In the 19th century, the world was transformed by a powerful idea.
A belief amongst Europeans that their civilisation alone represented
the pinnacle of human progress.
It was an idea driven by the modernising forces of science
and industry.
Artists tried to make sense of it all.
The exhilarating dreams of a brighter world...
..the nightmares about where it might lead,
and the real impact of progress on ordinary human beings.
As the frontiers of European civilisation advanced,
cultures across the world were either decimated...
..or learned to adapt and survive.
Some artists fled the forces of modernisation by turning
to so-called primitive cultures.
Others sought a primal energy that they believed was lacking
in the industrial world.
For me, as a historian of empire,
art is key to help us understand these profound tensions between
the idea of inevitable progress and the fear of what it might cost.
Tensions that helped shape the world of the 19th century
and foreshadowed the catastrophe to come.
In the 18th century man learned to harness the power of nature
in radical new ways.
In the end, virtually no civilisation on Earth
would remain untouched by the changes.
The Industrial Revolution first emerged in the English Midlands.
Its most potent symbol was a new kind of architecture...
..the factory.
This cotton mill, hidden away in the Derbyshire countryside,
was the world's very first fully fledged modern factory.
It was built in the 1770s by the entrepreneur Richard Arkwright
and it was designed around his greatest invention -
the water frame.
A machine that used the power of flowing water to drive looms
that produced cotton yarn cheaper and faster than anybody ever had.
That makes this factory the birthplace of mass production.
Here, industry forced nature to bow before the ambitions of mankind.
But from now on, industry would also demand that human beings submit
to the needs of the machine...
..working in shifts around the clock.
Arkwright was so proud of his cotton mill he had it painted
by the artist Joseph Wright of Derby,
in an apparently idyllic, deceptively peaceful landscape.
There's no hint here of the whirling,
clanking machines and the sheer relentless energy of the coming age.
Yet Wright the artist was intrigued by the changing world around him,
though as much by the new science and technology
as their effects on humanity.
What really fascinated Wright of Derby was not all the machinery
and the hard labour of the Industrial Revolution,
but the ideas that drove it.
And these were the great ideas of the Enlightenment -
a faith in reason and in scientific method,
an unquenchable thirst for knowledge
and an unshakeable belief in progress.
It was this idea - that science believed it was creating
a brave new world -
that lay at the heart of one of Wright's most celebrated paintings.
A travelling scientist has placed a bird in a glass bell jar
and begun to pump out the air.
Deprived of oxygen, the bird begins to suffocate.
The onlookers respond with a mix of fascination and horror.
This is science as the new religion,
with the power over life itself.
But Wright also hints at the great fear of the age -
that science, the machine, and progress all come at a cost.
Would those who dared to stand in the way of progress be sacrificed,
like the bird in the air pump?
As the 18th century drew to a close,
one momentous event would mark the start of a new zealous export of
Enlightenment ideas to other cultures.
In the summer of 1798, a French army,
led by Napoleon Bonaparte, invaded Egypt.
In military terms, Napoleon's objectives were clear -
to gain strategic advantage over the British
and expand France's imperial ambitions.
But the invasion of this ancient land was about much more
than just military strategy.
Many Europeans regarded Egypt as the birthplace of civilisation.
They believed that ideas that had first been nurtured here under
the pharaohs had been passed down, through ancient Greece,
through the Roman Empire, through the Renaissance,
all the way down to modern Enlightenment France.
So by invading Egypt,
Napoleon was leading France back to the source of civilisation.
To uncover the secrets of ancient Egypt,
Napoleon brought with him 167 of France's most brilliant scientists,
mathematicians, engineers and artists.
They set about studying every aspect of the country they'd conquered,
especially the ancient ruins that lay half-buried beneath the sand.
They would publish their findings in a monumental multivolume work -
The Description Of Egypt.
It documented this lost world
and its as-yet-undeciphered hieroglyphics
for the tantalisation of the West.
Napoleon's team of experts also fuelled an archaeological race
to unearth the treasures of the ancient world.
Many of those treasures ended up in the new museums of Europe
and North America.
Displayed in the Enlightenment spirit of learning,
for the betterment of a wider public.
