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Great Art Explained with James Payne · explore words discover worlds

0:01
SPEAKER_01: Hi.
0:05
SPEAKER_01: Hi, my name is James Payne, and I'm the uh creator of um the YouTube channel and now the book.
0:13
SPEAKER_01: And um I'm I kind of add lib stuff as I'm going, but I've got a set amount of images I want to show you.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: And um and if you have any questions, then um leave them till afterwards and I'll be around by the book signing area and you can just ask me questions there.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: So I want to do a full hours talk.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: Um so I'm gonna talk to you first of all about um a little bit about my history, um, because it's important to how I talk about art, and it's important to how the book has been a success, I think.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, because I come from a working class background.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: My dad was a lorry driver and my mum was a cleaner.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: So proper working class background in London.
0:49
SPEAKER_01: Um fortunately, I had access to lots of museums and art galleries for free.
0:55
SPEAKER_01: You know, that's a great thing about the UK, is so many free art galleries.
0:58
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think I really understand because I loved art from the from the age of 13.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: None of my family did, it was just me.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: And I think I I do understand how art can put up barriers to stop people appreciating art, can put up language barriers, and can put up educational barriers as well.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: So my whole ethos is about making art accessible and making and democratizing art really.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna talk to you very briefly about um how I started, and I also put together a little homage to David Hockney, so um, I was coming here.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Who does anyone know that he used to work in this theatre?
1:37
SPEAKER_01: He used to sell programs in this theatre, and in return for selling programs, they used to let him go to all the orchestra productions.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: So all through college, he used to spend time and he did lots of sketches connected to it as well.
1:50
SPEAKER_01: Um so I put together a little homage to him because that would be silly not to.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I'm gonna read a few extracts from my book, just four actually, and talk to you about um this is kind of my idea, and I'm gonna talk to you about David Hockney in that respect as well.
2:03
SPEAKER_01: Knowing what we know about Van Gogh's life doesn't make Starry Night a better painting, but it does make it more interesting.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, when I'm talking, it's my opinion, it doesn't mean it's a fact.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of this is what I think.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: I think to me, opening up the story of the artist and the art makes it a more interesting work of art.
2:23
SPEAKER_01: Of course, art can live on its own.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: So this is an extract from my um this the book um I was approached.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: If you don't know, I have a big art art YouTube channel and there's two million subscribers, and it's massive.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: And I honestly have never woken up in the last since lockdown, I've never woken up and thought, what the bloody hell happened to my life?
2:43
SPEAKER_01: Because I didn't have that career to start off with.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: So I'll talk to you about how that happened.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: So we live in an era defined by images.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: Social media platforms, streaming services, and advertising inundate us with visual content, demanding our attention at every turn.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: Yet, in this cacophony, the profound visual narratives that art offers are at risk of being drowned out.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: We need to stop and consider the impact of one image, one work of art.
3:17
SPEAKER_01: Art is not just something to look at, it's something to engage with.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: It challenges us to pause, to question, and to connect with ideas that transcend time and place.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: One of the guiding principles of great art explained has always been accessibility.
3:33
SPEAKER_01: Art history should not be the exclusive domain of scholars and critics.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: I've written this book for those who have ever stood before a painting or sculpture and felt a deep emotional connection, an inexplicable pull.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: I've written it for the curious, the skeptics, and the dreamers.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: I've written it for anyone who has ever wanted to see beyond the surface and understand the layers and meaning that art can offer us.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: So this is of course David Hockney here.
4:05
SPEAKER_01: Is the sound okay for you guys?
4:06
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna do an experiment, and I'm doing this a lot at the moment, so this is something I do every morning myself, but we're gonna do this with a David Hockney image.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: So I want you to just look at that image for about 10 to 15 seconds and scan the image all over.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: Now I want you all to close your eyes, including me, and we're gonna imagine that image in our heads for a few seconds.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: And this is what I think art is so good at, because I don't think art can save lives, I don't think it's gonna change history necessarily, but I think with all the awful things which are going on in the world that we wake up every morning with this awful news, art can sometimes just take us out of that, can just remove us from the situation and just let our minds have a break.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: And that's what I think great art does, including this one, which is a bigger splash from 1967.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: This is a mini film I put together, which was very brief.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: Voila! Seven years ago, David Hockney won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: Now he has paintings in museums all over the world and an international reputation.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: His image is that the bright young boy from Bradford, where he was born in 1937.
5:34
SPEAKER_02: That was me, yeah, before I had blonde.
5:40
SPEAKER_02: I was 18 when I first visited London, 22 when I moved there.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: When I first came to New York when I was 24.
5:49
SPEAKER_02: And I went to live in California when I was 26.
5:55
SPEAKER_02: It was sunny and sexy.
5:57
SPEAKER_02: Sexy.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: So I think this image, of course, you can just look at this image straight away, and it's a beautiful image, it's beautifully dumb.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: But I think this is one of the few images of his that doesn't have people in it, for example.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: And there, but there is a person in it, but they're underwater, they've disappeared.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: And there's that whole idea of absence in this painting.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: Um, but also I think it's really hard to look at this painting without understanding that um homosexuality was illegal in this country for so long.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: You could be put in prison for homosexuality until around this period.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: So it's also a painting about freedom.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: So all I'm saying is you can see paintings as they are, which is a beautiful image, but understanding something about the artist and the and the painting itself just adds something to it.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: Um so I started a YouTube channel called Great Art Explained in 15 Minutes.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: It's a really simple idea, and I came about it totally by accident.
7:03
SPEAKER_01: The idea is that I explain one work of art.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: So in 15 minutes, I take one work of art, but I use that to expand the story.
7:12
SPEAKER_01: So, for example, when I talk about the starry night, it becomes the story of mental health in the arts.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: When I'm talking about Artemisia Gentileschi, it's talking about women in the 17th and 18th century.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: So it expands a bigger story, but within that there is the story of the painting itself.
7:29
SPEAKER_01: That's the simple idea behind it.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, if you've seen the videos, I don't show my face in the videos because I've spent my entire life watching documentaries, going, get out the way, I want to see the painting.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: So it's I kind of took myself out of it and just concentrated on the painting.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: This is what I did for 28 years.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: So I never started out as an arts historian, although I studied to become an artist when I was 35.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: So I left school at 16.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: Um, I traveled around the world.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: I by 17 I was living in Paris, 18 I was living in Rome, and I was a bit of a rebel running around all over Europe learning languages, and that's really where it came from.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: And from those learning languages and learning history, I became a tour guide, taking people around the world.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: So I would take groups of Americans or Canadians, North Americans, around Europe, and I learned very quickly that that boy on the far right hand side is really bored.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: And so if I started talking for more than 15 minutes about the Mona Lisa, they all started dropping off.
