All language subtitles for BBC.Civilisations.8of9.The.Cult.of.Progress.1080p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.eng

In the 19th century, the world was
transformed by a powerful idea.

A belief amongst Europeans that
their civilisation alone represented

the pinnacle of human progress.

It was an idea driven by the
modernising forces of science

and industry.

Artists tried to
make sense of it all.

The exhilarating dreams
of a brighter world...

..the nightmares about
where it might lead,

and the real impact of progress
on ordinary human beings.

As the frontiers of
European civilisation advanced,

cultures across the world
were either decimated...

..or learned to adapt and survive.

Some artists fled the forces
of modernisation by turning

to so-called primitive cultures.

Others sought a primal energy
that they believed was lacking

in the industrial world.

For me, as a historian of empire,

art is key to help us understand
these profound tensions between

the idea of inevitable progress
and the fear of what it might cost.

Tensions that helped shape
the world of the 19th century

and foreshadowed
the catastrophe to come.

In the 18th century man learned
to harness the power of nature

in radical new ways.

In the end, virtually
no civilisation on Earth

would remain untouched
by the changes.

The Industrial Revolution first
emerged in the English Midlands.

Its most potent symbol was
a new kind of architecture...

..the factory.

This cotton mill, hidden away
in the Derbyshire countryside,

was the world's very first
fully fledged modern factory.

It was built in the 1770s by the
entrepreneur Richard Arkwright

and it was designed around
his greatest invention -

the water frame.

A machine that used the power of
flowing water to drive looms

that produced cotton yarn cheaper
and faster than anybody ever had.

That makes this factory the
birthplace of mass production.

Here, industry forced nature to bow
before the ambitions of mankind.

But from now on, industry would also
demand that human beings submit

to the needs of the machine...

..working in shifts
around the clock.

Arkwright was so proud of his
cotton mill he had it painted

by the artist
Joseph Wright of Derby,

in an apparently idyllic,
deceptively peaceful landscape.

There's no hint
here of the whirling,

clanking machines and the sheer
relentless energy of the coming age.

Yet Wright the artist was intrigued
by the changing world around him,

though as much by the new science
and technology

as their effects on humanity.

What really fascinated Wright of
Derby was not all the machinery

and the hard labour of the
Industrial Revolution,

but the ideas that drove it.

And these were the great
ideas of the Enlightenment -

a faith in reason
and in scientific method,

an unquenchable thirst for knowledge

and an unshakeable
belief in progress.

It was this idea - that science
believed it was creating

a brave new world -

that lay at the heart of one of
Wright's most celebrated paintings.

A travelling scientist has placed
a bird in a glass bell jar

and begun to pump
out the air.

Deprived of oxygen,
the bird begins to suffocate.

The onlookers respond with a mix
of fascination and horror.

This is science as the new religion,

with the power over life itself.

But Wright also hints at the great
fear of the age -

that science, the machine,
and progress all come at a cost.

Would those who dared to stand in
the way of progress be sacrificed,

like the bird in the air pump?

As the 18th century drew to a close,

one momentous event would mark the
start of a new zealous export of

Enlightenment ideas
to other cultures.

In the summer of 1798,
a French army,

led by Napoleon Bonaparte,
invaded Egypt.

In military terms,
Napoleon's objectives were clear -

to gain strategic advantage
over the British

and expand France's
imperial ambitions.

But the invasion of this
ancient land was about much more

than just military strategy.

Many Europeans regarded Egypt
as the birthplace of civilisation.

They believed that ideas that had
first been nurtured here under

the pharaohs had been passed down,
through ancient Greece,

through the Roman Empire,
through the Renaissance,

all the way down to
modern Enlightenment France.

So by invading Egypt,

Napoleon was leading France back
to the source of civilisation.

To uncover the secrets
of ancient Egypt,

Napoleon brought with him 167 of
France's most brilliant scientists,

mathematicians,
engineers and artists.

They set about studying every aspect
of the country they'd conquered,

especially the ancient ruins that
lay half-buried beneath the sand.

They would publish their findings in
a monumental multivolume work -

The Description Of Egypt.

It documented this lost world

and its as-yet-undeciphered
hieroglyphics

for the tantalisation of the West.

Napoleon's team of experts also
fuelled an archaeological race

to unearth the treasures
of the ancient world.

Many of those treasures ended up
in the new museums of Europe

and North America.

