Welcome to Great Art.
For the past few years, we have been filming
in the biggest exhibitions, art galleries
and museums in the world,
exploring some of the greatest artists and art in history.
Not only do we record landmark shows,
but we also secure privileged access behind the scenes.
We then use this as a springboard to take a broader look
at extraordinary artists.
In this film, we focus on a blockbuster
that came to the Royal Academy in London a short while ago,
Painting The Modern Garden: Monet To Matisse.
No-one quite imagined just how popular it would be.
But it was more than that, it was an exhibition that sought,
amongst other things, to show how gardening
wasn't seen as a hobby by these artists,
but as an artform in itself.
They became great horticulturalists as part of their efforts
to create gardens, which were then the subjects of their art.
By tracing these relationships,
the show also traced the development of modern art.
Our film not only captures this gorgeous show,
a landmark in every sense at the Royal Academy,
but also travels to the gardens themselves
to help us explore how artists painted the modern garden.
"We went for a walk in the garden."
"It's a perfect garden, a panorama of flowers
"whose beauty is deeply moving."
"They are so tall on their stems
"that they seem to walk along with us."
"Today, for the first time,
"Monet took me across the road and the railway line
"beyond which the garden extends,
"but where the landscape changes its appearance completely."
"There is Monet's pond where his water lilies float...
"..surrounded by his pale willows."
"A pond which he has created as God created the caprices of nature."
I think we love to try and compartmentalise artists
so they have singular disciplines.
You've got a painter, you've got a sculptor.
No sense that, as Michelangelo was,
a great sculptor can be a great draughtsman
or that a great painter can also be a great sculptor.
And Monet was clearly a great sculptor
because in his garden, he's sculpting nature,
he's making sure that there are larger flowers, smaller flowers,
darker tones, lighter tones,
there are colours that are fighting against one another
and dragging you through the scene.
It's a great natural sculpture.
I don't think you should undermine quite how important
that kind of creativity is in our world.
So every person who goes out into their own garden
and creates a space for them is building something
that can have the same effect on you as a wonderful painting,
that can allow you to immerse yourself, to retreat,
to find solace in beautiful things.
Artists have always had a fascination with gardens
because artists can't help but have a fascination with nature.
You know, Durer, Botticelli,
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Monet, Matisse,
these are all people who find in a simple flower,
a whole universe,
in the structures, in the engineering.
In the elegance and beauty and simplicity of a flower,
you really can find a whole world, and that's what you are doing
when you're mixing up colours on a palate.
You're finding whole new opportunities
to express yourself in very simple acts.
And nature expresses so much, gardens can express so much
even in a space that we just seem to take for granted so often.
I think the premise of this exhibition,
the linkage between art and gardens, is really interesting and timely,
partly because of the low cultural status of gardens
in the hierarchy of the arts, which is sort of somewhere down
with knitting, say, or embroidery
and other what we might call "applied arts" nowadays.
But I think as this exhibition shows,
many of the greatest artists of the early 20th century
were interested, if not obsessed, with their gardens
and the different effects, chromatic effects,
the effects of atmosphere and place,
they were really interested in exploring the garden.
First of all, as subject matter for their own work,
but in some cases, most notably in Monet's case, of course,
the garden itself becomes an artwork in its own right.
We think Monet may have been the greatest painter of gardens
in the history of art, but he wasn't alone.
There are many other artists who are invested in this subject, deeply.
Artists who you might expect are Impressionists
cos they're obviously interested in the natural world,
but I think other artists that people will be surprised to learn
were also active gardeners, fascinated by gardeners,
and you see a wide range of them in the exhibition.
They are dedicated to the project of modernity.
The garden, I think, has a very wide context
in the 19th century.
We have to remember this is the century
of Darwin, after all, his Origin Of Species in 1859
draws people's attention to the possibility
that the world wasn't created just in seven days,
but has a longer history going back to fossils
and the evidence that they offer.
And, of course, in a sense, he is therefore exploding, Darwin,
the whole concept of paradise and of the Garden of Eden
and these places of perfection that have underpinned
so much of Western cultural thought and tradition.
There are depictions of the Garden of Eden in ancient manuscripts.
Of course, it becomes a really crucial subject
during the medieval period, you have depictions of the Virgin,
and there are all kinds of inner garden,
and there are conventions about that.
She's in an enclosed garden which is symbolic of her virginity.
During the baroque era, gardens were a significant aspect,
actually, of royal power because you have great kings,
Louis XIV and others, creating magnificent, enormous gardens.