8:36
SPEAKER_01: So I learned to talk about these things quickly.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: Now, when they put me up in a hotel for this particular talk, I'm staying in the Leonardo, do you know it?
8:46
SPEAKER_01: Leonardo Hotel.
8:47
SPEAKER_01: Well, actually, I used to stay there with my groups years ago, so I kind of know it from there.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: So it was kind of I had a shiver moment.
8:54
SPEAKER_01: So they used to follow me around, 52 of them.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: And I'd have a flag, you know, I'd be walking around Europe like this, with all of them asking me lots of questions.
9:03
SPEAKER_01: Usually when you got to a hotel, it was where's the bathroom?
9:06
SPEAKER_01: Or what is the Wi-Fi password?
9:08
SPEAKER_01: That was really the only questions they ever asked me in a hotel.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: But lots of them were very engaged, but I learned to talk quickly and I learned to talk succinctly as well, and using a particular language.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: Um, then during lockdown, just before lockdown, I was guiding people around museums.
9:26
SPEAKER_01: Then lockdown happened, and I lost my job because it was tourism, and so I was kind of thinking maybe I'll retire, maybe I'll start another business, and then one day I woke up and I thought I'm gonna start a YouTube channel.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: I'd never even watched YouTube really for more than five or ten minutes.
9:42
SPEAKER_01: I had no idea.
9:43
SPEAKER_01: Um, and pretty much by the second video, it really took off, and then Stephen Fry tweeted about me, and it was just like everyone started watching it.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: Every time I woke up, there was more and more people watching my videos to the point that Mona Lisa has seven million views, you know, and I have 75 million views on my channel in total, and I still wake up thinking, how did that happen?
10:05
SPEAKER_01: Because it's all accidental.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: Um, so this is the main channel is Great Art Explained.
10:10
SPEAKER_01: Then I started a channel called Great Books Explained.
10:12
SPEAKER_01: The reason I'm talking about this is because I think there's a desire for people to learn, and I think YouTube has that capacity as well, a really interesting capacity, because my first books film was about James Joyce's Ulysses.
10:25
SPEAKER_01: Has anyone read James Joyce's Ulysses?
10:28
SPEAKER_01: I've read the first four pages a hundred times, you know, because it's one of the most difficult books to read.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: But I wrote that script with a young kid of 24 who was an expert on James Joyce.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: That's had 1.8 million views for a very complicated, difficult book.
10:42
SPEAKER_01: So it shows there's a there's a hunger to learn on YouTube as well.
10:46
SPEAKER_01: So I've I think I've kind of made it my own in a way.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: These are my principles.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Language.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Um language can be a barrier.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if anyone's ever been into a museum.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: Um I went in one in uh three weeks ago in London, and I read the the um description, and I thought, I did five years at art school and I don't understand what they're saying, you know, and and I did all of that technical stuff.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so language I think can be used as a barrier sometimes, and I think that's a really big issue.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: Storytelling, I think it's a way in for me.
11:17
SPEAKER_01: It's okay to have an opinion, that's a very opinionated thing to say, but it's uh I think it's okay to have an opinion because I never say I'm right.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: I always say this isn't this is an idea, you know, and it's just let people make up their own minds and let people have an opinion.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: Don't patronize.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: This is on top of my laptop when I'm working, I've got it written uh stuck on top on a post-it note.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: Don't patronize, don't dumb down, and don't assume.
11:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, don't dumb down is um, let's say, for example, um I do know all the terms.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: If I talk about chiaroscuro, if I talk about sfumato, if I talk about the sublime, these are all complicated art terms.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: But I believe I can explain them clearly and simply because I don't think everyone needs to have this very complicated language.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: Don't assume, don't assume that someone does know what chiaroscuro is, because a lot of people don't.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: Um, I would say this is the most important thing I think about.
12:10
SPEAKER_01: It's not anti-intellectualism, but it's anti-exclusion.
12:14
SPEAKER_01: So these are the two people I think about when I am making my films and when I was writing my book, which took me four years to write, because I'm not a very academic person, and I had a lot of help, it was great actually.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: So these are the two people I think about.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: The one on the left is me, maybe.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: They're imaginary people.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: I just pulled these images off the internet about five years ago.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, this is someone who knows a lot about art, who understands terms about art, who understands the history of art, and knows a lot.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: I want to appeal to him.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: The one on the right, she is someone from Wisconsin, or in my case, Ipswich, because I live in Suffolk, you know, or some kind of small town where there's not necessarily a lot of museums.
13:00
SPEAKER_01: And I think it I want to reach out to those people as well.
13:03
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's my one skill.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: I can reach both of those people.
13:06
SPEAKER_01: So I talk about complicated issues, I talk about very difficult issues.
13:10
SPEAKER_01: You know, I talk about the AIDS crisis in the 80s when I talk about Keith Herring, but it's how I approach it that makes me appeal to those two people.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: These are the two things I kind of think about.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: So this image here on the left is Gustav Klimt, I'm sure you all know it, it's the Kiss.
13:26
SPEAKER_01: What you might not know is in the museum where it is in Vienna, um, you're not allowed to have your photo, you're not allowed to take selfies with it, which is a great idea, thank you very much.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, but they have a separate room with a copy of it.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: So with that copy, you can take selfies with it, and also it's become a place where young lovers go to, and it's where people propose to their partners in front of it.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: So it started to be seen as one of the most romantic images in history.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: Whereas my proposal is it's pretty much accepted that the man in this painting is Gustav Klimt himself, and the woman is Emily Flerger.
14:09
SPEAKER_01: And Emily Flerger was a very revolutionary fashion designer.
14:14
SPEAKER_01: Now, Gustav Klimt pretty much slept with every woman he ever met.
14:19
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
14:20
SPEAKER_01: He had 14 children from 14 different women.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about he slept with his models, he slept with his clients, he slept with everyone, and never had a romantic bone in his body.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: Yet he's done this beautiful romantic image.
14:33
SPEAKER_01: And Emily Flerger is one of the women who never slept with him.
