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Imagine a shimmering city
conjured out of thin air,

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rising in just a few decades

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where once there had been
a wilderness of barren marshes.

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A place to rival
the beauties of Venice and Paris...

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St Petersburg.

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St Petersburg was founded at
the start of the 18th century

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in imitation of the great
western European cities.

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Russia had never seen
a place like this,
with its elegant classical facades.

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It was part
of a great cultural project

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to end centuries of isolation.

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But when Russia opened its doors
to Europe, it didn't just let in

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new ideas
about art and architecture,

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it let in a host of other,
even more dangerous ideas.

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Ideas that would lead to bloodshed
and, eventually, revolution.

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For the next two centuries,
art was to be a battlefield,

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pitting the glories of the court...

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..against the anguish
of its peasants.

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Showing
the beauty of the landscape...

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..and the demons of the mind.

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From a crushing symbol of tyranny...

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to an art
that would devour Russia itself.

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This is the story of Russia's
journey from royal excess

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to mass rebellion,
and of how art went from being

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the servant of the state
to an agent of its destruction.

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For centuries,
Russia had been cut off

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from the culture
and ideas of the West.

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But in St Petersburg,

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you see a whole nation
making up for lost time.

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Peter the Great
began the immense project

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of Europeanising Russia
by founding the city in 1703.

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But he never lived to see

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the imperial splendour
of its architecture.

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Its brightly coloured palaces

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were created in the decades
after Peter's death by his daughter.

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She would dress St Petersburg up

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in the colours
of a thousand ball gowns.

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Her name was Tsarina Elizabeth I.

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Elizabeth's been rather
written out of Russian history.

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Peter the Great, Catherine the
Great, never Elizabeth the Great,

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but she was great in her own way,

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and she certainly left her mark
on Russian culture.

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Because
when we come to St Petersburg

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and we admire its wonderfully
elegant architecture,

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what we're really admiring
is her taste.

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Peter might've got
St Petersburg built,

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but it was Elizabeth who really
decided what it would look like.

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Elizabeth was positively
bacchanalian

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in her pursuit of pleasure.

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She loved parties and masquerades
and she was drawn

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to the grandiose
European style of the baroque.

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In the 1740s, she employed an
architect with Italian blood,

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Bartolomeo Rastrelli,
but their buildings

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have a distinctly
Russian feeling of excess.

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The Catherine Palace

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was Elizabeth's own Versailles,
but on an even grander scale.

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The facade's
nearly a quarter of a mile across.

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And this, the Smolny,

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was Elizabeth and Rastrelli's
version of a convent.

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Their take on the baroque
was an exotic hybrid.

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Painted in bright colours,
like the churches of old Russia,

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and topped
with glittering onion domes.

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Now, Elizabeth was no
mere follower of fashion.

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She was one of the most
dynamic and progressive

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patrons of art and architecture
of the entire 18th century.

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And when you look at this wonderful
wedding cake of a building,

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what you realise is that she brought
into the world of Russian art

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a new spirit of panache
and theatricality.

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And nowhere else in Europe
was the baroque style

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pushed to this extreme level
of fantasy.

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The most magnificent of all these
creations

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is on the coastal fringes
of St Petersburg, Peterhof.

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It was begun by Peter the Great
as a modest affair,

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but in the 1740s,
Elizabeth and Rastrelli

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waved their magic wands over it.

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With its grand staircases and its
gilded water-pumping statues,

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Peterhof's a wonder of
architecture and engineering,

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but it's also a miraculous survival.

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The Nazis tried to blow the palace
up during the Second World War,

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and reduced large parts of it
to a shell.

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It's taken more than 60 years to
return Peterhof to its former glory,

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and the work still continues.

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This is Elizabeth's chapel, the
very last section to be restored.

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A mind-boggling 200 pounds

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in weight of gold leaf
will be needed to complete the job.

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Here, the finishing
touches are being applied by an army

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of blue-suited
architectural make-up artists.

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TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN:

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Don't you ever sometimes sort of
look around and think to yourself,

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"Isn't it a little bit over the top?

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So is your house at home like this?
HE CHUCKLES

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Thank you very much. I got the joke,
even with my terrible Russian.

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If you want to experience
the full baroque blast of Peterhof,

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you have to go to the grand
state rooms of the main palace.

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It's almost as if
Elizabeth had a Midas complex.

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She wanted everything she touched
to turn to gold.

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This is Tsarina Elizabeth's
ballroom,

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and it's the great set piece
demonstration

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of the baroque style as SHE wanted
it reincarnated in Russia.

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Absolutely dripping
with giltwood decoration.

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You've got wonderful candelabra,
you've got giltwood Cupids,

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you've got sexy mythological
scenes set into little roundels.

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There's not a square inch
of this room that isn't decorated.

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Now, the art history term for it
is "Russian baroque",

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but I think
of it as the baroque of bling.

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It's just fantastically excessive.
And you have to also imagine

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that in Elizabeth's day,

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these rather ugly light bulbs
wouldn't have been there,

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there would've been
actual candles with flames.

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And then, if you imagine this
whole space full of people dancing,

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the effect must've been
positively hallucinogenic.

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Now above,

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as if to underscore her role
as the great founder

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of Russian visual culture, Russian
art and decoration and architecture,

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Elizabeth had herself painted as...

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almost as the patron saint
of Russian art. There she is,

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hovering in the sky,
holding aloft

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a sceptre of enlightenment.
And she's above

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Mount Parnassus of classical legend,
where Apollo and the muses -

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those who inspire artistic
creativity - are to be found.

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There's the muse of music,
the muse of theatre and there,

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with her compass,
the muse of art and architecture.

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But for all the lofty myth-making,
there's also a kind of mania

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to prove that Russians
could do European culture

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even better
than Europeans themselves.

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And nowhere more so
than the portrait gallery...

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..a breathtakingly
overloaded version of the galleries

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in grand European houses,

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with walls like pages
of a stamp album.

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Like Rastrelli, the artist
responsible was of Italian descent -

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Pietro Rotari.

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It's said that Elizabeth paid
Rotari the sum of 1,000 gold roubles

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to come to Russia - a world record
transfer fee for a portrait painter.

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And what she got in return,
were some of the very first pictures

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of Russians seen
through a European lens.

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Now, in this room there are 367
altogether

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and they're all in a
well-established European tradition

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of painting so-called beauties.

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Innocent, rather coquettish
young ladies. But the twist here

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is that each one of these individual
girls is meant to represent

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a different region of Russia. You
can tell by the different costumes

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and headdresses.
So what this amounts to

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is a kind of ideal catalogue
of Russian womanhood.

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But there's more to it than that
too, because Rotari employed

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an army of Russian apprentices,
and many of these pictures

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were painted by them.

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So what we've got here is a kind of
extraordinary capsule

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of a particular moment.
We've got Russians

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painted by a European
but we've also got Russians

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painting in a European style.

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In the new St Petersburg,
portraiture flourished.

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Russian artists became expert

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at capturing
the glamour of an aristocracy

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in love with its own,
fashionably European image.

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The city's elite
made a cult of luxury,

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so even eating could become
a kind of artistic performance.

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Consuming caviar became the ultimate
symbol of one's nobility...

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..but one that might leave
a bitter aftertaste.

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For all its glittering
social rituals,

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Russia was
essentially a feudal society.

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You have to remember that the
aristocracy was a tiny elite,

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supported by a mountain
of human misery.

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Their lifestyle were sustained
by the existence of the serf class.

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Serfs were owned peasants,
effectively slaves,

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00:13:03,440 --> 00:13:06,640
and they made up
half of the country's population.

