a studio for him that's good what's bad is domestic life here which is intolerable it's all based on his father's completed rationalism in 1878 twins and nearly 30 his father opens a letter to him from one of the impressionist buyers in it he learns that not only does Susanne have a lover but also a son he decides that when Susanne goes to Paris he keeps several women in rooms there he fights with Susanne and temporarily cuts down his allowance but years later and Suzanne's father has a flirtation with one of the maids of the just de Buffon it temporarily increases his allowance in 1886 as an is nearly 50 but still in that year his mother and sister and his father who's now nearly 90 are able to pressurize his an for the sake of respectability to finally marry Autons the wedding takes place it's a bleak event because they don't love each other a few months later Suzanne's father dies and Suzanne becomes a wealthy man from the inheritance Suzanne is now the boss of the Jazz but instead of this cheering him up it becomes convinced that his own death is drawing near and that all human interaction is futile he lives here with his mother and sister running the household he quite likes them but on the whole nobody in this family likes each other or tans does endless modeling sessions for Suzanne but they have nothing in common she hates his mother and sister his mother and sister hate each other and hate her she spends as much time as she can away from ex living in Paris with her and Suzanne's son who's now a teenager all the connections in this human tangle tend to be negative suspicion and paranoia Renoir once came down to stay at the Jazz during this period but yet to leave early he said because of a black avarice that reigns here you what's happening with these paintings well we've reached the real sedan style mature Suzanne this Titanic figure in art history how do you make modern art that is at the same time like the old masters that holds together and has an impact for the ages not just for the moment that's the aim will he achieve it that's the question he doesn't know he's always racked with doubts this is a portrait of Autons from the 1880s here's another from the same time she's hardly there in either as a personality both are still very moving emotionally it's because of the tenderness it's a dissociated thing one state makes up for another the schematic anonymous cipher of a figure emotionless the loose paint nuanced melting delicate tender conveying emotion instead it's still Impressionism but in a way that's solid as well as atmospheric it's a mixture of Monet's darting observant alertness to light and color in nature mayonnaise patterned arrangements cor BAE's roughness and frankness with the physical stuff of paint a mixture of all that into a slowly built up carefully ordered arrangement his art is composed and ordered but he's even more eccentric than when he was young he's a rebel against anything established he suddenly becomes a devout Catholic he goes to the mass every Sunday the cathedral pays careful attention to every word of the sermon that has changed ready for the beggars outside says I want to share in what it was like to be in the Middle Ages this painting is the most revolutionary type of art has ever been but he suddenly becomes politically conservative he won't tolerate any left-wing views being expressed even if it's people who support his art and the work of the artists that he used to like he says the supporters of Impressionism are only intellectuals a type you can't stand you can't stand anyone who's only clever he spends years being driven mad by not getting any success and then when he gets it drives him mad too in 1886 one of the dealers of the Impressionists puts on a show of sedan in Paris a few of the paintings sell to writers and poets de gar and Renoir draw lots to see who will get the best steel lives now there's a stream of articles in the papers the former idiotic shocker has become a cult figure it's a tiny cult only artists and a few writers the general audience still thinks as an is merde meanwhile the cultists go on pilgrimages to X to watch him work to work with him and bring back reports of his conversations tells them he's looking at Prusa here's a picture by Pusa he's a classicist from the 17th century he paints idealized scenes of nature of biblical meanings or meanings from classical culture in Suzanne's time salon art pays a full tummy to this kind of thing trivializing its greatness with salon sweetness the salon hate says Anne but says Anne wants to do something that really will connect the high Renaissance tradition of creating a marvelous illusion of reality done wholly in the studio using old master trickery he wants to connect that with the sensations he experiences out in the marvelous raw reality of nature I want to redo Impressionism after Pusan he says or redo Pusan after nature comes to the same thing says and interest in Pusan is an interesting solidity Courbet who says and also a Meyers is interested in that too but for Suzanne who has the lesson of money as well as corbeil solidity must be connected to its opposite the fleeting the fugitive the changeable and the ephemeral solidity in Suzanne as a result of a patchwork of painterly equivalence forces and sensations the richness is that each unit is abstract that means being real is connected to being abstract this sounds confusing because we're used to thinking of reality as something out there that's opposed to ideas in fact reality is an idea we don't know what's out there we're always coming up with different ideas for it Suzanne is building scenes based on feeling observation and the material stuff that he's working with the canvas the paint how can he get all this to be powerful to hold together that's why there's transparency in Suzanne as well as solidity it still lives are so obviously artificially posed so concocted he doesn't hide how