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APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

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We live in a confessional age.

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This is the first time in my life

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I've ever told anyone how I'm feeling.

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But the confessional is now a different kind of box.

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Heartbroken.

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I'm going to lose everyone.

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Exposure to the max.

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Privacy, so over.

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How many artists are here from that show?

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I'm here. I'm drunk, but I don't care.

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I couldn't give a BLEEP! about it.

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It's no surprise that sooner or later,

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the long tradition of self-portraiture

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would arrive at this.

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There's no way I want this BLEEP! mic on me.

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An archaeology of sexual disaster presenting itself as art.

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Here, then, is the shrine of celebrity squalor.

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Enthroned like a medieval relic.

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Instead of holy toenails, the unholy, soiled sheets.

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Condoms embalmed.

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Half-squeezed lubricants

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made venerable for modern-art pilgrims.

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Tracey Emin's My Bed ought to be exactly what I most hate

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and despise about some kinds of contemporary art.

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The orgy of personal self-indulgence,

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the assumption that art can really be just a document

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of a broken life in which we ought to be interested.

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The confusion of exhibitionism with an exhibition.

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And yet there is something to it.

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There is something odd, there is something magnetic. I don't deny it.

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In its little corner here, simultaneously miserable

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and then glorious at the same time,

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it does kind of exude a certain smelly power.

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That power comes from the drama at the heart of every self-portrait.

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The passion play between, "Check me out. Aren't I something?"

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And, "Look at me. What a mess."

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When the artists look at themselves in the mirror,

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the mirror becomes the site of a battle between vanity and verity.

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Flattery and truth.

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The artworks they make are courageous moments of candour

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that are reports from this drama of the ego.

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Self-portraiture is one of the most compelling, thrilling,

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disturbing, unsettling, exhilarating

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forms of portraiture there is.

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It has manifold ways of expressing

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the sense of the creative self.

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And what it does is not just introduce you

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to the abyss of the artistic soul,

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it says something to us about our own relationship with it.

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It's a document not just of the boiling creative mind,

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but of the human condition.

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In the medieval world, it would have been unseemly for artists

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to offer their art as a product of individual talent.

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Through the Christian centuries, the most prolific artist was anonymous.

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There was only one creator, God, the Almighty.

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And the artist worked for the glory of the Church,

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not for the glory of himself.

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But in the mid 13th century,

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one Christian artist had the audacity to show his face.

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William de Brailes lived and worked in Oxford.

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It was a time when a market

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for lavishly-decorated sacred books arose.

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For the first time, those books

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could be owned by wealthy individuals

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and shown off as treasures.

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And one of the most spectacular came from the hand of de Brailes.

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It was a book of psalms he made around 1240.

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And so proud was he that among these pages,

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he felt bold enough to proclaim his authorship.

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And he did it with his face.

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It's really very, very early,

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the 13th century, that we see the face of an artist

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and we know who that artist is.

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And where William de Brailes has painted his own portrait

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is in a climatic moment, the last judgment.

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So he wants to be there, right at the heart of the drama,

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and, in case we haven't figured out who this little figure is,

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his advertising logo is painted in at the end.

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"William de Brailes me fecit."

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William de Brailes did this. This is me.

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This is a William de Brailes' fully-authorised,

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there-shall-be-no-imitations production.

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And what a production it is.

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De Brailes' skill shines through in these golden leaves.

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Stories of the Bible brought to life in his unique style,

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both ceremonious and playful.

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He was famous for pictures of demons

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wearing little kind of Roman wrestler loincloths

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with fringy, tasselly bits on.

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Fashion for fashionable demons.

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We always like those.

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And there's a wonderful picture of King David playing the harp.

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Remember, he's the author of all the Psalms.

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Like the good businessman artist he is,

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with a production line to promote,

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De Brailes wants to have it both ways.

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He wants to appear in his own work,

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but at the same time make a point

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that he is aware of the perils of arrogance.

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Look at the context in which it's portrayed. It's wonderful.

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He's not a hero, he's not the virtuoso artist.

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He's not some anticipation of the great Michelangelo.

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Just the opposite.

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He positions himself teetering above

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the vertiginous drop into the world of the damned.

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The damned are all these naked little figures cowering with terror

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because flying above them is the angel of the last judgment.

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And the angel with wings outstretched

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has his arms around two different things.

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One arm is holding a mighty sword

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which is about the whack the damned into the pit of hell.

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Guess what?

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He is also evidently the angel of all good artists,

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publishers and bookmakers,

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because his other arm is protecting de Brailes

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from falling down amidst the doomed.

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So I am after all a good Christian,

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and I'm making something which ultimately

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will propagate the light of the gospel.

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As long as Christian humility was a sovereign virtue for an artist,

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even an ambitious self-promoter like de Brailes has to

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smuggle himself into his work.

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300 years later,

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artists had less trouble squaring humility with self-portrayal.

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Even then, there were dangers.

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The first full self-portrait in England that we know of

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was made in a prison cell.

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But not in solitary confinement.

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In 1554, an elderly German artist named Gerlach Flicke found himself

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sharing a cell with a gentleman pirate.

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Gerlach Flicke had come to England in the wake of Holbein

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and other German successes,

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but this was a time of nervy rebellion and conspiracy

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and you could find yourself in the Tower for reasons

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you couldn't possibly understand,

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and that probably was the case for poor old Gerlach Flicke.

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As for the pirate, Henry Strangwish,

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he was here for doing what he did best, pirating.

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They were an odd couple to share this space.

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But whatever the reason that brought these two men together,

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from this moment came an absolutely exquisite work of art.

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As if staring from the little windows of their shared cell,

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the painter Flicke is on the left.

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And to his right - the buccaneer, Strangwish.

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This is one of the most extraordinary works of art ever seen, really.

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Not particularly in its quality, although it is very, very beautiful,

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but in its circumstances.

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Despite the fact they are in fear of their lives,

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the painter takes the most exquisite care

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to produce a beautiful, beautiful image of the two of them.

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It's also very striking that our first oil self-painting is not

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a solo act, it's a duet.

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It's about the company of each other in straitened circumstances.

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Technically, this is an extraordinary feat of fine motor control.

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My favourite passage is that each of them has a little attribute.

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The pirate is not only a pirate, folks, he's a musical pirate.

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He sings as he does "arrr, me hearties", he's the Red Rover.

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And he has a lute there, and the lute is perfectly painted.

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And then there is the pallet.

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There is everything that makes this slightly elderly German artist

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himself.

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His thumb, stuck through the hole in the pallet,

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and even the nail is beautifully painted here.

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But this enigmatic work gets even more intriguing

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with delicate inscriptions, painted in gold,

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directly above the heads of Flicke and Strangwish.