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Among them, poverty was rife.

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They lived
a hand-to-mouth existence.

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The treatment of the serfs might've
improved

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when Catherine the Great
came to the throne in 1762.

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Schooled by the European
Enlightenment,

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a patron of both
Diderot and Voltaire,

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she boasted of her benevolent
treatment of Russia's peasants.

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And in the art created
during her reign,

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the Russian peasant
suddenly moved centre stage.

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Whether it's Shibanov's
Peasant Wedding -

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00:13:40,640 --> 00:13:44,280
a heart-warming
celebration of rural life -

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or Argunov's Peasant Woman,
beaming health and happiness

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00:13:49,240 --> 00:13:53,800
with her smooth skin
and perfectly plucked eyebrows.

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00:13:56,400 --> 00:13:59,360
But such pictures
were really just propaganda -

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the lot of the poor had worsened
under Catherine's reign.

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00:14:06,640 --> 00:14:09,480
And one truly monumental work of art

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00:14:09,480 --> 00:14:11,880
shows the brutal reality

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00:14:11,880 --> 00:14:15,200
behind the myth
of Catherine's Enlightenment.

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00:14:18,320 --> 00:14:21,280
In the 1760s, she commissioned
a statue of Peter the Great,

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now known as "the Bronze Horseman".

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00:14:27,920 --> 00:14:31,160
It shows the tsar
as a dynamic Caesar.

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00:14:32,880 --> 00:14:37,760
This was Catherine's way of
claiming Peter's power as her own.

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00:14:37,760 --> 00:14:42,720
She too would master the Russian
people as Peter masters his horse.

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00:14:50,160 --> 00:14:53,880
But for me, the most
fascinating thing about the monument

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is not the statue itself, but the
enormous plinth on which it stands,

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00:14:58,120 --> 00:14:59,880
the so-called thunder rock.

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00:14:59,880 --> 00:15:02,200
According to legend, it's the stone

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00:15:02,200 --> 00:15:06,640
from the top of which Peter first
surveyed the site of St Petersburg.

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00:15:06,640 --> 00:15:12,120
Now, at Catherine's insistence,
this enormous piece of granite -

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00:15:12,120 --> 00:15:14,680
it weights 1,800 tonnes -

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00:15:14,680 --> 00:15:17,840
was transported to this site
several miles.

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00:15:17,840 --> 00:15:20,760
It took hundreds of men
nearly two years.

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00:15:20,760 --> 00:15:22,760
No beasts of burden were used.

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00:15:22,760 --> 00:15:26,200
It's quite possibly the
single largest piece of stone

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00:15:26,200 --> 00:15:28,240
ever moved by human force alone.

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00:15:28,240 --> 00:15:32,760
Now, it's a crushingly
powerful, overbearing symbol

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00:15:32,760 --> 00:15:37,840
of the real relationship between
ruler and ruled in Tsarist Russia.

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00:15:37,840 --> 00:15:40,520
This was Catherine's way
of saying to her people,

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00:15:40,520 --> 00:15:43,480
"No matter how difficult it might
seem,

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00:15:43,480 --> 00:15:45,960
"no matter how mad it might appear,

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00:15:45,960 --> 00:15:48,600
"whatever I tell you to do,
you do it."

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00:15:54,520 --> 00:15:59,680
And artists too had to endure
their own form of servitude.

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00:15:59,680 --> 00:16:04,200
The St Petersburg Academy
was built as a Roman temple.

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00:16:05,720 --> 00:16:08,960
It rigidly controlled
the training of artists

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00:16:08,960 --> 00:16:12,720
in the European
classical tradition...

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00:16:12,720 --> 00:16:16,920
emphasising the study of Greek
and Roman art.

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00:16:16,920 --> 00:16:21,160
This depiction of the studio
of Venetsianov -

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00:16:21,160 --> 00:16:24,240
the leading Russian artist
of the early 19th century -

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00:16:24,240 --> 00:16:27,440
is dutifully filled
with casts of classical statues.

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00:16:32,520 --> 00:16:34,160
In the Russian Museum,

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00:16:34,160 --> 00:16:37,720
you can see how this overwhelmingly
academic approach

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00:16:37,720 --> 00:16:41,880
was to keep a tight leash on the
development of the nation's art.

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00:16:47,640 --> 00:16:49,440
Now, if you want to experience

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00:16:49,440 --> 00:16:53,680
the Russian tradition of European
style art, 100 years of art history,

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00:16:53,680 --> 00:16:57,360
squeezed into just a few rooms,
this is the best place to do it.

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00:16:57,360 --> 00:17:00,160
Here, you might be in an English
style portrait gallery,

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00:17:00,160 --> 00:17:02,160
look at those two pictures
of a young girl

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00:17:02,160 --> 00:17:03,800
and young boy, like mannequins

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00:17:03,800 --> 00:17:07,600
in the airless interior
of some palace.

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00:17:07,600 --> 00:17:10,840
They were determined to have
everything in their palaces

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00:17:10,840 --> 00:17:13,600
that you'd find in any
of the great European palaces.

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00:17:13,600 --> 00:17:17,400
Tapestries made at the newly founded
in St Petersburg tapestry factory,

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00:17:17,400 --> 00:17:20,920
great monumental bronzes -
this time it's Empress Anna,

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00:17:20,920 --> 00:17:22,720
attended by an Arab boy.

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00:17:25,160 --> 00:17:28,360
They also quickly developed
their own traditions

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00:17:28,360 --> 00:17:32,480
of classically inspired art -
heroic nudes, or scenes from Homer,

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00:17:32,480 --> 00:17:36,160
designed for the moral contemplation
of the Russian aristocracy.

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00:17:36,160 --> 00:17:40,320
Now by the time you get
to the end of the 18th century,

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00:17:40,320 --> 00:17:44,760
Russian artists have really mastered
most of the major European genres.

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00:17:44,760 --> 00:17:48,000
And this room is devoted to the work
of Dmitri Levitsky,

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00:17:48,000 --> 00:17:51,000
who's the giant of late
18th century Russian portraiture.

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00:17:51,000 --> 00:17:54,040
He's Russia's answer
to Sir Joshua Reynolds.

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00:17:54,040 --> 00:17:57,440
This great picture here,
a wonderfully theatrical portrait

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00:17:57,440 --> 00:17:58,800
of Catherine the Great,

239
00:17:58,800 --> 00:18:01,760
could almost have been
painted by Reynolds himself.

240
00:18:01,760 --> 00:18:05,080
It's an utterly competent,
completely derivative work of art.

241
00:18:05,080 --> 00:18:07,880
But that's the point,
they didn't want originality.

242
00:18:07,880 --> 00:18:10,240
They wanted EXACTLY
what the Europeans had.

243
00:18:12,960 --> 00:18:17,160
And Russia's tradition of grand,
academic copycat painting

244
00:18:17,160 --> 00:18:20,680
would come to a wild crescendo
with THIS picture.

245
00:18:20,680 --> 00:18:22,880
It's my favourite picture
in the museum.

246
00:18:22,880 --> 00:18:24,320
It's not so bad it's good...

247
00:18:24,320 --> 00:18:26,240
it's so bad it's fantastic.

248
00:18:26,560 --> 00:18:31,120
It's Karl Bryullov's
The Last Day of Pompeii.

249
00:18:33,120 --> 00:18:35,680
Bryullov's painting
gleefully captures

250
00:18:35,680 --> 00:18:39,080
the destruction
of the ancient Roman city,

251
00:18:39,080 --> 00:18:41,680
but it's really
an excuse to show off

252
00:18:41,680 --> 00:18:45,000
his mastery of European style
and subject matter.

