CIVILISATIONS: WHAT WERE WE THINKING?

Half a century ago, in 1968, Kenneth Clark was in Paris, standing in front of the BBC cameras, asking, ‘What is civilisation? I don’t know, but I think I know it when I see it’; then, turning to Notre Dame behind him, he added, ‘And, as a matter of fact, I’m looking at it now.’ Then off he sailed into the majestic television series that brought millions, previously daunted by museum grandeur, to the mighty illuminations of European art. The scene that day was sunny, the temper serene. But somewhere off camera the Fifth Republic was falling apart; students were roaring protests and when not buried in the Archives nationales or dodging a light mist of tear gas in Montparnasse, I was among them. I was, in fact, part of the problem: by Clark’s lights, barbarically feckless youth, stoned on self-righteousness, threatening to storm the doors of ‘bourgeois’ enlightenment.

So it’s with a sense of irony that Clark would doubtless have relished, not to mention a cartload of hubris, that at many points along the way I too found myself asking the same question or wondering whether it was even worth being put? But towards the end of filming one particular work of art gave me the answer. It was by an artist Clark would not have heard of, though I like to think he would have felt the same way about her. She was twelve years old when she made her picture, living in Building L410, in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, about an hour’s drive north of Prague. Like the other 15,000 children Helena Mandlová had been taken from her family on arrival and put into horrifyingly overcrowded, disease-riddled barracks. But during the hours she spent as a pupil of her art teacher Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, one of the great unsung heroes of the history of art, Helena was free. Her collage, which you can see in the Jewish Museum at the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, is a night landscape, as if seen in a dream. Mountains rinsed in moonlight look down on a huddle of houses; stars burst in a deep red sky. The white paper used for stars and mountains is office stationery, its heading, inverted by Helena so that it lies at the foot of her composition, German. The sheet is not some enumeration of transports east, one of which would carry Helena (like 90 per cent of the Theresienstadt children) to her death in Auschwitz, but simply some piece of dull bureaucratic supply of the kind needed by those who managed the efficient business of mass extermination. But for a moment, Helena had cleansed the sheet of its moral dirt. She had made art.

And this was important because Theresienstadt (Terezin in Czech) was a travesty culture. When the International Red Cross visited it in 1944 they were shown concerts, football, a children’s opera. The eighteenth-century garrison town was spruced up, the grim ‘lower fortress’ of torture and execution hidden away. Along with the film made by the SS this was meant to show the world that Jews were being treated humanely in their resettlement. It was all a lie. The camp was just a way station to the crematoria.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis would also be among the murdered millions, and it is unlikely she was deluded. But she had been taught at the Bauhaus by Paul Klee, Johannes Itten and Lyonel Feininger and had become herself an impassioned teacher. When she was deported to Theresienstadt at the end of 1942 she used her meagre luggage allowance to bring art materials to the camp and after her death, some 4,500 drawings, paintings, collages and sculptures were found in two surviving, hidden suitcases. She told her pupils – all between the ages of nine and thirteen – to sign their work so posterity would know them. Some of the pictures are what you would expect from children of that age; others are strikingly beautiful: an underwater scene made at the same time Matisse was cutting his own oceanic reveries; flowers painted gigantically as if from a caterpillar’s point of view; a hasidic Jew flying over a bed; and many landscapes seen through opened shutters. Also, trains and, in one case, a public hanging. Some, too, are imaginative variations on paintings by Vermeer and Raphael shown to the children in photographs brought by Friedl. Thus civilisation came to the inferno, fighting back hard for humanity.

