By 1910, we see avant-garde experimentation all over Europe.
In 1900, it was largely centred in Paris, and forms
of experimentation in painting and sculpture were rippling out from there.
A whole new world of breaking of form, of new
colours, of new sculptural possibilities, moving
from the art of the human body that we see in Rodin,
to entirely abstract sculpture as well as painting.
Since the 1880s Rodin started to exhibit internationally.
This certainly spread out his very influential stance
as the major turn of the century sculpture for his time.
The remarkable plaster of the Monument to Balzac is the result of a long commission
by the Société des Gens de Lettres, a group of people representing French authors.
Rodin’s approach to the commission was first to engage himself
with the subject, but he didn't want the monument to resemble something realistic.
He really wanted to show the importance,
the strength of the full body of work
even more than the real body of the author.
You didn't have any books or sheets of papers or anything alluding to a writer.
You just had that huge, monumental shape, which was very far from what people were expecting.
So it is more of a scandal than a success
and Rodin will keep it in his studio and will not be cast during his lifetime
because it is not appropriate to what the Société was hoping for.
Paris in 1900 was really the epitome of modernity.
It held in 1900 the universal exposition, following on from the one in 1889.
With at its centre the Eiffel Tower.
And there was this sense of relentless innovation,
positivity, wealth, scientific discoveries
that translated directly into the innovation that art was taking.
Louis Anquetin’s night scene was painted not very far from here on L’Avenue de Clichy in 1887.
This was an area of Paris that was really at the border
between on the one side, the bourgeois quarters of Paris,
and on the other, the hill of Montmartre, where the community of artists lived.
The area played host to a whole range of artistic revolutions from the late 19th century,
from Neo-Impressionism to Fauvism and Cubism.
Anquetin depicts a bustling scene at night in the winter
in front of a butcher’s shop where people are congregating, buying their groceries after work.
It's a very daring picture because it has nothing really impressionistic or naturalistic about it.
Anquetin sort of simplifies the composition and uses a very pared down palette of these blues,
contrasting with the warmth, the yellows and the oranges of the light coming out of the shop.
This area around the Place de Clichy
was also the home of many artists, including Degas, but also the Van Gogh brothers.
But it was really Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec who was the artist that sort of embodied
the spirit of this place, frequenting its many cabarets, brothels, depicting the prostitutes,
the singers, the actors that were really part of the bustling life of this area of Paris.
And, of course, central to all of this was the Moulin Rouge.
The young Picasso also had a studio in this area and was acquainted
and influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Picasso first comes up from Barcelona to visit Paris
in 1900, goes back, but then in 1901 comes again at which point
the great dealer, Ambroise Vollard, gives him his first Paris exhibition.
And he prepares a show that is a sensation.
Vollard very cleverly asks a man named Coquiot, a critic, to write the catalog
of that first exhibition.
It's a brilliant essay, the first one in French on Picasso.
Picasso, by way of thanks, paints a portrait of Coquiot,
which is in the exhibition and which is perhaps his first great masterpiece.
Like Van Gogh, a generation earlier, Picasso arriving in
Paris is looking at everything, is meeting everyone he can.
He became increasingly intrigued by Gauguin, and you can see him absorbing
those influences and slowly embedding himself in the Paris art world.
Gertrude Stein was an American writer who lived on the rue de Fleurus
with her brother, Leo Stein, and a little bit later with her life partner, Alice Toklas.
And together they hosted one of the most avant-garde salons of the beginning of 20th century Paris.
And it's the place where allegedly Pablo Picasso was introduced to African sculpture.
And the story goes that Henri Matisse had just bought this little Vili
sculpture from Congo at essentially a sort of junk shop on the street nearby.
And he brings that sculpture back to Gertrude Stein, and sort of puts it in Picasso's lap.
And Picasso sort of describes that moment over and over again as this realisation
of the power of non-Western art and what he could do with it.