Displayed in the
Enlightenment spirit of learning,

for the betterment
of a wider public.

In the capitals of Europe,

Napoleon's mission spawned
a new fascination

with the art of ancient Egypt.

But Napoleon's invasion
had had another purpose -

not only to uncover the secrets of
ancient Egypt, but also to impose

European civilisation on the
living, contemporary Egypt.

Armed with a library of books
and a printing press,

Napoleon wanted to re-educate
an Islamic world that Europeans

had long seen as the enemy,

a civilisation they considered
to have lost its way.

Ultimately, Napoleon's
occupation would fail

at the hands of the British.

But, in a curious twist,

Europeans became increasingly
obsessed with the very culture

Napoleon had tried to change.

Or more accurately, their imagined
fantasy of what that culture was.

Soon artists began to travel
throughout the Islamic world

to paint the exotic places
and people they encountered.

This is the painting that inspired
an entire genre of 19th century

European art - Orientalism.

It's the work of the French artist
Eugene Delacroix

who painted it in the 1830s,

after he'd actually gone
on a visit to Algeria,

which had recently been conquered
and colonised by France.

And this is the first
real serious attempt

to portray ordinary life
in the Islamic world.

But like many of the Orientalist
paintings that were to follow,

not everything about this
is what it seems.

Now, Delacroix claimed to
have based the composition

on a visit he'd made
to an Arab household in Algeria,

but it would've been extremely
unusual for a male stranger

to given access to the women
of an Arab household,

so there's every chance that
these women are in fact Jewish.

And there are other elements
of this painting

which were either fabricated
or embroidered by Delacroix.

So the painting was completed in
Paris using exotic costumes,

and the models are Parisian models.

And this figure of the black
servant or perhaps black slave

was of Delacroix's invention.

So what seems like a real scene
is in fact a Parisian revelry

of a supposed exotic sensuous
world that didn't exist in Europe.

Yet in Delacroix's gifted hands,

there is a subtlety of shade and
colour that was rarely achieved

by the generation of Orientalist
painters he inspired.

Many Orientalists invented scenes
that revelled in the decadence

and despotism that Europeans
considered to be oriental qualities.

Concubines languishing
in hidden harems,

naked female slaves
for sale in busy markets.

Orientalist themes became
so popular that Ingres,

master of the classical nude,

set one of his greatest works in
an imagined women's bathhouse,

even though he'd never been
to the Middle East.

These were European fantasies,

and they suggest a desire to
escape the turmoil of life

in industrial Europe.

As the Industrial Revolution
gathered pace,

Europe's cities began to change
beyond all recognition.

To begin with,

few saw the emerging factory
landscapes

as a worthy subject for art.

But the British painter
Turner did.

In his view of Dudley, in
England's industrial heartland,

he juxtaposed the
old town on the hill,

its ruined castle
and church steeple,

symbols of tradition and faith...

..with the blazing furnaces and
busy canals of the modern age.

The great thinker and art critic
John Ruskin saw in the picture

an indictment of how the old way
of life was being destroyed

by the factory
and the machine.

Because as manufacturing cities
mushroomed in size,

they became a social disaster...

..overcrowded and rife
with poverty and disease.

This was the human
cost of mechanisation.

STEAM WHISTLE BLOWS

In America, the frontiers
of progress

pushed inexorably westwards,

into territory as yet unspoiled
by industry.

The United States was
a young country,

forged, like France,
out of revolutionary

and Enlightenment idealism.

To its pioneers, the entire American
wilderness, from East to West,

seemed like virgin territory.

Artists translated these
vast landscapes onto canvas

and filled them
with divine light.

They conveyed the idea that God
himself blessed not only the land

but also the new nation
being forged from it.

The great pioneer of American
landscape art was the British-born

Thomas Cole.

Thomas Cole regarded the American
landscape as being what he himself

called "The undefiled work of gods".

In this young country that
just didn't have what Europeans

recognised as a history,

mountains and canyons
and waterfalls were to replace

the classical ruins so beloved
of European landscape artists.

In America, natural history was
to stand in for history itself.

In his landscapes,

Cole often included
America's indigenous peoples.

But they are invariably dwarfed
by the vastness of the scene,

as though they themselves are merely
features of the natural world.

The embodiment of the Enlightenment
idea of the noble savage -

an idealised, uncorrupted people,

living a pure life,
connected to nature.