Most people know the gardens of Versailles,
but this occurred in many places in Europe,
and these were actually an expression of the king's power.
This whole culture began to change in the 19th century
when you had a rise of the middle class
and more people could have time to do private pleasure gardening
as opposed to practical gardening just for growing vegetables.
Now, they're doing this for personal pleasure,
there's a lot of feelings that this contributes
to the health of family life, to the health of the culture,
and you also have, at the same time, new varieties and species
of flowers and plants being imported from around the world,
from Asia, Africa, the Americas.
And, of course, we have science intersecting here,
and they are taking these imported varieties,
they're creating new hybrids.
And artists get involved with this new flora culture
in an attempt to really create new types of species and varieties.
And that is all facilitated by technological developments,
because for the first time also, from the 1820s,
there is a really effective way of carrying plants,
and not just seeds, back from foreign lands.
These include the Wardian case invented by a British doctor,
Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward,
and then we also have the greenhouse being developed, the conservatory,
and that enables these exotic plants to be overwintered
and also enables them to be brought on and then planted out.
And, in a way, people are having to rethink the relationship
they, as individuals, have with nature.
I think there are certain plants which are recurring
within these canvases that when you garden with them,
you understand why they're here.
Dahlias, for instance,
are an extraordinary thing in themselves,
they're incandescent when they flower,
they break all the rules of what goes with what.
The dahlia-grower is fascinated in the flower,
and that juxtaposition of two things
creates often this tremendous tension and a clash.
There are poppies which appear again and again
which also have that amazing ability to jump out of a landscape.
There are chrysanthemums for the same reason,
and there're things which, in a way, are larger-than-life flowers,
peonies.
There are things which take over a moment
which make a particular time of year.
As a colour exercise, it's a wonderfully freeing thing.
Horticulture is an amazing thing because it links art with science,
perhaps more than almost any other practice.
So it is inevitable really, that people like Monet,
who become seriously interested in gardens,
then get seriously interested in the technical side of things
at a very advanced level.
So we're talking Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte.
I'm sure there are one or two more, but they are the main ones
and they were great gardening buddies.
And they were interested in going to the flower exhibitions,
seeing the water lilies bred by Latour-Marliac
or the great nurseries, French nurseries,
like Vilmorin at this time,
breeding chrysanthemums and dahlias in new forms.
And we know that Monet, like many a keen gardener,
was really obsessed by novelty.
He ordered these new hybrid species of water lilies,
largely produced by a grower who still exists in France today
called Latour-Marliac.
What was new at the time,
they were these bright pink and even red,
and, I believe, sometimes scented water lilies,
whereas the more common variety were white or yellow.
I think Monet is very keen on having these accents of pink and red
in the overall grey-green watery environment of the pond.
So he's creating a garden with an artist's eye.
And he's also creating a garden or an environment
as subject for him to paint,
over which he has a great deal of control.
There were many writers who were discussing the importance
of gardening to family life.
This was a place where French civilisation could be reborn,
this was a healthy place to be with children and families,
and that is seen actually in the Impressionist paintings
and in those paintings by Monet,
where you see a couple in the background,
and it's a reference to the garden of love.
So it becomes part of everyday bourgeois life,
and that really is a primary subject for the Impressionists
but other artists working in this period.
It's all about a sort of quiet, domestic idyll,
or very often that becomes a very popular subject with artists.
So I think the small, private garden fits very well
into that general view of the world.
And so the need to escape to nature and to the restorative powers
of nature and gardening become very strong.
We begin the exhibition with two very interesting paintings.
One is by Monet of his dahlia garden
in the house he was renting in Argenteuil,
which is just outside of Paris in the early 1870s.
Here, he is a poor, struggling artist,
this is just the moment when the Impressionist group
is beginning to emerge.
He couldn't afford his own house,
he's just living in rented properties,
but wherever he went, he made a garden.
And next to it, we were very happy to get the loan of painting
by Renoir, painting Monet painting the dahlia garden.
These two pictures together tell us quite a lot.
First of all, they tell us that dahlias were a very popular flower.
It also shows the companionship and this sort of camaraderie
between these young Impressionists
when they were a fringe avant-garde group.
There we have Monet standing before his easel,
he's got his brush extended,
he's putting a touch of colour on the canvas.
We don't see the picture he's painting,
Renoir leaves that to our imagination,
but we can see that it must be the great mass of dahlias alongside.