14:37
SPEAKER_01: So I might suggest this is not a romantic picture at all, that this is actually a picture of two friends because they remain friends for their whole life.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: Maybe because she wouldn't sleep with him.
14:47
SPEAKER_01: The other one is war, and this is Claude Monet, and his water lilies were done between 1900 and 1926.
14:53
SPEAKER_01: As you can see, that's a very long period.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to talk a bit longer about Monet in a second.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: But my suggestion is that he's painting these huge water lily paintings in Giverny in the north of France.
15:05
SPEAKER_01: His son is in the First World War.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: His stepson, who he adored, is also in the First World War.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: And while he's painting these in Giverny, he can hear the front.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: So he can hear the bombs going off and the war happening around him.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: And my my only idea is that do these paintings represent something more than just flowers or more than just water lilies?
15:30
SPEAKER_01: Because how could he not be affected by that when he was painting?
15:34
SPEAKER_01: So that's just an added way of looking at things.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: This painting here, as you know, is probably as the night hawks.
15:42
SPEAKER_01: This was painted just as America was about to enter the Second World War.
15:47
SPEAKER_01: And he was a miserable bugger, and his wife was very miserable as well, and they had a really miserable marriage, a really unhappy marriage, mainly because he wasn't a very nice person.
15:58
SPEAKER_01: But he did this painting, and it's become one of the most iconic images of all time.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: And many, many people see this this was done during World War II, and America was probably just about to enter World War II.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, you may not know this, but on the East Coast of America, where this is based in New York, East Coast of America, they had two practice air raids already before Americans entered the war, and on the West Coast they had one.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: So there was that feeling already in the air.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: So I'm kind of suggesting maybe that's something to do with it.
16:31
SPEAKER_01: Um people think this is one of the most lonely images of all time.
16:35
SPEAKER_01: Some people find it very comforting.
16:40
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna do a straw poll.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: I need to move out the light a little bit.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: How many people find this image comforting?
16:48
SPEAKER_01: And how many people find it lonely?
16:51
SPEAKER_01: I think I might have influenced the lonely people because we might but the the idea that I'm talking about here is that we bring our own history to these paintings as well.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: So it's also what we're thinking.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: So it's not necessarily there isn't a right or wrong answer.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: It's just something that we bring to ourselves to paintings.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: Let's look at this painting here, the Arnold Feeney portrait.
17:16
SPEAKER_01: This is by Jan van Eyck.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: This is one of the most incredible paintings in history, I think.
17:21
SPEAKER_01: It's one of my favourite paintings, and I see this as a very romantic painting.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: It's about this big.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: So it's not huge, but the detailing is incredible.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: He is credited as being one of the first oil painters in the world, as opposed to um working with egg tempera.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: You know, the the egg tempera is when they mix egg yolk with pigment powder.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: So when you see the old things like giotto or something, they're done with pigment and and um and uh uh egg yolk.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: Whereas this was done with oil paint, using it as a binder.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: He wasn't the first, but he did perfect it.
17:57
SPEAKER_01: So this is a portrait that I grew up in London as a kid calling the Arnulfini Wedding.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: Does everyone anyone else remember calling it that?
18:06
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of accepted now that it's not a wedding, even though people still think it is.
18:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, because on the right hand side that's Giovanna, that's his wife, and he is Arnulfini.
18:19
SPEAKER_01: So it's um Arnulfini was an importer of luxury goods.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: What this painting is, they were from Italy, they were from Lucca in Italy, and they live in Bruges in Belgium.
18:30
SPEAKER_01: So, what this painting literally is, is an advertisement for his luxury goods that he's importing into the country.
18:38
SPEAKER_01: It's all about showing off, and a lot of art is about showing off.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: The very first thing is that it was painted by Jan van Eyck.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: Jan van Eyck was already famous, he was already very expensive.
18:51
SPEAKER_01: So to have a painting done by Jan van Eyck on your living room wall was a pretty much like having a Ferrari parked outside your drive.
19:00
SPEAKER_01: It was really expensive.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: So that's one way of showing off, and then there's more ideas here as well.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: You think she's pregnant, right?
19:08
SPEAKER_01: The way she's standing like that, but it's not.
19:10
SPEAKER_01: She's bunching up the cloth.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: So she's holding the cloth up.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: If you look at this painting of Eve, this was a way of showing fecundity to show that women were capable of giving birth.
19:21
SPEAKER_01: And we know she's not pregnant because we know for a fact she died in 1433, so a year before this painting was done.
19:31
SPEAKER_01: So that suggests that it's probably a memorial painting.
19:35
SPEAKER_01: Most people in the UK understand memorial paintings because we know from Henry VIII, you know, with his dead wives in certain paintings and things like that.
19:43
SPEAKER_01: So it's that's Eve pregnant, so she's not pregnant, she's just pushing her belly out.
19:49
SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of what they did.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about all the material in here, first of all.
19:53
SPEAKER_01: To get that green and that cloth, to dye that with vegetable dyes, would have taken 20 to 30 processes to get it that deep dark green.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: That's one thing that's expensive, first of all.
20:05
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of material she's holding.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: She would have had to have a servant to carry the train.
20:10
SPEAKER_01: This here is called dagging, which is actually even more material.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: It must have weighed a ton on her as well.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: The fur, can you see the fur lining there?
20:21
SPEAKER_01: That's 2,000 squirrels, but not the squirrels.
20:26
SPEAKER_01: The red, the white fur of the red squirrel.
20:29
SPEAKER_01: They just used the white fur to make that.
20:31
SPEAKER_01: So 2,000 squirrels died making this dress.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: Now, they're showing off, but they can't show off too much because this is the rise of the middle classes, and the royalty, the aristocracy, they started pushing them down, saying there was too much showing off, too much money going around.
20:49
SPEAKER_01: So, for example, they were they were called sumptuary laws they introduced, and these laws told them what they were allowed to wear, what were they allowed to buy, etc.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: etc.
20:59
SPEAKER_01: They weren't allowed to wear too much blue, for example, because blue is a royal colour.
21:04
SPEAKER_01: So you can see she's just kind of pulling out of her sleeve to say, I do have blue underneath this, you know.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: So, and in fact, you can't see it here, but there's a little bit of blue here as well.
21:14
SPEAKER_01: So it's to show she can afford the blue because the blue is lapis azuli, and that's a semi-precious stone coming from present-day Afghanistan.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine in the 1400s importing that precious stone from Afghanistan, grinding it down and making pigment out of it?