253
00:18:50,680 --> 00:18:53,400
Almost everything
in the picture is second-hand.

254
00:18:53,400 --> 00:18:56,960
It's a wonderful collage
of borrowings. The dead mother

255
00:18:56,960 --> 00:19:00,280
with her baby in the foreground
is taken from a classical source.

256
00:19:00,280 --> 00:19:03,480
Those figures masked with the cloak
are from the Italian Raphael.

257
00:19:03,480 --> 00:19:06,040
If you look up at the back the man
on the rearing horse,

258
00:19:06,040 --> 00:19:09,720
he's nicked from Delacroix,
the French Romantic painter.

259
00:19:09,720 --> 00:19:12,640
But the picture's more than
the sum of its parts

260
00:19:12,640 --> 00:19:15,960
and once all of these elements
have been whirled around

261
00:19:15,960 --> 00:19:20,040
in Bryullov's magic liquidiser,
the result is an extraordinarily,

262
00:19:20,040 --> 00:19:22,520
theatrical,
mad vision of apocalypse.

263
00:19:22,520 --> 00:19:25,320
And what it makes me think of,
more than anything else,

264
00:19:25,320 --> 00:19:28,000
is the great Russian genius
for theatre, for opera.

265
00:19:28,000 --> 00:19:29,640
In fact, I think it's a painting

266
00:19:29,640 --> 00:19:32,560
that really aspires
to the condition of cinema.

267
00:19:32,560 --> 00:19:35,920
After all,
it's painted in Cinemascope format.

268
00:19:35,920 --> 00:19:38,360
I think, in a way, the only
thing that's missing

269
00:19:38,360 --> 00:19:41,320
is a little man coming up
through the floor playing an organ!

270
00:20:03,160 --> 00:20:05,680
But by the start of the 1840s,

271
00:20:05,680 --> 00:20:09,120
Russian culture was on the brink
of a momentous change.

272
00:20:09,120 --> 00:20:12,160
Writers like Gogol
were beginning to show

273
00:20:12,160 --> 00:20:14,600
that the lives of ordinary Russians

274
00:20:14,600 --> 00:20:17,000
could be the stuff
of great literature.

275
00:20:17,000 --> 00:20:21,640
And, after a century of academic
repression, artists were desperate

276
00:20:21,640 --> 00:20:24,160
to follow their lead.

277
00:20:25,840 --> 00:20:29,200
There was a growing hunger for
images of real day-to-day life.

278
00:20:29,200 --> 00:20:31,320
And
by the middle of the 19th century,

279
00:20:31,320 --> 00:20:34,080
Russian art had reached
a kind of tipping point.

280
00:20:34,080 --> 00:20:38,520
Artists were fed up with endlessly
depicting the same tiny elite,

281
00:20:38,520 --> 00:20:41,360
or churning out
huge classical melodramas.

282
00:20:41,360 --> 00:20:44,680
They wanted to paint what they saw
as the real Russia -

283
00:20:44,680 --> 00:20:46,320
Russia in the here and now.

284
00:20:50,880 --> 00:20:54,280
The first painter really to
peer beneath the surface

285
00:20:54,280 --> 00:20:58,280
of Russian society
was Pavel Fedotov.

286
00:20:58,280 --> 00:21:03,200
From the 1840s,
he caricatured the ruling classes.

287
00:21:05,360 --> 00:21:08,880
Russia had virtually no history
of satirical art,

288
00:21:08,880 --> 00:21:14,080
so people were truly shocked
by Fedotov's feckless young woman,

289
00:21:14,080 --> 00:21:16,240
his preening major

290
00:21:16,240 --> 00:21:18,400
and his penniless noble

291
00:21:18,400 --> 00:21:20,120
hiding a pauper's breakfast.

292
00:21:25,920 --> 00:21:28,720
This picture is called
the Fresh Cavalier,

293
00:21:28,720 --> 00:21:31,120
and it's one of Fedotov's
biggest hits.

294
00:21:31,120 --> 00:21:33,600
When he exhibited it
at the 1846 exhibition,

295
00:21:33,600 --> 00:21:37,880
thousands of people crowded round
to see this satire

296
00:21:37,880 --> 00:21:41,200
of a rather small-minded
cavalry officer.

297
00:21:41,200 --> 00:21:44,840
He's been given a medal, and he's
spent the whole night carousing

298
00:21:44,840 --> 00:21:47,920
and celebrating this honour
that's been bestowed on him.

299
00:21:47,920 --> 00:21:52,600
He's a vain man, his hair
is in curlers. He's also immoral,

300
00:21:52,600 --> 00:21:55,560
because he's spent the night
with his mistress.

301
00:21:56,840 --> 00:21:58,800
Fedotov was a huge fan of Hogarth

302
00:21:58,800 --> 00:22:02,560
and of the European satirical
tradition and you can see that

303
00:22:02,560 --> 00:22:05,040
in his love
of incriminating details.

304
00:22:05,040 --> 00:22:07,840
Look
at the drained champagne bottle,

305
00:22:07,840 --> 00:22:11,440
the broken crockery
symbolising smashed virtue,

306
00:22:11,440 --> 00:22:15,480
the guitar without its strings,
which is a symbol of discord...

307
00:22:15,480 --> 00:22:20,120
..and the cat, scratching away
at the silk cover of the chair.

308
00:22:20,120 --> 00:22:23,920
And I think the cat, in some way,
is a symbol of the man himself -

309
00:22:23,920 --> 00:22:27,760
a privileged person
who's abusing his status.

310
00:22:29,280 --> 00:22:33,040
Fedotov's own life ended unhappily.

311
00:22:33,040 --> 00:22:37,360
He was brutally jumped on
by the Russian censor,

312
00:22:37,360 --> 00:22:40,760
who prevented him from publishing
his work in the form of engravings

313
00:22:40,760 --> 00:22:43,840
or lithographs, reaching
out directly to the wider public

314
00:22:43,840 --> 00:22:47,600
because it was seen
as simply too inflammatory.

315
00:22:47,600 --> 00:22:52,560
What happened was that the artist
gradually retreated in on himself.

316
00:22:52,560 --> 00:22:56,440
He died at the age of 37
after a long depression.

317
00:22:56,440 --> 00:22:59,760
In fact, he ended his days
in a lunatic asylum.

318
00:22:59,760 --> 00:23:01,400
And this picture,

319
00:23:01,400 --> 00:23:06,880
ironically entitled Encore Encore
is one of his very, very last works.

320
00:23:06,880 --> 00:23:11,960
And it takes us to a far bleaker
and darker place

321
00:23:11,960 --> 00:23:15,920
than anything
seen in his earlier pictures.

322
00:23:15,920 --> 00:23:19,040
Here, we've got this image of a man,

323
00:23:19,040 --> 00:23:24,480
a military officer, somewhere at
the rump end of the Russian Empire,

324
00:23:24,480 --> 00:23:26,640
perhaps in Siberia.

325
00:23:26,640 --> 00:23:29,600
There's a glimpse of snow
and perhaps a rook or two

326
00:23:29,600 --> 00:23:32,360
in the murk outside that window.

327
00:23:34,360 --> 00:23:39,560
He's in a log cabin, he's on
his own, the implication is that

328
00:23:39,560 --> 00:23:41,160
he's spent months here

329
00:23:41,160 --> 00:23:44,120
and he's passing the time

330
00:23:44,120 --> 00:23:48,880
by teaching his dog
to jump over a stick.

331
00:23:50,800 --> 00:23:56,080
The dog is this
blurred, strange form.