So it was in that summer in Collioure in 1905, where Derain and Matisse go together to work, bathed
in Mediterranean sunlight and create works of art using colour to a sort of new expressionist form.
They're very much influenced by the work of Gauguin,
who used colour, and particularly the idea of juxtaposing sort of pure colours
next to one another to really make them vibrate, and they take that idea even further.
They bring that body of work back to Paris and it is shown at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, that autumn.
And the works are unlike anything that anybody seen before.
The critics that hated called them the Fauves, wild beasts, creating an art that is unreasonable,
overdone, pushing sensory experience way beyond naturalism and the way the world actually looks like.
André Derain’s ‘La Danse’
is really the seminal work of Fauvism and displays both this heightened use of colour,
creating a work that is sort of brighter and bolder than really had ever been seen before,
but also is centralising the shapes of its figures in a way that he thought
was analogous to the art of Africa and Oceania, of West Africa in particular.
If you look at one of the figures of ‘La Danse’,
the face of that figure is actually taken from the ‘Fang Mask’
that Derain had just acquired from his friend Maurice de Vlaminck, his first work of African art,
what he would have considered to be a primitive form of sculpture making.
The term primitivism is a very loaded term.
It's a term that was used throughout the 20th century to denote a perspective on non-Western culture
that was deeply problematic and that today is seen as profoundly controversial.
By the end of the 19th century, it grows to incorporate colonial notions
of inferiority, essentially, of what was non-Western, what was thought to come
from a sort of primal urge to create, which is, of course, ludicrous.
If you look at African art,
you know that these works are incredibly deliberate, incredibly sophisticated.
But that is not the understanding that the artists had at that time.
The Bateau-Lavoir was a headquarters to many artists,
including Georges Braque, Modigliani, but also Picasso, who moved here in 1904.
His studio, down a warren of many corridors and sheds, was very simple, comprising a bed,
an old wicker chair, a washbasin stove and was also the home of a tame white mouse.
It was here in 1906 that he painted ‘Nude combing her Hair’, a work
demonstrating his interest in simplified forms, very much influenced by the art of Cézanne,
but also of the ancient Iberian art which he saw at the Louvre.
By about 1906 Picasso was painting more and more unusual looking figures.
The forms were beginning to shatter.
There would be odd angles, odd fracturing of the form.
Both he and his friend Georges Braque realised that they did not have to commit themselves to naturalism.
Picasso was a great colourist as a painter.
One of the interesting things about cubism is that for several years
he sort of puts colour aside in favour of browns, blacks, greys.
And this allowed him to explore form.
A few years later, colour would begin to come back in, but that moment around 1907, 1908, 1909,
when colour diminishes, is the great moment of experimentation of early modern art.
What these Cubist artists are doing is really engaging with the way of
how do you represent the three dimensionality that a sculpture can have but on the flat surface.
In the ‘Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde’, how do you wrap around his body
to look at it from different angles, which is indebted to the work of Cézanne.
You can see the entirety of the object on the flat plane.
Simultaneous with Cubism,
other forms of radical art-making are emerging across Europe.
Most important, perhaps, is Abstraction, although there had been precedents for it.
Maybe the most important figure of the previous generation is Van Gogh, who liberated brushstroke
in his works, who became increasingly free and expressive in the way he used paint.
This had tremendous influence on artists who understood that if they pushed
it even further, they would break through from representation at all.
Moving from figuration, from works that could be identified as landscapes,
into big canvases where the forms are so rendered in terms
purely of colour and line that we cannot recognise forms any longer.
The period 1886 to 1914 marked an era of intense artistic experimentation,
very much fostered by the interconnectivity between European cities
- between Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Barcelona and Berlin.
But the outbreak of the First World War, and the chaos that ensued, severed
those relationships and brought this period of artistic experimentation to an end.
After four years of war, Europe looked very different.
Empires, nations and even peoples had been destroyed.
And yet the ideas developed after Impressionism would survive
and come to define modern art in the 20th century.