Have you ever tried to outstay your opponent in a contest with this crowd?

You'd lose.

There's often.

I'm Denise, and I'm hoping that my little exercise in concentration impressed you.

Because at this impressionable age, you'll remember forever those glaring faces that signal at last, the big bang.

The moment of truth.

The kickoff to modern art.

Oh, you got it.

All right.

We are going to talk about the French Impressionists.

But first we'll look at the artist Edouard Manet, who was more than an impressionist, more than the creator of those staring faces, more than a genius.

He is the father of modern art.

In 1863, Edouard Manet stunned the members of the salon by propping these faces up in front of those pompous Paris pipsqueak faces that seem to say, I'm busy.

Bugger off!

Before artist painted portraits and scenes of history and mythology like Napoleon or Neptune, but never lumpy, ladies like this staring back at us as if to say so what?

I'm dressed as a matador, so I'm not sleek and skinny.

I'm a woman, not a goddess.

I'm just a healthy human being.

Captured superbly in paint by Mr.

Many.

Yes.

Manet wants you to look at the way he paints.

Not what he paints.

He wants you to look at his technical skills and a Japanese composition subjects on the diagonal and slightly off center.

Look at Manet's two boaters on the diagonal.

See that tilted boat?

And the sort of sail Manet used?

Plain people, not glamor girls or gorgeous gents, but people like you and me.

Advertisers know now that the public wants to see everyday people selling their products.

But in 1863, the French Academy was not buying.

The salon was horrified with Manet's Plain People, and it banished his works to the exhibit reserved for paintings turned down the salon to refuse for works refused.

Undaunted, many worked inside his studio, but filled with shadows with color and outside light.

Look at the light in that chemical green railing, at the shimmer in that white.

Claude Monet picked up on Manet's idea, but took it further.

Moving canvas paints and brushes outside and recording sunlight the minute it hit the water.

He also borrowed the idea of Japanese diagonals, the slant Monet and those who joined him in idolizing Manet.

When nicknamed Impressionists, you know, they didn't seem able to capture that first impression.

The leader of the Impressionists, Monet, concocted such coppery waters and glinting greens turned gold such reflections on the water's surface.

Look at those amazing patches of paint.

Blue next to yellow.

Your eye mixes both.

And voila, you have green.

Like the sound of two chords struck apart, mixed by the air, producing one sound.

Those glittering colors were assembled by Monet into one brilliant symphonic effect.

But Monet and his followers and their works were also turned down, and they joined Manet, refusing.

Today we're looking at a few of those Impressionist works.

But you be the judge.

And if you've been thinking that Impressionism is beautiful but boring, that you couldn't tell one artist from another.

Stay tuned.

You'll get your chance.

Ever watched oil seeping out from under a car?

We puzzled by the rainbow of colors that formed Monet, poured out on canvas.

Such rainbow colors, colors that here make up the waters of Venice's Grand Canal.

Look at the fiery 5:00 shadow, the Santa Maria della salute.

Purple and yellow.

But never black.

The oxide green on the canal is squeezed out of Manet's balcony tubing, and that pole jabbed into the canal bottom is Japanese, way off center and cut right off Misty.

That's Monet, who wanted to see a tree that looked like a tree.

Neglect those details.

Be sketchy.

Mediterranean sky and sea and salt.

Misty but crisp.

No soup de jure.

This changes in atmosphere and weather and time fascinated Monet.

He recorded the royal cathedral day after day, all day for 20 days.

It's masonry becoming a living, moving, massive monster of color.

The Japanese bridge spans water lilies in his garden as Giovanni lilies.

The decomposed into a blur during Rene's 20 years in residence.

The Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir concentrated on the clothes, the hair, the skin of beautiful women.

His wife is shown here in Burning sunlight that sizzles the skin, proving Renoir's theory that skin is never yellow, black, red or white, but blue and orange and lavender.

Look at your skin in the sunlight this afternoon and find a dozen colors.

Beautiful, healthy young women dressed in their best having fun.

Renoir represented the turn of the century attitude.

Forget the world's problems.

Enjoy.

Paint.

Play the piano.

Miss me?

If your family tells you that you are part of the me, me, me first generation.

AU contraire.

Tell them it began with Renoir.

Renoir?

How happy he was to meet the daring impressionists who were tired of boring classes and rigid rules, and ready to cut loose with that paint brush.

Renoir, obsessed with the wonder of womankind.

Renoir's opposite among the Impressionists was Edgar Degas.

Some folks thought, because of the clumsy and curious contortions through which he put his ballerinas.

The guy was a chauvinist, someone who thinks men are better than women.

But no, he was merely fascinated with the rather plain girls who, through such contortions and twisting, could look so great on stage.

The girl, like his friends, borrowed ideas from Japanese prints, further distorting by lopping off legs, and in some cases, splitting a face with a frame.

Her poor singular.

The guy was the aristocrat of the Impressionists and the brains behind the business and technically, perhaps the best of the group.

And let's tell it the way it is.

He draws magnificently and wants us to look at the actual marks.

Doesn't even bother to hide or paint over his sketching.

The guy produced canvas after canvas of delectable marked up derbies and drinkers and demoiselles, but mostly dancers.

Awkward but elegant, contorted yet poised.

Plain yet to come.

Is that not the holiest face?

The side of the sin.

Charming dancers on the diagonal.

How they intrigue the guy.

But he observes them with uneasiness and reservation.

The girl's dear friend, Mary Cassatt, an American in Paris to paint with the Impressionists, chose children and their mothers as subjects.

Her silk and lace ladies are pampered, and the children are, too.

Mary Cassatt was a lady.

Didn't go in for the Bohemian or should we say 19th century hippie lifestyle of her colleagues.

But their style of painting, yes.

Infusing light into her work with bright pigments brushed quickly on canvas like toga.

She was never married, unless, one might say she was married to a career.

And although she understood amazingly the affection of these mothers for their children, these mothers never dote.

Just adore.

There is a slight melancholy in her work.

The sad uneasiness of an outsider looking in like the girl, the reserved joy of witnessing the dance of life from afar.

If you stand far away from George Serra's masterpiece Sunday afternoon on the island of grunge, at Blue dots next to yellow become green.

Remember Monet?

But Serra is called Post-Impressionist because he comes after the Impressionists, and he's also a pointillist.

Look at those points, those dots.

Sara said no to impressionistic spontaneity.

Calculatedly positioning his paint full of color and light.

His formula produced a sophisticated mosaic of circles that glitter on a dress like sequins in the spotlight.

What, you think you could do this?

He wish.

Listen, Masumi, this is no paint by numbers exercise.

Sara spent two excruciating years applying these dots, painting them on in a scientific, systematic pattern.

67ft of these dots.

Count them.

Check that trombone player in LA parade.

One can almost imagine JJ Johnson or Jack Teagarden doing a stint on Saturday Night Live.

I'll read it.

Toulouse-Lautrec, another Post-Impressionist, was a wealthy, titled, talented yet sad young man who sought a childhood accidents and broken legs, was extraordinarily short in stature and unnecessarily bitter.

But on the bright side of this story, Toulouse-Lautrec canvases were lively, also spotted with Dot, but his spats from ink soaked bristles form the fleeting pose of those in his world a world like the French Quarter or, better still, the Printer's Alley.

Paris, the Moulin Rouge actors and dancers intermingled with sportsmen, noblemen and many shady characters.

The hero was the guy he was.

Degas drawing copied his diagonals, his Japanese slants as the guard drew dancers in twisted positions.

Toulouse-Lautrec drew corruption in every line and expression, although revealing through his characters a sympathetic understanding for those whose fate he would someday share.

Toulouse-Lautrec is the master of line line that sags on call, or slithers like snakes.

Yes, master of line and of poster design.

Inspired once more by the girl and the Japanese, a moulin Rouge summarizes Toulouse-Lautrec.

It's a calculated composition of separation and isolation.

Lautrec in the circle.

Yet not in this circle.

Like Mary Cassatt.

Note the Impressionists had a stroke the chemical oxide green of Manet and Monet, the idea of orange and blue skin.

Renoir yet to lose the tricks.

Colors are strident and grating.

Keep all those things in mind as we review for our contest a competition.

The drop dead stare, the glare many go ahead, make my day.

Monet.

Hey.

And anything else on the list seen through mist.

Renoir.

Redheads and other girls there to be kissed.

The guy.

Dancers on the diagonal.

And then Mary Cassatt.

Mothers and children.

M.C.. Mothers and children M.C.. Mary Cassatt.

Pardon my French.

It's not so hot.

But remember this Seurat that.

Choose.

Don't read the Toulouse-Lautrec.

But cabaret life sadly makes one a wreck.

Okay, mess on foam.

Let's stick out our necks and name the artists.

I hear the scream in nature.

While you're thinking about the scream in nature.

Think about this pitiful apparition.

Does it scare you?

The man who painted it, a Norwegian master named Edvard Munch.

Didn't mean to frighten you, but he certainly meant for you to experience many emotions.

Hi, I'm Denise, and today I want to show you paintings that are communications of feelings in art.

Expressionism.

By the end of this program, you'll be able to recognize the styles of six expressions painters.

And by knowing something about the lives of these artists, you'll be able to pinpoint their paintings.

So let's begin with Edvard Munch, who said, I hear the scream in nature.

The time is 1880.

Norway.

Beautiful but bleak, icy, isolated moon grew up in an atmosphere of frozen silence, of sickness and insanity.

His distinct style was fashioned by these circumstances.

Northern artists in general adopted eerie forms and colors that were dictated by cold weather, isolation, and the struggle to make a living.

Think for a moment about southern Europe.

Warm, friendly people making pretty good money.

Think of the French Fauves and the Impressionists who painted with spontaneous, joyous abandon.

Nature is kind along the sunny Mediterranean.

Nature, for a monk was cruel along the icy fjords of Norway, and relentlessly cast out waves of color that burn the heart, the way that dry ice burns the fingers.

Most skies are writhing ropes with wavy lines that make the landscape vibrate.

You feel these sensations when you look at his works, and that's the point.

Move.

Once you on his wavelength.

Munk got rid of the nightmares of childhood through art.

How does that work?

Consider this.

Expressionist art is the outward demonstration of an inner anxiety.

Think of bursting across the finish line and collapsing, exhausted in victory.

Think of being strong during a sad movie and finally collapsing in tears.

Think of having the flu and a raging fever.

Then, after taking the doctor's medicine, think of the relief that comes when the fever breaks.

Monk worked at such a fever pitch to create these works of art, which spelled out the sad circumstances of his life.

I'll no longer paint interiors and people knitting, he said, but living people who breathe and suffer and love.

He took these paintings of people who, as he said, breathe and suffer and love to Paris, and then to Berlin and to Munich.

And there the German masters were gripped by Monk's ability to express that northern isolation and anxiety that they too, experienced from life.

Monk named this painting The Dance of Life because he discovered that love was, for him, a slow promenade of jealousy and disappointment.

Thank heaven for the time monk spent in Paris.

At least it lightened his palette.

Monk was almost 40 when he painted girls on a bridge.

But even in monk's colors of spring, there's heard a tiny cry, as if from a flower whose petals have been torn away one by one.

She loves me.

She loves me not.

Monk's paintings made their mark in a politically torn Germany at the turn of the century.

German artists were disgusted and disappointed with their government.

They saw Monk's paintings and were determined to express their disappointment and bitterness in their works.

So they banded together in groups, keeping Germany jumping with exhibitions, surviving on coffee and conversation.

The rebellious group called themselves the Broken the Bridge.

They bridged the gap between French and German art by bringing in exhibits from Paris and, through exhibition, united other northern artists from Berlin and Munich, as well as Austria and Russia.

All groups bound together in a movement called expressionism.

But Berlin was hostile to the new art.

Government officials called the works decadent, corrupt, degenerate and threw one.

They broke a painting.

Someone had driven a nail.

Ernst Ludwig Kirshner, a member of Dibrugarh, was then even more determined to jolt viewers into feeling the way he felt by expressing his disillusionment on canvas.

Look at his painting of stress and strain called The Restless.

Oh, a 1909 Hulk Hogan and a gorgeous George gone brunet.

And look at the background.

Spectators V-shaped, huddled yet distant.

Look at this green green blouse.

The red red jumper.

Red red lips, no nonsense with Kirshner V-shaped face, V-shaped collar.

Looking at one of Kushner's people in the street pictures makes us feel nervous and crowded.

Notice the repeated V shapes.

These women, jammed together, have angles where they would have had curves.

If monks, ice maidens reminded you of Morticia.

Take a good look at Elvira.

A crisis, anxiety rebellion.

Kirshner used these ladies to express the stress.

A Russian who crossed the bridge into Germany was Vasily Kandinsky, a man inspired by Munk and Kirshner.

It was something other than subject matter on his mind.

In order to enter the Munich Academy of Art.

Kandinsky abandoned careers in law and music.

In art school, he learned what was known as the official style of landscape.

In other words, the style that was accepted by the state.

You get the picture.

Big brother is watching.

I want you to see how Kandinsky arrives in 1910 at abstraction, a style without objects or subject matter that affected all styles which followed.

Kandinsky builds his case in art the way a lawyer does in court, and he proceeds from that predictable state stuff gradually to musical rhythms and planes of color.

Kandinsky was the leader of their blaue, a writer.

Hey, don't let these German phrases throw you there.

Our writer, the Blue Rider.

Easy.

Kandinsky loved horseman.

Another artist in the group loved horses and they both loved blue, so they're bluer.

Writer.

Can you see Kandinsky's Horseman amidst this partially abstract landscape?

At first glance, you just have to work it out in your head.

What's there?

Is it a bird or a plane?

It's a horse, man.

And besides abstraction, what's the big difference between Kandinsky's pictures and those of Munk and Kirschner?

These give you a lift.

And although magnificent, there's exhaust you.

And remember, it was planned that way.

In Kandinsky's early landscape, you can still see cute little Bavarian towers and trees, but it's getting tough to translate terrain.

Kandinsky assigned certain qualities to certain colors.

Yellow is savage and rowdy, has a lot of nerve, and upsets people.

But blue is heavenly, peaceful.

Like this landscape.

I see mountains, trees, a lake, perhaps.

But hold on.

Kandinsky is about to jump off the deep end.

We at last no recognizable subject matter.

Oh, you can imagine things you can coax this thing into a silhouette, and that's maybe, But forget it.

We now see organic forms that look like nothing we know of in this world.

Look at Kandinsky's crisscrossed lines, his bursts of energy, of motion and tension.

Little bits of architecture, little bits of geometric skyline.

Kandinsky knew color affects us.

He knew colored blobs and forms make us think.

Kandinsky scored these colors, blobs and symbols carefully, like notes on a scale.

Remember, our lawyer turned painter was also a musician.

Kandinsky now tells us form, color and music affect you, and my painting somehow should speak to you.

It's sort of like Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Remember how the spacemen communicated with sound and how that sound conjured up that piece of the rock?

Remember when the translation had worked and that giant Simon in the sky?

Beep.

Two hours on Earth.

The message that read.

Hello?

Collapsing in tears and exhaustion in victory.

We broke the code.

Now let's get down to specifics.

A Kandinsky triangle transmits its own mental images and emotions.

I see it as a balalaika, on which a Russian villager plays a melancholy tune.

It makes me see masks and onion domes.

Towers.

I feel cold yet refreshed by that icy mountain stream.

Hallelujah.

I've broken the code.

Franz Marc got Kandinsky's drift, too.

Mark was the other blower writer artist who loved horses, although he never went in for total abstraction.

You can still see Marc's blue horses.

Marc specialized in painting animals in landscapes, at first in a natural manner.

But Mark's vibrant canvases soon showed a style that seemed to come from Cubism.

Look at those triangles and searchlights.

Franz Marc had a touching theory about animals.

Simply stated, he was convinced that animals go to heaven.

Well don't they?

It's as if Mark wanted to provide a shelter of color for animals while they were still on Earth.

But his paintings became sinister as the political situation in Germany began to deteriorate.

Look at his wolves of 1913.

Oh, such fragmented, tormented animals united with Mark and Kandinsky.

And this phenomenon, called expressionism, was an art struck Russian soldier, a handsome aristocratic bear of a man named Alexei Jablonski.

You have.

Lynskey teamed up with his comrade Kandinsky by placing their paintings on a piano for a Russian pianist to interpret to music.

Can't you just hear somebody like Igor Stravinsky crescendoing away in front of this awesome portrait?

You have landscapes, color.

Wow.

Just look at those ruby lips.

Look at that alpine doll with a marzipan mouth.

Yeah.

Lenski knew how to use line two.

We're talking big time, jagged magic marker here.

You have Lenski, Mark and Kandinsky.

Just what was it you said was their favorite color?

We can be amused by the playful spirit of these blue brothers.

But the turn expressionism took during the last years of World War One was serious, dead serious German painters would soon express their shock at what Germany was to do in both world wars.

Through some of the most powerfu Max Beckmann, perhaps the greatest German painter of the 20th century, served as a volunteer medical orderly during World War One until duty in the trenches drove him mad.

Fighting mad, he decided to retaliate through his art against his government.

Beckmann packed people like pretzels into the tightest spaces imaginable.

These rooms seem like replicas of those awful trenches with lean limbs and mouths like gashes.

Figure stands straight up, as in fright, like punk hair standing on end.

Some of the men look like Hitler, but also present is the symbolism of God.

Palms outstretched in communion, in surrender.

Beckmann gave up the fight and fled to America, but his works survive as reminders of what must never happen again.

Expressionism from Munich to Beckmann.

Northern artists revealing their inner feelings of loneliness, misfortune, anguish and tragedy.

But for a moment, let's try to forget our sadness and remember some clues in review.

Moog the whale, the cry, the scream.

Kirschner.

Streets bursting at the scene.

Kandinsky.

Abstract works with hidden features.

Mark.

Cubist landscapes.

Hidden creatures.

You have Lenski rainbow faces, heavy lashes.

Beckmann.

Heavy outlines.

Metals like gashes.

Now for the contest.

Name the artist.

A child of six could do it right.

Come on.

If you really believe that.

Stay tuned.

You know who actually did that, don't you?

Picasso.

His name alone sums up the century in art.

My name is Denise, and I'm going to do my best today to make you understand that the works you're seeing are masterpieces, and that Picasso and others like him went through the agony of defeat, the gnashing of teeth.

Through trials and tribulations, to arrive here victorious.

Today's subject is Cubism.

The blockbuster of modern art.

Cubism.

Paintings composed of cubes, cones, cylinders.

And the one who started it all.

Suzanne.

Paul.

Suzanne was the most revolutionary painter of the last 500 years.

He said that he wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and durable.

Literally, one could say that he did.

Look at those solid, durable, cylindrical cubical planes.

Everything in nature starts to become architectural and geometrical.

We'll sent Victoire here for Suzanne.

Everything begins to square off.

Walls.

People.

Fabric.

Fruit.

Yes.

Even fruit.

The fruit is not round anymore.

Crazy.

Not at all.

Suzanne didn't want a mountain that looked like a mountain.

Or fruit that was ready for the wax museum.

Suzanne wanted oranges with mass, volume, weight, edges.

Look at these peaches.

Even cherries are square and architectural.

And he tilts the tabletop up so that we can see all sides.

Remember that.

Look at those square strokes.

Unprecedented.

But who wants something a camera can do?

Of course, Suzanne could draw masterfully.

And that's important.

Training.

Don't knock it.

But Suzanne wanted to recreate trees, mountains, fruit his way.

Oh, sure, the critics were furious, but at the same time, they knew that Suzanne would forever after be on every painter's mind and look at his people.

Facial features become angular units.

Solid walls become rocky.

Fabric is heavy, as if it were concrete.

Born 150 years ago in exile in Provence, Suzanne inherited money and could afford to spend his time painting his way.

Never mind the critics, but Suzanne had rough, surly and awful manners.

When he did come to Paris.

He'd walk into the salon with muddy boots and scruffy beard, loving the shock waves he sent out.

Suzanne's paintings became more abstract toward the end of his life.

Oh, Suzanne's brilliant yet awkward but thoroughly marvelous paintings and of noble African tribal masks was born.

The Cubism of Pablo Picasso.

Picasso is the genius of all time.

His 90 years of work, his wonderful moods, his pithy, mischievous themes stretch from A to Z. But first, let's go back to that word abstract for a minute.

It means no recognizable subject matter.

You can't tell what it is.

Abstraction bothers you.

Listen, don't you think a banana split is interesting?

The ingredients.

The subject matter.

Bananas.

Whipped cream.

Ice cream, nuts, cherry.

All interestingly arranged, but still recognizable.

A parfait mere abstraction.

What was that?

I just bit into now?

A milkshake?

That's total abstraction.

No recognizable ingredients.

You know, don't you, that a painter is free to pick and choose, split and shake, disguise, do anything to achieve a desirable effect.

And Picasso puts a line through anything that gets in his way.

He is El Toro.

Charging through.

Of course Picasso can do what you've been accustomed to.

Thinking is good.

But listen, amigos, you've got to get out of that way of thinking.

Picasso likes design and his ideas.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them, he said.

That's what Cubism is, all about.

It's intellectual.

Brainy.

Don't think it isn't cool to be smart.

Just look at today's quarterbacks.

Picasso and the Cubists who followed wanted to pursue brainy ideas, non-European things, African sculpture, Greek vases, Egyptian jewelry.

Remember, too, that at the turn of the century, there were all kinds of upheavals and breakthroughs Marconi and the radio, the Wright brothers airplane.

And in Europe, Freud and psychoanalysis.

You know, the shrink, the couch.

A new art was needed to mirror these new ideas and changes.

Picasso lived in Paris.

But remember, Picasso was Spanish, so there's going to be blue in his interpretations.

The Spanish were people oppressed, and blue equals tragedy, sadness.

She works hard for the money.

But can you see how Picasso's people are beginning to square off?

Here's one from his circus period.

It's a long, gated, angular look at Gertrude Stein, American thinker and mover and shaker living in Paris.

The Cubists gathered around her table to swap ideas.

Look at how Picasso painted her.

The real distortion has begun.

And here is Picasso's analytical Cubism.

Subjects are broken apart.

Here, you got that right.

It's a woman's portrait.

Synthetic Cubism subjects put together.

Picasso's three musicians.

His classical period heavy, rounded it sculptural.

And on and on.

With Cubism still at the helm.

Picasso wants to show us all sides of the subject.

Several different views in 3D.

The profile, the full face in space and who in time heavy and perhaps several personalities.

But let's go back a minute.

Look at this, Picasso and this one.

Oh.

Not a figure.

So this one is by George Braque.

Don't panic.

Here's how you tell them apart.

Picasso is Spanish.

He's fire and emotion.

El toro.

Braque is French controlled, chunky.

You can see brushstrokes.

Baroque is scrubbed blue, gray and chocolate mousse.

Brown.

Braque's violins have a woodgrain textured look, provided by a fine toothed comb on wet paint.

Look at Braque's richer, more tilted table.

What a painting!

What a reordered, rearranged mushroom and pepperoni pizza of a painting.

And look at Braque's postwar violins still rearranged.

Still hidden.

As in modern jazz, the melody is hidden and only through sticking with it can you finally name that tune.

Isn't it fun also to try to figure out the figure and the form?

You'll note, too, that when you see cafe trappings with bright green and sometimes red, that it's not a Braque or a Picasso, but probably something by Xuan Greece.

Spanish like Picasso.

Greece is the poetic painter of the group.

He's rhythmic, nostalgic, homey.

This is a table at his favorite place, the Cafe Ravinia, seen as a still life with tilted, grid like patterns and V-shaped spotlights.

Greece disguises and changes.

Shifts, rearranges.

Like a poet, he uses phrases instead of paint to portray his subject uniquely.

Take, for example, Alfred Noyes, whose highwayman rode under a jeweled sky that was the poet's way of saying a sky with bright stars, bright stars.

Phooey!

Doesn't the phrase a jeweled sky really set off all sorts of explosions of light in your mind's eye?

Look at the jewels in this sky, painted by the Cubist painter Robert Delany, who is well aware of the fact that he had the right to rearrange the sun, the moon and the stars.

Just as the highwaymen could ride under a moon that was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.

Delaney's melon moons, suns and arcs could merge and pirouette toward the Paris architecture of the 20s that inspired him.

Let's look at Delaney's path through Cubism.

It's funny, but he's around Cubist.

He tried to free Cubism from the browns and blues and grays to free it with stained glass colors like violet, orange and green.

Go for it.

Robert Delany thought the new fangled machines of the 20s were fun.

He played with them for a while, then shot for the stars.

But back down to earth in a way, was leisure.

Come on, say it.

This looks like the Tin Man from Mars and the Yellow Brick Road.

Okay, it even looks like tubes of toothpaste.

Go ahead.

Call it tube ism if you want to.

Fernand Léger, he liked machines and factories and cities and people largely saw people as city robots outlined in black.

This painting is called smoke.

And here we have a human smokestack or a nice day.

Use the jangling combo of red and yellow and blue.

Remember his Tin Man and yellow stairs?

How about these stairs?

This painting was the showstopper from New York to Paris.

Nude Descending the Staircase is by Marcel Duchamp, the enfant terrible, the bad boy, the Cubists, a Frenchman who helped bring modern art to New York.

President Teddy Roosevelt said, I have a really good Navajo rug.

That's a much better interpretation of the Cubist theory.

One writer said.

Explosion in a shingle factory and a cartoonist for the New York Evening Sun produced the rude Descending the Staircase, or Rush Hour at the subway.

But one can see how Duchamp can so analytically and geometrically convey the repetitive mechanical motion of a machine turned human.

R2-d2 eat your heart out.

Wow.

The ultimate cubist, the Dutchman Pete Mondrian.

Here is Mondrian is Fauve as impressionist, but can't just see Suzanne and Picasso and Delaney throughout Mondrian, Mondrian's 1912 cubist tree branch out.

He's saying go out on a limb.

Mondrian whittles away through variations on Cubism.

Finally, using plastic strips of tape, moving them around on canvas till they look just right.

You know what I think?

Well, we're into the 40s now, and I think that Mondrian flew over the Holland he loved, looked down, saw two fields and tried to recreate that bird's eye landscape.

He loved New York City, too.

Love jazz, boogie woogie.

And frankly, this looks like the lights of Broadway from 2000 and feet.

New York love Mondrian in Paris, too.

We can see it in this East Saint Laurent fashion tribute.

How fitting.

Oh, what a day we've had.

Let's review Suzanne.

Cubism begins.

Picasso, it never ends.

Braque.

Brown and blue.

Greece.

Different to you.

Delany.

Mellons and auf ism.

Lazy.

Tinman and Cubism.

Duchamp.

Stomp down the staircase.

Mondrian.

Paint from the air.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, and name that artist.

Do you keep notebook, paper and pencil beside your bed so that you can write down your dreams before you forget them?

Some dreams.

They're so weird, fantastic and beautiful.

What a video they'd make.

What a story.

If only we could paint those dreams underneath.

And let me tell you a secret.

Some of the greatest painters in history did record their dreams on canvas in living color.

The name that was given to the painting of those dreams, to that dictation of the imagination, is surrealism.

Surrealism takes us into a world where the undeniable and the unbelievable coexist.

Let's explore and interpret that world through a few surrealist masterpieces.

We may as well begin with the showman of surrealism, the show off a fantasy, the showstopping Spaniard Salvador Dali in 1930, the notorious Dali made surrealism a household word.

Whoa!

Were you not prepared for this?

Remember, the purpose of surrealism is to give you a jolt and to stir up mysteries and memories that lay hidden within your unconscious.

Let's figure out Dali's flawless dreamscape together.

What in the world is it?

Is it of this world?

What did Dali see or remember that instilled this vision and these circumstances so indelibly in his unconscious?

Remember the real and the unreal in the same picture.

This landscape is probably from his childhood in Spain, the coastal town of port he got in the region of Catalonia.

The unreal, the melting watches.

Probably the passage of time.

A comment on eternity.

Insects bite the watches and nibble at nature.

But it's useless.

Time marches on.

We know Dali detested bugs.

I looked it up.

But the rose, the key.

It would take more than an ant cyclopedia to unlock some of Dali's mysteries.

There's that beach again, this time with a table from the café casino.

In case three Catalan coffee glasses are real.

But instead of coffee drinkers, we see a tired camel rider on a beach jet and a beach boy with no shadow.

You're probably saying no fair.

Denise knows what the clues mean.

Well, yes, I learned them in school, just as you're learning right now.

Here's the coast to Spain again.

And another table.

But this time a familiar one.

You can figure this out without my help.

Yes, the last supper.

Think about this.

Christ is transparent.

What can that mean?

And why do you suppose the disciples have modern haircuts?

But Dali's dreams were not always divine.

Some were nightmares.

This is called sleep.

Dolly said that sleep can be a monster.

Because when we sleep, we sometimes imagine terrible things.

Nightmares, dreams and the unconscious were being investigated at this time by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Dali felt that psychiatry was the answer to his problems.

So we painted his own dreams and memories for pleasure, but often he painted them for relief from his pain.

Later in life, Dali painted his dreams primarily for profit.

He loved rubbing elbows with the stars.

An eerie dream sequence was painted for Alfred Hitchcock's movie spellbound, and a portrait was done for wow.

Mae West, who, like Dali, is a legend.

That face a stage hair, a curtain that an mouth, a couch and her nose is a fireplace.

Another Spanish surrealist, Joan Miro, lived in Barcelona, down the Costa Brava from Dali.

The farm by Miro sold in 1922 for $200.

Today it would bring 2000 times 200.

The painting depicts an intimate knowledge of the thinker that only a Spanish farmboy could know.

That's the real Spanish moon.

Miro was a poet in paint, and for almost a century he regaled us with images like man with pipe, magical poetic visions of everyday scenes, imaginative musical visions and check that guitar neck, that fisheye.

Psychiatrists say that a person, relaxed, can summon up hidden ideas.

See how Miro relaxed?

That is easier than summoned up those marvelous red nails sprouting like feathers from a headdress.

Miro was then led to paint the lady's sweetheart amused, leading her to the dance, dropping a chartreuse blob on canvas.

Accidentally, Miro let his brush move through that blob until the design was born.

Miro sometimes worked as if he were in a trance because he was intent on accurately recording these dream images.

Everything is a symbol for something.

A scribble is a bird, an asterisk, a star.

Here's a hint, muchachos.

Look for Miro's funny little stars.

His trademark.

Miro's figures are sometimes witty, always ferocious, always suspended in wide open spaces.

Dream symbols and a simple, innocent world.

Through his daydreams, the painter Andre Rousseau lived in a simple, innocent world.

Rousseau, also serious, stands with brush and right hand, and in his left a palette on which is written the names of his lady loves.

His beret sits on his head like a crown.

He thought he was the king of the art world.

In 1890.

But don't laugh.

Just look at Rousseau's jungles.

Masses of luxurious leaves and fat, luscious fruits.

Weird looking animals.

That big cat looks like a Tom's toasted peanut shell.

But wow, is this scene a stunner.

It's magnificent.

Yes.

Rousseau was a strange man.

He never saw those stars jungles, but got his ideas from the botanical gardens and the Paris Zoo.

You have to love his pictures, even though nothing's done to scale.

No correct drawing, no knowledge of art, history, politics, people or perspective.

But just look at this funny, fascinating French marionette.

Remember Miro's farm?

This is Rousseau's farm and Miro's moon.

This is Rousseau's moon.

Rousseau was a toll collector adorning the French border.

Retiring at 40 to paint younger artists adored as cute little bridges and Parisian landmarks like Notre-Dame here.

Hardly correct structurally, but charming.

Rousseau was enthralled by the primitive arts of Africa and Polynesia, using travel magazines and posters for ideas.

The paintings are all wrong scientifically, but were won over because they're part of our dreams of faraway, unspoiled, exotic places.

The jaguar in this famous painting lives on in modern day ads.

Rousseau's innocence was refreshing.

As one critic said, he sings like a bird without learning a score, meaning that his art came naturally without the benefit of training.

Artists were usually burdened with such highbrow stuff.

Remember how intellectual Cubism was?

Surrealism came about in part through a search for the spontaneous from dreams and the unconscious.

But don't get the wrong idea.

If you think surrealism was for airheads, you're mistaken.

Besides escape into the unconscious, the Surrealists were brilliant technicians, registering shock from what human beings could do to each other in war.

The Surrealists used visual jolts to make us think, hey, life has to be just a dream in a crazy world like this.

Dream.

Rev is the French word for dream.

The word here also looks like the name René.

The artist, Magritte's first name.

René Magritte jolts us through transformation.

A closed door, for example, becomes a doorway.

We can make jokes about Magritte's painting.

Ha ha.

Somebody was in a big hurry.

But to tell you the truth, the greet can be strange.

A magritte is brilliant and clever and amusing.

And yes, he makes us smile at first.

But then we are Magritte's victims.

This one is called Liberator.

Why?

What do the objects and symbols mean?

A pipe, a bird, a glass, a key.

Well, neither Sherlock nor Hitchcock.

Not even Matlock can unlock the door to this puzzle.

At first glance, this Magritte picture seems normal.

But then we look again.

Bang!

A man is studying the back of his own head in the mirror.

This visual trick of man and man in mirror brings to mind these lines from Edgar Allan Poe, whose book of poetry rests on the mantel.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Look at this picture carefully.

It's a painting propped on an easel or.

Or are we looking through the window?

Magritte's picture within a picture presents a stage set.

Drapery served dramatically as to da an open curtain and the receding road is a negative of the positive tower.

Magritte takes objects from their usual places and puts them in unfamiliar ones.

He calls it dislocates look at time, transfixed.

A clear snapshot in oil of the impossible.

A tidy room, still quiet, eerie mood.

That's Magritte.

The train is suspended in air, puffing out of a fireplace where would never burned.

Time stands still in Giorgio de Chirico tower, guarded Italian piazzas through which trains chug silently in the distance.

TNT trains and towers saturated with medieval melancholy, these desolate landscapes and Arcadian squares that contemporary time forgot.

Where natural subjects.

For a boy whose dad was a railroad engineer.

Someday when you travel through Italy by train, you'll remember de Chirico as dreamy, melancholy pictures up and down the Apennine spine Verona, Padua, Vicenza.

Vacant vistas where time is layered.

Medieval mood, Renaissance architecture, Mannerist tower and naturally, a modern van.

Marc Chagall, our last surrealist, is a natural, a supernatural.

When I say shygirl, I think of those Eastern European villages in Barbara Streisand's Yentl, of rickety churches and synagogues, picket fences and chickens in the yard.

Chagall is a fiddler on the roof and living, breathing color.

And look at that dream cycle.

Chagall turned the town of tents upside down as commissioner of fine arts.

He had everybody painting walls with horses and cows and chickens.

Where there should have been portraits of Marx and Lenin.

In 1920, sugar fled to Moscow.

But as a painter in trouble and as a Jew in Eastern Europe, it was France, and finally America, where he was harbored.

As a surrealist, Chagall favors irrational arrangements of natural objects.

Although his stained glass dream images are joyful, there are also mournful and sometimes perplexing.

Chagall never really goes in for nightmares.

His figures float through the air like Superman, but Chagall himself always keeps one foot on the ground.

Our contest today will be a nightmare if you don't watch and listen carefully if you think this one's a piece of cake.

Dream on.

Sea and sand and time and folly.

Bugs and beaches.

Hello, Dolly.

Comic Dog or kid or Kitty?

Criss-Cross stars.

Miro is witty.

Jungle pets lush vegetation from Rousseau's imagination.

Mirrors are backwards.

Boots become feet.

Beware of booby traps, Mr.

Magritte.

Trains and towers.

Whenever you see the characters painting, just think TNT.

Seagull flies through the air with the greatest of ease.

Now name the Surrealists and get them right.

Please.

A quiet summer's day.

A pristine apartment on Main Street, U.S.A.. A carefree, attractive young woman on her way, perhaps to a party.

Is that how this strikes you?

Look again.

The weather may be nice, the building immaculate, and the girl undeniably fetching.

But the mood and the message is something else again.

And as you'll soon discover, what was going on in America in the 1930s and 40s was no picnic.

I'm Denise, and today I'm going to recreate for you a fascinating, troubling era that began with a stock market crash of 1929, when savings were lost, jobs were scarce, and people were without hope.

An effort by Americans to come out of this depression brought about a terrific concentration by painters to depict that American struggle.

Their art can be called realistic because it presents coal miners, not kings, gas pumps, not gardens, romantic because it is mysterious and exotic and nostalgic for the past.

The painting of the young girl is by Edward Hopper, and what a stagnant, stifling atmosphere he was able to impart.

Hopper specific subjects were city and village streets, diners, movie theaters, old houses, the American scene laid bare.

This is called early Sunday morning and the mood is unmistakable.

Lonely.

Silent.

Claustrophobic.

First row orchestra.

The eyes of the Hopper's characters never meet ours.

It's as if these people were zombies.

From the classic sci fi invasion of the Body Snatchers, where beings from outer space take over humans, even in sunnier climes and wide open spaces.

The air in Hopper's paintings is stifling, like in a flower hothouse.

No Barney and Andy on a mayberry porch here, talking about maybe going on down to the diner in a little while.

Hopper's people never talk.

Never move.

Never sleep.

Hopper's mood is detached, indifferent.

But oh, he could extract from a scene such beauty that we are nevertheless hypnotized, mesmerized by his lighthouses, entranced by his brooding streets.

The Hopper house in Cape Cod, much like this one, looked like a hopper playing white clapboard square, brooding.

Ben Shone usually painted political and social injustice.

The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, seen here, dramatizes the post execution of two Italian born American activists involved in a controversial murder trial.

Reconstruction celebrates the liberation of European cities.

There's a lot of German expressionism in Shawn's work.

So much emotional content, so much delicate line.

In this scene, a West Virginia depot, Shawn uses his expressive line to read joyless faces.

Through such faces, he pays tribute to the concentration camp victims of World War Two in Miners Wives.

We feel the eerie anguish of women who wait for news after a mine disaster.

The acid yellow green floor, red hard brick and the blue gray denim are, strangely enough, exquisite.

Luckily, Shawn loves neither his esthetic sophistication, his warmth, nor his sense of humor.

When he paints old people, poor people like these on Park benches in Brooklyn, we're hoping.

Well, maybe they're waiting for Ralph Kramden.

Bus on this magnificent temple mosaic.

We're drawn in by the shofar, a ram's horn wind instrument of the Old Testament, calling us to brotherhood.

Look at this funeral by Jack Levine, another Lithuanian born Jewish artist.

Satirical.

Critical.

Biting.

But Levine has a sense of humor that won't quit.

He lets everybody have it in gangster funeral.

Government officials, the mob, even the clergy.

We see a widow draped in fur, grieving.

Oops.

Two widows, one very shapely.

The chief of police files past mourning as old associate.

The syndicate is Levine's triumvirate of small time hoods by ID with taffy pull faces tugged and stretched in the manner of astronaut faces seen in slow motion sequences during spacecraft liftoff and reentry in reception in Miami.

Levine shows his disgust with Americans who bowed and scraped to the visiting Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Levine was incensed that we'd put on the dog for such free wheeling, free spending sweethearts when our own folks were in need.

Levine's a realist reporter, revealing personality with a stroke of the Brush Cafe, two young matrons sizing up their next victims.

But look at that marvelous black and yellow suit.

That orange blouse still chic decades after their creation.

In the trial, we see a judge and court characters who resemble too closely some of the unsavory politicians of the time.

The accused, an Indian, is as bored with the proceedings as the rest of the group.

Everybody knows the trial's probable outcome.

As Levine used satire, Horace Pippin used sensitivity to set forth the era.

Pippins first drawings were of his World War One experiences.

You may think his style is crude, and although it is simple, uncomplicated and folksy and called primitive, it is nevertheless refined and sophisticated.

Growing up in Pennsylvania, Pippin began his career at age seven after winning a set of crayons in a magazine contest.

See, with just a small dose of self-conscious evidence will do.

This is my favorite, Pippin.

It's going to be our next year's Christmas card.

Christmas morning breakfast.

It's a perfect example of Pippins two major influences, objects and patterns stemming from the rural Pennsylvania Dutch area and symbolic, imaginative, colorful strains of his black heritage.

Mom is fixed pancakes.

Her son is dressed and ready for church.

The presents, prettily packaged, are unopened, awaiting their proper turn.

Pippin, badly wounded in world War One, often painted 17 hours a day, supporting his injured right arm with his left.

He painted his studio, his house, his neighbors houses with direct truth and sparkle, peeling plaster and clothes.

Mending suggests the hard times of the depression in terms of material possessions.

This is a far cry from the Huxtable household of the 80s, but there is a warm familial camaraderie in domino players that links both eras