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Here's what the inscriptions say. And they are in two different moods.

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On the pirate's side, we've got gallows humour.

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"Hey, it's just prison, it's just hangmen,

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"just an executioner's block. Laugh it off, everybody."

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So it says this.

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"Strangwish, thus strangely depicted is.

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"One prisoner for th'other hath done this.

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"Gerlach hath garnished for his delight

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"the work you now see before your sight."

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The word "garnished" is a piece of prison slang for greasing

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the palm of a jailor - paying your way in prison to make life

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a little easier - a bit more food, a bit more walk around the Tower.

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So in some ways this suggests that the painter has painted this

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beautiful thing for the pirate, or for them all,

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to make life in prison just a bit more comfortable.

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But on the other side is the other mood, which is

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solemn and poignant and elegiac.

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And in Latin.

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This was the face of Flicke,

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when he was painter in the city of London.

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He had painted this from a mirror,

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so that his friends might have some remembrance of him after his death.

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So, despite the prison world,

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we have a sense actually of art, both as joke

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and as remembrance, in these two veins of humour, comedy and tragedy.

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Both men survived the Tower, but their time in jail left us with

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a marvel in which so much emotion is crammed into so minimal a space.

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But another painter, a century later, would need maximal space

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to carry the great weight of his outsized personality.

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Brimming with artistic flair, Isaac Fuller depicts himself

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as an erudite and virtuoso painter, but the eyes tell a deeper story.

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Isaac Fuller could never decide

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whether he wanted to be an entertainer or a high-minded artist.

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What he did know was after 1660,

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when Charles II was restored to the throne,

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an opportunity opened up to supply exactly the things which

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Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans had banished -

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the painted glorification of the King

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and enormous spectacular pictures in churches.

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And one of Fuller's early commissions could not have been better calculated

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to advertise himself as Mr Restoration.

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It was the job of redecorating the chapel of All Souls College, Oxford.

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He's not getting a little, tiny commission

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from some weenie podunk church at the back of beyond

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in some, you know, Blagwold-on-Pissmire

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in the countryside.

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No, it's All Souls College.

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And these are fragments of an enormous decorative scheme

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which would have covered All Souls Chapel.

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And these paintings were essentially a mighty

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and genuinely noble ambition.

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As he set to work, Fuller drew on everything

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he'd learned during his years of training on the Continent.

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And visions of the great European painters marched through his mind.

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You look at these figures from Fuller's programme for

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The Last Judgment and you see he wants to be the English Michelangelo.

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It's meant to express the power of the revival of Christian decoration.

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He's taking this essential idolisation of Michelangelo -

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and why not? - from his years in training in Paris

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with the great Francois Perrier.

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And he knows what he's supposed to do,

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that you need to have the immense power of the human form.

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There's a foot... What's the largest shoe size you can have,

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size 25 or something? There's a bloody enormous foot

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that's stepping over a ledge from this figure here,

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and everything is sort of huge and beefy and meaty.

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We've got acres of flying textile there

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in the same sort of colour that Michelangelo uses

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on the Sistine Chapel, this lovely delicate green.

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And the head is rather lovely.

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The head is very nice.

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But here, Fuller's talent didn't quite match his ambition.

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The problem is there is something catastrophically wrong

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going on at the shoulder. And indeed at the hip.

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It's all, kind of, apprenticeship

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in surgical reattachment which is not actually going to pass the exams

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at the Royal College of Surgeons.

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So we have bits of muscles in different directions,

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so it doesn't really work.

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You have to BE Michelangelo in order to get the biceps right.

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This looks like an advertisement for a gym.

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If Fuller was aiming at posterity,

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his choice of materials wasn't going to help.

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He'd used oils directly on plaster and timber,

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so not long after they were completed,

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they started to degrade, leaving college with no choice

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but to have them painted over.

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I think wherever it was, on the ceiling,

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he's spending too much time on the ladder

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00:18:17,000 --> 00:18:21,000
and needed to get down and step back a bit and say,

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"That's gone really badly wrong!"

259
00:18:26,000 --> 00:18:27,000
And look what's happened to the knee!

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These fragments are all that survive.

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But there was nothing Fuller believed he couldn't do.

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A new kind of history painting, for instance.

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Not ancient history, but the history everyone was talking about -

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00:18:51,000 --> 00:18:55,000
the ripping yarn of Charles II's miraculous escape from Cromwell

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00:18:55,000 --> 00:19:00,000
after the Battle of Worcester was currently a Restoration hit.

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00:19:03,000 --> 00:19:08,000
And Fuller thought he was the man to bring this history to life.

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Painting as popular entertainment.

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But Fuller's canvases were not so much Classics as comics, writ large.

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So in this kind of extravagant showmanship, there was a danger.

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Well, the danger is when you make the King a character in a cartoon strip,

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you run very close to comedy.

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And not everyone saw the funny side.

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Do you not think that horse is looking a bit worried?

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Maybe he's worried that he has got two riders instead of one.

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"Didn't sign on for two bodies on my back," he says,

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or is he worried because the face of Charles II,

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00:19:56,000 --> 00:20:00,000
the great king, is undecided? Or is he worried that,

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00:20:00,000 --> 00:20:03,000
"I don't think this picture is working out

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00:20:03,000 --> 00:20:04,000
"the way it was supposed to?"

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We don't actually know where the Charles superhero pictures ended up.

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00:20:12,000 --> 00:20:15,000
But someone must've liked them because they survived

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00:20:15,000 --> 00:20:19,000
and turned up in the 18th century in a grand aristocratic estate.

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00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:26,000
But Fuller never succeeded in creating a new kind of popular,

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contemporary history painting.

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And in his disappointment, he sought solace in the taverns of London.

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00:20:36,000 --> 00:20:41,000
Spending his days decorating pubs with scenes of bacchanalian abandon,

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spending the proceeds drowning his sorrows.

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Yet even in his boozy period,

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there were moments of sober self-recognition,

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00:20:53,000 --> 00:20:59,000
and one of them produced a tour de force of self-portraiture.

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00:21:01,000 --> 00:21:05,000
It's a phenomenally engaging painting,

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00:21:05,000 --> 00:21:10,000
and it's full of a kind of self-advertisement that he belongs

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00:21:10,000 --> 00:21:14,000
to the most seriously considered tradition of art.

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It's extravagant, flamboyant. This is brilliantly painted.

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Wherever you look, you see a really brilliant,

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00:21:23,000 --> 00:21:26,000
technically-gifted painter.

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It's as though he has come off the stage,

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as though he is the star of Restoration comedy.

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It's larger-than-life, a good bit larger-than-life.