332
00:23:56,080 --> 00:23:58,600
And it's hard not to read it
as a kind of metaphor

333
00:23:58,600 --> 00:24:02,440
for Fedotov's
very bleak view of Russian society.

334
00:24:02,440 --> 00:24:06,800
In a sense, aren't we all doing
something as pointless as this?

335
00:24:12,920 --> 00:24:16,280
But the trickles
of discontent in Fedotov's work

336
00:24:16,280 --> 00:24:18,600
were about to become a tidal wave.

337
00:24:21,960 --> 00:24:26,040
The great rebellion had taken
more than a century to arrive

338
00:24:26,040 --> 00:24:29,400
but it would revolutionise
the course of Russian art.

339
00:24:33,960 --> 00:24:38,400
In 1863, the students at St
Petersburg's rather stuffy academy

340
00:24:38,400 --> 00:24:41,880
started lobbying to be allowed
to paint purely Russian subjects.

341
00:24:41,880 --> 00:24:45,040
But their professors said, "No,"
and the subject set

342
00:24:45,040 --> 00:24:49,920
for that year's final exam was
Odin entering the gates of Valhalla.

343
00:24:49,920 --> 00:24:52,800
Fourteen students left in protest.

344
00:24:52,800 --> 00:24:55,960
They decided to turn their back
on St Petersburg

345
00:24:55,960 --> 00:24:59,320
and take their art
to the whole of this vast country.

346
00:24:59,320 --> 00:25:03,280
They were to be called
the Peredvizhniki - The Wanderers.

347
00:25:12,560 --> 00:25:16,760
The Wanderers saw themselves
as more than just artists.

348
00:25:16,760 --> 00:25:19,600
Acutely aware of Russia's
lack of democracy,

349
00:25:19,600 --> 00:25:24,200
they believed it was
the painter's duty to explore

350
00:25:24,200 --> 00:25:28,160
and expose
every aspect of Russian life.

351
00:25:28,160 --> 00:25:31,000
They showed the bitter lives
of the peasants.

352
00:25:33,120 --> 00:25:36,000
They celebrated
the splendour of the landscape.

353
00:25:37,520 --> 00:25:40,560
They remembered
Russia's tyrannical history,

354
00:25:40,560 --> 00:25:43,840
the blood-letting of mad
Ivan the Terrible.

355
00:25:46,280 --> 00:25:48,280
They didn't paint the idle rich

356
00:25:48,280 --> 00:25:51,600
but kindred spirits wrestling
with Russia's destiny.

357
00:25:52,600 --> 00:25:55,640
Writers like Ivan Turgenev

358
00:25:55,640 --> 00:25:58,600
and the brooding Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

359
00:25:59,920 --> 00:26:03,320
Above all,
they painted the towering figure

360
00:26:03,320 --> 00:26:06,080
of 19th century Russian culture,

361
00:26:06,080 --> 00:26:08,720
Leo Tolstoy.

362
00:26:10,560 --> 00:26:14,960
The Wanderers regarded Tolstoy
as their spiritual godfather.

363
00:26:14,960 --> 00:26:17,480
And for him,
the purpose of writing novels

364
00:26:17,480 --> 00:26:19,880
was to point the way forward
for Russia.

365
00:26:19,880 --> 00:26:23,920
So take a book like Anna Karenina.
Yes, it's a great tragic love story

366
00:26:23,920 --> 00:26:26,880
but, at its heart,
it's really a political tract,

367
00:26:26,880 --> 00:26:30,120
a great rejection of the values
of the court and the city

368
00:26:30,120 --> 00:26:32,480
and an embrace
of the values of the land.

369
00:26:32,480 --> 00:26:36,240
The central scene in the book
has the male character Levin

370
00:26:36,240 --> 00:26:39,320
being taught
to wield a scythe by his peasants.

371
00:26:39,320 --> 00:26:42,200
And suddenly, at this moment,
he realises

372
00:26:42,200 --> 00:26:46,160
that he feels truly Russian,
he feels at one with the world.

373
00:26:51,880 --> 00:26:55,600
Tolstoy was celebrated in a series
of paintings by the Wanderers.

374
00:26:57,400 --> 00:27:00,520
Here by Nesterov,
wearing peasant garb.

375
00:27:02,640 --> 00:27:06,640
Here by Repin, ploughing a field.

376
00:27:06,640 --> 00:27:08,840
But there was nothing twee
or escapist

377
00:27:08,840 --> 00:27:11,440
about this retreat to the land.

378
00:27:11,440 --> 00:27:14,480
Tolstoy believed the nation could
only be saved

379
00:27:14,480 --> 00:27:17,600
by reconnecting
with her ancient traditions...

380
00:27:17,600 --> 00:27:20,640
and Russian artists
followed his lead.

381
00:27:25,520 --> 00:27:29,200
The Wanderers were fascinated by
documenting the Russian landscape.

382
00:27:29,200 --> 00:27:32,520
They were part of a broad movement
towards landscape painting.

383
00:27:32,520 --> 00:27:35,400
Artists all over Europe
were getting back to nature -

384
00:27:35,400 --> 00:27:38,200
most famously,
the French Impressionists.

385
00:27:38,200 --> 00:27:41,120
But the Russians weren't interested

386
00:27:41,120 --> 00:27:44,640
in impressionistic effects
of haze or blur

387
00:27:44,640 --> 00:27:46,080
because, for them,

388
00:27:46,080 --> 00:27:49,320
Mother Russia had the value
almost of a spiritual absolute.

389
00:27:49,320 --> 00:27:53,440
They wanted to capture every
leaf, every stalk, every cloud.

390
00:27:53,440 --> 00:27:59,240
So they opted for a style of almost
hypnotic, photographic realism.

391
00:28:02,320 --> 00:28:06,680
The Wanderers' greatest
landscape artist was Isaac Levitan.

392
00:28:06,680 --> 00:28:12,480
Regarded with suspicion by many
Russians, Lithuanian and Jewish,

393
00:28:12,480 --> 00:28:17,160
he nonetheless set out to capture
the essence of Russian nature.

394
00:28:20,400 --> 00:28:23,640
He painted the nation's
great birch forests -

395
00:28:23,640 --> 00:28:27,200
a world of silver
and green, dappled by sunlight.

396
00:28:35,840 --> 00:28:39,480
He said he painted
to touch people's souls.

397
00:28:39,480 --> 00:28:43,360
And here you can see
his positively religious sense

398
00:28:43,360 --> 00:28:46,520
of the vastness
of the Russian landscape.

399
00:28:46,520 --> 00:28:51,240
He looks down,
as if from God's point of view,

400
00:28:51,240 --> 00:28:55,400
to a tiny Orthodox church set within
the greater cathedral of nature.

401
00:29:00,640 --> 00:29:03,120
But Levitan
could chill the soul too.

402
00:29:03,120 --> 00:29:08,000
One of his most celebrated
landscapes, Vladimirka,

403
00:29:08,000 --> 00:29:11,720
is shot through with a sense
of morbidity and dread.

404
00:29:13,240 --> 00:29:16,960
You need to know this was the path
political prisoners tramped down

405
00:29:16,960 --> 00:29:18,920
on their way to Siberia.

406
00:29:26,840 --> 00:29:30,800
Levitan had used landscape
as a vehicle for protest.

407
00:29:30,800 --> 00:29:34,560
Political dissidence lay at the core
of everything the Wanderers did.

408
00:29:36,760 --> 00:29:40,160
The most famous member of the group
saw himself

409
00:29:40,160 --> 00:29:42,760
as Russia's conscience.

410
00:29:42,760 --> 00:29:46,120
His name? Ilya Repin.