I am not someone who subscribes to the Romantic theory that torment and sorrow, whether of the artist or the world, are the necessary conditions of great art. Yet, without leaning on the scales of history, it has been striking how often a period of great creative energy either followed a period of calamity or was produced as a response to it. The first truly sophisticated landscape paintings in the history of art were made in tenth- and eleventh-century China under the northern Song dynasty following a period of catastrophic civil wars. Imperial patronage encouraged the production of scenes of mountainously imposing authority beneath which the proper order of society could proceed untroubled. But that process could be dramatically reversed. One of the most unforgettable moments of filming was in the Shanghai Museum where Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains by the fourteenth-century painter Wang-meng was freed from its cylindrical storage container to cascade down the wall. Proud of his descent from the Song dynasty, Wang-Meng was one of four masters who famously refused to serve the Mongol Yuan dynasty, but who could never completely escape the pressure of politics. At the centre of the scroll is a pavilion built for spiritual retreat belonging to his own family with a single solitary figure seated there. But his place is precarious. For all around him, the great mountain writhes in tumult, as if a dragon aroused, its slabs of rocks heaving in some sort of rehearsal of its primordial creation. And all this geological and botanical havoc is registered in astonishingly expressive stabs of the brush. There was reason for Wang-Meng to paint in this disturbed mode. Wrongly accused of plotting against the new Ming emperor, he would die in prison.

Art as redeemer from calamity was of course the leitmotif of Clark’s heroic narrative of European genius. Rescued from the darkness closing in on the ruins of antiquity (Clark made that age rather darker than it actually was), by the likes of the monks of Iona, the ‘precious’ hit its stride in the ‘warming’ of the twelfth century bursting into full glorious flower in the Italian Renaissance, onward and upward to the sunlit plateau of Enlightenment cheerfulness and reason. Cue Mozart. But then came the siren song of Romantic revolution and the twin exterminating angels of war and industrialisation. It is a coherent, seductive story told with eloquent persuasiveness and in many respects not at all wrong.

So what could possibly be added by a new series? And of course the answer is the rest of the world. It won’t have escaped your attention that these days those who shout most loudly about the sovereign virtues of ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’ (an oxymoron by the way) are generally those who are most clueless about its actual content. They are often even less aware of the countless moments when contact between the European and the non-European world seeded a blossoming of cultural creativity. The most abrasive issue of our own time, worldwide, is precisely this relationship between connection and separation, and the history of art has not been unaffected by it. Academic departments are often ghettoised into western or Asian or African or pre-Columbian specialists who seldom teach together, though the phenomena they deal with often unfolded at the same time.

At which point alarm bells will ring. But our series is not some sort of television manifesto by the Citizens of Nowhere; much less knee-jerk deference to non-western cultural constituencies. Mary Beard, David Olusoga and I (‘Hey,’ Mary joked at a meeting, ‘the woman, the black and the Jew, what could possibly go wrong?’) instead try to give the wider truth an airing without, we hope, spoiling the view. Quite often, that truth can be one of fruitful connections. In one programme David Olusoga reveals the effect that the import of Dutch optical instruments had on the art of Tokugawa Japan; in another I look at the opposite flow: the dramatic impact that the availability of woodblock prints by Hokusai, Hiroshige and the rest had on painters like Monet, who collected more than 200 of them, and van Gogh, who borrowed them from the dealer Siegfried Bing, and his brother Theo, who sold them. Van Gogh portrayed his art materials supplier ‘Père Tanguy’ three times, always surrounded by those prints, and when he went south to Provence he described his migration as a quest for ‘Japanese light’.

Sometimes, to be sure, the spur is competitive envy, born of mutual, wary, observation. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Mimar Sinan, the Ottoman sultan Suleyman’s master builder, and Michelangelo (both of them old) were each trying to outdo the Hagia Sophia by building massive, domed houses of worship that would proclaim the invincibility of their respective faiths. Turks visited the site of the partially rebuilt St Peter’s and there was an entire colony of Italians in Istanbul, so it seems unlikely that either of them would have been unaware of the other’s progress. And in some respects, their designs, a vast cupola, pierced with light, resting on four colossal piers, were strikingly similar, though while Sinan got to realise his vision, Michelangelo’s Greek Cross, inherited from Bramante, would be partially thwarted by his successors.