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00:21:35,000 --> 00:21:38,000
No artist, not even Anthony van Dyck,

301
00:21:38,000 --> 00:21:43,000
does an image of his face which is that much bigger than the real thing,

302
00:21:43,000 --> 00:21:45,000
and look how extravagantly he's dressed.

303
00:21:45,000 --> 00:21:51,000
That fantastic red velvet cap that I've never seen anywhere else in art,

304
00:21:51,000 --> 00:21:55,000
even in Dutch art, which has a very large hat department.

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00:21:55,000 --> 00:21:58,000
Down his shoulders comes this enormous waterfall

306
00:21:58,000 --> 00:22:01,000
of oxblood-red velvet

307
00:22:01,000 --> 00:22:06,000
and all put together with a pure Mick Jagger, rock'n'roller

308
00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:10,000
silver and pink scarf - fantastic, I would kill for one of those.

309
00:22:10,000 --> 00:22:16,000
So we have Isaac Fuller, the showman, the can-do man in any medium,

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00:22:16,000 --> 00:22:19,000
someone the world should acknowledge.

311
00:22:21,000 --> 00:22:24,000
But look beyond the swagger

312
00:22:24,000 --> 00:22:27,000
and this powerful self-portrait becomes a reckoning.

313
00:22:28,000 --> 00:22:33,000
Fuller's fantasy majesty is shadowed by deep melancholy.

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00:22:36,000 --> 00:22:42,000
It is absolutely the painting of someone who's made it in every way.

315
00:22:42,000 --> 00:22:45,000
But, of course, Isaac Fuller has not.

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00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:47,000
When he's not drunk,

317
00:22:47,000 --> 00:22:51,000
he is looking for any jobbing work he can get.

318
00:22:51,000 --> 00:22:57,000
And in that face is a kind of baroque cantata of regret.

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00:23:00,000 --> 00:23:05,000
It's a sorrow that he has in some ways wasted his potential.

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00:23:07,000 --> 00:23:11,000
What the painting says to us, in its brilliance,

321
00:23:11,000 --> 00:23:14,000
is this, I could have been.

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00:23:19,000 --> 00:23:23,000
Fuller's art was a kind of city theatre,

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00:23:23,000 --> 00:23:26,000
straining for applause, the ego on parade.

324
00:23:26,000 --> 00:23:28,000
Looking at us.

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00:23:31,000 --> 00:23:36,000
But a century later, finding oneself had become a kind of religion.

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00:23:38,000 --> 00:23:42,000
And the place to do it was not amidst the clamour of town, but in nature.

327
00:23:51,000 --> 00:23:54,000
There, amidst God's unpolluted creation,

328
00:23:54,000 --> 00:23:59,000
it was possible to recover what had been lost in the urban swarm.

329
00:24:00,000 --> 00:24:02,000
The inner child.

330
00:24:13,000 --> 00:24:17,000
And no-one was looking harder than Samuel Palmer.

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00:24:23,000 --> 00:24:29,000
He really hated what he called the "great national dust hole" of London,

332
00:24:29,000 --> 00:24:30,000
but he had grown up in it.

333
00:24:30,000 --> 00:24:34,000
He was the son of a quite prosperous bookseller who also happened to be

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00:24:34,000 --> 00:24:37,000
a Baptist lay preacher, and both those things

335
00:24:37,000 --> 00:24:41,000
were important for the forming of Palmer

336
00:24:41,000 --> 00:24:46,000
and his very peculiar, extraordinary, visionary kind of art.

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00:24:46,000 --> 00:24:50,000
What he hated was the crass vulgarity of what

338
00:24:50,000 --> 00:24:54,000
he called the "flashy distraction" of the modern world.

339
00:24:54,000 --> 00:24:59,000
"It was the kind of world", he said, "where solid facts and still more

340
00:24:59,000 --> 00:25:04,000
"solid pudding nourishes a fat, waddling alderman."

341
00:25:04,000 --> 00:25:08,000
So we had this kind of young man's fantasy of coming here

342
00:25:08,000 --> 00:25:12,000
and getting towards a non-modern England.

343
00:25:12,000 --> 00:25:16,000
If you could only get away from the tatty, tacky modern world,

344
00:25:16,000 --> 00:25:23,000
you'd find this perfect heaven of a Jerusalem among the green fields.

345
00:25:31,000 --> 00:25:36,000
In 1825, Samuel Palmer came to the Kentish village of Shoreham.

346
00:25:39,000 --> 00:25:43,000
Here, he seemed to acquire a new pair of eyes.

347
00:25:43,000 --> 00:25:47,000
Eyes which saw deeper, clearer than in the London murk.

348
00:25:54,000 --> 00:26:00,000
And what he trained them on right away was, of course, himself.

349
00:26:07,000 --> 00:26:09,000
Around the time Palmer is going to Shoreham,

350
00:26:09,000 --> 00:26:13,000
he produces this extraordinary self-portrait -

351
00:26:13,000 --> 00:26:18,000
perhaps the greatest romantic self-portrait ever,

352
00:26:18,000 --> 00:26:21,000
in Britain, in any other kind of art. And why?

353
00:26:21,000 --> 00:26:24,000
Because it does something which was indispensable

354
00:26:24,000 --> 00:26:27,000
to the Romantic temperament.

355
00:26:27,000 --> 00:26:29,000
It's an epiphany, it's a revelation,

356
00:26:29,000 --> 00:26:32,000
but it's a revelation of the inner person.

357
00:26:35,000 --> 00:26:40,000
When you look at it, you feel you're absolutely cheek by jowl with it.

358
00:26:40,000 --> 00:26:44,000
And the technique is absolutely wonderful.

359
00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:46,000
It's a drama of his own face

360
00:26:46,000 --> 00:26:50,000
and the drama is made more spectacular by the special instrument

361
00:26:50,000 --> 00:26:53,000
of Palmerian drama - white chalk,

362
00:26:53,000 --> 00:26:56,000
to heighten accents, to give it light.

363
00:26:56,000 --> 00:26:58,000
Look where the chalk heightening falls.

364
00:26:58,000 --> 00:27:03,000
It falls in the temple of the imagination, on his forehead.

365
00:27:03,000 --> 00:27:10,000
It occurs on the eyes - this is a man with amazing fine motor control.

366
00:27:10,000 --> 00:27:13,000
Everything he does that's good is teeny-weeny,

367
00:27:13,000 --> 00:27:19,000
but out of teeny-weeny comes immense emotional power.

368
00:27:35,000 --> 00:27:38,000
So you do have this astonishing sense of being rather searingly,

369
00:27:38,000 --> 00:27:42,000
and disconcertingly, spookily addressed

370
00:27:42,000 --> 00:27:45,000
in a kind of confrontational way by Palmer.

371
00:27:45,000 --> 00:27:48,000
But that, of course, is an illusion.

