Original subtitles

I'm Waldemar Januszczak...

..and for 40 years, I've been looking at art,

writing about art and thinking about art.

So, I've learned a lot, and it's all useful...

..because art is full of mysteries...

..and mysteries need solving.

If you ask people what their favourite painting is

by that great French Post-Impressionist Georges Seurat,

most of them will tell you it's that famous masterpiece

Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte.

Ever since it was painted in 1886,

La Grande Jatte has fascinated people.

It shows a parade of fashionable weekenders

strolling along a river bank in Paris.

And everybody here is made entirely of dots.

It's one of the 19th century's best-known pictures,

and one of the most mysterious.

Most of Seurat's art is mysterious.

It has a haunting quietude to it, an atmosphere of timelessness,

and that's particularly true of this strange picture here,

Les Poseuses, as it's called -

a Seurat masterpiece which ought to be much better known than it is.

Les Poseuses is French for "The Models".

There's three of them here, naked and glum,

posing silently in the artist's studio.

And look what's behind them.

It's La Grande Jatte again.

Today, Les Poseuses hangs in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia,

where it puzzles the hell out of everyone who looks at it.

In fact, Les Poseuses has two meanings in French.

It means "the models" - as in artist's models -

but it also means

"people who pretend to be something that they're not."

People pretending to be something they're not.

Not the most helpful clue I've ever heard...

..but it's a start.

And the thing we really need to answer is why,

here in the corner, Seurat has added La Grande Jatte.

Why is it here? What's it trying to say?

Why are we getting two masterpieces at once?

Three nudes, a picture within a picture,

and everyone really unhappy.

Don't just stand there, Januszczak.

On your bike!

Paris, the City of Lights.

It's called that because it was the first city in the world

to get electric lighting.

In Paris, the night was finally lit up,

and the secrets of the dark were finally revealed.

Seurat was born here in 1859, the son of a rich lawyer.

I'd love to show you what he looked like as a boy, but I can't.

He was pathologically private.

There are almost no images of him.

Years later, he painted his mistress powdering her nose in her boudoir.

And later still,

someone X-rayed the flowers at the back of that picture,

and found a secret portrait of him lurking behind the blooms.

So, that's the first known image of him...

..and this is the second.

Seurat's dad was so rich that, at the age of 42,

he retired to live a life of bourgeois indolence.

And Seurat himself never had to work.

His dad paid for it all.

And in 1878, he was enrolled here,

at the most prestigious art school in Paris,

the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

At the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,

under the watchful eye of his predecessors,

Seurat was taught art the old way...

..drawing from plaster casts,

copying the statues of the Greeks...

..and absorbing the classical myths.

It was a traditional art education -

copying the old masters, studying the past,

completely ignoring the modern world -

and he got very good at it.

You can see from the start just how talented he was.

There's a painting made at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts

of his young cousin.

It's exceptionally sensitive and sad.

In his cousin's downturned face,

we see the first signs

of Seurat's appetite for feminine mystery.

It won't be the last.

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts wasn't just plaster casts

and the old ways of doing things.

The school also had a spectacular library,

with just about every book on art ever written,

and Seurat, a bookish chap who liked studying things,

took full advantage of this great library.

He was particularly drawn to the science of colours,

and to books that explained how colour works,

what it does to your eyes, how one colour sits next to another.

And that's how Seurat's scientific interests

led him to the work of the pioneering optical scientist

Eugene Chevreul - the master of the dot.

Seurat had to pass

very difficult competitions

to be admitted in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

He succeeded with very bad marks, but he succeeded,

and he stayed in the Ecole as a pupil during two years.

So, you've got here the actual books

that Seurat could have looked at in the library.

I mean, this is one of, I know, the most important for him.

This is Chevreul with his theories of colour.

Chevreul was a chemist - a French chemist -

and he said that two colours put close to one another

produce another colour - a third colour.

He called this a theory of harmonies.

His books were very famous.

A copy of this book was sent in every grammar school in France.

The first thing, of course, you see about it is that

most of the illustrations are these beautiful arrays of dots.

Yes, there are lots of experiences about colours in those books.

Of course, it's rather scientific,

but it was meant to help the painters.

Mm. Well, it certainly helped Seurat, didn't it?