they're constructed he lets the scenes show jars and fruits and tables and tablecloths are tipped up or angled in an unreal way he actually balanced the objects and upturned coins are used artificial fruit instead of real ones the scale of things is unreal the pair is impossibly huge or impossibly small this is the idea now that in the effort to be real arts will always be an invention constructed new from nothing Suzanne did about two hundred paintings of bathers they range from small like this it's a very large in art now we've got used to mysteries being explained by a lot of mysterious chat so they're not really explained at all we forget why we were interested in the first place so we're used to not seriously questioning art anymore it seems almost embarrassing to have to ask just why are there distortions incident the answer is that the contours of objects are pressurized by a sense of pattern or design that builds up as Suzanne is working they're not distorted because Suzanne is mad which he wasn't or because he's obsessive or anxious which he certainly was but because of the demands of the painting he sees that it gets better as a painting if the contours keep getting reworked as he keeps refined in the rhythm of the painting re finding the structure and the order this makes sense as patches they have a pictorial logic and beauty it's an abstract logic the figures become so distorted that like trolls the feeling is that the paintings real beauty is abstract like a parallel world says and models for the bathers paintings her early drawings had done as an art students or else photos had acquired or drawings of old masters in the Louvre that he saw in his regular trips back to Paris they were entirely products of his imagination he never did them from real people it stand for hours at the Louvre with Michelangelo slaves drawing them and then he'd go back to the studio and process the results into his bathers paintings or he'd go upstairs and draw renewed by Rubens anything voluptuous as long as it wasn't actually breathing why not have the lovely live models in the studio after all he could afford it he said to Renoir women models frightened me the sluts they're always watching you trying to catch off your guard the end of the 19th century MANET and corbeil are long dead Monet is a millionaire Suzanne has to sell all the Jaster blue foam for legal reasons he buys land just outside X and has a studio built on it he paints there but lives in a little flat in town every day more or less for the last four years of his life Susanne left his flat annex and came to the studio at the top of these stairs he then worked for the rest of the day either in the studio or in the countryside surrounding it the first session of the day's work began at 6:00 in the morning and went through without a break until 10:30 yes lunch at 11:00 works through for the rest of the day and then walks back to town has dinner and sleeps in his flat in the loo Goolagong he never dated his paintings or titled them or in most cases signed them he just worked on them and left them lying around in fields and came back later for them if you remembered one day's out painting a few hundred yards from the studio and he gets caught in a storm he already has bronchitis diabetes he's weak he's old beyond this sixty-six years it continues to work and then soaked to the skin he collapses he's found there a few hours later by some men who returned him on the back of a laundry cart to his flat in X he's got pneumonia he's bedridden for ten days there's only him and the housekeeper in the place and the doctor Autons and Paul are in Paris housekeeper sends them a telegram that they arrive too late Suzanne dies alone upstairs in this house 7:00 in the morning on the 23rd of October 1906 what we're offered with Suzanne is anxious restlessness forever trying to achieve a name as opposed to with money a confident celebration of something fantastic or with man a suave intelligent picture of modern life or Korb a solid picture of ordinary life I cannot attain the intensity that unfolds before me says an wrote all the ideas of the other artists flow into what Suzanne does but it says and difficulty that sticks for modern art it becomes the fuel for all modern arts future developments so the two hours are nearly over the Impressionists were all dead before Impressionism became truly popular now it's so loved seems too easy habits familiarity being saturated with Impressionism these all make us not really see Impressionism then when it's woken up for us its intensity is a challenge successful trendy art today refers to the aggressive relationship to the audience that art in following Impressionism lead always had it does that referring even though the art world now is no longer thought of as a place of genuine rebellion we have sanctified rebellion instead what you gain from today's type of OnGuard ISM a type of art that says you don't have to have anything visually sophisticated you don't have to be a nice feet to get it you don't have to cock your head on one side and squint and marvel at a bit of green next a bit of blue what you gain is pop glamour the popular avant-gardist circus of now is a magic act even more so when you have the illusion that you could do it yourself whether it's pop death or pop politics it's about creativity and invention in a kind of jokey slogan izing relationship to what the genuine avant-garde of the past has left us what you lose is the richness that makes Impressionism z' niceness not superficial and therefore something that can easily be dispensed with but profound so that's the challenge of this art of the nice the amusing institutionalized infant arity of today's art versus Impressionism x' blazing candor making a structure and analyzing the making of a structure waking you up to pleasure how it works to the meaning of pleasure I think that's everything that art can do goodnight you