372
00:27:48,000 --> 00:27:52,000
What Samuel Palmer is looking at, staring at

373
00:27:52,000 --> 00:27:58,000
in this trancelike intensity, is the innermost Samuel Palmer.

374
00:28:02,000 --> 00:28:07,000
Palmer stared and stared until the landscapes passing before his eyes

375
00:28:07,000 --> 00:28:10,000
turned into mindscapes.

376
00:28:17,000 --> 00:28:21,000
And a mind, for that matter, on a serious trip.

377
00:28:22,000 --> 00:28:25,000
At the height of his creative fervour,

378
00:28:25,000 --> 00:28:29,000
Palmer set down these startling little drawings.

379
00:28:29,000 --> 00:28:33,000
The vision somehow both compressed and expanded,

380
00:28:33,000 --> 00:28:36,000
dreamily, far, far away.

381
00:28:41,000 --> 00:28:44,000
These landscapes come out of his own head,

382
00:28:44,000 --> 00:28:48,000
from a superior, ecstatic illumination.

383
00:28:49,000 --> 00:28:53,000
These are kind of magnificently clotted, little gem-like,

384
00:28:53,000 --> 00:28:58,000
dense, concentrated miracles of compression.

385
00:29:01,000 --> 00:29:07,000
Palmer said that the visions of the soul, being perfect,

386
00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:10,000
are the only true standard

387
00:29:10,000 --> 00:29:15,000
by which nature should be tried. And he clung to his vision.

388
00:29:15,000 --> 00:29:19,000
Everything is really an earthly paradise.

389
00:29:19,000 --> 00:29:22,000
It has that kind of fullness, the fecundity, the fruitfulness

390
00:29:22,000 --> 00:29:26,000
that goes way back as Palmer wanted it to do.

391
00:29:26,000 --> 00:29:32,000
And by going back, by consciously recovering an innocent vision,

392
00:29:32,000 --> 00:29:38,000
he is at the same time archaic and profoundly, profoundly modern.

393
00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:42,000
We don't see this kind of stylisation of landscape

394
00:29:42,000 --> 00:29:45,000
until you get to the end of the 19th century.

395
00:29:46,000 --> 00:29:50,000
This particular one, which I love very much...

396
00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:53,000
There are these beautiful wheat sheaves

397
00:29:53,000 --> 00:29:57,000
around a recumbent reader.

398
00:29:57,000 --> 00:29:59,000
We are in Fairy Land.

399
00:29:59,000 --> 00:30:04,000
We're really in the land of the child's imagination.

400
00:30:04,000 --> 00:30:07,000
Another one of these has a tree which... Look at it,

401
00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:09,000
it's a magic mushroom, isn't it? Absolutely.

402
00:30:09,000 --> 00:30:13,000
There's the kind of...the hare from heaven with his ears

403
00:30:13,000 --> 00:30:16,000
in a state of quivering attentiveness.

404
00:30:16,000 --> 00:30:20,000
Samuel Palmer, at this perfect moment,

405
00:30:20,000 --> 00:30:26,000
is a child in a glorious state of suspended animation,

406
00:30:26,000 --> 00:30:27,000
a child who doesn't grow up.

407
00:30:27,000 --> 00:30:33,000
And it's this child's vision of earthly heaven that he gives us,

408
00:30:33,000 --> 00:30:35,000
and no-one else does it.

409
00:30:35,000 --> 00:30:39,000
And it happens in the bosom of England.

410
00:30:44,000 --> 00:30:45,000
For generations,

411
00:30:45,000 --> 00:30:49,000
Palmer's startling, revolutionary work went virtually unseen.

412
00:30:52,000 --> 00:30:57,000
Too strange for Victorian tastes, too out-there to make a living,

413
00:30:57,000 --> 00:30:59,000
Palmer hid them away.

414
00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:03,000
And, in time, he retreated from visions,

415
00:31:03,000 --> 00:31:07,000
left Shoreham and became conventional,

416
00:31:07,000 --> 00:31:10,000
dull, respectively successful.

417
00:31:16,000 --> 00:31:21,000
Palmer traded in his originality for acceptability.

418
00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:24,000
But for another whole category of artists,

419
00:31:24,000 --> 00:31:29,000
being accepted was always going to be a prolonged battle.

420
00:31:30,000 --> 00:31:33,000
It was very tough for women in Victorian England

421
00:31:33,000 --> 00:31:35,000
because the governing institutions

422
00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:40,000
and the schools of art were not designed to help female talent along.

423
00:31:40,000 --> 00:31:45,000
Women were expected to do things that were all about being pretty

424
00:31:45,000 --> 00:31:47,000
and feminine.

425
00:31:47,000 --> 00:31:54,000
So, in Britain, there was this great, teeming mass of frustrated,

426
00:31:54,000 --> 00:31:56,000
gifted women artists.

427
00:31:56,000 --> 00:31:59,000
And one of them was Laura Knight.

428
00:32:01,000 --> 00:32:04,000
Laura Knight was to become a front-line warrior who'd use

429
00:32:04,000 --> 00:32:09,000
the self-portrait to violate gloriously all the confining

430
00:32:09,000 --> 00:32:14,000
conventions that the men who ruled the art world had imposed.

431
00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:18,000
She would bring a startlingly distinctive vision to what

432
00:32:18,000 --> 00:32:22,000
women could do when they became painters.

433
00:32:22,000 --> 00:32:24,000
But it was very difficult.

434
00:32:24,000 --> 00:32:28,000
Her father had left and then died when she was very young.

435
00:32:28,000 --> 00:32:30,000
The mother was in modest circumstances

436
00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:33,000
and there was very little money in the family.

437
00:32:33,000 --> 00:32:37,000
The mum essentially made ends meet from teaching at art school.

438
00:32:37,000 --> 00:32:42,000
So when she saw that her daughter, aged 10, 11, 12, 13,

439
00:32:42,000 --> 00:32:45,000
had this phenomenal, precocious gift for drawing,

440
00:32:45,000 --> 00:32:48,000
she did everything she could to encourage it.

441
00:32:50,000 --> 00:32:54,000
Laura won a scholarship to the Nottingham School of Art.

442
00:32:56,000 --> 00:32:58,000
But, like most women,

443
00:32:58,000 --> 00:33:02,000
she was excluded from the exalted art of drawing the nude,

444
00:33:02,000 --> 00:33:08,000
and in the name of decency, confined to the inert forms of plaster casts.

445
00:33:09,000 --> 00:33:12,000
Thus, she was denied the training that since the Renaissance had

446
00:33:12,000 --> 00:33:17,000
been considered essential for any serious artist.

447
00:33:25,000 --> 00:33:27,000
To find the freedom she craved,

448
00:33:27,000 --> 00:33:32,000
Laura Knight would have to travel to the remotest edge of England.