Because if you're looking for the origin of Seurat's dots,

I think you don't need to look much further than here, do you? Yes.

So, that explains the dots.

The big idea here is that they mix in your eye and not on the canvas.

What it doesn't explain

is Seurat's fascination with unhappy women.

This era we're talking about - the 1870s and '80s -

these were also the great years of the Impressionists

who were putting on revolutionary exhibitions

and attacking the things that Seurat was being taught

at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

So, Seurat, he wanted to be young and revolutionary, too.

And after little more than a year, he packed in the Ecole,

and with his dad's money supporting him,

set himself up as an independent artist.

So, the first thing he does

is to devote himself entirely to drawing,

with these beautiful black drawings in crayon.

That was the foreplay.

Then, having studied colour with Chevreul,

and with his head full of scientific information

about the way colours work...

..he began painting those famous dot pictures...

..where the Paris around him is slowed to a halt.

As I said before, this was still the era of the Impressionists,

who, at exactly this time, were trying to make the modern world

a suitable subject for great art.

You don't have to go to classical Rome or ancient Greece,

they said, to find good subjects.

You can find them right here in modern Paris,

right under your nose.

This was a world that liked having fun,

if you had enough francs in your pocket.

In particular, the Impressionists were fond of the River Seine,

which flows through the middle of Paris,

and which fashionable Parisians used as a pleasure ground.

They'd go dancing and boating and flirting -

enjoying the pleasures of life.

Manet, the so-called father of the Impressionists,

painted a very famous picture by the Seine

called Dejeuner sur l'Herbe - The Picnic on the Grass.

It's a very provocative image.

A group of young Parisians is relaxing on the river bank.

The woman is naked.

Perhaps she's been swimming.

The men, meanwhile, are lounging about like typical blokes,

mansplaining something important.

But she ignores them and stares brazenly out at us,

as if daring us to disapprove.

Interestingly, Manet based his Dejeuner sur l'Herbe

on a famous picture by an old master -

The Judgment of Paris by Raphael.

Raphael's original design has disappeared...

..but there's a print of it by his pupil, Raimondi,

which Manet must have seen.

And what's interesting - very interesting -

is that Dejeuner sur l'Herbe is based not on the main scene,

but on a detail at the side of some river gods by the water.

The main scene -

the actual judgment of Paris - is missing.

So, Manet and the Impressionists

were bringing this lively new subject matter to art

of a 19th-century bourgeois having fun by the river.

But for Seurat, that wasn't enough.

Art shouldn't just be about having fun.

It should also be about something deeper.

So, Seurat began plotting his first masterpiece -

the Bathers at Asnieres.

Now, lots of old masters had painted river scenes before

with undressed figures relaxing by the water...

..but they were usually nymphs or goddesses

or classical heroes,

and not a bunch of blokes from the factory

grabbing a dip in their lunch break.

But where the Impressionists were happy

with carefree and splashy brushstrokes,

Seurat wanted something more permanent.

So, he swapped the splashy Impressionist brushstrokes

for a careful arrangement of speckles and dots.

And he seemed to freeze all the action,

as if the Seine had been magically transported

to ancient Pompeii.

It was completely revolutionary,

not just because it was painted with all these dots

in this new scientific method invented by Seurat,

with the help of Eugene Chevreul,

but the Bathers was also a picture with an important social message -

a message aimed at Paris and the modern world.

Look at all these factory chimneys belching smoke into the sky.

You don't see those very often in Impressionist art.

They're a harsh reminder of the grim divide in Seurat's Paris

between the haves and the have-nots.

The Bathers is such an interesting picture

with all these blokes from the factory

sprawled on the grass like river gods.

And have you noticed how they're all looking the same way -

across the river to the other side?

I wonder what they're looking at.

They're actually looking at that -

the island of La Grande Jatte on the other side of the river,

which is where Seurat's next great painting,

Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, is set.

# La brise d'un soir d'ete

# Je suis soudain emportee... #

So, here is Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte,

which hangs today at the Art Institute in Chicago.

# Tes yeux, ta voix... #

And here, again, are the Bathers at Asnieres,

from the National Gallery in London.

# Je connais a peine ton prenom... #

But look at this.