These encounters are not necessarily the rule. There are plenty of instances where cultures take root and evolve in complete isolation from the rest of the world: the glories of the Maya being a spectacular case in point. In 1986, a sacrificial grave was discovered at Sanxingdui near Chengdu in Sichuan; along with a mass of elephant tusks, a trove of bronze masks were found, some colossal, some gilt, which bore absolutely no relationship (except in the technology of their casting) to anything else seen in Bronze Age China. There was a struggle to integrate the astonishing objects within the continuity of ancient Chinese art, but one look at those masks tells you it’s in vain. Sometimes cultures just happen in their own idiosyncratic style.

None of this is to say that we short-changed the glories of the west. You’ll find Greek sculpture, medieval stained glass, Titian and El Greco as well as Olmec heads, Mughal miniatures and Paul Gauguin in the programmes. But Civilisations makes no pretence to being a comprehensive survey of world art. Clark had thirteen episodes for Europe between the early Middle Ages and the early twentieth century. We had a paltry nine to get us from the Ice Age to last week. Inevitably, then, each of the programmes, while delivering a feast for the eye, is driven as much by themes as well as stories; and the questions that looking at masterpieces provoke.

But you can’t always get what you want. Filming the exquisite Iranian mosques of Isfahan was frustrated by discovering that our American co-producer, PBS, would have been charged with violating sanctions. Many of the caves holding the most spectacular displays of Paleolithic art are now off limits due to the damage that human presence, especially our breath, has done to their fragile condition, although at Tito Bustillo in Asturias we were able to film astonishingly beautiful images of horses from 25,000 years ago. After a day deep inside those caves I was so weirdly smitten with a sense of their hospitable cosinesss (the temperature is a mild 12 degrees all year round) that I had to be dragged out in grumbling protest. On the Japanese ‘Art Island’ of Naoshima, the custodians maintain such reverence before Monet’s water-lilies that no speaking is countenanced and requests to film a fine James Turrell installation were greeted with shocked disbelief. On the roof of St Peter’s our clerical handler wasn’t thrilled with my impression of Gene Kelly’s ‘Singing in the Rain’ between takes. I can’t imagine why not. And along the way there were the usual hazards: a car crash on the Delhi–Agra road at 4 a.m., with the colliding party evidently the worse for wear with booze. At Petra, a bolting horse thundered towards us in a narrow gorge, turning itself and its buggy over just feet away.

But there were also epiphanies: rounding the corner of a Paleolithic cave and seeing the stencilled hand of a fellow human from 40,000 years ago; sitting halfway up one of the great pyramids of Calakmul, populating the Maya plaza below in my imagination; being allowed by the owner of a print shop that has been in business in Tokyo since the late nineteenth century, to hold in my hand one of the greatest Hokusai masterpieces. And there were also powerful revelations from works I mistakenly thought I knew inside out: the poignant figure of a woman of uncertain age, trudging across a bridge, stooped under an immense pile of twigs and branches (for thatching or fuel) in Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, a tiny detail that suddenly seemed an emblem of the human condition; the androgynous interchangeability that the bisexual Benvenuto Cellini contrived in the beautiful heads of both Perseus and the decapitated Medusa.

In the end we have tried to fail better, as Beckett’s famous injunction has it. But I have no qualms at all about being grateful for the opportunity to bring a dazzlingly photographed art series, made on a scale only the BBC could contemplate, to realisation. Clark’s original series, conceived by the then controller of BBC Two, David Attenborough, as a vehicle for the new medium of colour television, unapologetically celebrated the enduring at a time of Vietnam miseries, and political and social upheaval. Art should never be a bromide for discontent, but it can deliver things in short supply in our own universe of short attention span: attentiveness, thoughtfulness, contemplation; depth; illuminations that persist when the screen goes dark. As close as we could get to the works of art, though, I am under no illusion that what we offer is any sort of substitution for being in their material presence. So the offering is by the way of an invitation: go, see, think. Let the exhilaration, the disturbance, the power and the beauty sink in. And if in the weltering storm of the trivial we can interpose some sense of what really matters in the array of things that humans – the art animals – have fashioned, then perhaps we will be judged to have done our job.