449
00:33:46,000 --> 00:33:50,000
By the time she arrived, in 1907,

450
00:33:50,000 --> 00:33:53,000
Cornwall had become known as a haven for artists.

451
00:33:56,000 --> 00:34:00,000
With its bohemian atmosphere and scintillating light,

452
00:34:00,000 --> 00:34:07,000
Laura found herself living, she said, "A carefree life of sunlit pleasure."

453
00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:16,000
And here, far away from the stuffy art establishment,

454
00:34:16,000 --> 00:34:18,000
she found her artistic self.

455
00:34:28,000 --> 00:34:31,000
In this barefooted freedom,

456
00:34:31,000 --> 00:34:33,000
Laura's friends posed for her,

457
00:34:33,000 --> 00:34:35,000
comrades in art.

458
00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:41,000
No men, no poses to please men.

459
00:34:42,000 --> 00:34:47,000
Instead, these women are caught in quiet pensiveness,

460
00:34:47,000 --> 00:34:52,000
lost in thought and drenched in hot, radiant colour,

461
00:34:52,000 --> 00:34:58,000
as if burning from pent-up emotion and frustrated ambition.

462
00:35:02,000 --> 00:35:07,000
And in 1913, she brought all those instincts - a riot of colour,

463
00:35:07,000 --> 00:35:12,000
the audacity of a strong woman, a compositional gift -

464
00:35:12,000 --> 00:35:17,000
to make a self-portrait like no other that had ever been seen before.

465
00:35:24,000 --> 00:35:26,000
It came from Laura Knight's bitter memory

466
00:35:26,000 --> 00:35:29,000
all those years ago in Nottingham

467
00:35:29,000 --> 00:35:34,000
of not being allowed to do life classes because she was not a man.

468
00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:36,000
It came from an art memory, too.

469
00:35:36,000 --> 00:35:39,000
It came from knowing very well that

470
00:35:39,000 --> 00:35:44,000
when you had a portrait of a nude female model and a clothed artist,

471
00:35:44,000 --> 00:35:49,000
what a surprise, the artist was always going to be a man.

472
00:35:51,000 --> 00:35:54,000
I don't mean to say this is a political painting,

473
00:35:54,000 --> 00:35:57,000
but it can't be irrelevant that exactly when this

474
00:35:57,000 --> 00:36:02,000
is on show in 1913, the suffragette movement is at its height.

475
00:36:02,000 --> 00:36:05,000
This is a painting about sisterhood,

476
00:36:05,000 --> 00:36:08,000
but it's about the sisterhood of art.

477
00:36:12,000 --> 00:36:14,000
The self-portrait shows Laura at work

478
00:36:14,000 --> 00:36:18,000
painting her friend and model, Ella Naper.

479
00:36:21,000 --> 00:36:24,000
The consummate professional, brush in hand,

480
00:36:24,000 --> 00:36:28,000
gaze locked so tightly to the body she is celebrating.

481
00:36:31,000 --> 00:36:35,000
Though the painting is an anthem to the female body, it is,

482
00:36:35,000 --> 00:36:40,000
for the first time, delivered entirely on a woman's terms.

483
00:36:43,000 --> 00:36:46,000
Both the women are masked from us.

484
00:36:46,000 --> 00:36:50,000
She's sideways, there's a shadow falling down over her face.

485
00:36:50,000 --> 00:36:53,000
Ella herself has her back to us.

486
00:36:53,000 --> 00:36:59,000
We get her back doubled twice - rhymed, multiplied.

487
00:37:01,000 --> 00:37:07,000
But the real boast of this sisterhood collaboration is in the staggering

488
00:37:07,000 --> 00:37:11,000
cerebral cleverness and complexity of the picture.

489
00:37:11,000 --> 00:37:13,000
If you take Ella out, if you take Laura out,

490
00:37:13,000 --> 00:37:18,000
what you've got is a stunning abstract work of art.

491
00:37:19,000 --> 00:37:24,000
If you want a kind of lesson in what the French New Wave

492
00:37:24,000 --> 00:37:27,000
of painters are doing, all you have to do is look at

493
00:37:27,000 --> 00:37:31,000
the tremendous stabbing marks on the back of her jacket.

494
00:37:31,000 --> 00:37:34,000
These very loose brush strokes.

495
00:37:34,000 --> 00:37:37,000
There's a rhyme between this beautiful rug

496
00:37:37,000 --> 00:37:40,000
and the stripes on the back of the scarf

497
00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:42,000
which Matisse would have killed for.

498
00:37:44,000 --> 00:37:50,000
That huge red screen is a kind of abstract slab of colour.

499
00:37:50,000 --> 00:37:55,000
All the planes are shifting this way and that, very ambiguously.

500
00:37:55,000 --> 00:37:59,000
She's applied this fantastic streaky quality to the scarlet there,

501
00:37:59,000 --> 00:38:03,000
so that your vision is absolutely gripped

502
00:38:03,000 --> 00:38:05,000
by the energy she's put into it.

503
00:38:09,000 --> 00:38:15,000
When she showed it in Cornwall, Laura called it Self Portrait With Nude,

504
00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:18,000
and although there are two people here, it is

505
00:38:18,000 --> 00:38:22,000
essentially a self-portrait, a manifesto issued by someone

506
00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:27,000
who knew exactly who she was and what she wanted to be.

507
00:38:30,000 --> 00:38:33,000
But not everyone was so self-assured.

508
00:38:38,000 --> 00:38:40,000
At the beginning of the 20th century,

509
00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:46,000
few parties were more notorious than the Chelsea Arts Club Ball.

510
00:38:46,000 --> 00:38:49,000
And if you were to grace the dance floor, it is

511
00:38:49,000 --> 00:38:52,000
more than likely you'd have come across this man.

512
00:38:53,000 --> 00:38:55,000
Or this man...

513
00:38:55,000 --> 00:38:57,000
or this man.

514
00:38:57,000 --> 00:39:01,000
All of these men are in fact the Irishman, William Orpen,

515
00:39:01,000 --> 00:39:03,000
painter and party animal.

516
00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:09,000
While self-portraits were supposed to reveal the real,

517
00:39:09,000 --> 00:39:13,000
unique inner painter, Orpen thought, "Why bother?"

518
00:39:13,000 --> 00:39:16,000
It was much more fun being a quick-change artist.

519
00:39:18,000 --> 00:39:22,000
He imagined himself as champion jockey one moment...

520
00:39:24,000 --> 00:39:26,000
..a heroic hunter the next,

521
00:39:26,000 --> 00:39:30,000
then a virtuoso painter from a bygone age.

522
00:39:30,000 --> 00:39:35,000
All with that look of impish mock severity.