411
00:29:54,480 --> 00:29:59,400
This is Ilya Repin's estate, and
to Russians it's hallowed ground.

412
00:29:59,400 --> 00:30:02,840
He's not that well known
outside Russia, but within Russia

413
00:30:02,840 --> 00:30:08,080
he's considered a giant, every bit
as famous as Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy.

414
00:30:08,080 --> 00:30:10,560
And that's because
he used painting

415
00:30:10,560 --> 00:30:13,160
to address the great issues
of the day.

416
00:30:13,160 --> 00:30:16,680
In fact, during the course of his
long career, there was hardly

417
00:30:16,680 --> 00:30:19,480
an aspect of Russian life
that he didn't touch on.

418
00:30:24,640 --> 00:30:28,400
Repin's paintings are a
panorama of Russian society.

419
00:30:31,120 --> 00:30:33,680
His Religious Procession in Kursk

420
00:30:33,680 --> 00:30:36,520
is on the scale
of a great Russian novel.

421
00:30:36,520 --> 00:30:39,560
It's a piercing, pitiless image
of a divided society,

422
00:30:39,560 --> 00:30:43,240
full of
flawed figures of authority -

423
00:30:43,240 --> 00:30:47,080
the guard lashing out at the crowd,

424
00:30:47,080 --> 00:30:51,040
the vain priest primping his hair,

425
00:30:51,040 --> 00:30:55,120
the cruel father,
beating his crippled son.

426
00:30:58,840 --> 00:31:03,800
Repin had his own wars with Tsarist
authority, and the state censors.

427
00:31:03,800 --> 00:31:10,280
This picture, The Arrest of a
Propagandist, shows a heroic
revolutionary seized by the police.

428
00:31:10,280 --> 00:31:18,160
But Repin suppressed the image,
knowing it was too inflammatory
to show in public.

429
00:31:19,440 --> 00:31:22,440
He did plan to exhibit this
even more shocking painting

430
00:31:22,440 --> 00:31:27,160
of a political prisoner spurning
confession before his execution,

431
00:31:27,160 --> 00:31:30,160
but it was banned outright
by the censor.

432
00:31:31,440 --> 00:31:36,400
Even in his portraiture, Repin was
drawn to rebels and firebrands -

433
00:31:36,400 --> 00:31:41,600
this picture of the young,
pallid Maxim Gorky
emanates intellectual unrest.

434
00:31:45,240 --> 00:31:51,520
Elena Kirillina, the curator
of the estate, has a particular
love of Repin's portraits.

435
00:32:27,600 --> 00:32:31,040
If you had to name your
favourite Repin painting,
which one would it be?

436
00:32:45,600 --> 00:32:47,440
Repin lived in this dacha,

437
00:32:47,440 --> 00:32:51,560
which he designed himself
in a simple, folksy style.

438
00:32:55,640 --> 00:33:01,560
But don't be fooled by appearances.
This house, too, had an
intensely political purpose.

439
00:33:09,880 --> 00:33:13,720
Repin's house embodies his values,
and although he was rich enough to

440
00:33:13,720 --> 00:33:17,160
employ an army of servants,
he prided himself on having none.

441
00:33:17,160 --> 00:33:20,200
In fact, visitors to the house
were greeted by this sign...

442
00:33:20,200 --> 00:33:24,600
'Don't call for the butler, we
haven't got one! Please announce
yourself with a tam tam! '

443
00:33:26,560 --> 00:33:33,000
I think it was Repin's way of
quietly banging a gong for his own
democratic values.

444
00:33:37,120 --> 00:33:42,000
And this is his dining room.
And because he didn't have any
servants to wait on his guests,

445
00:33:42,000 --> 00:33:48,040
he devised this rather ingenious
circular table, to make sure the
plates got to each and every person.

446
00:33:48,040 --> 00:33:49,960
It was really quite revolutionary!

447
00:33:54,360 --> 00:33:59,240
You can see a smiling Repin
on the left of the screen in
this fragmentary home movie.

448
00:34:03,440 --> 00:34:09,200
And here he is,
proudly shovelling away snow
without a servant in sight.

449
00:34:09,200 --> 00:34:13,360
The living embodiment of the
Wanderers' revolutionary ethos.

450
00:34:18,760 --> 00:34:22,760
I think the great thing about
Repin was the breadth and
the depth of his humanity.

451
00:34:22,760 --> 00:34:26,600
And unlike many other 19th century
painters who depicted poor people,

452
00:34:26,600 --> 00:34:30,480
Repin didn't approach them in any
patronising or sentimental way.

453
00:34:30,480 --> 00:34:33,640
He'd been brought up in
poverty himself, as a peasant,

454
00:34:33,640 --> 00:34:39,760
and I think it was that background
that gave him the ability to capture
the harsh realities of Russian life

455
00:34:39,760 --> 00:34:41,880
like no other artist.

456
00:34:57,600 --> 00:35:03,040
In the 1870s, Repin created the
most celebrated painting in the
history of Russian art.

457
00:35:03,040 --> 00:35:08,920
It was to shock the nation
with its unflinching depiction
of peasant life.

458
00:35:14,040 --> 00:35:17,160
Barge-Haulers on the Volga is
Repin's most famous picture.

459
00:35:17,160 --> 00:35:20,200
It's a great work of social protest.

460
00:35:20,200 --> 00:35:23,240
I'm not interested in painting
light and colour, he said.

461
00:35:23,240 --> 00:35:24,920
I want to paint content.

462
00:35:24,920 --> 00:35:29,680
And the content here
is unadulterated human misery.

463
00:35:29,680 --> 00:35:32,920
11 men hauling,
with their own force,

464
00:35:32,920 --> 00:35:38,000
a great barge to the
shore of the Volga river.

465
00:35:38,000 --> 00:35:41,960
They are human beings who have
been reduced to the level of beasts.

466
00:35:41,960 --> 00:35:43,840
Now these figures draw the eye

467
00:35:43,840 --> 00:35:45,960
in so much that it's
quite easy to miss

468
00:35:45,960 --> 00:35:50,120
a very important detail which is
this little tugboat.

469
00:35:50,120 --> 00:35:54,880
And what it tells us,
quite simply, is that
there is another way of doing this.

470
00:35:54,880 --> 00:35:57,000
We've got steam power.

471
00:35:57,000 --> 00:36:00,440
But the fact is, that human labour
is still so cheap,

472
00:36:00,440 --> 00:36:04,480
and our disregard for any sense of
human rights is so enormous,

473
00:36:04,480 --> 00:36:07,240
that we're still prepared
to treat people like this.

474
00:36:07,240 --> 00:36:11,200
Now, one of the things that's most
interesting about this picture

475
00:36:11,200 --> 00:36:16,200
is that from the very moment it was
painted, it was hugely popular,

476
00:36:16,200 --> 00:36:19,360
and its popularity
has never diminished.

477
00:36:19,360 --> 00:36:22,520
It was, for example, Stalin's
favourite painting.

478
00:36:22,520 --> 00:36:26,800
This was the picture that he held up
to the artists of communist Russia

479
00:36:26,800 --> 00:36:31,440
as a model on which they
should base their own work.
And it's not hard to see why.

480
00:36:31,440 --> 00:36:35,000
because to a communist this would
look like a depiction of

481
00:36:35,000 --> 00:36:38,480
the energies and the will that would
lead to revolution.

482
00:36:38,480 --> 00:36:42,800
And the key figure of all,
and this was said at the time
when the picture was painted,

483
00:36:42,800 --> 00:36:45,160
the key figure, who's
picked up by the light,

484
00:36:45,160 --> 00:36:47,720
is this boy in the middle.