And it's as though Monet's taking his colours from those dahlias
and transferring them with the brush to the canvas.
The garden is obviously an outdoor studio,
you can use it as an extension of your house
in order to get at, first-hand, the effects of light and atmosphere
that become increasingly important
with the rise of Pleinairism, painting out-of-doors.
And those elements of modern life can be found,
can be situated in a garden,
and that, in a way, is a means of merging the modern life theme
with the outdoor painting theme,
and the garden is a useful meeting point for the two.
This painting by Tissot was one of a group
that he did in his home in St John's Wood in London.
A wonderful garden he developed there,
which was modelled partly on the Parc Monceau in Paris.
I think there is a tremendous theme running through Tissot's work
where we have the woman as someone who is to be admired
almost as an object, but also a mystery,
and the garden is traditionally associated with the woman.
The woman is described as the "good genius" of gardens
in some of the 19th century horticultural journals,
but equally, she's the one who is, in the ancient tradition
of the biblical narrative, for example,
the Virgin and her Hortus Conclusus.
That underpins a lot of the imagery of the woman in the garden, still,
in the 19th century.
And he's maybe just blurring those boundaries
so that we don't quite know if the woman
is in the traditional mode of a virgin in a garden,
or in a rather more risque mode,
because conservatories were certainly places
where seduction and all sorts of licence was happening.
It was a space, the garden itself, in turn,
where you might dispense with etiquette
that would've ruled in the drawing room or the parlour, salon.
So there are, I think, little hints maybe that Tissot
is manipulating the tradition and not just giving us
a standard version of a woman in a garden.
Here we've got chrysanthemums, which were plants introduced
in 1789 to Europe.
They came from the Orient, from China, Japan,
and they were an immediate sensation, really,
and developed into a whole variety of forms and shapes,
and there was a great art in picking them, cutting them
so that you would develop the best for the next year.
You could also take various other forms of growth
and make them come on.
I always find looking at paintings of gardens or flowers,
you can usually tell fairly quickly if the person who's painted it
has a real interest in the subject.
There's something about the way they depict the flowers in particular,
I suppose the form of the whole plant,
they are able to honour the plant.
They're interested enough in it as an entity,
as a being in the world, if you like,
to actually spend an awful lot of time over it,
just as much time as they might spend
over a portrait of a person.
But in some cases, most notably in Monet's case, of course,
the garden itself becomes an artwork in its own right.
"If I could see one day Claude Monet's garden,
"I really feel I would see a garden
"in more tones and colour than flowers."
"A garden which could be less an old flower garden
"than a colourist garden, so to speak."
"Flowers displayed together but not as nature,
"because they were sown so that only the flowers
"with matching colours will bloom at the same time...
"..harmonised to the infinite in all ranges of blue or pink."
"A powerful manifestation of the artist's intent
"to dematerialise them of everything but colour."
Well, there are both modern gardens
and there's modern paintings of gardens,
and there's a great variety, there's a tremendous variety.
For Monet, it's growing new types of plants,
new more spectacular varieties of flowers,
arranging them specifically in colour harmony
so he's orchestrating environments so that they're blooming
in different colours at different times of the year.
For other artists,
it's the way they interpret the garden that's modern.
We hope that people coming to the exhibition
will get great pleasure from seeing a number of spectacular works of art
by famous and well-known artists.
Monet of course is really the heart of the exhibition,
but also works by Matisse, by other Impressionist artists,
and then there's Bonnard's garden at Vernonnet,
which is up in Normandy on the Seine,
only about three miles from Giverny, in fact.
But it couldn't be a more different
from Monet's very carefully planned and designed garden.
Bonnard really just let nature take its course.
He called it "mon jardin sauvage", "my wild garden",
and when you go there today, there is very little evidence
of a formal garden, certainly.
But nevertheless, this garden with its panoramic view
out to the Seine beyond is the setting
of many of Bonnard's paintings.
We have many paintings too by perhaps less familiar names,
but artists who really responded to the theme of the garden
in many different ways.
Max Liebermann made a garden on Lake Wannsee
just outside of Berlin.
Liebermann's garden follows this idea,
current in German design at the time,
of constructing the garden around a series of outdoor rooms.
So there's a rose garden, there's a hedge garden,
there's a kitchen garden at the back of the house,
and then there are formal flowerbeds and a long birch alley,
which leads as a sort of avenue down to a lake,
providing these viewpoints and perspectives.