523
00:39:38,000 --> 00:39:41,000
He was never sure which persona he'd next adopt.

524
00:39:43,000 --> 00:39:47,000
But then, he was given a chance to dress up once more.

525
00:39:48,000 --> 00:39:52,000
And it was a costume that would change his life forever.

526
00:39:56,000 --> 00:39:59,000
The painting is called Ready To Start,

527
00:39:59,000 --> 00:40:02,000
and since Orpen is the master of irony,

528
00:40:02,000 --> 00:40:07,000
you pretty much know that he never is going to be quite ready.

529
00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:10,000
He had arrived in France in the spring

530
00:40:10,000 --> 00:40:13,000
and he is in the little town of Cassel in a small hotel.

531
00:40:13,000 --> 00:40:17,000
He writes about its picturesqueness, about the sweetness of the town.

532
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:20,000
He says, "In this place are all kinds of people -

533
00:40:20,000 --> 00:40:25,000
"some thoughtful, some unthoughtful. Misery, delight, all mixed up..."

534
00:40:25,000 --> 00:40:29,000
Beautifully, he puts it, "..all mixed up like a kaleidoscope."

535
00:40:31,000 --> 00:40:34,000
But despite Orpen's playfulness, there's a mood here

536
00:40:34,000 --> 00:40:38,000
that's not seen in any of his previous incarnations.

537
00:40:39,000 --> 00:40:43,000
There is, very unusually for Orpen's self-portraits,

538
00:40:43,000 --> 00:40:48,000
a sombre expression to his face underneath that Tommy helmet,

539
00:40:48,000 --> 00:40:54,000
and a very watchful, apprehensive, nervous look in his eyes.

540
00:40:54,000 --> 00:40:59,000
There is something in Orpen's letters and something about Orpen's art,

541
00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:01,000
too, at this moment which is fearful.

542
00:41:01,000 --> 00:41:04,000
"I don't have the courage, really, for what lies ahead,"

543
00:41:04,000 --> 00:41:08,000
says Orpen, "except one kind of courage - Dutch courage."

544
00:41:08,000 --> 00:41:12,000
The kind of courage represented in this spectacular still life

545
00:41:12,000 --> 00:41:17,000
at the front of the painting. It pretty much dominates everything.

546
00:41:17,000 --> 00:41:20,000
He might as well have called the picture Whisky And Splash.

547
00:41:24,000 --> 00:41:26,000
Orpen had been drinking heavily in Cassel,

548
00:41:26,000 --> 00:41:31,000
hoping to lose himself in the warm embrace of intoxication.

549
00:41:31,000 --> 00:41:36,000
But the alcoholic haze disappeared swiftly with the first salvos

550
00:41:36,000 --> 00:41:39,000
of the Battle of Arras.

551
00:41:39,000 --> 00:41:43,000
EXPLOSIONS

552
00:41:43,000 --> 00:41:48,000
The great offensive of 1917 saw Orpen on the front line.

553
00:41:49,000 --> 00:41:52,000
And it was here, amidst the labyrinth of trenches,

554
00:41:52,000 --> 00:41:55,000
that Orpen's soul-searching came to an end.

555
00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:11,000
In the summer of 1917,

556
00:42:11,000 --> 00:42:16,000
in the pit of human horror, he finds, at last,

557
00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:21,000
the incarnation which somehow makes sense.

558
00:42:21,000 --> 00:42:27,000
He becomes the most unlikely tommy perhaps in the entire British Army.

559
00:42:27,000 --> 00:42:30,000
He had been able to have the rank of second lieutenant

560
00:42:30,000 --> 00:42:35,000
and then he was jumped up through social connections to become a major.

561
00:42:35,000 --> 00:42:38,000
And he was still insecure about what he was supposed to be doing,

562
00:42:38,000 --> 00:42:41,000
which, officially, of course, was to be a war artist.

563
00:42:41,000 --> 00:42:46,000
He sends a letter back to his mistress, which has a little picture

564
00:42:46,000 --> 00:42:52,000
in which some British Army officer says, "And what exactly can you do?"

565
00:42:52,000 --> 00:42:56,000
And Orpen, 'ickle Orps, little Orps, as he constantly called himself,

566
00:42:56,000 --> 00:43:00,000
said, "Nothing, sir. I'm an artist."

567
00:43:00,000 --> 00:43:05,000
And he never lost that sense of kind of withering...

568
00:43:05,000 --> 00:43:08,000
almost humiliation about his impotence

569
00:43:08,000 --> 00:43:10,000
in the face of human horror.

570
00:43:10,000 --> 00:43:13,000
And look, just look at how he is standing.

571
00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:19,000
The cigarette there is not the way a tommy is going to smoke, is it?

572
00:43:19,000 --> 00:43:22,000
This is the way you hold a cigarette in a fashionable

573
00:43:22,000 --> 00:43:25,000
Mayfair cocktail party.

574
00:43:25,000 --> 00:43:29,000
The stance, actually shifting your weight to one leg,

575
00:43:29,000 --> 00:43:32,000
has an enormous art historical provenance.

576
00:43:32,000 --> 00:43:38,000
It is called "contrapposto" - one leg nonchalantly against the other.

577
00:43:38,000 --> 00:43:42,000
He's still crawling in the skin of a fashionable man.

578
00:43:42,000 --> 00:43:48,000
And yet, he wants to embody the experience of every man

579
00:43:48,000 --> 00:43:50,000
in the trench.

580
00:43:50,000 --> 00:43:55,000
It's here in the Somme, at this moment, that the Orpen who is

581
00:43:55,000 --> 00:44:01,000
constantly searching for himself has found something and someone

582
00:44:01,000 --> 00:44:07,000
he wants to be, but he's also losing something at the same time.

583
00:44:07,000 --> 00:44:12,000
What he's losing is the belief that humanity can do anything.

584
00:44:12,000 --> 00:44:15,000
What he now believes is what humanity does is to

585
00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:19,000
kill each other in ever-increasing numbers.

586
00:44:23,000 --> 00:44:28,000
With this new sense of himself came a new sense of purpose.

587
00:44:28,000 --> 00:44:34,000
Orpen set about making a devastating set of paintings that captured

588
00:44:34,000 --> 00:44:36,000
everything he'd witnessed.

589
00:44:36,000 --> 00:44:39,000
No dressing up, just the implacable truth.

590
00:44:49,000 --> 00:44:52,000
This is what Orpen saw.

591
00:44:52,000 --> 00:44:57,000
Summer 1917, and the sunlight was boiling down.

592
00:44:57,000 --> 00:45:02,000
Orpen has the genius to make this painting about the cruelty

593
00:45:02,000 --> 00:45:04,000
of radiance.

594
00:45:04,000 --> 00:45:06,000
Because what's it shining on?

595
00:45:06,000 --> 00:45:10,000
These figures found at the bottom of the trench.

596
00:45:10,000 --> 00:45:17,000
German soldiers, putrefying bodies, a hand held up in rigor mortis.

597
00:45:19,000 --> 00:45:23,000
This is the ultimate picnic in hell.

598
00:45:25,000 --> 00:45:28,000
More than any other picture that I know of, bathed in hot sunlight

599
00:45:28,000 --> 00:45:34,000
on one side and deep, dark, infernal shadow on the other,

600
00:45:34,000 --> 00:45:38,000
this really is an open grave.

601
00:46:00,000 --> 00:46:05,000
Orpen returned home after the war to resume a successful career

602
00:46:05,000 --> 00:46:08,000
as a society painter.

603
00:46:08,000 --> 00:46:10,000
But he was never the same man.

604
00:46:10,000 --> 00:46:12,000
Unable to forget,

605
00:46:12,000 --> 00:46:16,000
his memories of the war shattered his fragile sense of self.

606
00:46:19,000 --> 00:46:23,000
Two years before he died, he painted his masterpiece -

607
00:46:23,000 --> 00:46:28,000
the self-portrait of a tormented and fragmented soul.

608
00:46:37,000 --> 00:46:40,000
What do self-portraits do?

609
00:46:40,000 --> 00:46:44,000
They're investigations of the self, of the artistic self.

610
00:46:44,000 --> 00:46:46,000
And the investigation here, even though

611
00:46:46,000 --> 00:46:51,000
the face isn't completely bleak or despairing, none of that...

612
00:46:51,000 --> 00:46:55,000
Don't you think it's more anxious

613
00:46:55,000 --> 00:47:01,000
and tentative in its questioning than any other Orpen self-portrait?

614
00:47:01,000 --> 00:47:02,000
I think so.

615
00:47:02,000 --> 00:47:04,000
And what he has done, of course,

616
00:47:04,000 --> 00:47:08,000
is play this extraordinary mirror game with his own image

617
00:47:08,000 --> 00:47:14,000
and the painting of his own image using multiple mirrors.

618
00:47:14,000 --> 00:47:20,000
Endless versions of the painting and of Orpen, receding endlessly,

619
00:47:20,000 --> 00:47:24,000
multiplying endlessly, each one more broken than the last.

620
00:47:24,000 --> 00:47:29,000
What is so brilliant is that as you get further away,

621
00:47:29,000 --> 00:47:30,000
they're not the same.

622
00:47:30,000 --> 00:47:33,000
They're not identical. He knows what he's doing.

623
00:47:33,000 --> 00:47:40,000
That bloody, red, juicy, fruity lower lip goes all pink and anaemic and,

624
00:47:40,000 --> 00:47:46,000
as you go further and further back, it becomes more and more like a mask.

625
00:47:46,000 --> 00:47:51,000
And the message, the payoff of all this,

626
00:47:51,000 --> 00:47:57,000
is if you want to ask me the question fundamental to self-portraiture,

627
00:47:57,000 --> 00:48:02,000
"Who am I?", poor 'ickle Orps's answer is simply,

628
00:48:02,000 --> 00:48:05,000
"Damned if I know."

629
00:48:14,000 --> 00:48:18,000
The fractured sense of self will become an obsession among

630
00:48:18,000 --> 00:48:20,000
artists and writers of the 20th century.

631
00:48:20,000 --> 00:48:24,000
For them, the self was no longer something that could be

632
00:48:24,000 --> 00:48:27,000
discovered and located.

633
00:48:27,000 --> 00:48:30,000
Instead, it was nothing but a chimera.

634
00:48:31,000 --> 00:48:37,000
Recoiling from that futile search, artists fell back on the only thing

635
00:48:37,000 --> 00:48:42,000
they could be sure of - the anatomical facts in the mirror.

636
00:48:46,000 --> 00:48:50,000
But even this was too much for one young artist.

637
00:48:59,000 --> 00:49:01,000
In the 1940s and '50s,

638
00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:06,000
Lucian Freud was fanatical about avoiding anything sentimental.

639
00:49:14,000 --> 00:49:19,000
Instead, we get the glittering eye of the hawk, flat, linear forms,

640
00:49:19,000 --> 00:49:24,000
as hostile and spiky as the dried thistle on the sill.

641
00:49:25,000 --> 00:49:27,000
There's something spooky about it.

642
00:49:27,000 --> 00:49:32,000
We don't know whether that's a window or a mirror or both.

643
00:49:37,000 --> 00:49:40,000
It's as if he's stalking himself.

644
00:49:40,000 --> 00:49:45,000
Yes, Freud means all this to be a study in watchful cool, but in

645
00:49:45,000 --> 00:49:51,000
its chilly calculation, it's as cold as the grave and wooden as a coffin.

646
00:49:57,000 --> 00:50:02,000
But at some point in the 1960s, Freud suddenly warmed up.

647
00:50:03,000 --> 00:50:08,000
And it was because he fell deeply and irreversibly in love.

648
00:50:10,000 --> 00:50:13,000
I don't know if Lucian Freud was ever in love with anything

649
00:50:13,000 --> 00:50:18,000
so much as he was in love with the texture of paint itself.

650
00:50:18,000 --> 00:50:20,000
He almost made a religion out of it.

651
00:50:20,000 --> 00:50:24,000
He said very often, "I don't paint likenesses of people.

652
00:50:24,000 --> 00:50:26,000
"I create flesh.

653
00:50:26,000 --> 00:50:31,000
"I create a kind of living sense of their presence, their immediacy,"

654
00:50:31,000 --> 00:50:37,000
and this is a trip into the heart of majestic oil painting.

655
00:50:45,000 --> 00:50:47,000
Freud's creative revelation led him

656
00:50:47,000 --> 00:50:51,000
to believe that he could match the texture of oil paint,

657
00:50:51,000 --> 00:50:56,000
in all its unctuous ooze, to the substance and colour of human flesh.

658
00:51:00,000 --> 00:51:02,000
Match it, in fact,

659
00:51:02,000 --> 00:51:06,000
to the felt physical experience of being in a body,

660
00:51:06,000 --> 00:51:12,000
and to do it without any of the emotional baggage he so detested.

661
00:51:13,000 --> 00:51:19,000
Give Lucian Freud a passion, sorrow, desire, joy, he couldn't do it.

662
00:51:21,000 --> 00:51:24,000
But a black eye, given to him by a taxi driver,

663
00:51:24,000 --> 00:51:28,000
becomes a symphony of discolouration.