485
00:36:47,720 --> 00:36:54,360
He's the only figure looking up,
looking out as if to a better life,
as if to a more optimistic future.

486
00:36:54,360 --> 00:36:58,440
And he even looks as if he's
about to take off the shackles
of slave labour.

487
00:37:03,680 --> 00:37:05,480
This was more than just a painting.

488
00:37:05,480 --> 00:37:12,000
This was an incendiary work of art,
a manifesto for political change.

489
00:37:34,880 --> 00:37:41,360
So what was the Wanderers'
alternative to this brutal world of
oppression and servitude?

490
00:37:41,360 --> 00:37:44,600
You can glimpse it here at the
estate of Abramtsevo,

491
00:37:44,600 --> 00:37:50,280
where they founded
an artists' colony.

492
00:37:52,160 --> 00:37:56,960
Surrounded by buildings designed in
homage to ancient folk architecture,

493
00:37:56,960 --> 00:37:59,120
they studied the arts
and crafts of old Russia.

494
00:38:05,560 --> 00:38:09,360
Abramtsevo was to be a model
society, taking Russia itself
back to basics.

495
00:38:13,000 --> 00:38:17,200
At its centre they built
an orthodox church,

496
00:38:17,200 --> 00:38:21,400
which still bears witness to their
highly charged sense of mission.

497
00:38:24,840 --> 00:38:28,440
HE SAYS SOMETHING IN RUSSIAN

498
00:38:28,440 --> 00:38:33,720
I'm sorry my Russian is terrible
but we'll get there in the end.

499
00:38:33,720 --> 00:38:35,520
The keeper to the church.

500
00:38:35,520 --> 00:38:37,240
That is a big key.

501
00:38:40,400 --> 00:38:41,920
Spasibo.

502
00:39:21,360 --> 00:39:23,920
This is the
Church of the Holy Saviour.

503
00:39:23,920 --> 00:39:29,680
And it marks a very important
moment, a point where the artists of
the late 19th century here in Russia

504
00:39:29,680 --> 00:39:33,600
reconnect with the mysteries
of orthodox Christianity.

505
00:39:33,600 --> 00:39:37,120
And a whole group of painters,
craftsmen and sculptors

506
00:39:37,120 --> 00:39:40,960
collaborated to create the
decoration for this church.

507
00:39:40,960 --> 00:39:46,560
An artist called Viktor Vasnetsov
created this rather beautiful,

508
00:39:46,560 --> 00:39:51,720
naive style mosaic floor.

509
00:39:51,720 --> 00:39:55,640
But he real splendour of this little
church is its iconostasis,

510
00:39:55,640 --> 00:39:58,880
the screen that separates the
congregation from the altar.

511
00:39:58,880 --> 00:40:03,160
And here Repin himself, the greatest
of the Wanderers,

512
00:40:03,160 --> 00:40:09,560
contributed the image of Christ as
if imprinted on the veil,
like the Turin shroud.

513
00:40:09,560 --> 00:40:13,360
I think what's fascinating about
this is the solemnity of the gaze

514
00:40:13,360 --> 00:40:17,600
and the fact that Repin
has made Christ look like an
archetypal Russian.

515
00:40:17,600 --> 00:40:25,480
This could almost be
an image of Russia itself as Christ,
as the sacrificial victim.

516
00:40:25,480 --> 00:40:29,680
I think what this moment of
reconnection with orthodox
Christianity

517
00:40:29,680 --> 00:40:34,440
gave to the whole movement was a
powerful, almost mystical
sense of vocation.

518
00:40:47,720 --> 00:40:52,720
There was one artist who would
bring together this heady mixture

519
00:40:52,720 --> 00:40:59,760
of ancient mysticism and folk
motifs, and in doing so, push
Russian art to its outer limits.

520
00:41:01,720 --> 00:41:03,040
Mikhail Vrubel.

521
00:41:11,160 --> 00:41:14,360
Unlike most of the other artists
who came here to Abramtsevo,

522
00:41:14,360 --> 00:41:18,240
Vrubel didn't need to be taught
the rudiments of Russian folk art.

523
00:41:18,240 --> 00:41:20,720
He understood it at a gut level.

524
00:41:20,720 --> 00:41:25,840
Very unusually, he had grown
up painting icons, restoring
murals in Russian churches.

525
00:41:25,840 --> 00:41:31,120
And here where they preserved his
studio almost intact, you can see
his homages to the folk tradition.

526
00:41:31,120 --> 00:41:33,200
These ceramics,

527
00:41:33,200 --> 00:41:36,960
depicting figures from
myths and fairy story.

528
00:41:36,960 --> 00:41:42,760
But for me there's also something
obsessive, strange, almost grotesque
about some of these figures,

529
00:41:42,760 --> 00:41:47,680
and Vrubel himself was a deeply
neurotic individual.

530
00:41:47,680 --> 00:41:52,840
In the end, his greatest achievement
was to take this popular language of
Russian folk art,

531
00:41:52,840 --> 00:41:57,520
and merge it together into
a new form of Russian painting,

532
00:41:57,520 --> 00:42:00,960
a painting of dark prophecy.

533
00:42:00,960 --> 00:42:06,920
Vrubel's work always
has a disturbing, decadent edge -

534
00:42:06,920 --> 00:42:13,280
an end of century fixation with
dark forces, which he shared
with many European artists.

535
00:42:13,280 --> 00:42:17,240
But he took it to an extreme,
obsessed with a figure that was like

536
00:42:17,240 --> 00:42:22,080
the ghost of ancient Russia,
bent on a terrible vengeance.

537
00:42:47,840 --> 00:42:50,120
During the last 20 years
of his life,

538
00:42:50,120 --> 00:42:54,440
Vrubel became fascinated by a
figure he simply called 'The Demon'.

539
00:42:54,440 --> 00:42:58,440
He painted picture after
picture of this mythical creature.

540
00:42:58,440 --> 00:43:05,600
The series began as illustrations to
a poem, but they developed into a
strange private obsession.

541
00:43:05,600 --> 00:43:09,240
And you can sense that in
a picture such as this,

542
00:43:09,240 --> 00:43:12,960
Vrubel is straining,
almost self-consciously, to create

543
00:43:12,960 --> 00:43:16,200
a very Russian language.,
there's a vibrancy of colour.

544
00:43:16,200 --> 00:43:21,320
And over here on this side of the
picture you've got this tremendously
adventurous use of paint

545
00:43:21,320 --> 00:43:26,840
which seems almost to prefigure
Cubism, these blocks of colour
have been placed here like this.

546
00:43:26,840 --> 00:43:32,400
But I think they're actually meant
to evoke the mosaic traditions of
folk art and their ceramics.

547
00:43:32,400 --> 00:43:36,240
And in the centre we've got this
figure of the demon,

548
00:43:36,240 --> 00:43:40,920
this brooding spirit of modern
Russia, of Russia as the 20th
century approaches,

549
00:43:40,920 --> 00:43:46,080
which I think is meant to
be somehow pondering the great
questions that face the nation -

550
00:43:46,080 --> 00:43:47,920
who are we, where are we going?

551
00:43:50,640 --> 00:43:53,160
But if you want to see just how far

552
00:43:53,160 --> 00:44:00,440
Vrubel would push the Russian folk
traditions towards a kind of
fin de siecle melancholia,

553
00:44:00,440 --> 00:44:04,560
you need to look
at this picture, the very last
of his demon paintings.

554
00:44:04,560 --> 00:44:08,400
- The Demon downcast. Now at
first sight, it's a baffling image.