In the capitals of Europe,
Napoleon's mission spawned a new fascination
with the art of ancient Egypt.
But Napoleon's invasion had had another purpose -
not only to uncover the secrets of ancient Egypt, but also to impose
European civilisation on the living, contemporary Egypt.
Armed with a library of books and a printing press,
Napoleon wanted to re-educate an Islamic world that Europeans
had long seen as the enemy,
a civilisation they considered to have lost its way.
Ultimately, Napoleon's occupation would fail
at the hands of the British.
But, in a curious twist,
Europeans became increasingly obsessed with the very culture
Napoleon had tried to change.
Or more accurately, their imagined fantasy of what that culture was.
Soon artists began to travel throughout the Islamic world
to paint the exotic places and people they encountered.
This is the painting that inspired an entire genre of 19th century
European art - Orientalism.
It's the work of the French artist Eugene Delacroix
who painted it in the 1830s,
after he'd actually gone on a visit to Algeria,
which had recently been conquered and colonised by France.
And this is the first real serious attempt
to portray ordinary life in the Islamic world.
But like many of the Orientalist paintings that were to follow,
not everything about this is what it seems.
Now, Delacroix claimed to have based the composition
on a visit he'd made to an Arab household in Algeria,
but it would've been extremely unusual for a male stranger
to given access to the women of an Arab household,
so there's every chance that these women are in fact Jewish.
And there are other elements of this painting
which were either fabricated or embroidered by Delacroix.
So the painting was completed in Paris using exotic costumes,
and the models are Parisian models.
And this figure of the black servant or perhaps black slave
was of Delacroix's invention.
So what seems like a real scene is in fact a Parisian revelry
of a supposed exotic sensuous world that didn't exist in Europe.
Yet in Delacroix's gifted hands,
there is a subtlety of shade and colour that was rarely achieved
by the generation of Orientalist painters he inspired.
Many Orientalists invented scenes that revelled in the decadence
and despotism that Europeans considered to be oriental qualities.
Concubines languishing in hidden harems,
naked female slaves for sale in busy markets.
Orientalist themes became so popular that Ingres,
master of the classical nude,
set one of his greatest works in an imagined women's bathhouse,
even though he'd never been to the Middle East.
These were European fantasies,
and they suggest a desire to escape the turmoil of life
in industrial Europe.
As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace,
Europe's cities began to change beyond all recognition.
To begin with,
few saw the emerging factory landscapes
as a worthy subject for art.
But the British painter Turner did.
In his view of Dudley, in England's industrial heartland,
he juxtaposed the old town on the hill,
its ruined castle and church steeple,
symbols of tradition and faith...
..with the blazing furnaces and busy canals of the modern age.
The great thinker and art critic John Ruskin saw in the picture
an indictment of how the old way of life was being destroyed
by the factory and the machine.
Because as manufacturing cities mushroomed in size,
they became a social disaster...
..overcrowded and rife with poverty and disease.
This was the human cost of mechanisation.
STEAM WHISTLE BLOWS
In America, the frontiers of progress
pushed inexorably westwards,
into territory as yet unspoiled by industry.
The United States was a young country,
forged, like France, out of revolutionary
and Enlightenment idealism.
To its pioneers, the entire American wilderness, from East to West,
seemed like virgin territory.
Artists translated these vast landscapes onto canvas
and filled them with divine light.
They conveyed the idea that God himself blessed not only the land
but also the new nation being forged from it.
The great pioneer of American landscape art was the British-born
Thomas Cole.
Thomas Cole regarded the American landscape as being what he himself
called "The undefiled work of gods".
In this young country that just didn't have what Europeans
recognised as a history,
mountains and canyons and waterfalls were to replace
the classical ruins so beloved of European landscape artists.
In America, natural history was to stand in for history itself.
In his landscapes,
Cole often included America's indigenous peoples.
But they are invariably dwarfed by the vastness of the scene,
as though they themselves are merely features of the natural world.
The embodiment of the Enlightenment idea of the noble savage -
an idealised, uncorrupted people,
living a pure life, connected to nature.
But underpinning Cole's work
was a fear that the American wilderness and
its inhabitants would inevitably be tamed, even destroyed,
in the process of creating a new nation.
In his masterpiece, an allegory of civilisation in five paintings,
Cole fused landscape with an imagined history,
to challenge mainstream ideas about America's future.
These five paintings tell an epic story,
the story of the rise and fall of a great civilisation.
And they're influenced by a historical theory
that saw the past as an endless cycle of rises and falls,
and that was popular in the 19th century.
It begins with what Thomas Cole called The Savage State.
This is a primordial Earth.
There's a hunter chasing a stag across the landscape.
In the background is his village,
which is a cluster of animal-skin tents,
which look almost exactly like the tepees of the Plain's Indians.
And this supposedly savage state was the level of civilisation that many
Americans thought that the Native Americans have reached before
the arrival of Europeans.
But it's the next stage, The Arcadian, The Pastoral State,
that in many ways is Thomas Cole's ideal.
In this painting, mankind has discovered agriculture.
There's a farmer ploughing his field,
there's a shepherd with his flock.
And because food is now plentiful,
the men and the women of this society
have the chance to discover the arts.
There's music and there's dancing, there's poetry.
But there's also a hint of the direction of travel
in which this society is moving,
because on the beach is a longboat being constructed,
and the hint there is the men of this society
are going to go out into the world and forge an empire.
And centuries later, in the centrepiece,
literally the centrepiece of this series of paintings,
is The Consummation Of Empire.
This is mankind's greatest achievements.
There's classical architecture, there's great civic statues.
This is a society with fleets of ships engaged in trade and in war.
It's also a civilisation that has given birth to democracy.
And that's not led to a flowering of Republican values,
that democracy has been corrupted, Thomas Cole is telling us,
by the emperor,
the figure who's marching into his great city
ahead of a column of horses and elephants.
This is a demagogue who has sowed the seeds of the fall
of his civilisation.
The fourth painting, Destruction,
is the moment of the fall of an empire.
The city is being invaded.
We don't know who this army is,
they could be these forces of a stronger,
more morally virile Empire.
They could be the slaves of this empire,
who have risen up in revolution,
or they could be, this could be a civil war.
All of those eventualities are hinted at here.
But what is clear is that this society has brought its fall down
upon its own head, because of its own moral corruption.
What is missing from this city is nature.
All the trees have been expunged.
And in the final painting, centuries have passed.
This is Desolation.
From thousands of people,
we have a scene completely empty of human beings.
Nature has recolonised.
Course Of Empire isn't really about the classical world.
These paintings aren't about Rome in the fifth century.
They're about the United States of America
in the middle of the 19th.
Because Thomas Cole was one of many figures who believed
his society stood at the crossroads.
It would either stay true to its original founding principles
or become a commercial, industrial, urbanised society,
and one that would expand on a continental scale.
And perhaps not surprisingly,
Thomas Cole, the painter of landscapes,
the painter of nature,
also profoundly believed that any society that lost touch with nature
also lost its moral compass.
But many did not believe, like Cole, in the cyclical nature of history.
In fact, by the mid 19th century,
most white Americans believed they had what became known
as a "manifest destiny..."
..to take what they saw as their superior civilisation
to the furthest edge of the continent.
From the 1830s it became official US policy to drive Native Americans
from their traditional lands and into poorer, harsher environments.
Those who resisted were deliberately starved, hounded out or massacred.
One artist more than any other made it his life's work to record those
disappearing cultures...
..George Catlin.
Over the course of five trips to what was then the western frontier,
Catlin met and painted the portraits
of hundreds of Native American men and women.
Together they formed a unique collection that Catlin called
The Indian Gallery.
He would tour them around the country and later around the world.
George Catlin was by no means indifferent to the sufferings of
the people whose faces appear in these paintings.
And unlike some artists,
he went out of his way to accurately name his sitters.
These are individuals, they're not types.
And through his art, Catlin demonstrated to anyone
who cared to look that there were numerous
different distinct Native American nations,
all of them with their own traditions and cultures
and all of them under threat,
as the United States pushed ever westwards.
But Catlin didn't produce these paintings in order to take part
in some campaign to save the Native Americans,
as we might like to think.
Catlin accepted that these people were, as he said,
"Doomed and must perish".
Catlin's portraits have undoubtedly preserved a rich cultural record
for posterity. Yet for many Native Americans,
they are troubling, romanticised images of the vanishing Indian,
that Catlin put on display for white fee-paying audiences.
After all, there is another perspective -
the art of the Native Americans themselves.
Because even the nomadic Plains Indians recorded key events
on their portable belongings.
It was a traditional art form that began to show
the influence of European contact.
This image, painted onto an animal hide,
was produced by people of the Cheyenne nation.
It's a depiction of the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 -
one of the few major Native American victories
in the so-called Indian Wars.
And through artefacts like this,
the Native Americans recorded their plight
in their own artistic traditions,
and there are, inevitably, many more images of defeat than victory.
This is the work of people who were the victims,
not the beneficiaries, of manifest destiny.
This is art from the other side of the frontier,
art that records how the west was lost.
While George Catlin was trying to preserve the culture
of Native Americans on canvas,
on the far side of the world
another artist would take a very different view
of the indigenous people he met on the frontiers of empire.
In 1874, Gottfried Lindauer,
a Czech artist from the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
arrived in New Zealand, known to its original inhabitants as Aotearoa.
Lindauer arrived after decades of warfare,
in which the Maori had lost much of their land to the British.
The Czech painter suddenly found his skills much in demand,
producing portraits of Maori men and women.
To begin with, the portraits were commissioned by European settlers
eager to preserve a record of Maori culture for posterity.
They believed that the Maori, like the Native Americans,
were a dying race.
But the Maori didn't regard themselves as a doomed people,
and by the 1890s their population was on the increase
after decades of decline.
And they were absolutely determined to forge a new future in which
their culture, their traditions,
their language and the memories of their ancestors were all to be kept
alive and kept vibrant.
And one of the ways they did this was by co-opting the talents
of Gottfried Lindauer and commissioning him to paint
their portraits, but on terms dictated by them, to their tastes,
and according to how they wanted to be seen and to be remembered.
For Lindauer it didn't matter whether his commissions came from
Europeans or from the Maori elite.
He treated both as he would any paying customer.
Artistically, the style was always resolutely European.
But for his Maori patrons and their families,
Lindauer's paintings began to assume an entirely new level of meaning.
As a people who had always venerated their ancestors,
many Maori came to regard the portraits of Lindauer
not just as memorials to their ancestors,
but as almost living icons that kept their spirit alive in the present.
Now, today, Lindauer's portraits are scattered all over the world,
in museums and galleries, but some, including this one,
have remained within a single family,
passed down through the generations.
This is Te Rangiotu, a Maori chieftain
but also a successful businessman
who had the wealth and the foresight to commission
this portrait from Lindauer in 1884.
Now, what's really significant
is that when Lindauer was painting portraits
of Maori for European customers,
he tended to paint them in traditional costume,
but many Maori patrons who had their portrait painted by Lindauer
demanded that they be shown in a hybrid mixture of European
and traditional dress,
to show that they were people who could freely move
between the two cultures.
It's through this of Te Rangiotu,
adorned with the symbols of his status,
that his descendants feel they are still able to connect with their
illustrious ancestor.
His picture is given pride of place in the clan's meeting house,
a sacred space in Maori culture.
The traditional Maori meeting house is itself designed to embody
an ancestor, both spiritually and physically...
..from the head and the outstretched arms
to the backbone and the ribs.
Each of the semi-abstract designs and swirling patterns represents
specific qualities,
from courage and strength
to health and prosperity.
These patterns are mirrored in the most dynamic of all
the Maori art forms.
Ta Moko - the art of the tattoo.
Face and body tattoos link Maori not only with their ancestors,
but also with other cultures across the Pacific,
who practice it in different forms.
The Maori almost certainly brought it with them
when they first settled in
Aotearoa, New Zealand, over 700 years ago.
For centuries, Ta Moko carried specific cultural meanings.
They denoted social status or family connections,
and it's said that no two designs are ever alike.
While today, perhaps inevitably,
the designs of Ta Moko have been appropriated as a global fashion accessory,
for many Maori they've been re-claimed
as a highly visible symbol of cultural pride and identity.
Throughout the 19th century,
art in many forms was changed by the spreading
European cult of progress.
Not only on the furthest edges of Empire...
..but also in the capitals of Europe.
Here too, artists were being challenged by rapid social change
and by the emergence of new technology.
Like Lindauer's portraits,
it would transform the way human beings perceived themselves.
The age of the camera and the age of the photograph
began on the day Louis-Jacques Daguerre made an image
using his new daguerreotype process of a Parisian street.
Now, the exposure time for those early primitive cameras
was ten minutes,
far too slow to capture images of the people
and the horses and carriages rushing up and down the street.
But one man who stayed still long enough to have his shoes shined
became, as far as we know,
the first person ever to appear in a photograph.
What this picture doesn't reveal is the disastrous effects
of rapid industrialisation on the city -
the overcrowding, dirt and disease.
But thanks to an ambitious urban planner called Eugene Haussmann,
Paris was about to be transformed out of all recognition -
and the evolving art of photography would be there to capture it.
From the 1850s,
Charles Marville photographed the city's narrow medieval streets,
just as they and the communities who lived in them were being swept away.
They were replaced by Haussmann's grand, spacious boulevards
and lined with uniform terraced apartments.
The reborn city was Europe's acknowledged capital of culture
and it was the genius of another pioneer photographer,
known simply as Nadar,
to capture the celebrated figures of Parisian high society.
These were the world's first great portrait photographs,
each one documented with a realism no painter could ever achieve.
For a younger generation of Parisian artists,
the camera was both a challenge and an inspiration.
They'd turned their backs on the art establishment
and its obsessions with grand historical themes
and classical mythology.
What they wanted to paint was everyday modern life,
and rather than compete with the camera,
they set out to explore what the camera couldn't -
our human subjective experiences of the world
and how they're affected by light, colour and emotion.
The work of the artists who became known as the Impressionists
is so familiar to us today that we forget its original power to shock.
When Renoir painted a popular outdoor dance
that attracted crowds every Sunday,
he was celebrating modern life
and the new leisure time it made possible.
Compared with traditional Academy paintings,
his style would've seemed rough and incomplete.
But it is this impression of the effects of light
that has helped define our image of 19th century Paris.
Monet is best remembered for his natural landscapes.
But he was also fascinated by the modern city.
He painted Paris's first train station, the Gare Saint-Lazare,
filled with clouds of smoke.
Barely visible through the haze,
we glimpse the terraces of Haussmann's reinvented Paris.
The art of the Impressionists is today regarded
as endlessly and effortlessly optimistic,
a portrayal of France in a golden age of success and self-confidence.
And it is true that the Impressionists did love to paint
the Paris middle-class at play,
picnicking in the parks and boating on the lakes,
but they also sometimes did try to capture that strange sense of
dislocation, of isolation,
that was a new and a troubling feature of the modern city.
In Caillebotte's vision of a rain-soaked Paris,
Haussmann's grand boulevards loom oppressively, as though distorted
by a camera's wide-angle lens.
Pedestrians hurry privately about their business.
Nobody makes eye contact with anybody else,
not even the couple walking towards us.
People are cocooned from each other,
not only by their umbrellas but by the anonymity of city life.
Even the bourgeois world of Paris at play had its shadowy side.
Mary Cassatt, an American artist living in Paris,
painted an elegantly dressed woman at the opera,
peering at the performance.
Yet she herself does not escape the attention of a distant male viewer,
as he stares through his opera glasses and studies her,
just as we, the viewer, study her.
It's a sly comment, perhaps,
on the objectifying male gaze that produced so many of 19th-century
art's female nudes.
Although Edgar Degas came from a bourgeois background,
the son of a middle-class banker,
he focused increasingly on those alienated by modern society.
In Absinthe, he paints two dishevelled figures in a cafe,
their lives apparently destroyed by the infamous drink of the title.
They sit side by side,
yet are utterly disengaged from one another
and from the world that has rejected them.
But it is one of Impressionism's most enigmatic works
that most powerfully encapsulates
the paradox at the heart of the city.
A Bar At The Folies-Bergere by Edouard Manet from 1882.
This is a glimpse into the glamorous, glittering world
of Parisian high society,
but it's not a world that we get to see directly.
We only see it in reflection on a mirror behind a bar.
And from the moment this painting was put on display,
it was seen as controversial.
And at the centre of the controversy is the figure at the centre of
the painting, the barmaid.
Because there she is in the Folies-Bergere,
the most decadent, the most glamorous,
the most joyous cabaret nightclub in Paris,
and yet she has an expression that is anything but joyous.
It's said to be the face of indifference
or an expression of alienation.
And the fact that Manet has included in the painting
all of these luxury goods - the champagne,
the very expensive imported beer, and this bowl of oranges -
might have been his way of hinting
that she herself might be a commodity that's for sale.
That this is a young woman who works as a prostitute
as well as selling drinks.
And the reflection adds to the confusion
because her reflection isn't where we think it should be,
it's off to the right.
And in her reflection she's not looking at us,
she's talking and leaning into this man in a top hat.
He is a customer.
But I think everything in this painting is telling us
that he's a man who's after more than just a round of drinks.
This is a masterclass in ambiguity.
This is a painting that is a reflection,
in more than just one sense,
of a Paris that is both real and unreal,
a consumer society in which everything is for sale,
a city that is a constructed reality that doesn't bear close scrutiny.
In 1889, on the centenary of the French Revolution,
Paris staged the Exposition Universelle,
a celebration of French culture and civilisation.
The centrepiece of the exposition was an enormous new monument
to industrial power.
Designed to showcase French engineering...
..it was the tallest structure ever created by the hand of man,
and would be for another 40 years.
The exposition also celebrated France's expanding empire
with a number of colonial pavilions.
People from Asia and Africa were displayed to the public
in mock villages...
..along with their art...
..and their architecture.
In the heart of the capital,
the cultures of colonial peoples were here being contrasted
with the assumed superiority of France.
In the view of the time, it was the sophistication
of French civilisation,
with its links back through the Enlightenment,
the Renaissance and to the classical world,
that gave France the right
to rule over the supposedly primitive peoples of her empire.
And so the organisers of the Exposition Universelle
imagined that visitors who came here
would revel at the sight of members of these supposedly
lower races on display,
and that they'd do so confident in the belief
that they were be guided by France and her civilising mission.
What visitors were not supposed to do was to see in the art
and the culture of Africa and Asia the potential for an escape
FROM Europe and FROM Western civilisation.
And yet that is exactly the view taken by an artist
who was one of the 28 million people
who passed under the Eiffel Tower and entered
the exposition in the summer of 1889.
His name was Paul Gauguin,
a former city trader who had lost it all in the financial crash of 1882.
He'd grown to hate the stifling conventions of bourgeois society.
He wanted to leave it all behind
and find somewhere not yet tainted by
the artificiality of modern life.
The restless Gauguin had already sought escape
in the quiet backwaters of France and Martinique.
But each time he had returned to Paris.
Now, after visiting the exposition and seeing its colonial villages,
Gauguin decided that in order to find paradise,
he should head for the South Pacific,
for the island of Tahiti.
As Gauguin left, he wrote to a friend,
"The European Gauguin has ceased to exist."
To him, Tahiti represented an almost mythical Eden.
The first French explorers who had arrived in the 1760s regarded
the people they found there as the most content on earth.
They seemed, to the European imagination,
to be living proof of the idea of the noble savage -
a simple people with an unspoiled way of life.
But that is not the Tahiti Gauguin found.
By the time Gauguin arrived in Tahiti in 1891,
this was one of the most tragic places in the world.
Because while a tiny local elite had done rather well
from the arrival of Europeans,
the Tahitian people had been devastated
by war, disease and alcohol.
The population was a fraction of what it had been
and the missionaries had done their absolute best
to stamp out the local culture and religion.
Tahiti was no longer a romanticised alternative
to European civilisation,
it was a classic case study of what European civilisation could do
to other societies.
Once he got away from the capital, Papeete,
Gauguin discovered that some parts of the old legend still survived.
He found beauty in the landscape...
..and in the villages,
proof of the island's reputation for the easy availability of women.
Gauguin quickly found himself a local mistress,
a girl of around 13, called Teha'amana,
who became his model and his muse.
There are many reasons to not like Paul Gauguin.
He was a man who spent much of his life wallowing in self pity
or else engaged in an endless campaign of self-promotion.
And the relationships that he had with young Tahitian girls
is something that we today find deeply disturbing.
And yet, for all his faults,
the art that he produced here on the islands of the Pacific was radical,
vivid and stunningly beautiful.
The way Gauguin used solid blocks of colour was something new in art.
And these images were no mere European fantasy version
of a carefree paradise.
There is melancholy and loss here.
Gauguin's paintings of the Tahitians were, in one sense,
an honest account of the condition in which he found them...
..a people in the latter stages of contamination
by the civilising mission,
a people consumed by the European society Gauguin
thought he had left behind.
We should not forget that Gauguin was a vocal critic
of French colonialism in Tahiti,
and that one particular aspect of the way he saw himself
made his view of civilisation more complex
than he's normally given credit for.
Like most Europeans, he saw the world as being divided
between those who lived civilised, somewhat artificial lives
and those who had remained in a natural, savage state.
But he believed he himself was mixed race -
French-Peruvian but also partly Incan.
And those two states, the natural and the savage,
existed within him, literally in his blood.
So in Tahiti he wasn't just looking for a lost island paradise,
he was searching for a lost part of himself.
But Gauguin's last great work suggests that his search
for identity and meaning was never resolved.
On a vast canvas,
a row of Polynesian women represent the universal cycle of life,
from birth to old age.
Death and the beyond are represented by a blue idol.
It's a Gauguin invention,
though based on his fascination with the myths of the lost Tahitian past.
In trying to find an antidote to modern life,
Gauguin had turned to the art and culture
of a civilisation most Europeans
would have labelled primitive.
Yet, in the end, perhaps he concluded that there are no answers
to the universal questions about the meaning of life and death.
At the turn of the 20th century,
Europeans did not generally consider the cultural artefacts of the
so-called primitive peoples to be art.
Yet they were fascinated by these objects and by the fashionable ideas
about race and savagery that were projected onto them.
Pablo Picasso deeply admired Gauguin's explorations
of non-European art.
But, unlike Gauguin,
Picasso was never interested in escaping from the modern world.
For him, primitive art would be a catalyst,
inspiring him to shatter the conventions of the past.
In 1907, Picasso visited the Trocadero in Paris,
where he came face-to-face with a display of objects and masks
from the Pacific Islands and Africa.
The exact date of that visit to the Trocadero is unknown,
but then the whole affair has become shrouded in mythology,
most of it of Picasso's own making.
But it is thought that this mask might have been one of the ones
that Picasso saw.
It was made by the Fang people of Gabon,
but it seems that Picasso had no real deep interest
in its cultural meaning or its ritual function.
What he was interested in was their potential for his art.
And that visit to the Trocadero
has become one of the most famous moments
in the story of modern art,
because it was at that moment that Picasso found -
and from outside of Europe -
the inspiration and the expressive power that would transform
his paintings and revolutionise modern art.
Picasso described the masks he'd seen as weapons.
They had the power, whether supernatural or psychological,
to exorcise unwanted spirits.
Picasso tried to incorporate this new power into his work,
and created one of art's masterpieces.
The curtain is drawn back on a brothel scene.
We see five naked prostitutes waiting for clients.
And though there was a long-established tradition of female
nudes in Western art, these are unlike any nudes ever seen before.
What made this picture particularly shocking and revolutionary
were the images Picasso combined within it.
The faces of the three women to the left are believed to be derived
from archaic Iberian sculpture.
But the two women on the right, their fractured, irregular,
distorted faces are based on the art of Africa,
on tribal African masks that Picasso had encountered in Paris.
Now, there's a long debate about the extent to which Picasso
was influenced by African art,
and he muddied the waters considerably by making a series
of completely contradictory statements.