664
00:51:34,000 --> 00:51:37,000
In the most powerful works, like this one painted

665
00:51:37,000 --> 00:51:42,000
when he was in his 60s, the Siamese twins of the self-portrait

666
00:51:42,000 --> 00:51:44,000
tradition are with him -

667
00:51:44,000 --> 00:51:48,000
sombre watchfulness and a hint of self-admiration.

668
00:51:50,000 --> 00:51:54,000
But he has one supreme concern - the physical truth.

669
00:51:56,000 --> 00:52:01,000
Look at the work of time squarely in the face and you'll defeat it.

670
00:52:01,000 --> 00:52:06,000
You may wear out, but this portrait never will.

671
00:52:12,000 --> 00:52:16,000
What you have here is an unflinching look at the work that time

672
00:52:16,000 --> 00:52:21,000
does sculpturally, almost, on the face.

673
00:52:21,000 --> 00:52:25,000
If you look at the kind of red rims on the lower eyelid under the eye,

674
00:52:25,000 --> 00:52:29,000
that kind of red sense of concentration, the slight break

675
00:52:29,000 --> 00:52:33,000
in the line of the nose, the wrinkles in the brow,

676
00:52:33,000 --> 00:52:36,000
you look at the crevices under the cheekbone,

677
00:52:36,000 --> 00:52:41,000
that's full of different kinds of colours - an incredibly exact

678
00:52:41,000 --> 00:52:45,000
and creative sense of the way you would do shadow.

679
00:52:45,000 --> 00:52:47,000
Of the darks and lights.

680
00:52:47,000 --> 00:52:50,000
You can go from feature to feature, from passage to passage

681
00:52:50,000 --> 00:52:57,000
of painting with absolute, gripping, poetically-precise clarity.

682
00:52:58,000 --> 00:53:03,000
All those things somehow resolve themselves into nothing

683
00:53:03,000 --> 00:53:05,000
but the naked truth.

684
00:53:09,000 --> 00:53:13,000
So, is that all there is?

685
00:53:13,000 --> 00:53:19,000
Once, when the artist looked in the mirror, the image called out,

686
00:53:19,000 --> 00:53:21,000
"I made this.

687
00:53:21,000 --> 00:53:24,000
"Remember me. Pity me."

688
00:53:27,000 --> 00:53:31,000
And, turning inwards, they set off in search of the soul,

689
00:53:31,000 --> 00:53:35,000
only to find it had gone AWOL.

690
00:53:35,000 --> 00:53:39,000
And when the self-portrayers couldn't find anything in their faces,

691
00:53:39,000 --> 00:53:41,000
they turned instead to the body.

692
00:53:42,000 --> 00:53:45,000
Even when that body had left the premises.

693
00:53:47,000 --> 00:53:49,000
So, we have this.

694
00:53:53,000 --> 00:54:00,000
Marc Quinn has gone as far as to make a face out of his body fluid - blood,

695
00:54:00,000 --> 00:54:04,000
the metabolical juice of life suspended in liquid silicon.

696
00:54:05,000 --> 00:54:10,000
It's hard to tell if this is a death mask or if, one day, the artist

697
00:54:10,000 --> 00:54:12,000
may awake from his bloody sleep.

698
00:54:14,000 --> 00:54:18,000
So is this the fate of self-portraiture,

699
00:54:18,000 --> 00:54:24,000
to go so far inside the body that it disappears entirely into our DNA?

700
00:54:35,000 --> 00:54:40,000
There's one modern work of art at least in which self-portraits

701
00:54:40,000 --> 00:54:44,000
look not inward but outward to the world.

702
00:54:54,000 --> 00:54:58,000
On the very western edge of Britain is a beach at Crosby Sands.

703
00:55:01,000 --> 00:55:05,000
To walk this deserted coast ought to be a lonely experience,

704
00:55:05,000 --> 00:55:07,000
but here, you are never alone.

705
00:55:14,000 --> 00:55:18,000
Spread over two miles are 100 iron figures,

706
00:55:18,000 --> 00:55:26,000
each one identical, each one staring impassively to the great beyond.

707
00:55:26,000 --> 00:55:28,000
Together, they form an installation of self-portrait

708
00:55:28,000 --> 00:55:32,000
sculptures by one of Britain's most visionary artists.

709
00:55:35,000 --> 00:55:38,000
This is the body of Antony Gormley, cast in iron

710
00:55:38,000 --> 00:55:42,000
and then reproduced on an industrial scale.

711
00:56:27,000 --> 00:56:30,000
Well, you would suppose when the age of the self meets the obsession

712
00:56:30,000 --> 00:56:35,000
of the body and an artist makes a body cast of himself

713
00:56:35,000 --> 00:56:40,000
and then clones it 100 times and then plants those clones all over

714
00:56:40,000 --> 00:56:44,000
a beach near Liverpool, it would be the ultimate ego trip.

715
00:56:44,000 --> 00:56:49,000
Oddly enough, that's not the way we read Antony Gormley's figures,

716
00:56:49,000 --> 00:56:51,000
because they are faceless.

717
00:56:51,000 --> 00:56:57,000
They become an emblem of the human condition, not of A Gormley, Esq.

718
00:56:57,000 --> 00:57:02,000
They are planted there on the edge of the earth,

719
00:57:02,000 --> 00:57:05,000
on the rim of the land facing the ocean.

720
00:57:05,000 --> 00:57:08,000
So there's a way in which something which begins

721
00:57:08,000 --> 00:57:14,000
physically as a self-portrait becomes a symbol of humanity.

722
00:57:14,000 --> 00:57:16,000
These are very, very poignant figures.

723
00:57:20,000 --> 00:57:25,000
An individual self-portrait is now dissolved, featureless,

724
00:57:25,000 --> 00:57:28,000
into the universal human condition.

725
00:57:28,000 --> 00:57:31,000
And these iron men, standing for all of us,

726
00:57:31,000 --> 00:57:34,000
seem oddly, touchingly skinless...

727
00:57:34,000 --> 00:57:36,000
vulnerable,

728
00:57:36,000 --> 00:57:40,000
forever worked on by time and tide.

729
00:57:43,000 --> 00:57:46,000
But there they stand, as must we.

730
00:57:46,000 --> 00:57:48,000
Not masters of the earth,

731
00:57:48,000 --> 00:57:50,000
not separate from the physical world,

732
00:57:50,000 --> 00:57:53,000
but inevitably and fully part of it.

733
00:58:09,000 --> 00:58:13,000
So, these figures are not just Gormley, they're really all of us.

734
00:58:13,000 --> 00:58:19,000
This is the self-portrait made plural, made collective, forever.

735
00:58:19,000 --> 00:58:22,000
As the tide comes in,

736
00:58:22,000 --> 00:58:25,000
disappearing in the water, re-emerging,

737
00:58:25,000 --> 00:58:33,000
coming from and going back into the element from which we all came.