555
00:44:08,400 --> 00:44:15,000
Here at the centre you've got this
elongated, strangely dislocated
figure of the demon,

556
00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:20,360
who appears to have been wedged
into some piece of hillside

557
00:44:20,360 --> 00:44:26,680
in the middle of a barren Siberian
plain, cloud-capped, snow-capped
mountain in the distance.

558
00:44:26,680 --> 00:44:32,520
And once again you've got,
very much you've got the colours
of the Russian orthodox church.

559
00:44:32,520 --> 00:44:35,000
You've got this gold everywhere.

560
00:44:35,000 --> 00:44:39,760
And yet the whole things been
whipped up into a storm of
almost total visual incoherence.

561
00:44:39,760 --> 00:44:43,560
This is figurative painting that's
almost on the brink of abstraction.

562
00:44:43,560 --> 00:44:48,520
You've got the sense of almost
as if the elements of
your visual experience

563
00:44:48,520 --> 00:44:53,560
have been put into a kaleidoscope
by the artist and whirled around.

564
00:44:58,080 --> 00:45:04,200
Like many another Russian artist
and writer of his time, Vrubel
ended up in a lunatic asylum.

565
00:45:04,200 --> 00:45:08,280
But I think there's a kind of
passionate sanity about this image.

566
00:45:08,280 --> 00:45:11,720
I think he genuinely did feel

567
00:45:11,720 --> 00:45:17,360
that Russia at the start of the
20th century was on the brink
of some kind of apocalypse.

568
00:45:17,360 --> 00:45:22,640
And this image of a world almost
ripped to pieces by its
own elemental energies

569
00:45:22,640 --> 00:45:28,600
was his way of saying what he
thought perhaps lay ahead
for his nation.

570
00:45:36,440 --> 00:45:41,960
Vrubel's sense of approaching
apocalypse was shared
by many Russians.

571
00:45:41,960 --> 00:45:49,080
And it was a feeling fuelled by
new, radical strains of
political thought from Europe.

572
00:45:49,080 --> 00:45:55,120
A book which would change the course
of Russian history was published
in the late 19th century,

573
00:45:55,120 --> 00:46:00,280
the work of a dangerous
German revolutionary.

574
00:46:04,560 --> 00:46:06,600
Das Kapital got past
the Tsar's censors

575
00:46:06,600 --> 00:46:10,080
on the grounds that nobody in Russia
could possibly understand it!

576
00:46:10,080 --> 00:46:15,760
And although it is a dense and
difficult book, it's also full of
prophecies and Biblical metaphors

577
00:46:15,760 --> 00:46:20,760
that appealed very strongly to
Russia's mystic, apocalyptically
inclined thinkers.

578
00:46:20,760 --> 00:46:25,600
Marx compared the accumulation
of capital to original sin,

579
00:46:25,600 --> 00:46:31,520
and described capitalism itself as a
demonic force, hatching golden eggs.

580
00:46:31,520 --> 00:46:38,640
As Russia accelerated
into the 20th century,
this book became its new bible.

581
00:46:44,760 --> 00:46:49,880
While Marxists plotted,
back in St Petersburg
Russia's old tsarist regime

582
00:46:49,880 --> 00:46:52,120
was looking ever more out of touch.

583
00:46:54,280 --> 00:46:57,560
Ancient structures of power had
barely changed in Russia

584
00:46:58,000 --> 00:47:01,880
since Peter the Great and the
cracks were beginning to show.

585
00:47:06,200 --> 00:47:10,480
In 1894, Nicholas II
took to the throne,

586
00:47:10,480 --> 00:47:15,760
a feeble ruler who resisted
calls for democracy.

587
00:47:15,760 --> 00:47:19,120
The people were
stirring into open revolt,

588
00:47:23,040 --> 00:47:26,320
but Nicholas chose to ignore
the abyss opening before him.

589
00:47:37,480 --> 00:47:44,000
His own favourite art
shows him disappearing into a
darkly intoxicating dream world.

590
00:47:44,000 --> 00:47:50,080
The Tsar commissioned a series of
eggs from the Faberge workshop.

591
00:47:50,080 --> 00:47:55,400
With the shimmering colours of silk,
miraculously fixed in enamel,

592
00:47:55,400 --> 00:47:58,640
they're like Marx's
golden eggs come to life.

593
00:48:11,640 --> 00:48:16,600
Housed behind bullet proof
glass, these cold, glittering,
brilliant objects of luxury

594
00:48:16,600 --> 00:48:22,720
are still the greatest symbol
of the Tsarist regime in its
last and most vulnerable years.

595
00:48:22,720 --> 00:48:26,560
And in fact, you can even
see a tiny little portrait
of Tsar Nicholas II

596
00:48:26,560 --> 00:48:29,480
embedded in the top
of this particular Faberge egg.

597
00:48:29,480 --> 00:48:32,960
He looks as aloof
and remote as ever.

598
00:48:32,960 --> 00:48:39,160
The timing of this weird imperial
cult of mad extravagance
could hardly have been worse.

599
00:48:39,160 --> 00:48:43,160
This egg was created in 1900,
and just a few years earlier,

600
00:48:43,160 --> 00:48:46,920
half a million people in Russia
had died of famine.

601
00:48:46,920 --> 00:48:49,840
Talk about obscene self indulgence.

602
00:48:53,040 --> 00:48:56,920
Nicolas' disconnection from
the people was fanning
the flames of revolution.

603
00:48:58,520 --> 00:49:03,720
And artists were growing so bold
that even a royal commission

604
00:49:03,720 --> 00:49:07,400
could be used to
undermine royal authority.

605
00:49:12,800 --> 00:49:18,880
This is the hippopotamus,
as it was instantly nicknamed
by the Russian people.

606
00:49:18,880 --> 00:49:23,160
A statue of Tsar Nicholas'
late father, Alexander III,

607
00:49:23,160 --> 00:49:28,240
it's an outrageous parody
of the heroic Bronze Horseman.

608
00:49:28,240 --> 00:49:31,160
This is the Obese Horseman.

609
00:49:31,160 --> 00:49:33,320
But so out of touch was Nicholas,

610
00:49:33,320 --> 00:49:36,520
he gave it the royal
stamp of approval.

611
00:49:42,680 --> 00:49:47,440
The great Wanderer, Ilya Repin
described the horse as an image
of the Russian people,

612
00:49:47,440 --> 00:49:52,600
oppressed by the burden of the tsar,
digging its heels in and
refusing to go on.

613
00:49:52,600 --> 00:49:57,880
And even the sculptor
responsible for it, Trubetskoy,
who later fled to France,

614
00:49:57,880 --> 00:50:00,840
admitted that he'd intended the
piece as a caricature.

615
00:50:00,840 --> 00:50:04,360
"I wanted to depict one animal
on top of another." he said.

616
00:50:04,360 --> 00:50:11,480
So, ironically, what had been
conceived as a grandiose celebration
of the power of the Tsar,

617
00:50:11,480 --> 00:50:15,760
became a rallying point for those
who wanted to overthrow his regime.

618
00:50:15,760 --> 00:50:18,160
And there were plenty of them.

619
00:50:21,760 --> 00:50:28,040
The Hippopotamus was the last
gasp of the art of
Imperial St Petersburg.

620
00:50:28,040 --> 00:50:31,920
An emblem of a culture
about to be swept away.

621
00:50:37,440 --> 00:50:39,800
As the 20th century dawned,

622
00:50:39,800 --> 00:50:43,000
the energies of
Russian culture shifted
away from the capital

623
00:50:43,000 --> 00:50:45,280
and found a new home.

624
00:50:53,200 --> 00:50:57,160
A revolutionary centre for
these revolutionary times.