21:30
SPEAKER_01: So, all of this is showing off as well.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, even their shoes, these shoes here, they were used for walking in the mud because the streets weren't paved in that of that period.
21:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, and then let's go through some other elements.
21:45
SPEAKER_01: So I think she's definitely dead by the time this painting is done, and I'm going to give you some evidence for it.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: So, this is that mirror in the background.
21:59
SPEAKER_01: If you Hold your hand like this and look at your little finger, those roundels are smaller than your little finger.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: That's how tiny they are.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: So those ten roundels going around, and I blew this one up on the right-hand side.
22:15
SPEAKER_01: It's pretty hard to get a strong image of this, but that crucifixion is done with a single hairbrush.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: It's just unbelievable the painting involved in this.
22:26
SPEAKER_01: So all of the images on her side, so imagine she's over here, are Christ's death, etc.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: So the crucifixion, deposition, the entombment, the resurrection.
22:38
SPEAKER_01: All the images on his side, he's over here, remember, are when Christ is still living.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: So this is the Last Supper, Kiss of Judas, flagellation, etc.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: Just have a look at those on the right hand side, on the left hand side, rather, they're rosary beads.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: He was importing those rosary beads, so he's another advert for his wares, if you like.
22:59
SPEAKER_01: But every single image in that rosary bead, but there, and you you you can see this, they're actually amber.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: So he was importing amber.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: Every single rosary bead has got a reflection of the room in it.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: A tiny.
23:13
SPEAKER_01: Look at the green thread running through it.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: That's a single hairbrush as well.
23:19
SPEAKER_01: This skill is unbelievable.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: And this is a reflection of them.
23:24
SPEAKER_01: That's a reflection of them in there.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: Now, what do you think this room is?
23:33
SPEAKER_01: What type of room is this in their house?
23:36
SPEAKER_01: There's a bed behind them.
23:39
SPEAKER_01: You'd think it was the bedroom, wouldn't you?
23:42
SPEAKER_01: But in fact, it's not at all, because they're not going to have people walking into their bedroom.
23:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, it was very, very common practice, and I've seen it in five or six different paintings, to have a bed in your room that no one ever used.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: And it was just a status symbol to say you could afford it.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: Because to get that red, that velvet, that red by dying would have cost a fortune as well.
24:11
SPEAKER_01: So, this is the chandelier.
24:13
SPEAKER_01: So this is her side here on the right hand side, his side on the left.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: If you look very carefully here, there's a candle.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: Can you see the candle above him?
24:22
SPEAKER_01: That's lit, it's still burning.
24:24
SPEAKER_01: If you look above her, you can't see it very clearly, but you can see the wax melted.
24:29
SPEAKER_01: Can you see the wax melted?
24:30
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, when they use the microscope on it, you can see a little plume of smoke to show this just snuffed out.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: So it's more evidence, perhaps, of that.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: On the writing on the wall, it says Jan van Eyck was here.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: That's literally what it says in Latin.
24:50
SPEAKER_01: And we still don't know why he signed it like that, because most artists didn't sign their works.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: Michelangelo, for example, he signed one work.
24:58
SPEAKER_01: He didn't, the artist didn't sign their work.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, and we think it's because he was showing off as well, saying, Look what I've done, you know, look at this art I've created.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: So there you see the mirror here.
25:09
SPEAKER_01: By the way, even simple things like the mirror itself, um, to make a convex mirror like that, you couldn't make it that size.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't technically possible to make it that size.
25:20
SPEAKER_01: So that means Jan van Eyck has cheated to make it bigger because one second.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: It looks like the eye of God in the background looking over them.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: So that's probably a cheat that he has done.
25:38
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna read you out another excerpt here.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: But I think this is my uh final word on this painting, and why I think it's one of the most moving paintings of all, because I think um we we we know he didn't get married again, so he must have really loved that woman who died.
25:58
SPEAKER_01: There's a possibility she died in childbirth, maybe we're not 100% sure, but I think my final piece of evidence for this is that their hands, and that's why I put this in the frontist piece of this chapter about them, because it looks to me like her hand is slowly slipping out of his.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: So let's read another part from my book, because there's a lot of ideas and mystery about this, but here I say the true mystery of this painting lies in its unparalleled use of space, depth, colour, and texture, creating the illusion that we could walk through the flat wooden panel of the painting into a mirrored universe.
26:40
SPEAKER_01: Jan van Eyck's contemporaries dubbed him an alchemist, but while he may not have invented oil painting, as early historians suggest, he undeniably refined the medium.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: Understanding that some pigments become almost transparent when mixed with oil, he applied numerous thin layers, almost a wash, which gave the work a luminous quality and a finish so smooth that it suggests the Arnulfini portrait has been untouched by human hands.
27:09
SPEAKER_01: That is really important because when you look up close, you can't see a brush stroke.
27:14
SPEAKER_01: And that's because he's using these thin washes.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: So this part of her dress here, this part here, has 27 layers of wash.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: So that's thin layers of wash.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: Just to give you some kind of context, the Mona Lisa, the part by her chin here, has 38 layers of wash.
27:35
SPEAKER_01: So very thinly done again and again and again.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: The patience involved in that, but it's also to make the painting look like there are no brush strokes, as if it's been made by God.
27:45
SPEAKER_01: Then there's the element here of the dog and the dog at her feet, and this is dogs from medieval tunes which showed fidelity.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: So they quite often had dogs at the feet of uh medieval women.
28:01
SPEAKER_01: Now let's jump forward to Francis Bacon.
28:04
SPEAKER_01: So, Frances Bacon, um, and my book looks at this um painting here, this triptych, and it's called Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: My suggestion is that's the most important word in the whole long, very long title.
28:21
SPEAKER_01: He always uses long titles because it's a crucifixion, it's not the crucifixion, and that's really, really important in the context of Francis Bacon, because it's not a religious image.
28:32
SPEAKER_01: When we look at an image like this, by the way, this was done just um after the end of World War II.
28:40
SPEAKER_01: So you can imagine the shock of someone seeing this work.
28:43
SPEAKER_01: It's pretty much the same as the banana take to a wall that we all saw in the newspapers, right?
28:50
SPEAKER_01: So it's pretty much it would have been as shocking as that in that period.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: You would have thought that it was a triptych, and this is a classic triptych that would have been folded and carried around with them.