But you can see that Picasso, consciously and subconsciously,
by using African art,
was bringing into his paintings ideas about Africa
that were current in Europe at the time.
He was a product of his time, like anybody else,
and he lived in an age when Africa was the focus
of huge amounts of speculation and debate
about the meaning of savagery and civilisation,
of us and them, ideas about race, ideas about exoticism,
ideas about eroticism.
So by placing the faces of African masks onto prostitutes,
Picasso was detonating two powerful sets of ideas
about race and savagery,
civilisation, empire,
with older ideas about female sexuality and prostitution.
In one painting, Picasso had turned Western ideas about art
on their head.
He sought to express not simply aesthetic beauty, but frightening,
primal feelings about sex, violence and even death.
And that worked partly because of the masks' associations
in the minds of those who first saw this painting
with civilisations they considered primitive.
It was the apparent threat of these objects that made them so shocking,
and the perceived barbarism of the cultures that produced them,
which reinforced the assumed superiority of European culture.
And so, when Europe went to war in July in 1914,
few ordinary people questioned
the prevailing view of Western civilisation
as sophisticated, rational and humane.
Yet the horror that was unleashed by new weapons that could slaughter
human beings on an unprecedented scale was a product of the same
Industrial Revolution that had forged the railways
and built the Eiffel Tower.
Now it seemed Europeans were reduced to the same
irrational barbarism...
..that they'd convinced themselves was the hallmark of other,
supposedly primitive, peoples.
In the German trenches of the First World War
was an artist who perhaps more than any other
created a graphic visual record of the new barbarism.
Otto Dix was one of the millions of young European men who
enthusiastically rushed to enlist at the outbreak of fighting in 1914,
and he went on to spend three years in the mud and the slime of the
trenches, serving on both the Western and the Eastern fronts.
At one point, he served in a machine gun unit,
wielding the ultimate industrial weapon,
the literal fusion of the gun and the machine.
And throughout all of this, Otto Dix produced sketches, hundreds of them,
that graphically recorded what these new weapons did
to the flesh and the bone of his doomed generation.
Dix drew the broken faces, the mud and the misery.
He chronicled how industrial warfare had transformed the soldier
from warrior to victim.
It is perhaps fitting that it was a German artist who most clearly
captured the horror of industrial warfare.
After all, Germany did not have the consolation of victory
behind which to conceal the inhumanity that had been unleashed.
Her war cemeteries, like the art of Otto Dix,
are austere, frank and bleak.
In Dix's work, a new type of mask took root in European art -
the gas mask...
..the icon of total war,
otherworldly, hypermodern.
This was the face of Europe's own home-grown barbarism.
But these masked faces, haunting and visceral though they are,
were in a sense merely preparatory sketches for Otto Dix's definitive
statement on war and on where European progress had led.
It's a work that turns another European artistic tradition,
the religious triptych, completely on its head.
In the far panel, the soldiers are marching onto the battlefield,
through the smoke.
And in the panel opposite it, we can see the results of that battle.
A soldier is dragging a wounded comrade off the battlefield
through the broken bodies.
But that soldier is Otto Dix himself,
his face utterly traumatised.
But it's the central panel that's the most powerful
and the most shocking.
This is the wasteland of the Western Front.
It is the great putrid scar of mud and decaying,
rotting flesh that's been cut across the face of Europe.
This skeletal figure leering over the battlefield
is a reference to the Crucifixion.
This is the work of a man who was trapped inside his own recurring nightmare.
Otto Dix and his generation had borne witness to these horrors,
but they'd also been witness to the death of the 19th century faith
in inevitable, unstoppable progress.
What they'd learned in the trenches was that savagery and barbarism
weren't external, to be found only in the colonies,
but inside all of us.
They had seen that industry and progress and the supposed triumph
of Enlightenment rationalism
did not guarantee the survival of civilisation.
And it was them,
the poets and the artists and the painters of the trenches,
who best understood what Europe had been through
and who best foresaw the horrors that lay ahead.
The Open University has produced a free poster
that explores the history of different civilisations
through artefacts.
To order your free copy, please call 0300 303 3553,
or go to the address on screen and follow the links
for the Open University.