If, with the magic of television,

we put the two pictures together side-by-side...

..we can see that Seurat was deliberately trying

for a stereo effect...

..where one side of the river is calling across to the other.

The Bathers at Asnieres are calling to La Grande Jatte.

# Dans le silence de la nuit

# L'amour a parle... #

So, this is it, the island of La Grande Jatte.

Today, it's just a dismal place to walk your dog,

but in Seurat's time,

this was the fashionable playground of the Parisian bourgeois.

It's where the posh folk paraded...

..where the top-hat brigade brought their mistresses...

..and where the mistresses brought their pet monkeys -

the ones that feel so symbolic.

For Seurat, over here and over there

are different worlds, different realities.

Over there are the workmen from the factories,

the great unwashed.

Over here is fashionable Paris,

where tout le monde has turned up to stroll along La Grande Jatte.

# Enlaces l'un et l'autre... #

The more I look at La Grande Jatte, the more symbolic it all feels.

# L'amour a parle... #

It's like a Roman frieze unfolding across the picture...

..a secretive encapsulation of Seurat's Paris.

And there are plenty of blokes strutting about the island,

but it's the women who grab your attention.

And look how everything seems to converge

on the little girl in white at the centre of the picture...

..who stares straight at us so pointedly,

as if everything here is our fault.

Back at my place, I try to make sense of what I've seen,

and what it means for Les Poseuses.

Seurat was such a sneaky painter.

Everything he gives you has something hidden underneath.

At the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,

it wasn't just Chevreul's dots that he discovered.

It was also the art of the Greeks and the Romans

with all those frozen figures

and that sense of hidden, symbolic meaning.

As for his women, he was always on their side,

and never on the side of the sugar daddies and the bankers.

So, I'm getting a good idea of what Les Poseuses may be about,

but there's just one more thing I need to investigate.

Remember Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe

and how it was inspired by Raphael's Judgment of Paris?

Well, what the hell is going on in the Judgment of Paris?

It's a famous story from classical mythology.

There are lots of paintings of it, and this one is by Rubens.

A young man called Paris - that's this fellow here -

has been asked by the gods

to choose the most beautiful of all the goddesses.

Is it Minerva or Juno or Venus?

The one who wins gets the golden apple.

When they've all got their clothes on,

Paris can't decide.

They're all beautiful, so he gets them to strip,

and when they're naked, he can see that Venus is the most beautiful,

so she's the one who gets the golden apple.

But what's this got to do with Les Poseuses?

Well, everything.

DOOR CREAKS OPEN

Hmm.

Three nudes and La Grande Jatte thrown in, as well.

What was Seurat up to?

Well, one thing he was certainly doing

was rhyming one picture with another.

See how this girl here, with her back to us

and the parasol and the basket of flowers,

seems to echo the young girl in La Grande Jatte?

And the model on the right, she echoes that figure there -

the one with the straw hat.

And there it is -

the straw hat from La Grande Jatte, which she's now taken off.

And as for the model in the middle,

the one who's standing there so forlornly...

..she's rhyming with the elegant mistress with the monkey -

the one strolling with her sugar daddy

at the centre of La Grande Jatte.

So, this picture is deliberately echoed in that picture.

Why?

To connect them, that's why.

To link the storyline of La Grande Jatte

with the storyline of Les Poseuses.

Remember I told you that Les Poseuses

doesn't just mean "the models"?

It also means "people who pretend to be something they are not".

The three sad nudes in Les Poseuses are pretend goddesses -

Seurat's stand-ins for Juno, Minerva and Venus...

..because Les Poseuses is a Judgment of Paris

updated to Seurat's times.

It's a pun, a joke.

In this Judgment of Paris, Paris isn't a person.

It's a city - Seurat's city.

And what looks like a simple studio interior

is a clever and biting satire

on the hypocrisy and deceitfulness of Seurat's world.

These nudes haven't taken off their clothes

to prove how beautiful they are.

They've stripped off

because that's what women had to do in Seurat's Paris to make a living.

They've been posing for La Grande Jatte,

and now it's time to get dressed again

and return to the real world...

..because in this Judgment of Paris, there are no winners.

In this Judgment of Paris, Paris itself is being judged.

There are a million stories in the world of art.

This has been just one of them.