But underpinning Cole's work

was a fear that the
American wilderness and

its inhabitants would inevitably
be tamed, even destroyed,

in the process of creating
a new nation.

In his masterpiece, an allegory of
civilisation in five paintings,

Cole fused landscape
with an imagined history,

to challenge mainstream ideas
about America's future.

These five paintings
tell an epic story,

the story of the rise and
fall of a great civilisation.

And they're influenced by
a historical theory

that saw the past as an
endless cycle of rises and falls,

and that was popular
in the 19th century.

It begins with what Thomas Cole
called The Savage State.

This is a primordial Earth.

There's a hunter chasing
a stag across the landscape.

In the background is his village,

which is a cluster
of animal-skin tents,

which look almost exactly like
the tepees of the Plain's Indians.

And this supposedly savage state was
the level of civilisation that many

Americans thought that the
Native Americans have reached before

the arrival of Europeans.

But it's the next stage,
The Arcadian, The Pastoral State,

that in many ways
is Thomas Cole's ideal.

In this painting, mankind
has discovered agriculture.

There's a farmer
ploughing his field,

there's a shepherd with his flock.

And because food is now plentiful,

the men and the women
of this society

have the chance to discover
the arts.

There's music and there's
dancing, there's poetry.

But there's also a hint
of the direction of travel

in which this society
is moving,

because on the beach is a longboat
being constructed,

and the hint there is the men
of this society

are going to go out into the
world and forge an empire.

And centuries later,
in the centrepiece,

literally the centrepiece of
this series of paintings,

is The Consummation Of Empire.

This is mankind's
greatest achievements.

There's classical architecture,
there's great civic statues.

This is a society with fleets of
ships engaged in trade and in war.

It's also a civilisation that
has given birth to democracy.

And that's not led to a
flowering of Republican values,

that democracy has been corrupted,
Thomas Cole is telling us,

by the emperor,

the figure who's marching
into his great city

ahead of a column
of horses and elephants.

This is a demagogue who has
sowed the seeds of the fall

of his civilisation.

The fourth painting, Destruction,

is the moment of
the fall of an empire.

The city is being invaded.

We don't know who this army is,

they could be these
forces of a stronger,

more morally virile Empire.

They could be the slaves
of this empire,

who have risen up in revolution,

or they could be,
this could be a civil war.

All of those eventualities
are hinted at here.

But what is clear is that this
society has brought its fall down

upon its own head, because of
its own moral corruption.

What is missing from
this city is nature.

All the trees have been expunged.

And in the final painting,
centuries have passed.

This is Desolation.

From thousands of people,

we have a scene completely
empty of human beings.

Nature has recolonised.

Course Of Empire isn't really
about the classical world.

These paintings aren't
about Rome in the fifth century.

They're about the
United States of America

in the middle of the 19th.

Because Thomas Cole was one
of many figures who believed

his society stood at the crossroads.

It would either stay true to its
original founding principles

or become a commercial,
industrial, urbanised society,

and one that would
expand on a continental scale.

And perhaps not surprisingly,

Thomas Cole, the painter
of landscapes,

the painter of nature,

also profoundly believed that any
society that lost touch with nature

also lost its moral compass.

But many did not believe, like Cole,
in the cyclical nature of history.

In fact, by the mid 19th century,

most white Americans believed
they had what became known

as a "manifest destiny..."

..to take what they saw as
their superior civilisation

to the furthest edge
of the continent.

From the 1830s it became official
US policy to drive Native Americans

from their traditional lands and
into poorer, harsher environments.

Those who resisted were deliberately
starved, hounded out or massacred.

it his life's work to record those

disappearing cultures...

..George Catlin.

Over the course of five trips to
what was then the western frontier,

Catlin met and painted
the portraits

of hundreds of Native American
men and women.

Together they formed a unique
collection that Catlin called

The Indian Gallery.

He would tour them around the
country and later around the world.

George Catlin was by no means
indifferent to the sufferings of

the people whose faces appear
in these paintings.

And unlike some artists,

he went out of his way
to accurately name his sitters.

These are individuals,
they're not types.

And through his art,
Catlin demonstrated to anyone

who cared to look
that there were numerous

different distinct
Native American nations,

all of them with their own
traditions and cultures

and all of them under threat,

as the United States
pushed ever westwards.

But Catlin didn't produce these
paintings in order to take part

in some campaign to save
the Native Americans,

as we might like to think.

Catlin accepted that these
people were, as he said,

"Doomed and must perish".

Catlin's portraits have undoubtedly
preserved a rich cultural record

for posterity. Yet for many
Native Americans,

they are troubling, romanticised
images of the vanishing Indian,

that Catlin put on display
for white fee-paying audiences.

After all, there is
another perspective -

the art of the Native Americans
themselves.

Because even the nomadic
Plains Indians recorded key events

on their portable belongings.

It was a traditional art
form that began to show

the influence of European contact.

This image, painted onto
an animal hide,

was produced by people
of the Cheyenne nation.

It's a depiction of the Battle of
Little Bighorn in 1876 -

one of the few major
Native American victories

in the so-called Indian Wars.

And through artefacts like this,

the Native Americans
recorded their plight

in their own artistic traditions,

and there are, inevitably, many
more images of defeat than victory.

This is the work of people
who were the victims,

not the beneficiaries,
of manifest destiny.

This is art from the
other side of the frontier,

art that records
how the west was lost.

While George Catlin was trying
to preserve the culture

of Native Americans on canvas,

on the far side of the world

another artist would take
a very different view

of the indigenous people
he met on the frontiers of empire.

In 1874, Gottfried Lindauer,

a Czech artist from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire,

arrived in New Zealand, known to its
original inhabitants as Aotearoa.

Lindauer arrived after
decades of warfare,

in which the Maori had lost much
of their land to the British.

The Czech painter suddenly found
his skills much in demand,

producing portraits of Maori
men and women.

To begin with, the portraits were
commissioned by European settlers

eager to preserve a record
of Maori culture for posterity.

They believed that the Maori,
like the Native Americans,

were a dying race.

But the Maori didn't regard
themselves as a doomed people,

and by the 1890s their population
was on the increase

after decades of decline.

And they were absolutely determined
to forge a new future in which

their culture, their traditions,

their language and the memories of
their ancestors were all to be kept

alive and kept vibrant.

And one of the ways they did this
was by co-opting the talents

of Gottfried Lindauer and
commissioning him to paint

their portraits, but on terms
dictated by them, to their tastes,

and according to how they wanted
to be seen and to be remembered.

For Lindauer it didn't matter
whether his commissions came from

Europeans or from the Maori elite.

He treated both as he would
any paying customer.

Artistically, the style was
always resolutely European.

But for his Maori patrons
and their families,

Lindauer's paintings began to assume
an entirely new level of meaning.

As a people who had always
venerated their ancestors,

many Maori came to regard
the portraits of Lindauer

not just as memorials
to their ancestors,

but as almost living icons that kept
their spirit alive in the present.

Now, today, Lindauer's portraits
are scattered all over the world,

in museums and galleries,
but some, including this one,

have remained within
a single family,

passed down through
the generations.

This is Te Rangiotu,
a Maori chieftain

but also a successful businessman

who had the wealth
and the foresight to commission

this portrait from Lindauer in 1884.

Now, what's really significant

is that when Lindauer
was painting portraits

of Maori for European customers,

he tended to paint them
in traditional costume,

but many Maori patrons who had their
portrait painted by Lindauer

demanded that they be shown in
a hybrid mixture of European

and traditional dress,

to show that they were people
who could freely move

between the two cultures.

It's through this of Te Rangiotu,

adorned with the symbols
of his status,

that his descendants feel they are
still able to connect with their

illustrious ancestor.

His picture is given pride of
place in the clan's meeting house,

a sacred space in Maori culture.

The traditional Maori meeting house
is itself designed to embody

an ancestor, both spiritually
and physically...

..from the head and
the outstretched arms

to the backbone and the ribs.

Each of the semi-abstract designs
and swirling patterns represents

specific qualities,

from courage and strength

to health and prosperity.

These patterns are mirrored
in the most dynamic of all

the Maori art forms.

Ta Moko - the art of the tattoo.

Face and body tattoos link Maori
not only with their ancestors,

but also with other cultures
across the Pacific,

who practice it in different forms.

The Maori almost certainly
brought it with them

when they first settled in

Aotearoa, New Zealand,
over 700 years ago.

For centuries, Ta Moko carried
specific cultural meanings.

They denoted social status
or family connections,

and it's said that no two designs
are ever alike.

While today, perhaps inevitably,

the designs of Ta Moko
have been appropriated as a
global fashion accessory,

for many Maori they've
been re-claimed

as a highly visible symbol of
cultural pride and identity.

Throughout the 19th century,

art in many forms was
changed by the spreading

European cult of progress.

Not only on the
furthest edges of Empire...

..but also in
the capitals of Europe.

Here too, artists were being
challenged by rapid social change

and by the emergence
of new technology.

Like Lindauer's portraits,

it would transform the way
human beings perceived themselves.

The age of the camera
and the age of the photograph

began on the day
Louis-Jacques Daguerre made an image

using his new daguerreotype
process of a Parisian street.

Now, the exposure time for
those early primitive cameras

was ten minutes,

far too slow to capture images
of the people

and the horses and carriages
rushing up and down the street.

But one man who stayed still long
enough to have his shoes shined

became, as far as we know,

the first person ever
to appear in a photograph.

What this picture doesn't
reveal is the disastrous effects

of rapid industrialisation
on the city -

the overcrowding, dirt and disease.

But thanks to an ambitious urban
planner called Eugene Haussmann,

Paris was about to be transformed
out of all recognition -

and the evolving art of photography
would be there to capture it.

From the 1850s,

Charles Marville photographed the
city's narrow medieval streets,

just as they and the communities who
lived in them were being swept away.

They were replaced by Haussmann's
grand, spacious boulevards

and lined with uniform
terraced apartments.

The reborn city was Europe's
acknowledged capital of culture

and it was the genius of
another pioneer photographer,

known simply as Nadar,

to capture the celebrated figures
of Parisian high society.

These were the world's first
great portrait photographs,

each one documented with a realism
no painter could ever achieve.

For a younger generation
of Parisian artists,

the camera was both a challenge
and an inspiration.

They'd turned their backs
on the art establishment

and its obsessions with
grand historical themes

and classical mythology.

What they wanted to paint was
everyday modern life,

and rather than compete
with the camera,

they set out to explore
what the camera couldn't -

our human subjective
experiences of the world

and how they're affected by light,
colour and emotion.

The work of the artists who became
known as the Impressionists

is so familiar to us today that we
forget its original power to shock.

When Renoir painted
a popular outdoor dance

that attracted crowds
every Sunday,

he was celebrating modern life

and the new leisure time
it made possible.

Compared with traditional
Academy paintings,

his style would've seemed rough
and incomplete.

But it is this impression
of the effects of light

that has helped define
our image of 19th century Paris.

Monet is best remembered
for his natural landscapes.

But he was also fascinated
by the modern city.

He painted Paris's first train
station, the Gare Saint-Lazare,

filled with clouds of smoke.

Barely visible through the haze,

we glimpse the terraces of
Haussmann's reinvented Paris.

The art of the Impressionists
is today regarded

as endlessly and
effortlessly optimistic,

a portrayal of France in a golden
age of success and self-confidence.

And it is true that the
Impressionists did love to paint

the Paris middle-class at play,

picnicking in the parks
and boating on the lakes,

but they also sometimes did try
to capture that strange sense of

dislocation, of isolation,

that was a new and a troubling
feature of the modern city.

In Caillebotte's vision
of a rain-soaked Paris,

Haussmann's grand boulevards loom
oppressively, as though distorted

by a camera's wide-angle lens.

Pedestrians hurry privately
about their business.

Nobody makes eye contact
with anybody else,

not even the couple
walking towards us.

People are cocooned from each other,

not only by their umbrellas
but by the anonymity of city life.

Even the bourgeois world of
Paris at play had its shadowy side.

Mary Cassatt, an American artist
living in Paris,

painted an elegantly dressed woman
at the opera,

peering at the performance.

Yet she herself does not escape the
attention of a distant male viewer,

as he stares through his opera
glasses and studies her,

just as we, the viewer, study her.

It's a sly comment, perhaps,

on the objectifying male gaze that
produced so many of 19th-century

art's female nudes.

Although Edgar Degas came
from a bourgeois background,

the son of a middle-class banker,

he focused increasingly on those
alienated by modern society.

In Absinthe, he paints two
dishevelled figures in a cafe,

their lives apparently destroyed
by the infamous drink of the title.

They sit side by side,

yet are utterly disengaged
from one another

and from the world
that has rejected them.

But it is one of Impressionism's
most enigmatic works

that most powerfully encapsulates

the paradox at
the heart of the city.

A Bar At The Folies-Bergere
by Edouard Manet from 1882.

This is a glimpse into the
glamorous, glittering world

of Parisian high society,

but it's not a world that
we get to see directly.

We only see it in reflection
on a mirror behind a bar.

And from the moment this
painting was put on display,

it was seen as controversial.

And at the centre of the controversy
is the figure at the centre of

the painting, the barmaid.

Because there she is
in the Folies-Bergere,

the most decadent,
the most glamorous,

the most joyous
cabaret nightclub in Paris,

and yet she has an expression
that is anything but joyous.

It's said to be
the face of indifference

or an expression of alienation.

And the fact that Manet has included
in the painting

all of these luxury goods -
the champagne,

the very expensive imported beer,
and this bowl of oranges -

might have been his way of hinting

that she herself might be
a commodity that's for sale.

That this is a young woman
who works as a prostitute

as well as selling drinks.

And the reflection adds
to the confusion

because her reflection
isn't where we think it should be,

it's off to the right.

And in her reflection
she's not looking at us,

she's talking and leaning into
this man in a top hat.

He is a customer.

But I think everything in this
painting is telling us

that he's a man who's after more
than just a round of drinks.

This is a masterclass in ambiguity.

This is a painting
that is a reflection,

in more than just one sense,

of a Paris that is
both real and unreal,

a consumer society in which
everything is for sale,

a city that is a constructed reality
that doesn't bear close scrutiny.

In 1889, on the centenary
of the French Revolution,

Paris staged the
Exposition Universelle,

a celebration of French
culture and civilisation.

The centrepiece of the exposition
was an enormous new monument

to industrial power.

Designed to showcase
French engineering...

..it was the tallest structure
ever created by the hand of man,

and would be for another 40 years.

The exposition also celebrated
France's expanding empire

with a number of
colonial pavilions.

People from Asia and Africa
were displayed to the public

in mock villages...

..along with their art...

..and their architecture.

In the heart of the capital,

the cultures of colonial peoples
were here being contrasted

with the assumed
superiority of France.

In the view of the time,
it was the sophistication

of French civilisation,

with its links back through
the Enlightenment,

the Renaissance and to
the classical world,

that gave France the right

to rule over the supposedly
primitive peoples of her empire.

And so the organisers of
the Exposition Universelle

imagined that visitors who came here

would revel at the sight of
members of these supposedly

lower races on display,

and that they'd do so
confident in the belief

that they were be guided by France
and her civilising mission.

What visitors were not supposed to
do was to see in the art

and the culture of Africa and Asia
the potential for an escape

FROM Europe and FROM
Western civilisation.

And yet that is exactly
the view taken by an artist

who was one of the 28 million people

who passed under the
Eiffel Tower and entered

the exposition
in the summer of 1889.

His name was Paul Gauguin,

a former city trader who had lost it
all in the financial crash of 1882.

He'd grown to hate the stifling
conventions of bourgeois society.

He wanted to leave it all behind

and find somewhere
not yet tainted by

the artificiality of modern life.

The restless Gauguin
had already sought escape

in the quiet backwaters of
France and Martinique.

But each time he had
returned to Paris.

Now, after visiting the exposition
and seeing its colonial villages,

Gauguin decided that
in order to find paradise,

he should head
for the South Pacific,

for the island of Tahiti.

As Gauguin left,
he wrote to a friend,

"The European Gauguin
has ceased to exist."

To him, Tahiti represented
an almost mythical Eden.

The first French explorers who
had arrived in the 1760s regarded

the people they found there
as the most content on earth.

They seemed, to the
European imagination,

to be living proof of
the idea of the noble savage -

a simple people with an
unspoiled way of life.

But that is not the
Tahiti Gauguin found.

By the time Gauguin
arrived in Tahiti in 1891,

this was one of the most tragic
places in the world.

Because while a tiny local elite
had done rather well

from the arrival of Europeans,

the Tahitian people
had been devastated

by war, disease and alcohol.

The population was a
fraction of what it had been

and the missionaries had
done their absolute best

to stamp out the local culture
and religion.

Tahiti was no longer
a romanticised alternative

to European civilisation,

it was a classic case study of what
European civilisation could do

to other societies.

Once he got away from
the capital, Papeete,

Gauguin discovered that some parts
of the old legend still survived.

He found beauty in the landscape...

..and in the villages,

proof of the island's reputation
for the easy availability of women.

Gauguin quickly found
himself a local mistress,

a girl of around 13, called
Teha'amana,

who became his model
and his muse.

There are many reasons
to not like Paul Gauguin.

He was a man who spent much of
his life wallowing in self pity

or else engaged in an endless
campaign of self-promotion.

And the relationships that he
had with young Tahitian girls

is something that we today
find deeply disturbing.

And yet, for all his faults,

the art that he produced here on the
islands of the Pacific was radical,

vivid and stunningly beautiful.

The way Gauguin used solid blocks of
colour was something new in art.

And these images were no mere
European fantasy version

of a carefree paradise.

There is melancholy and loss here.

Gauguin's paintings of
the Tahitians were, in one sense,

an honest account of the condition
in which he found them...

..a people in the latter stages
of contamination

by the civilising mission,

a people consumed by
the European society Gauguin

thought he had left behind.

We should not forget that
Gauguin was a vocal critic

of French colonialism in Tahiti,

and that one particular aspect
of the way he saw himself

made his view of
civilisation more complex

than he's normally given credit for.

Like most Europeans, he saw
the world as being divided

between those who lived civilised,
somewhat artificial lives

and those who had remained
in a natural, savage state.

But he believed he himself
was mixed race -

French-Peruvian
but also partly Incan.

And those two states,
the natural and the savage,

existed within him,
literally in his blood.

So in Tahiti he wasn't just looking
for a lost island paradise,

he was searching for
a lost part of himself.

But Gauguin's last great work
suggests that his search

for identity and meaning
was never resolved.

On a vast canvas,

a row of Polynesian women represent
the universal cycle of life,

from birth to old age.

Death and the beyond are
represented by a blue idol.

It's a Gauguin invention,

though based on his fascination with
the myths of the lost Tahitian past.

In trying to find an antidote
to modern life,

Gauguin had turned to
the art and culture

of a civilisation
most Europeans

would have labelled primitive.

Yet, in the end, perhaps he
concluded that there are no answers

to the universal questions about
the meaning of life and death.

At the turn of the 20th century,

Europeans did not generally consider
the cultural artefacts of the

so-called primitive peoples
to be art.

Yet they were fascinated by these
objects and by the fashionable ideas

about race and savagery
that were projected onto them.

Pablo Picasso deeply admired
Gauguin's explorations

of non-European art.

But, unlike Gauguin,

Picasso was never interested in
escaping from the modern world.

For him, primitive art
would be a catalyst,

inspiring him to shatter
the conventions of the past.

In 1907, Picasso visited
the Trocadero in Paris,

where he came face-to-face with
a display of objects and masks

from the Pacific Islands and Africa.

The exact date of that visit to
the Trocadero is unknown,

but then the whole affair
has become shrouded in mythology,

most of it of Picasso's own making.

But it is thought that this mask
might have been one of the ones

that Picasso saw.

It was made by the
Fang people of Gabon,

but it seems that Picasso
had no real deep interest

in its cultural meaning
or its ritual function.

What he was interested in
was their potential for his art.

And that visit to the Trocadero

has become one of
the most famous moments

in the story of modern art,

because it was at that moment
that Picasso found -

and from outside of Europe -

the inspiration and the expressive
power that would transform

his paintings and
revolutionise modern art.

Picasso described the masks
he'd seen as weapons.

They had the power, whether
supernatural or psychological,

to exorcise unwanted spirits.

Picasso tried to incorporate
this new power into his work,

and created one of
art's masterpieces.

The curtain is drawn back
on a brothel scene.

We see five naked prostitutes
waiting for clients.

And though there was a
long-established tradition of female

nudes in Western art, these are
unlike any nudes ever seen before.

What made this picture particularly
shocking and revolutionary

were the images Picasso
combined within it.

The faces of the three women to
the left are believed to be derived

from archaic Iberian sculpture.

But the two women on the right,
their fractured, irregular,

distorted faces are based
on the art of Africa,

on tribal African masks that
Picasso had encountered in Paris.

Now, there's a long debate about
the extent to which Picasso

was influenced by African art,

and he muddied the waters
considerably by making a series

of completely contradictory
statements.

But you can see that Picasso,
consciously and subconsciously,

by using African art,

was bringing into his paintings
ideas about Africa

that were current
in Europe at the time.

He was a product of his time,
like anybody else,

and he lived in an age
when Africa was the focus

of huge amounts of
speculation and debate

about the meaning of
savagery and civilisation,

of us and them, ideas about race,
ideas about exoticism,

ideas about eroticism.

So by placing the faces of
African masks onto prostitutes,

Picasso was detonating
two powerful sets of ideas

about race and savagery,

civilisation, empire,

with older ideas about
female sexuality and prostitution.

In one painting, Picasso had
turned Western ideas about art

on their head.

He sought to express not simply
aesthetic beauty, but frightening,

primal feelings about sex,
violence and even death.

And that worked partly because
of the masks' associations

in the minds of those
who first saw this painting

with civilisations
they considered primitive.

It was the apparent threat of these
objects that made them so shocking,

and the perceived barbarism of
the cultures that produced them,

which reinforced the assumed
superiority of European culture.

And so, when Europe went
to war in July in 1914,

few ordinary people questioned

the prevailing view
of Western civilisation

as sophisticated,
rational and humane.

Yet the horror that was unleashed
by new weapons that could slaughter

human beings on an unprecedented
scale was a product of the same

Industrial Revolution
that had forged the railways

and built the Eiffel Tower.

Now it seemed Europeans
were reduced to the same

irrational barbarism...

..that they'd convinced themselves
was the hallmark of other,

supposedly primitive, peoples.

In the German trenches
of the First World War

was an artist who perhaps
more than any other

created a graphic visual
record of the new barbarism.

Otto Dix was one of the millions
of young European men who

enthusiastically rushed to enlist
at the outbreak of fighting in 1914,

and he went on to spend three years
in the mud and the slime of the

trenches, serving on both the
Western and the Eastern fronts.

At one point, he served
in a machine gun unit,

wielding the ultimate
industrial weapon,

the literal fusion of the gun
and the machine.

And throughout all of this, Otto Dix
produced sketches, hundreds of them,

that graphically recorded
what these new weapons did

to the flesh and the bone
of his doomed generation.

Dix drew the broken faces,
the mud and the misery.

He chronicled how industrial warfare
had transformed the soldier

from warrior to victim.

It is perhaps fitting that it was
a German artist who most clearly

captured the horror
of industrial warfare.

After all, Germany did not have
the consolation of victory

behind which to conceal the
inhumanity that had been unleashed.

Her war cemeteries,
like the art of Otto Dix,

are austere, frank and bleak.

In Dix's work, a new type of
mask took root in European art -

the gas mask...

..the icon of total war,

otherworldly, hypermodern.

This was the face of
Europe's own home-grown barbarism.

But these masked faces, haunting
and visceral though they are,

were in a sense merely preparatory
sketches for Otto Dix's definitive

statement on war and on where
European progress had led.

It's a work that turns another
European artistic tradition,

the religious triptych,
completely on its head.

In the far panel, the soldiers
are marching onto the battlefield,

through the smoke.

And in the panel opposite it, we can
see the results of that battle.

A soldier is dragging a wounded
comrade off the battlefield

through the broken bodies.

But that soldier is
Otto Dix himself,

his face utterly traumatised.

But it's the central panel
that's the most powerful

and the most shocking.

This is the wasteland
of the Western Front.

It is the great putrid
scar of mud and decaying,

rotting flesh that's been
cut across the face of Europe.

This skeletal figure
leering over the battlefield

is a reference to the Crucifixion.

This is the work of a man who
was trapped inside his own
recurring nightmare.

Otto Dix and his generation had
borne witness to these horrors,

but they'd also been witness to
the death of the 19th century faith

in inevitable, unstoppable progress.

What they'd learned in the trenches
was that savagery and barbarism

weren't external, to be found
only in the colonies,

but inside all of us.

They had seen that industry and
progress and the supposed triumph

of Enlightenment rationalism

did not guarantee
the survival of civilisation.

And it was them,

the poets and the artists
and the painters of the trenches,

who best understood what
Europe had been through

and who best foresaw the horrors
that lay ahead.

The Open University has
produced a free poster

that explores the history
of different civilisations

through artefacts.

To order your free copy,
please call 0300 303 3553,

or go to the address
on screen and follow the links

for the Open University.