29:00
SPEAKER_01: And that's where people think it came from, but Francis Bacon himself said it did not.
29:04
SPEAKER_01: He was obsessed with cinema, so it's it's interesting how we can look at these artists and see a different way of looking because cinema was so big for him.
29:12
SPEAKER_01: He was in Berlin at the birth of cinema, practically, all the big silent movies, and this is Abel Gantz's Napoleon from 1927, which he was obsessed with.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: And if you don't, if you don't know this film, by the way, this film is five hours, and I've seen it, so it's with a live orchestra, so it makes it a bit more special.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: But it starts off with one screen like this, and by the end of the film, it's it's about Napoleon, obviously.
29:37
SPEAKER_01: By the end of the film, it becomes three.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: And he loved this film, and he based a lot of his ideas and images on that.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: When we look at all these famous images of Francis Bacon, we always think of them as screaming figures.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: Um, I suggest something else.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: I suggest there's another way of looking at these, they're not just screaming figures.
29:54
SPEAKER_01: This is Francis Bacon here.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: You can see the very unhappy man there pointing there.
29:59
SPEAKER_01: Um what we have to remember about Francis Bacon is again, he was a homosexual and he he hid his life.
30:05
SPEAKER_01: So he used to lie all the time.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: He didn't tell, he didn't say, for example, that he was an interior designer.
30:11
SPEAKER_01: He didn't tell anyone he was an interior designer because he thought the art world would look down on it, and they would have as well.
30:17
SPEAKER_01: Um and he used to talk to tell all these different stories about his life, like he never admitted that he used photography, for example.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: That's him there, he was an air raid um warden.
30:26
SPEAKER_01: He had extremely bad asthma when he was a child.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: His father used to beat him all the time and um and made him sleep with the horses, which used to exacerbate his um, and in this day and age, of course, you're do talking about injections to cure this kind of thing.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: So he had this extreme asthma, and his job was picking up the dead bodies, you know, tape picking up the dead bodies, sorting through the rubble, moving things around, and the other thing we have to remember is while he's doing that painting, the images of Auschwitz were coming through as well.
30:58
SPEAKER_01: You know, so there's all these external ideas which took to become part of the picture.
31:03
SPEAKER_01: But anyway, he had to stop.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: He was um my suggestion is that here is that this could be Francis Bacon was always gasping for air when he was having his asthma attacks.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: So this could be that as well.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: It's another way of looking at it.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: Um, this was an image he loved from Battleship Potemkin, which is Sergei Eisenstein's film, another silent film, and he used this again and again and again.
31:27
SPEAKER_01: He didn't tell everyone because this is my chapter here.
31:32
SPEAKER_01: I talk about the images they found after he died, which was loads and loads of ripped-up photos.
31:38
SPEAKER_01: But he used to use the photos as a sketchbook.
31:40
SPEAKER_01: So you can see he's folded them and he's made these images here, and that image there of his partner, Dyer, becomes that image up there.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of he folded them and moved them around almost like a sketchbook.
31:52
SPEAKER_01: So instead of using a sketchbook, he used ripped-up photos.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: Now let's talk about Claude Monet.
31:58
SPEAKER_01: Um, Claude Monet is someone who I never really liked when I was younger, and now I'm obsessed with him.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: He's actually my hero.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: I love Claude Monet, he's a real rebel as well.
32:08
SPEAKER_01: So he was around for an extremely long time, uh, 1840 to 1926.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: And I talk in my book about Impressionism and how it came about.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: There's lots of ideas behind this.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: I suggest three ideas here.
32:20
SPEAKER_01: One is the Franco-Prussian War.
32:22
SPEAKER_01: The Franco-Prussian War was 1870 to 1871.
32:25
SPEAKER_01: Very short war, very violent, mostly took place in Paris.
32:30
SPEAKER_01: So all of these artists they would have seen their friends die.
32:33
SPEAKER_01: And I always say that a lot of these great art movements, like Cubism, came out of war as well.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: These great big art movements came from violence and destruction because they wanted to do something different.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: When you've seen your friends killed in action, do you want to do pretty pictures anymore?
32:48
SPEAKER_01: You know, so it's all these ideas behind it.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: Um, the next one is the invention of the camera.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: Uh by the way, Claude Monet, by the way, is painting around the 1870s to start with.
33:00
SPEAKER_01: So by the time he's painting, the camera is ubiquitous.
33:04
SPEAKER_01: So lots of people have cameras, lots of people use cameras.
33:06
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to explain why that's important.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: The last one is the invention of portable oil paints.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: If we go through those one by one, Franco-Prussian war happens.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: Monet moves to London.
33:16
SPEAKER_01: So he moves to London to escape the war.
33:18
SPEAKER_01: And while he's in London, he studies JMW Turner.
33:22
SPEAKER_01: And JMW Turner, I think, is the main reason for the Impressionists.
33:26
SPEAKER_01: I think that's where they came from, really, because they studied him, they loved Turner.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: And this is Claude Monet's very famous painting, his first Impressionist painting, which he called Impression Sunrise, Impression Sunrise.
33:39
SPEAKER_01: The critics hated the Impressionists, they despised them, they thought they were awful, horrible modern art.
33:45
SPEAKER_01: The stuff that we think is almost like chocolate box these days was considered radical.
33:49
SPEAKER_01: And so he is one of the critics said, That's all the work is.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: It's nothing, it's just an impression.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: It was a negative thing to say.
33:58
SPEAKER_01: And Claude Monet sat down with uh Cézanne and said, That's a really good title for a movement.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: So he took the negative and turned it into a positive, and that's where the word for impressionism came from.
34:10
SPEAKER_01: So that war meant he came to London.
34:12
SPEAKER_01: He studied, um, amongst others, he studied Turner.
34:16
SPEAKER_01: Um, invention of the camera.
34:17
SPEAKER_01: So the picture on the left, when you've got a camera, it's like you've taken that picture on the left.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: Why do you want to just paint an apple anymore that looks like exactly like a photo when you can just take a photo?
34:30
SPEAKER_01: So people started looking at different ways of doing it.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: That's Hunwa in the middle, and that's Cezanne on the right hand side.
34:37
SPEAKER_01: Cezanne is my ultimate hero, my favourite artist of all time, and he's the man who said, with this apple I will astonish Paris.
34:44
SPEAKER_01: When we look at this, we just see apples on a plate, right?
34:47
SPEAKER_01: When the up when the critics were looking at this, they saw it as something so different and so radical, because it really was.
34:53
SPEAKER_01: Then the last thing is the port, the invention of portable oil paints.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: So before this, the artist like uh John Singer Sargent, when he was starting out, he would have to take a pig's bladder out with him, stuffed with paint.
35:06
SPEAKER_01: You know, and he couldn't take hundreds and hundreds of them.
35:09
SPEAKER_01: So nearly all of these artists, including Turner, by the way, would have gone and sketched outside and then gone back into their studio to paint because the paint would have dried too quickly.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: So they had to paint inside with the oil paints.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: The invention of oil paint meant that artists could go outside and paint.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: That was really, really important.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: It changed the impressionist.
35:30
SPEAKER_01: That meant they could paint the impression of the sun.
35:33
SPEAKER_01: That meant he could paint, for example, Monet could paint Chateau Cathedral 38 times because he wanted to see how the light hit it at different times of the day, and it was just a way of seeing things in a new way.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: And so those just that little invention of portable oil paints meant that artists could go outside and they could really study light and they could really study colour, and that changed everything.
35:55
SPEAKER_01: Colour became so radically different.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: And uh, this is my chapter in my book, is about what I call the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism, and it's about um has anyone been to the orangerie in Paris?
36:10
SPEAKER_01: A few people.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: So the orangerie in Paris, if you go to Paris, please go to the orangerie, I beg you, don't go to the Apple Tower, go to the orangerie because it's just the most mind-blowing museum.
36:21
SPEAKER_01: So my chapter is all about the creation of that, which nearly didn't happen because Monet is getting on in years by the time he starts this.
36:31
SPEAKER_01: So it started in 1914, finished in 1926.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: 1914, of course, we know that date.
36:37
SPEAKER_01: And um, it started because of this man.
36:40
SPEAKER_01: Monet had had enough.
36:41
SPEAKER_01: He had had enough of painting, he'd had enough of doing this work, and he had cataracts in his eyes.
36:47
SPEAKER_01: So he had these cataracts in his eyes, and um, he couldn't see colours so well anymore, which is why his colours are so different from everybody else's.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: His best friend is the man on the left.
36:58
SPEAKER_01: So his total best friend that they were close forever for a long, long time, for nearly 50 years, and that's Georges Clemenceau.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: And you might know Georges Clemenceau as the signer of the Versailles Treaty and caused many problems for years to come.
37:12
SPEAKER_01: But he was also a great art lover, and he was also the president of France during the First World War.
37:18
SPEAKER_01: They loved each other, they were both obsessed with fast cars.
37:22
SPEAKER_01: So um they used to drive around Giverny.
37:25
SPEAKER_01: This is a little random fact which I love, is Monet was the first man in France to get a parking ticket for driving at 23 miles an hour.
37:34
SPEAKER_01: So, so in his Rolls Royce, by the way.
37:36
SPEAKER_01: So he was one of those artists who was very wealthy.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: Georges Clemenceau and him, they loved each other.
37:40
SPEAKER_01: Now look at the image on the right.
37:42
SPEAKER_01: That's nothing to do with Monet.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: That image is by Rodin, Auguste Rodin.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, Auguste Rodin, good working class boy, came from nothing, became a great businessman, actually.
37:54
SPEAKER_01: Um, when we criticize artists today for not doing the work, you know, for getting a teams of people to doing it, that's exactly what Rodin did.
38:00
SPEAKER_01: He hardly ever sculpted anything, he got someone else to do it.
38:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, but anyway, Rodin was just a genius, just a genius man, and he was best friends with him as well.
38:10
SPEAKER_01: They were really good friends with two great artists.
38:14
SPEAKER_01: Rodin did this sculpture in 1911 of Clemenceau.
38:18
SPEAKER_01: Clemenceau said that is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life.
38:22
SPEAKER_01: I hate it.
38:23
SPEAKER_01: Look how miserable I look, I look so grumpy.
38:26
SPEAKER_01: Um, just melt it down, please.
38:28
SPEAKER_01: And Rodin said, No, I'm not gonna melt that down.
38:31
SPEAKER_01: I've already sold it.
38:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, because of course it was a cast, you know, so he sold hundreds of them, well, 30, 40 of them, and um Clemenceau never spoke to him again.
38:41
SPEAKER_01: So that so that was it, they fell out.
38:43
SPEAKER_01: That's really important in this story.
38:45
SPEAKER_01: Because Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin were born the same year.
38:51
SPEAKER_01: Um Auguste Rodin died uh 15 years before Monet, but they're they're contemporaries and they were frenemies, you know, so they were kind of working um at the same time, and they were they were rich, Monet was quite jealous of Rodin as well, because Rodin was kind of uh uh making a lot more money than Monet was.
39:11
SPEAKER_01: So Clemenceau um comes up with this great idea.
39:16
SPEAKER_01: Rodin, two years before he died, gave all of his works in his studio to the city of Paris.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: And has anyone been to the Rodin Museum in Paris?
39:27
SPEAKER_01: You've been everywhere, you two.
39:30
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that is what Rodin gave to the city of Paris.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: He gave all these great works.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: Front page headlines, you know, Rodin is such a generous man giving all these works.
39:41
SPEAKER_01: Monet doesn't want to do work anymore.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: Then Clemenceau says to Monet, but have you noticed how Rodin is suddenly the hero of this whole situation?
39:50
SPEAKER_01: You know, he said, um, don't you think you might want to do one more great work for the nation?
39:56
SPEAKER_01: And that's what this is.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: This is that final work which took over 16 years.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: It was easy enough to persuade him to do it because he just gave him loads of cigarettes and loads of wine because it was the war, remember, so there was rationing, and Clemorceau had the power to do this.
40:14
SPEAKER_01: Um, allowed him petrol for his car, so and and he got him to do the work, but it was really hard to get them back off of him.
40:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Monet painted all these works, and that's what these works are.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: These works are these uh great works about where he actually worked on the design of the museum as well, the art with the architect, and it's to be a big, huge, self-enclosed area, almost like an installation work.
40:37
SPEAKER_01: However, if you look at the date it opened, 1927, and if you noticed before, Monet died in 1926.
40:46
SPEAKER_01: So he died a year before it was completed.
40:50
SPEAKER_01: And I hate to say this, but thank God for that, because it was a disaster.
40:55
SPEAKER_01: Everyone hated it, they thought it was awful.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna read an excerpt about that particular image.
41:07
SPEAKER_01: So, a few months after Monet's death, the public saw the water lilies for the first time.
41:12
SPEAKER_01: Sadly, they weren't particularly dazzled.
41:15
SPEAKER_01: Impressionism was already considered passe, and the paintings were attacked by critics as the work of an old man and devastatingly dull.
41:26
SPEAKER_01: The artist who had been rejected by critics in the 19th century for being too radical was now being criticized in the 20th century for not being radical enough.
41:38
SPEAKER_01: Then, that's Monet, by the way, on the top.
41:40
SPEAKER_01: That's a painting by Monet.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: It looks like modern art, right?
41:44
SPEAKER_01: Because these cataracts are so bad.
41:47
SPEAKER_01: Then in the 1950s, a new generation of American artists rediscovered Monet.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: What's really interesting about this museum is when you go in there nowadays, you see this glorious splash of colour.
41:58
SPEAKER_01: But after two years of the museum being open, no one was visiting.
42:01
SPEAKER_01: So they actually put boards up all around and started putting different pictures up and having different exhibitions.
42:07
SPEAKER_01: For three years it became a dog training area.
42:10
SPEAKER_01: It's where they train dogs because no one cared about money anymore.
42:13
SPEAKER_01: It's finished until the 1950s.
42:16
SPEAKER_01: And that's when Jackson Pollock and all of the great artists studied him, including Rothko, Mark Rothko.
42:23
SPEAKER_01: Mark Rothko idolized him to still, and these are all these great American artists, they were coming to Paris under the GI Bill, and they were learning in Paris about art, and they all idolized Monet.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: And from that point on, Monet was then seen as a great artist.
42:40
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting that someone that we now think is everyday artists, a great artist, at one point was considered passe.
42:48
SPEAKER_01: Arguably, without this, we might not have Yayoi Kusama, which is installation art.
42:55
SPEAKER_01: It's an argument.
42:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, it could be considered maybe the first possible installation work.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: Um, let's I want to briefly talk about Yayo Kusama, um, because she's a chapter in my book as well.
43:06
SPEAKER_01: She came from uh Tokyo and she was very young, she's only 19, and she came to um America because of she was friends with George O'Keefe.
43:16
SPEAKER_01: She used to write letters to George O'Keefe, and George O'Keefe gave her lots of introductions.
43:19
SPEAKER_01: She really struggled.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, a lot of my um book deals with a lot of mental health issues as well, because I think sometimes we overanalyze work.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: I think, for example, Van Gogh, he created work despite his mental health, not because of it.
43:34
SPEAKER_01: You know, so things like this.
43:36
SPEAKER_01: I think there are lots of ways of looking at these issues.
43:38
SPEAKER_01: Van Gogh, we all think of as this crazy artist.
43:41
SPEAKER_01: In fact, he had his first breakdown two years before he died.
43:45
SPEAKER_01: So he wasn't like that all the time.
43:46
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, he couldn't have made that many works if he was.
43:50
SPEAKER_01: Yayoi Kusama as well.
43:52
SPEAKER_01: So she creates this work.
43:53
SPEAKER_01: The one on the top is 1000 Boat Show.
43:55
SPEAKER_01: She created this wallpaper going around the show.
43:58
SPEAKER_01: Here on the bottom, Is accumulation.
44:01
SPEAKER_01: These are all kind of phallic symbols made out of material.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: The critics just ignored her.
44:08
SPEAKER_01: Everyone ignored her.
44:09
SPEAKER_01: She worked hard.
44:11
SPEAKER_01: She was there for decades.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: They all ignored what she did.
44:14
SPEAKER_01: But then male artists came along.
44:16
SPEAKER_01: That show by Andy Warhoe is six months later where he did wallpaper around the gallery.
44:21
SPEAKER_01: The show was, critics loved it.
44:23
SPEAKER_01: That's Klaus Olenberg on the right hand side.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: He had always done worked with hard material, suddenly he's working with soft material.
44:30
SPEAKER_01: Again, the show was heavily praised by the critics.
44:34
SPEAKER_01: If we think of Yayoikusama, we always think of those mirrored rooms, those infinity rooms.
44:40
SPEAKER_01: That's what she's really famous for.
44:41
SPEAKER_01: This is the one she did here in 1965, the first one she did.
44:45
SPEAKER_01: Critics ignored it.
44:46
SPEAKER_01: One critic wrote about it, he happened to be her boyfriend.
44:49
SPEAKER_01: So on the right hand side, Lucas Samaras, you see the difference in the times there one year later?
44:56
SPEAKER_01: Everyone lauded him.
44:58
SPEAKER_01: So she left New York.
44:59
SPEAKER_01: She'd had enough.
45:00
SPEAKER_01: She goes back to Tokyo, she checks into a mental asylum.
45:03
SPEAKER_01: That's where she's living to this day.
45:05
SPEAKER_01: She's in her 80s.
45:06
SPEAKER_01: She's still working living in a mental asylum since 1977.
45:10
SPEAKER_01: She still works every single day.
45:13
SPEAKER_01: She's not creating work like she did, but she's working with her teams every day.
45:19
SPEAKER_01: And that's the interesting thing, is that unlike Van Gogh, Yayoikusama had this support system around her.
45:27
SPEAKER_01: So she developed a support system, and that really helped her with her work.
45:33
SPEAKER_01: So I think we're going to finish up here pretty shortly.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: Now, when we closed our eyes, I think um when I close my eyes every morning, so I do this every morning, I've been doing it for three years now, and it's just to have an image of art in my head in the morning before I start work.
45:50
SPEAKER_01: And um and sometimes I do it when I'm doing yoga, and this is the image I mostly think of.
45:55
SPEAKER_01: This is my favorite work of art, which is kind of strange for me because I love modern art.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: I also love Michelangelo, but I'm also an atheist, and yet this is one of the most religious subjects of all time.
46:07
SPEAKER_01: So I think it's it's um what I want to talk to you about here is how we can be affected by art even if it doesn't connect with us on a personal level.
46:17
SPEAKER_01: So this is La Pietra by Michelangelo, genius work of art.
46:21
SPEAKER_01: He did this when he was 22.
46:24
SPEAKER_01: Um, he was the room, the story goes, he was looking at this work of art, and people were standing around and going, he didn't do that.
46:31
SPEAKER_01: It's not possible for a 22-year-old to do that.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: So he sneaks back in the middle of the night.
46:35
SPEAKER_01: This story is not true, but everyone says it.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: Sneak back in the middle of the night and he signs a sash.
46:40
SPEAKER_01: So that's why this is the only work signed by Michelangelo.
46:47
SPEAKER_01: Before we talk about this one, let's have a look at this one.
46:51
SPEAKER_01: So this is the chapter from my book, and this one here is 17 years before the Michelangelo one, and you can really see the difference, right?
47:05
SPEAKER_01: So these came from Germany.
47:07
SPEAKER_01: This is where this idea comes from, because in this period of history, artists they only illustrated religious subjects that were in the Bible.
47:16
SPEAKER_01: That's a clear, clear, strict way of working.
47:21
SPEAKER_01: The church would not have sanctioned it otherwise.
47:23
SPEAKER_01: The story of Jesus Christ dying in his mother's arms is not in the Bible.
47:29
SPEAKER_01: And I've studied the Bible, so I do know it's definitely not in the Bible.
47:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's not one of the stories from any of the passion, any of that story.
47:37
SPEAKER_01: So this is an image for the first time in history that was taken out of context, so it's not necessarily in the Bible.
47:44
SPEAKER_01: And the Germans uh they did they called them um, what did they call them?
47:48
SPEAKER_01: There you go, I can never remember that word, Vesperbilds.
47:52
SPEAKER_01: And um look how stiff Jesus is.
47:56
SPEAKER_01: Because it's very difficult for a small woman, because you're not going to do the virgin other in any other way, to hold her dead son like this.
48:05
SPEAKER_01: So he's very stiff and very long, and it's an awkward pose.
48:12
SPEAKER_01: But if we look at this, that's not awkward, is it?
48:15
SPEAKER_01: I think it's just beautiful, it's just perfectly captured.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: But it's how did he do it?
48:19
SPEAKER_01: How did he go from that to that in such a short period of history?
48:23
SPEAKER_01: He did it by doing what a lot of the Renaissance artists do, which is cheating.
48:28
SPEAKER_01: He had to cheat to do it.
48:30
SPEAKER_01: First of all, if Mary stood up, once you see this, unfortunately you'll never unsee it.
48:35
SPEAKER_01: If Mary stood up, she'd be over seven feet tall.
48:38
SPEAKER_01: And you can see that, right?
48:40
SPEAKER_01: Now you know you'll see it.
48:42
SPEAKER_01: She's enormous.
48:44
SPEAKER_01: The second thing he did, which is really shocking for the time, she's got her legs spread wide apart to support her son.
48:52
SPEAKER_01: It's very ungainly and very unsaintly.
48:56
SPEAKER_01: Because artists in the Renaissance are starting to think differently.
49:00
SPEAKER_01: They're not just seeing Mary as a saint, which is what they've always seen her as, they're seeing her as a mother.
49:07
SPEAKER_01: A mother holding her dying son, and that's a different way of looking at this.
49:12
SPEAKER_01: So to cover up her legs being spread so far like that, he covers them with material, and you don't even notice, first of all, when you first look at it.
49:20
SPEAKER_01: And everything is designed.
49:22
SPEAKER_01: If you look at any Renaissance image from Raphael, Michelangelo, think of the Mona Lisa, they're all triangular like that.
49:29
SPEAKER_01: Because they push our eyes up.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: These artists understood eyes, they understood how brains work.
49:35
SPEAKER_01: They were doing dissections all the time, which by the way, it's a myth, they were illegal, dissections.
49:40
SPEAKER_01: They were totally sanctioned by the church.
49:43
SPEAKER_01: So the image makes you look up towards her.
49:46
SPEAKER_01: Does Mary look like the mother of a 33-year-old man?
49:51
SPEAKER_01: She looks like a young woman.
49:53
SPEAKER_01: He was very heavily criticized for that, and he said, I don't care what you think because she represents purity.
49:59
SPEAKER_01: What's interesting about this is Michelangelo's own mother, who he's very close to, died when he was 12.
50:05
SPEAKER_01: So there is that story in there as well.
50:08
SPEAKER_01: Then we look at the the hands.
50:14
SPEAKER_01: If you know about the David statue, you know the David statue.
50:18
SPEAKER_01: So David's statue has got the sling over there, and he's got the sling shot in his arm.
50:23
SPEAKER_01: So everything in the Renaissance is about a moment in time.
50:27
SPEAKER_01: This is the moment Jesus is dying in his mother's arms.
50:30
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so he's expiring.
50:33
SPEAKER_01: David is the moment that David is looking at Goliath, David, sorry, pretentious, um, is uh looking at Goliath and summing him up because he's still got the slingshot in his hand, he hasn't thrown it yet, he's thinking.
50:47
SPEAKER_01: If you think about every other image of David before this, he's holding up the head, right?
50:53
SPEAKER_01: You've seen that image again and again and again.
50:56
SPEAKER_01: But he is doing something different.
50:57
SPEAKER_01: It's not about brute force anymore, it's about thinking, and it's about men thinking.
51:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, he also had with David, for example, this arm up here and this hand down here had different veins because he understood veins, he had dissected hundreds and hundreds of bodies, and he knew that the way the veins sat was very different when you're holding your hand down when the blood is flowing that way, and when your blood is flowing that way.
51:19
SPEAKER_01: That's just amazing.
51:21
SPEAKER_01: He's done the same here.
51:22
SPEAKER_01: See the veins here, perfect, and then you see the signs of the cross there as well.
51:30
SPEAKER_01: Now, the reason I've got this image up here is because to this day, this one thing affects me more than anything else, and that is it looks like Jesus is trying to hold on to his mother for the very last time.
51:49
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what makes this a work a masterpiece.
51:53
SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna read one final excerpt, and then we're done, I think.
51:58
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
51:58
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I talk a lot.
52:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, okay.
52:04
SPEAKER_01: So the young Michelangelo turned a religious subject into a moment of human experience, the sorrow of a mother mourning her son.
52:14
SPEAKER_01: The intimate portrayal of Mary cradling the body of Christ conveys a deeply personal moment of loss which transcends religious context to resonate with anyone who has experienced grief or love.
52:29
SPEAKER_01: It is this emotional pull that makes the sculpture timeless.
52:35
SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much.