So there are many different ways in which gardens could be organised,
and artists were really searching for something
that was particular to them and their culture.
Sorolla, for example, in Spain
laid out an interior courtyard garden
in a series of rooms in his house, and he had pools and water.
This was a place of reflection, for family life,
but also for spiritual thinking.
One of the questions you might ask yourself,
even subconsciously,
standing in front of one of these paintings is,
"Do I believe this is a real place, does this garden actually exist?"
And in the case of a painting like this,
it is absolutely the case, but I think in a way,
the question isn't so much, "Does that garden exist?",
but "Did that moment exist?"
In an earlier age, this picture would have been called
a "swagger" painting, because it shows
a very successful man in his white suit
at his weekend home on Long Island, just outside New York.
It's Louis Comfort Tiffany, the famous designer,
so he's painting, he's showing us his artistic side and his skill,
but this is a very successful man.
And the flowers, I think, interestingly,
are used in this painting by Sorolla as a way of bolstering
his credentials as a man of the world,
they're almost machismo, these blooms.
I think actually they are mainly hydrangeas
massed behind him in different colours,
but their bulbous blooms....
It's almost like he's the sort of artistic Napoleon
and this is his imperial guard backing him up behind
with his dog as well,
and all these accoutrements, if you like,
of the country gentleman,
you might see in a Gainsborough or something.
For more avant-garde artists,
flowers and gardens were a source of emotional inspiration.
They're not so much interested in whether it's a hyacinth,
but for many of these artists like Matisse or Emil Nolde,
it's really the colour.
Emil Nolde created gardens wherever he lived,
and they were a great inspiration to him.
I think the act of gardening also was very spiritual
and important to him.
His last garden was created in Seebull,
which is on the border of Denmark and Germany.
And he designed his garden
so that the paths created two entwined letters
that are the initials of himself and his wife,
so you know how personal this garden was to him.
And it was the great source of inspiration for his art
for the last 20 years of his life or so, and it still exists today.
I was really intrigued by Emil Nolde's garden at Seebull,
because he built this jewel-like place,
this fantasy realm.
He didn't really create the garden as a place to be experienced
as a series of pictures, as a tableau,
he created the garden as an intense space
in which you are immersed, and that's the feeling
that you have when you go into the garden today.
There are a series of winding paths around beds,
which are absolutely chock-filled with all kinds
of bright and colourful flowers which have not been,
and we can see this in the paintings,
which were not chosen for their compatibility
with each other, necessarily,
but chosen for the incredible colours that they exhibit,
and which Nolde was then able to experiment with in paint.
Emil Nolde is an artist who is very invested
in the project of modernity,
and he wants to paint in a certain way
that's very basic, it's primal.
He wants to get at the most basic level
of intense human emotion,
and he uses a technique that is meant to convey that.
For example, if you look at his paintings from the '20s,
he paints on very rough burlap, it's really rugged,
and he paints with incredibly heavy brushstrokes,
I mean, just caked-on paint.
And if you'll notice, it is very matte,
and that's partly because when you're painting with oil,
the oil soaks into that,
and he leaves these very heavily encrusted surfaces.
It's very rough and rugged,
and it's very shocking to many people
to see a painting in that condition, but that's what he wanted.
He wanted something that wasn't refined.
I mean, he was the enemy of the refined,
and he wanted that sense of rawness and intense emotion
in his paintings.
I think for many of these artists, this was a spiritual experience.
For them, it was a connection with nature.
It is kind of amazing to think that artists
like Matisse or Kandinsky, who are so theoretical,
would be interested in nature in this way,
but it was their way of connecting.
And, for example,
there's a fantastic painting in this exhibition
that is of a garden in Tangier, and Matisse had for years
been painting very conceptual works, severe in their geometry.
And he said specifically, when he wrote a letter,
requesting permission to see this Islamic garden,
that he wanted to reconnect with nature.
And he was extremely excited about this garden
that he saw in North Africa, through the wildness,
the exotic plants,
and he painted the first of three pictures,
which the first one is in this exhibition,
in a flash of inspiration.
It's just quickly-applied paint, you can still see pencil drawing,
he even took the backside of the brush
and scratched into the surface.
And it's just an explosion of colour and emotion,
so it was very important for Matisse,
and for some of these other artists, who were thinking so theoretically,
to find a way to connect with nature,
and gardens provided that opportunity.
For the Fauves artists, of course, whose greatest contribution
to modern art was arbitrary colour,
they could be inspired by the intensity of these tones,
and Matisse wrote evocatively about that.
For Matisse, we know that he did have a garden at his home,
he spent a lot of time in it.
We're told he greeted visitors wearing a gardener's smock,
he would give them flowers for presents,
he would use them for inspiration and for setting colour theory.
And then, even into later life,
Matisse wrote that when he was confined to his studio
or ill for some reason,
he would turn his studio into a garden.
And you can see his studio with these wild-growing,
sometimes exotic, plants imported from Mexico.
And it was a constant source of inspiration for him.
And even if you look at the late paper cut-outs,
you can see these large paintings of bushes and gardens
and plants and flowers.
And it was crucial for Matisse's artistic inspiration,
and I also think his spiritual and mental health.
There's a very close connection between Monet the gardener
and Monet the painter, and this painting of day lilies
is wonderful for the fact that he has really captured
what the day lily is all about.
And there's something very vigorous about this painting,
the way that you have this explosion of leaves
that are so particular to day lilies,
and then this suspense with the stem that then supports the flower
that only blooms for a day,
and when it does, it peels itself back facing the sky,
and absorbs all that light in this brilliant moment,
this flash of orange which he has then contrasted
against these cooler mauves and greens behind,
so you get that flare which happens with this plant
that's so absolutely particular to that plant.
And I just love how beautifully observed this is
and I can really feel how well he's understood those plants
and how they've actually made this part of his garden
into what it is,
it's probably why you go to that particular part of the garden,
just to be there with those day lilies
when they're doing their thing.
MAN AS MONET: "I have painted a lot of these water lilies,
"modifying each time my point of view,
"renewing the subject following seasons of the year,
"and therefore, following different luminous effects
"engendered by these changes."
"The effect varies incessantly."
"The essential of the subject is the mirror of the water
"whose aspect, at any one time, changes itself
"thanks to the expanses of sky which reflect in it,
"and spreading life and movement."
"The passing cloud, the freshening breeze,
"the threatening and falling rain,
"the sudden gust of wind,
"the light failing and shining again."
"So many reasons, elusive to the profane eye,
"which transform the tint and disfigure the body of water."
This exhibition originated with the desire to reunite
the three panels of Monet's great Agapanthus triptych.
Monet, though, never gave those paintings away
during his lifetime, he kept them all in the studio.
He was constantly reworking them,
making them more abstract and ethereal,
it's really amazing to see an artist at his age
reworking these great masterworks.
And he died then in 1926,
and a selection of paintings were taken off their stretchers,
moved to the Orangerie,
and literally glued to the walls there.
But many of the great decorations remained in the studio
and, in fact, that's true of this triptych,
it remained with his family until the 1950s
when the paintings were sent to America
and bought separately by different museums in the United States.
So reuniting this triptych is a major event,
this is the first time that we know of
it's ever happened in Europe,
and it's spectacular to see them together.
And they made us really think deeply about,
not only Monet's great Agapanthus triptych,
but also about his interest in gardening and painting gardens
because, of course, they depict the great water garden at Giverny
which is one of the great accomplishments
in the history of horticulture.
MAN AS MONET: "What I am becoming, you can well imagine."
"I am working and not without difficulty,
"because my sight diminishes each day
"and, also, I look after my garden a lot."
"This brings me pleasure, and with the beautiful days we have had,
"I am overjoyed and admire nature."
"With this, we never have time to be bored."
As Monet got older, he became more concerned
with abstracting the world around us
and trying to look closer, and closer and closer
at how colour was shaping, in an abstract sense,
how we see the world.
So his series of paintings of water lilies
are the most profound test of him as an artist,
forcing himself to look...
And that is the hardest thing about an artist,
the older you get, the more you think you've looked enough
to know exactly what's in front of you.
And as he considers his great lily ponds here,
you notice through the series of paintings
that his point of view begins to move more and more and more away
from a recognisable subject, away from a sense of a painting
receding into the distance towards a horizon
where there is a neat little bridge focusing your point of view,
and increasingly, it's just about reflections,
patterns of light and colour.
But the more I work into one of these paintings,
I become more and more intrigued by the things that are appearing
in the reflections in the water.
And as Monet spent more and more time here,
I guess that's what became his passion.
He didn't need a bridge anymore, he didn't need a tree trunk.
All he needed were ripples and cascades of light,
and that's a real push in the history of 20th century art
towards modernism.
Subtitles by TVT