625
00:50:57,160 --> 00:51:00,320
The City of Moscow!

626
00:51:05,480 --> 00:51:10,600
This great city had
long been Russia's
alternative centre of power,

627
00:51:10,600 --> 00:51:14,320
a place that defined itself
in opposition to St Petersburg.

628
00:51:14,320 --> 00:51:18,800
And while the Tsar's
city became ever more
museum like and stultifying,

629
00:51:18,800 --> 00:51:24,840
Moscow embraced the spirit of a new
age - bold, progressive, modern.

630
00:51:24,840 --> 00:51:31,400
At the start of the 20 century, this
was one of the most exciting places
in the whole world to be an artist.

631
00:51:36,600 --> 00:51:40,520
Moscow was a natural
home for artists who wanted
to combine radicalism

632
00:51:40,520 --> 00:51:42,520
with a renewal
of Russian culture.

633
00:51:45,880 --> 00:51:52,640
Vrubel emblazoned Moscow's grandest
hotel with figures from legend
and fairytales.

634
00:51:52,640 --> 00:51:54,880
Languid spirits casting
a spell on the city.

635
00:51:58,120 --> 00:52:00,200
Inspired by Cubism and Futurism,

636
00:52:00,200 --> 00:52:05,040
Natalia Goncharova celebrated
Russian life,

637
00:52:05,040 --> 00:52:07,600
in pictures that also
evoke icons and folk art.

638
00:52:15,360 --> 00:52:22,480
But one Moscow-born artist would
catapult Russian modernism further
than anything found in Europe,

639
00:52:22,480 --> 00:52:26,960
creating a completely new,
revolutionary style of art.

640
00:52:33,800 --> 00:52:38,440
Wassily Kandinsky turned Moscow
into a tapestry of colour.

641
00:52:40,080 --> 00:52:48,080
And he dissolved it
into the swirling forms of
a bewildering dream.

642
00:52:48,080 --> 00:52:52,960
It was the city's ancient
forms that enthralled him.

643
00:52:52,960 --> 00:52:56,240
Above all, its exotic onion domes.

644
00:53:01,560 --> 00:53:07,600
Kandinsky said that Moscow itself
was the catalyst for his new form of
disorientating painting.

645
00:53:07,600 --> 00:53:09,960
He saw it as a kind
of fairytale city

646
00:53:09,960 --> 00:53:16,520
and said that the music of
its streets made his
heart tremble and vibrate.

647
00:53:20,520 --> 00:53:24,240
Filled with these heady,
intoxicating visions of old Russia,

648
00:53:24,240 --> 00:53:27,160
Kandinsky would leap
into the unknown.

649
00:54:08,960 --> 00:54:16,040
Between 1909 and 1914,
Kandinsky worked to untether his art

650
00:54:16,040 --> 00:54:21,160
from any reference at all
to the visible world.

651
00:54:21,160 --> 00:54:25,720
And he created what have been
remembered as the very first
abstract paintings.

652
00:54:25,720 --> 00:54:30,240
This for me is the greatest of
them all, Composition seven,
which he created in 1913.

653
00:54:30,240 --> 00:54:36,280
Now, for all the importance of the
French influence on Kandinsky, the
influence of the Cubists, of Monet,

654
00:54:36,280 --> 00:54:41,400
the Impressionists, I think you
can really see his Russian roots.

655
00:54:41,400 --> 00:54:47,280
This is almost like
that extraordinary Vrubel painting
of the demon cast down.

656
00:54:47,280 --> 00:54:52,760
This could almost be that picture
seen through half closed eyes.

657
00:54:52,760 --> 00:54:58,200
Vrubel's kaleidoscope
has become Kandinsky's vortex.

658
00:54:58,200 --> 00:55:06,200
A kind of whirlpool
in which the last vestiges
of representation float free.

659
00:55:06,200 --> 00:55:10,640
Kandinsky was also a mystic.

660
00:55:10,640 --> 00:55:15,240
He believed that we were on the
brink of what he called the great
epoch of spirituality,

661
00:55:15,240 --> 00:55:17,040
and that is what he was painting.

662
00:55:17,040 --> 00:55:23,120
He was tearing the veil from the
over materialist eyes of mankind,

663
00:55:23,120 --> 00:55:27,600
I think that what
this picture expresses,
more than anything else,

664
00:55:27,600 --> 00:55:35,200
is his genuine belief that the world
was on the brink of some kind
of spiritual revolution.

665
00:55:41,080 --> 00:55:46,160
As Kandinsky launched Russian art
into abstraction, Russia itself was
degenerating into formless chaos.

666
00:55:50,800 --> 00:55:57,480
In 1915, in the throes of the
first world war, the Tsar was losing
all control over the country.

667
00:56:00,000 --> 00:56:06,080
As communists demanded revolution,
the most radical Russian
artist of all,

668
00:56:06,080 --> 00:56:11,760
Kazimir Malevich, created
art for a new world to come.

669
00:56:11,760 --> 00:56:15,560
A series of stark
geometrical shapes,

670
00:56:15,560 --> 00:56:19,480
thrusting away
all the old conventions.

671
00:56:20,920 --> 00:56:25,360
He was marching towards one
of the most shocking works
of the 20th century...

672
00:56:28,040 --> 00:56:29,880
..the Black Square.

673
00:56:41,440 --> 00:56:46,960
This cracked and fading painting
has the status of a holy relic,

674
00:56:46,960 --> 00:56:52,440
an icon touched not by God,
but by revolution.

675
00:56:52,440 --> 00:56:57,000
It's an image of Russia itself
as a blank space,

676
00:56:57,000 --> 00:57:01,680
ready for the great
change to be written into it.

677
00:57:03,160 --> 00:57:06,400
Malevich was a revolutionary,
in politics as well as in art.

678
00:57:06,400 --> 00:57:09,600
He had fought on the barricades
against the Russian state.

679
00:57:09,600 --> 00:57:12,920
Here, he's followed
Kandinsky into abstraction,

680
00:57:12,920 --> 00:57:17,480
but he's purged the image of
all colour, all form.

681
00:57:17,480 --> 00:57:21,320
He's left you with
nothing but a void.

682
00:57:25,720 --> 00:57:29,280
The traditionalists tried
to laugh the picture off.

683
00:57:31,120 --> 00:57:35,680
They said Malevich had gone mad,
he must've painted the
black square in the dark.

684
00:57:35,680 --> 00:57:37,680
His response was straight forward.

685
00:57:37,680 --> 00:57:39,400
"I'm glad I'm not like you.

686
00:57:39,400 --> 00:57:43,200
"I can go further and further into
the wilderness,

687
00:57:43,200 --> 00:57:47,880
"because it's only there that
transformation will take place.

688
00:57:47,880 --> 00:57:52,080
"My black square is a bare and
frameless icon for our times.

689
00:57:52,080 --> 00:57:58,360
"Arise, Comrades and free yourselves
from the tyranny of objects."

690
00:58:09,200 --> 00:58:12,280
In the same year the
Black Square went on display,

691
00:58:12,280 --> 00:58:17,480
Lenin was in Switzerland
plotting the overthrow of the Tsar.

692
00:58:20,280 --> 00:58:23,960
Russian troops were retreating
from German forces.

693
00:58:26,600 --> 00:58:29,880
Strikers were bringing
the nation to a standstill.

694
00:58:32,280 --> 00:58:34,040
Revolution was coming.

695
00:58:34,040 --> 00:58:37,120
Russia had reached Year Zero.

696
00:58:50,480 --> 00:58:54,800
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

697
00:58:54,800 --> 00:58:59,280
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk