For most of human history, winter has been our most bitter adversary.
Our ancestors faced brutal months of terrible cold,
and the constant anxiety that food and fuel would last until the thaw.
This heroic battle of endurance was ignored by artists,
who saw nothing to paint in this harshest of seasons.
But once we were able to protect ourselves from the worst the weather
could do, we began to look at winter in a new way, to appreciate
its transient beauty, its seasonal variety and its terrible power.
Winter began to inspire images that are now amongst the most
popular paintings of all time.
The struggle for survival in a Flemish village,
a temporary terra firma on the frozen Thames,
the most remarkable out-flanking manoeuvre in the history of war.
The more we understood the power of winter, the more we used art to
explore our fascination with its effect on our lives.
As our confidence grew, we developed a rational disregard for the cold
and learnt to love the things that had previously scared us.
But when winter occasionally reasserts its authority,
we can still experience the terror our forebears knew.
Across Northern Europe, the winter of 1564
was the coldest of the century.
Crops failed, and towns and cities were plagued with famine and riots.
A deep and prolonged frost left many dying from starvation
and hypothermia.
This terrible period of cold was the first great
winter of the Little Ice Age.
By the time we get into the 16th century,
there set in what has become known as the Little Ice Age.
It's a very traumatic period for an agricultural society,
and it's not until the 1800s that we start to warm up again.
The winters were terrible, this winter of 1564-5
saw the largest snowfalls that had been experienced in a generation.
Nowhere were the effects of this vicious winter more keenly felt than
in the Netherlands, where political turmoil and religious strife,
caused by the Spanish occupation, added to the misery.
But another revolution was taking place that winter,
in the studio of a Flemish painter in Brussels.
Pieter Bruegel was painting the first snowscape in art,
Hunters In The Snow.
Hunters in the Snow is one of the most original paintings of all time.
It's an incredible, almost a seismic shift, in the world of art.
Just forgetting about the snow for a moment, it's actually one of the
first great landscapes. Bruegel has this trick of conveying immense
amounts of territory and expressing the world itself,
a sense of being on a planet, "This is what Earth is like in winter."
CHORAL SINGING
This picture, you know, it's one of the most famous landscape paintings
in the world. I've asked myself, as an artist, why it's so iconic.
You know, why is it sort of seared itself into the public imagination?
We look at the hunters and their sort of slumped poses,
and the way the dogs' heads are all kind of drooping down towards the
snow. You know, we immediately get feelings of abjection,
you're taken into that late afternoon, you know...
For me, it's like,
"Oh, God there's school tomorrow," it's an awfully depressing thing.
But then in the background it's light and you're like,
"Oh, the people are having fun, it's nice, they're all skating
"on the ice." It's not a kind of uniformly pessimistic painting.
Bruegel was one of the few Northern European painters who had
travelled to Italy at this time.
But it wasn't the great works of the Renaissance that influenced his
pictures, it was the snowy landscape he had crossed on his journey.
It's a made-up landscape. I mean, here we have the architecture
and the people of Flanders juxtaposed with the Alps,
you know, it doesn't exist this scene. The Alps were like
the moon to people who lived in the low countries in this period.
In the Renaissance, nobody thought of painting a winter's day.
The sky should be blue, the atmosphere should be warm,
that was what was beautiful,
so winter was really a new idea in art,
snow is beautiful, as well.
It seems obvious to us now because it has been depicted in art for
so long, but it was something that had to be invented,
discovered, thought about.
He's used the snow totally in the way that an art gallery
works against the back of a painting,
it's a stark nothingness against which, life moves.
And so that's why it works, there's no different tones of snow,
it's all crisp, white, there's no melting going on here,
this is your perfect fantasy of a snowy day.
And there is an element of truth about that. If you're
out in the landscape in the snow, it always has a sort of a fluorescent
glow to it that kind of comes up from the ground, and it bleaches out
all the shadows like a slightly overexposed photograph.
I mean there are the footprints of the hunters but, yeah,
it's a pretty pristine scene, it is fairyland.
Bruegel was one of the first painters whose work had
overtly social and political messages,
and this has made his pictures easily adaptable for parody.
Hunters In The Snow remains immensely popular
with political cartoonists.
Most people know the title of the painting so they know what
the context is that you're putting your political figures in.
And so I subvert it, really, and it has to have a theme,
if you like, and the one I did for The Spectator at Christmas
last year was based on the Eurozone, and how that was collapsing.
It's quite a depressing painting in a strange way,
the colours are very muted and green, green-grey.
And one of the great joys of parodying it
is the fact that snow is obviously white, and what you're leaving is
the whiteness of the paper, and that's terrific.
I'll show you, basically, how it's done.
I have several trees.
I think there are four or five trees in the painting.
Trees were the nicest thing to draw, actually, in a strange way.
But where the trees end you've got this lovely absence of anything,
which is what the snow is and just by leaving areas completely white
and empty, you're creating something
that's physically there, and you're making a picture out of it.
He was just good at making it look bloody cold, really.
Hunters In The Snow was an immediate hit for Bruegel.
He had connected with something elemental about the experience
of winter that we can still find in the picture today.
The picture actually captures a very primal scene, one that is,
in some way, hard-wired into our perception of the seasonal, maybe
that's why it keys in so strongly to those of us who experience a winter.
To this day, I cannot come over the snowy brow of a hill without
thinking of that image, it's so intrinsic to the way that I perceive
the juxtaposition between the cold outdoors and the warm inside.
These elements seem to me
to speak of a deep, atavistic human need for security and shelter, and
also a kind of delight to the eye in wandering between the evocations of
cold and winter in the foreground, and then, although of course it's
very snowy in the mid-ground, there is the suggestion everywhere that
there will be warmth down there, around the churchyard
and around the hamlet and in the village.
You know, even if we're with the hunters in the snow for a minute,
there's a kind of Potterton boiler just down here.
We have to ask why does the winter landscape gradually become
a thing we can appreciate as beautiful,
a thing that we can enjoy?
And, of course, we can enjoy winter landscapes today
because we can go back indoors and put the central heating on,
so it's rather fascinating to look back
and wonder at what points people have felt comfortable enough,
have had a good enough quality of life, enough food and firewood,
to be able to go outside into the cold and enjoy it.
The position that the viewer occupies is sort of slightly up
and behind the hunters.
You're actually in the kind of position you're in nowadays
in computer gaming when you pull back behind the head of an avatar.
We're in a highly cinematic position to see
the development of where the hunters are going to go,
and ineluctably, you want to go with the hunters, quite clearly
you're with the hunters, you want to seek that warmth.
The painting perfectly captured a universally-shared emotional
response to the experience of winter and showed that this darkest
time of year could make a powerful subject for art.
No-one seemed more pleased with this discovery than Bruegel himself.
There is evidence he may even have gone back
and added snow to paintings he had already finished.
Bruegel was also a pioneer in another sense.
Though there is no mention in the Bible of the time of year
when Jesus was born, the Christian church had established
the festival of the Nativity in the depths of winter.
Bruegel was the first person to take this literally
and set the events of the Christmas story in the snow,
giving them a dramatic new realism for people who were
experiencing exactly the conditions they saw in his paintings.
Perhaps his most shocking scene is The Massacre Of The Innocents.
He was working in a time when there was war in Flanders,
the Spanish army were engaged in quite severe reprisals.
He sets it not in ancient times but in his own time, in a village
in a sort of village high street and soldiers are coming down the street,
not Roman soldiers, they're Spanish soldiers, and it's terrifying.
It's a bit like nowadays they might set a Shakespeare play in Iraq.
This painting is very political in that it's
set in a very brutal biblical scene, I mean, probably
one of the most brutal, The Massacre Of The Innocents,
and he's using that to get at the Spanish invaders.
And here, Bruegel has painted it in the snow,
emphasising the time of year, but also the kind of abject
misery of the scene, the brutality and harshness
is made all the more stark against the white background of the snow.
In Bruegel's darkest paintings, the cruelty of winter is
an image of the harshness of mortal life.
It's merciless and it's an image of the unrelenting nature of winter,
and perhaps, by extension, of the unrelenting nature of war.
The cruel snow of Bruegel's Massacre
was a reflection of the time in which he lived.
The extreme cold of the Little Ice Age set in for the next 250 years,
but these bitter winters could sometimes provide
opportunities for amusement.
The change in the climate was keenly felt in Britain, too,
most famously causing the Thames to freeze over more regularly.
In 1621, as a consequence, the Lord Mayor licensed more butchers
to compensate for the scarcity of fish.
But the cold was not the only thing that contributed to this phenomenon.
The way that Old London Bridge was built was also a factor.
This view of the river in 1677 was painted by Abraham Hondius,
a Dutchman who had recently moved to London.
The Old London Bridge has lots and lots of little arches,
and these are big platforms in between, which block the flow
of the river. As you soon as you had a few blocks of ice in the river,
they'd nudge up against the piers, get trapped, and before you know it,
the whole area to either side of London Bridge was frozen solid.
Hondius has painted a confident Dutchman
on skates amongst the revellers.
He would have been very familiar with the frozen dykes
and canals of Holland,
but his Londoners are astonished by this alien environment.
The British are not used to this.
They're clambering and falling all over the place.
I think there's a way in which Hondius is having
a laugh at them. These are grown men turned into children again.
He gives chaps like this a kind of heroic position,
clambering on top of the ice floes here.
The river has frozen right from the bridge up to
Southwark Cathedral, which we can see over there,
which at that point dominated the skyline. But it's not a flat
surface at all, we've got these shards and splinters of ice.
The ferrymen were out of work
because they couldn't ply their trade across the water,
and so they, rather proprietarily, decided that they could
charge people to come down onto the ice, and then charge them again
to leave the ice the other side. So people queued up,
you can see them queuing to come down the steps here.
And chap here being told to reach in his pocket for coins, but it
was clearly worth paying your few coins
cos this was like some kind of theme park.
Hondius was very interested in the ways in which we imagined remote
and extreme places, and in this same year, 1677,
he painted what he called an arctic adventure, which actually looks very
similar to this in that he imagines this barren, ice-clad landscape.
So actually, he's making the centre of London
into a version of the Arctic.
Five years later, the arctic conditions returned.
In 1683, Britain suffered what may have been the coldest
winter of the Little Ice Age.
Once again, the Thames froze but on this occasion
the stillness of the air and the abrupt and dramatic drop
in temperature left the river with a surface as smooth as glass.
This virgin real estate was quickly colonised by entrepreneurial
Londoners, who created a winter wonderland of epic proportions
without paying a penny in rent for their premises.
We're just in the right spot here, we can see Temple straight ahead,
and this whole area became known as Temple Street,
because it was actually a street.
There were carriages crossing the river at this point.
There were people queueing, thousands of people,
flocking down onto the Thames to see this spectacle.
And hundreds of little booths
selling anything that you wanted on the ice.
There was an unwritten but widely respected feeling that this
temporary terra firma was somehow not part of the realm,
and not subject to the normal laws of the land.
The huge crowds attracted by the spectacle contained an uneasy mix
of all classes and the courtesies of society were not respected.
The King brought the Royal Family down
to see what all the fuss was about,
and left with this commemorative card recording his attendance.
I suppose the whole obsession with souvenirs was really
the sense that this absolutely transitory carnival would vanish
overnight, absolutely just vanish.
This city on ice - it really is a whole city, isn't it? -
would be gone in an instant.
The sense that the punters at the frost fair were
living on borrowed time subsided as the cold continued.
The river was frozen for ten weeks and this enforced holiday had
a devastating effect on the economy of the city.
The fact that the Thames froze over almost brought the city
to a standstill. And what do you do if you're forced to have
a holiday in England? You go and put on a carnival like this.
London's frost fairs demonstrated our ability to adapt to anything
the weather could throw at us, and have a good time in the process.
In the 19th century, the medieval London Bridge was rebuilt,
the river embanked and the ice never returned.
Londoners may have lost their opportunity for a midwinter party,
but we were not alone in challenging the elements by having
fun at the coldest time of the year.
The Catholic Church adroitly adapted ancient
seasonal rituals to its own ends, and before the austerity of Lent,
revellers had traditionally celebrated their last chance
for feasting and excess in the depths of winter with a carnival.
Nowhere was this tradition more indulgently embraced
than in the serene Republic of Venice.
This picture by Francesco Guardi, painted in the 1780s,
shows the celebrations on Giovedi Grasso, the Thursday before Lent.
Well, what's so fantastic about this picture is the atmosphere, really.
There's just this sort of extraordinary sense of a party
going on, which I really, really like.
I think there are lots of reasons for the carnival.
Fundamentally, it was about surviving this long, often really bitterly
cold winter. It's saying, "Winter's OK, winter can actually be fun."
And it's also about what Venice is,
it establishes a kind of great sense of collective solidarity
between all the different people who lived in Venice.
As a good Venetian, Guardi was reflecting this
solidarity in one crucial respect -
no-one in his painting looks ready to admit that it was too cold
to be behaving like this.
I don't know what time Easter was that year, but it's on the
Thursday, Gioverdi Grasso,
and we're here on a Saturday,
two days later, in other words,
and all I can say is that it's seriously, freezing cold.
They all look quite relaxed,
and actually, the woman in the front, she's in a state
of slight undress. And of course, during the carnival in Venice that
would actually be quite difficult because what the picture doesn't
show us is how incredibly cold it can be in the winter in Venice.
The wind seems as though it's coming straight from Russia.
Francesco Guardi was a vedutista,
a Venetian view painter, a few years younger than Canaletto,
but he outlived his more famous rival by 25 years.
I prefer Guardi to Canaletto, because he really does
capture a sense of the movement and people of Venice.
In Canaletto, it's all about order,
and kind of Venice as it ought to be. Whereas in this painting, you've
got Venice as it really is and it's about people having a great time.
Guardi didn't know it but his picture showed the Doge
presiding over one of the last carnivals.
Four years after his death in 1797, Napoleon invaded Northern Italy
and brought an end to 1,000 years of the Republic.
The defeated Venetians stopped celebrating
the carnival at the same time.
The carnival was only revived in the 1970s,
really for commercial reasons, it was to bring tourists into the city
in February when normally it was a very low season.
There is still quite a lot about it that we can recognise.
There's a temporary structure over there in Piazza San Marco,
just like the temporary structure in Guardi's painting. And, also a whole
kind of atmosphere of dance and chaos and movement. You look at
the acrobats and it looks as though they're just about to fall over.
Although it is more commercial, you look around you
and people are really having fun, people are wearing masks,
people are really getting together and having a party.
The joy, the sheer joy, despite the freezing cold,
of being in Venice for an event like this, and I think in that
respect there are really a lot of similarities
between this painting and what we're seeing going on around us today.
Venice became a political bargaining chip in Napoleon's European wars,
and began a long period of decline.
But centuries of indolence
and extravagance had fitted her quite well for her new
role as a tourist curiosity.
Celebrating in winter didn't have to be such an ostentatious affair.
The city of Edinburgh could certainly match Venice
when it came to cold weather,
but the new rational sensibilities of the Scottish Enlightenment
led to more reserved ways to have fun in the cold.
Since the union with England in 1707, Scotland had steadily
increased in material prosperity, but it was in the fields
of science and the arts that a new confidence was most evident.
An English visitor famously claimed to be able to stand at the
cross in Edinburgh and take 50 men of genius and learning by the hand.
Had he done so, it's a safe bet that many of them would have
recently had their portrait painted by Sir Henry Raeburn.
In the 1790s, amusing themselves away from their books,
several of these men of learning established
the Edinburgh Figure Skating Club,
and met at The Sheep Heid Inn in Duddingston.
In the depths of winter, when the cold weather froze the nearby loch,
their leading light, the Reverend Robert Walker, took to the ice.
I think the Reverend Walker's right in front of us, because there,
going up the back of Arthur's Seat and then over to
Duddingston village, you've got the gentle hills moving down.
You can't see any of the houses of Duddingston village,
but I think he was being observed by Raeburn
roughly from where we are now.
The sky is that icy, watery, grey-blue of a Scottish winter
and I remember days like that, because as a child,
we went skating on the lochs all the time so it must have been colder.
Also, in Scotland, people were very stoic in the winter.
Winters were long and hard and dark.
Look, here he is, making the most of it.
If you look at the way Raeburn has done the cuts in the ice,
there's lots of gliding movement, there's lots of circular movements,
the Reverend Walker has been skating round for quite a while here.
I don't think Raeburn painted this oil painting
on the water, but he certainly took the sketches for it and he made sure
that he showed that the Reverend Walker had to work for his portrait
for quite a long time.
Presbyterianism, the strict Protestant doctrine
of the Church of Scotland, greatly approved of stoicism,
but in many other respects it was an institution seemingly at odds
with the rational and humanist ideals of the Enlightenment.
Presbyterianism is regarded as being incredibly dour, but actually,
this is not a pompous picture of a minister of the kirk saying,
"Look at me, I can skate so beautifully on the loch,"
"you know, I've been skating all my life." This is a minister who says,
"Let's have a bit of fun." Look, he looks like a dandy.
It's almost camp. He's got this beautiful frock-coat on,
and his lovely hat and this white tied shirt at the neck,
and he's got a slight smile on his face, which is what I love about it.
A lot of the clergy were involved with the literati
of the Scottish Enlightenment, and liked the conversation about science
and the natural world, geology, geography.
In Edinburgh, in this tiny area,
you could just feel their brains sizzling.
This is my favourite Scottish painting. This is my absolute
favourite Scottish painting. This, to me, is what Scotland's all about.
One of the great changes in the 18th century was homes have
barometers in them, it's something that ordinary people start doing,
is tapping their barometers to see whether today is changeable to fair.
People have thermometers and so where Bruegel couldn't measure how
cold his snowy scene was, it was only measurable in terms of what he
felt on his skin. But for the 18th century artist,
this is a very particular kind of cold. This is however many degrees
below zero. So when we talk now about
"the coldest winter since records began,"
we're really looking back to this time in the 18th century,
when it occurred to people to start measuring.
The casual grace of the Skating Minister, apparently immune
to the bite of the Scottish winter, reflected a general lack of
concern in these enlightened times for the threat from the weather.
Protected in their modern houses in the terraces
of Edinburgh's New Town, it seemed science and rational thought
could solve all the problems that beset their superstitious ancestors.
Winter was merely a natural consequence of the rotation
of the Earth, and held no fear for men of learning.
But the hubris of the Scottish Enlightenment's attitude to
the weather was nothing compared to that of the newly appointed
First Consul of France.
Napoleon Bonaparte was confident he could conquer
winter as a first step on his way to conquering the world.
The Great St Bernard Pass, crossing the Alps between France
and Northern Italy, was the scene of one of the most successful
surprises in military history.
Even today, the road through the pass is only open in the summer,
but in the winter of 1800, Napoleon marched his army
through these mountains.
This extraordinary feat was painted by the French revolutionary
enthusiast, Jaques-Louis David.
His dramatic and inspirational portrait was designed to put
Napoleon up there with the greatest generals of all time.
In the pantheon of military greats there is a special place
reserved for those who have campaigned in winter.
It's the ultimate challenge.
I mean, look at this painting, it's the apotheosis of heroic leadership.
He looks calm, collected, the windswept hair,
his mighty stallion rearing in the air,
his finger pointed towards Italy and his enemies.
This is the foundation myth of Napoleon as a warrior,
leader of the French people.
Napoleon's goal was the re-conquest of Northern Italy,
and his enemies, the Austrians, were waiting for him in Genoa,
confidently looking west along the coast for a French invasion.
By taking a short cut across the Alps, Napoleon arrived unexpectedly
at their rear and won a great victory at the Battle of Marengo.
The most remarkable thing about this
is that David never saw this pass, Napoleon never even sat
for this portrait. He simply said he wished to be painted
"Calme sur un cheval fougueux."
Calm on a fiery steed,
and that's exactly what David has done for him here.
David was a believer, he was a political believer.
He believed in the French Revolution,
and I think when he painted this, he believed in Napoleon.
This is a vision of Napoleon as more god than man.
One thing about David, he's not a landscape artist.
He is only interested in the crossing of the Alps
as metaphor, as a historical image, so nature was only there
to set off the man.
50 years later, when another Frenchman, Paul Delaroche,
painted the same event, the metaphor was gone.
The only thing his far more historically accurate picture
had in common with David's version was Napoleon's hat.
Delaroche produces a very, very different painting
but one, in fact, that is just as heroic because it's a far
more realistic impression of the incredible odds that Napoleon
had to overcome in order to get his army across this pass.
We see, not a mighty stallion,
but a mule pressed into service from a local village.
The men behind him had their hats couched down, trying to keep the wind
from blowing them off. Napoleon's breeches are mud-spattered,
he's wearing his campaigning greatcoat, huddled against the cold.
And he has a guide here, a peasant guide, leading him.
The mighty First Consul of France in the hands of a Swiss peasant.
Whichever version you buy into, what both these paintings do is provide
evidence of the enduring obsession with people for Napoleon Bonaparte.
Very embarrassingly, as a teenager boy
I had this painting on the wall of my bedroom, just as I was
developing a great love of military history. And whatever you thought
about Napoleon Bonaparte as a man, as a general, as a force of nature,
he's one of the most exceptional commanders who has ever lived.
It seemed perfectly reasonable of the Austrians to have ignored
the possibility that Napoleon would arrive this way.
The challenge of taking an army over this pass was unimaginable.
At nearly 10,000 feet, the thin air makes every footstep an effort.
At the very top of the pass is the Hospice of St Bernard.
They say there's no such thing as a free lunch but no-one told Napoleon.
The religious community up here have been providing
life-saving hospitality for centuries.
But I doubt they ever had a more demanding guest
than Napoleon Bonaparte.
Napoleon was famous for saying an army would march on its stomach,
he was a famous logistician.
And while they were here, the consumed 22,000 bottles of wine,
a tonne and a half of cheese, and nearly a tonne of meat.
He was also famous for being quite rapacious.
He didn't tend to pay the bills that much and he certainly never paid the
bill up here. But eventually, the monks got their own back.
Francois Mitterrand, president of France, visited this wonderful
monastery in the 1980s, and he finally, after about 200 years,
paid the bill.
Napoleon's achievement continued to inspire painters,
becoming even more celebrated in the late 19th century.
Outside, in front of the hospice, Edouard Castres painted this
scene of the passage of Napoleon's soldiers.
I'm looking down on Italy.
And behind me, several hundred miles, is Paris.
If you draw a line from Paris where Napoleon was to the Austrian
army in Northern Italy, you come through here.
Standing up here on the top of the world, he must have thought
he had winter licked. He was a commander like no other.
But 12 years later, it turned out he was a mere mortal, after all.
He invaded Russia without the necessary supplies
and winter clothing, and half a million of his men died.
In the end, winter got its own back.
In the years following his remarkable feat in this pass,
Napoleon seemed invincible, a situation that led to a great deal
of soul-searching in the nations he defeated.
In Dresden, the work of the Romantic landscape painter,
Caspar David Friedrich, reflected this brooding, sombre mood.
Caspar Friedrich is born at a very interesting time in German history.
On October the fourteenth, 1806, Napoleon had crushed the
Prussian army at Jena Auerstadt, and the Prussian army was
considered the greatest professional army, at the time, in Europe.
So this caused a real crisis in the way Germans and the German nations
thought about themselves.
They'd been defeated in the war and they really felt, well,
"Who and what are we, where are we going,
"we've got to reconstruct ourselves."
What they find in this dark wounded space, is the Gothic sensibility.
You might find vampires, you might find ruins,
graveyards, areas which, represent melancholy, represent the sublime,
represent terror, represent fear, represent anxiety.
These are the areas that are really becoming more interesting to romantic
writers and painters.
The picture itself is a fairly grim image.
Winter is obviously very bleak, everything's dead.
We have in the forefront the snow-covered ground,
a landscape of monks, of burial, and out of that comes these,
almost fingers, or skeletal trees, grasping at the light which is
coming from the sky.
And at the top you see this little circle of the moon,
which is suggestive of the redemptive force of Christianity.
The Christian message of Friedrich's picture is not immediately evident.
The ruined gothic tracery and bleak winter setting offer little comfort
to a believer, but Friedrich's northern European Protestant faith
led him to explore new ways to paint the experience of divinity in a
secular world.
I think it is radical, I think it would have been really
startling for people looking at this
at the beginning of the 19th century.
We look at it and I suppose we see Gothic horror,
and tropes of horror films and Twilight, perhaps,
but for them it was something that was new.
If you look at Christian art in the Catholic period
it's full of stories and people and stuff.
What he's doing as a good Lutheran is trying to look in nature,
and finding evidence of the sublime, evidence of God, by looking
into the book of nature, as Calvin would have put it,
and reading in the book of nature,
evidence of the presence and the purposes of God,
and that would have been a new thing.
Friedrich uses the power of nature
to heighten the drama of his picture.
In winter, in the face of this barren, unforgiving scene,
we feel the need for solace more than ever.
I mean, to a Christian, God in winter comes as no surprise because
the incarnation, the birth of Jesus is
something that happens not, you know, in bright sunshine
and not in a fanfare and blaze of glory but somewhere very unexpected,
the back of beyond, in the darkness of night, in winter, and the birth
of a baby, in a manger. That's become so familiar to us
we forget sometimes how surprising it is, but I think there's something
about surprise, the sheer, counterintuitiveness of it,
that Friedrich tries to capture.
At the heart of Christianity, is Christ crucified, abandoned on the
cross, who cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
which is a cry which the world would seem to take up in the dead of
winter, when the earth stands hard as iron and it's cold and it's
wretched and it's miserable, and that's that sense in Friedrich.
He doesn't underestimate that at all, he doesn't gloss
the darkness and the fierceness and the cold,
but he never loses grip on the hope that's implicit in it, too.
It's very subtle.
The subtlety of Friedrich's Gothic imagination would ultimately see his
powerful imagery become the stock in trade of the horror movie, but his
popularity has been very variable.
Though this painting had been bought by the King of Prussia,
by the time of his death he was largely forgotten.
Friedrich was revived in the early 20th century,
specifically by German expressionist filmmakers who directly take their
ideas from Friedrich. Now this is interesting because Friedrich's
painting, of course, comes straight after a terrible German defeat,
by Napoleon, and in the same way, this same anxiety,
this same introspection comes straight after the First World War,
with the rise of German expressionist cinema.
We see this in films like Dr Caligari,
which deals specifically with mental illness,
and with Nosferatu which deals with the invasion of a
foreign, plague-ridden vampire, into the midst of a German town.
The cinematic drama of Friedrich's dark winter landscapes was a sombre
Germanic response to the Napoleonic Wars, but for his restless British
contemporary, Joseph Turner,
the fighting was merely an irritating inconvenience that
prevented him from travelling to the continent.
In 1802 he managed a brief visit to Switzerland during a lull in the
conflict, but he was still using the sketches as inspiration eight years
later when he painted this view of an avalanche in the Alps.
He's a painter's painter, you could say that Caspar David Friedrich,
his great German contemporary, is a photographer's painter,
he has a kind of stillness which appeals very much now.
But Turner is about what painting can do, what oil paint can do.
This is paint making a world and then smashing that world
and then stirring it about
and then loving the results.
Winter, avalanche, snow, blizzards,
these massive forces give Turner the opportunity to depict abstract
energy and colour. If you wanted to depict the kind of abstract
mystery of blinding whiteness, snow was the opportunity to do so.
Bruegel saw that, in the 16th century, and Turner sees it again.
Snow for him is an opportunity to blast apart
the conventions of realism.
The British liked their conventions though,
and took some persuading to see mountains in a new light.
The Alps were generally regarded as something rather unpleasant
and dangerous, to hurry through on your way to more congenial pleasures
further south.
The philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, put up the shutters on his coach
with a shudder as they hove into view.
Turner, the son of a London barber who grew up in Covent Garden,
was struck dumb by their majesty,
but their effect on his great friend and champion, John Ruskin, was akin
to a divine revelation
and it was his love of mountains that would bring about a profound
change in our attitude to the whole idea of what winter was good for.
Ruskin was first brought here by his parents
when he was about 14 years old, in 1833,
and, the experience, it's only fair to say, was religious.
He felt that seeing something this beautiful,
this astonishing, was absolute proof positive,
that there was a benevolent God.
Ruskin we remember as an art critic, but long before he became interested
in painting he was fascinated by geology. Had he not become an art
critic he would probably have become England's greatest geologist.
Long before the problems that are raised by Darwin with biological
difficulties with Genesis,
in fact, geology was the science which really started to inflict the
wounds much earlier than Darwin, and Ruskin says that every time he
reads his Bible nowadays, he hears the chink of the geologist's hammers
at the end of every cadence, and it's as though there's a literal
undermining of his faith by these people with their little pick-axes.
So geology at once leads him to God and leads him away from God.
It's a really fascinating paradox.
Above the town of Chamonix, on the slopes of Mont Blanc,
Ruskin recorded the progress of the Mers de Glace glacier.
It's really amazing to look at this
because Ruskin, though he didn't give himself any great airs
as an artist, was very precise and if you
look at the upper part of this engraving, you see the skyline is
absolutely identical, every little chip, every little spur, every
little needle, exactly the same.
But then if you come down and look at the lower half of the picture,
it's completely changed, it's dropped 150 metres.
While Ruskin the artist painted the valley,
Ruskin the scientist, an early enthusiast for the new medium of
photography, made this Daguerreotype image of the scene.
But for the local population, whichever way you looked at it,
the glacier was a malevolent thing.
We tend to think about glaciers as being relatively static,
relatively immobile, but in fact,
this particular gigantic flow of ice one year advanced by as much as
450 metres, eating into local farmlands, destroying local
livelihoods, there was a cartoon done at the time of the
glacier as a kind of voracious white dragon, eating it's way down through
the hills with its wings spread out behind it, wings of snow.
Ruskin would have loved that, for him dragons encapsulate everything that
was evil, and in fact this whole
area used to be known as the cursed mountain, the Mont Mourdie.
Bishops used to have to come and sprinkle holy water over it to
diffuse the evil spirits.
So, by loving this place so much, by saying that it's actually not a
place of evil but a place of beauty, Ruskin was really going against a
very substantial folk tradition in the area.
The farmers of Chamonix were never going to love the glacier as Ruskin
did, but he won an increasingly adoring following
back home in Britain.
His passion for this landscape was so infectious that,
almost single-handedly, he started the fashion for winter tourism.
Ruskin has to be held culpable for developments
that would have made him weep.
With all due respect to the people who come here for their vacations,
that's fine, but had Ruskin seen the ski lifts, had he seen the
cafes, had he seen all the attendant paraphernalia,
I'm afraid he would have broken into tears.
Another of Ruskin's favourite views is on the other side of the valley.
Today the ski lift cuts short what, for Ruskin,
would have been a quite considerable expedition,
climbing several thousand feet above the town.
This view across Chamonix to what used to be called
the Waterfall of Madness, Cascade de la Folie,
was a scene he was particularly fond of.
It's a very fine piece of work and of course it's charged with Ruskin's
notion that this is as close as you
can get, almost literally, to paradise on earth.
Ruskin is a late romantic, which is one way of saying that he learned to
find beautiful things that previous generations had found completely
ugly, snow for example.
In some ways his love of snow is an extension of
his love of geology, in general, and of precious
stones in particular.
It's as though the mountainsides around us were simply cascaded with
beautiful white jewellery, but, of course, no-one
before Ruskin would have seen it that way.
This was all completely new to people as an aesthetic idea,
but Ruskin was so trusted that they followed his example, I mean, it's
almost impossible to exaggerate quite how much faith the broad,
Victorian-educated public put in Ruskin, he has almost no
counterpart in the modern world, you have to combine David Attenborough
with Terence Conran with Jamie Oliver, or whatever. None of those
even, none of those people singly, none of them put together, had quite
the sway over the British public and were held in quite such affection
and respect.
Like Bruegel, Ruskin used his art to completely change the way people
thought about winter. The precision
of his draughtsmanship tamed the Alps and made them seem accessible.
He established the idea that winter
was something you could visit for a holiday.
But his obsessive pursuit of accuracy was about to be turned on
its head by a group of young Frenchmen who admired Turner as much
as he did - but for all the wrong reasons.
In their own way, the Impressionists were just as keen on accuracy,
and were obsessive about something they called "snow effect,"
the elusive colour of the shadows in a snowy landscape.
This is Monet's first stab at snow effect, painted in Honfleur in 1867.
As paintings, I personally think Monet's snow scenes, are the best
since Bruegel. He's a painter of light, he's a painter of
transitory effects, impressions, he's not interested in, sort of,
underlying realities of things, he's interested in what it looks like
right now, right now before my eyes as it changes.
And it's that sense of the passing world, the effect of light on snow,
these incredibly light, sensitive, graceful capturings of passing
moments, this is what Monet's about.
The notoriety of the early Impressionist exhibitions did not
immediately lead to financial security for Monet. In 1878, poverty
forced him to move to a rented house, shared with another family,
in the village of Vetheuil, on the banks of the Seine,
40 miles from Paris.
Soon after the family moved to the village, Monet's wife Camille became
seriously ill and, after the birth of their second child,
her condition deteriorated.
He often had to choose between paint or medicine for his wife.
In a letter he said,
"I haven't been able to work for a month now, lacking all colours."
When you know what Monet was going through, in his life at the time,
it makes you feel really differently about this painting. Monet is in the
winter of his life, so it's fairly apt that it's so snowy.
It's that bit where snow has gone from being really beautiful
to being just like junky and dirty.
It's not pristine snow, it's not about smoothness and purity,
and everything looking peaceful, it's sort of out of
control a little bit.
I suppose that's probably how he felt at the time, out of control.
What you can see here, are people.
You don't see it at first because they're almost completely engulfed
in the landscape, they're more like ghosts.
And I think that's, incredibly poignant, as what's about
to happen is that he will lose Camille. And she'll become a ghost.
Camille died in September 1879.
Some 40 years later, Monet described to a friend
the thoughts that went through his mind
as he sat next to their bed, looking at her corpse.
"I caught myself in the act of mechanically analysing
"the succession of appropriate colour gradations
"which death was imposing on her immobile face.
"Tones of blue, of yellow, of grey.
"Even before I had the idea of setting down the features
"to which I was so deeply attached,
"my organism automatically reacted to the colour stimuli,
"and my reflexes caught me up in spite of myself,
"in an unconscious operation which was the daily course of my life."
In this painting, she seems to be cocooned in ice.
'This is such a tragic picture of Camille.'
It might seem macabre that he was painting her on her deathbed,
but, actually, it's completely what you have to do,
what HE had to do.
This compulsion to cherish her, and treasure her
and, I guess, to not lose her completely.
Trying to capture her in the brushstrokes, and stroking her.
Because every single mark, is, that brush and that's a caress.
And it's this kind of terrible, painful moment
and the only way that he could have got through it is painting.
Camille's death was followed by a brutally severe winter.
On the 10th of December,
the temperature reached a record low of -25 degrees.
The Seine froze over completely.
But by the thaw, Monet had managed to sell
some of his winter landscapes of the village,
and was busy painting the vast blocks of ice
as they broke up and drifted downstream.
His time in Vetheuil was to prove the turning point in Monet's life.
He gained confidence, raised his prices,
and his career began to prosper.
Financial success for the French Impressionists
was cemented by an exhibition that took place in 1886,
and featured over 40 of Monet's paintings,
but it didn't happen in Paris or London.
It happened in New York.
After suffering years of critical scorn at home,
the Impressionists were immensely successful
on the other side of the Atlantic.
Monet's dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, said,
"The American public does not laugh. It buys."
In a great cultural exchange,
many American painters travelled to Paris
to learn about Impressionism first-hand.
Amongst them was the man who was to become
the pre-eminent American Impressionist,
Childe Hassam.
"The man who will go down to posterity
"is the man who paints his own time
"and the scenes of everyday life around him,"
said Hassam, and there was certainly lots going on to paint.
New York was just beginning to emerge
as one of the world's great cities
with its own distinct style and culture,
and needed its own artists to recognise its changing status.
Hassam loved snow and painted it wherever he was.
He made this picture in his native Boston.
Like Monet, Hassam wanted to paint the elements
as he saw them in front of him at that moment,
and was equally fascinated by the winter light,
but his most enduring images of winter are of New York.
This picture shows horse-drawn cabs struggling down Fifth Avenue.
For Hassam, capturing winter in New York
wasn't a question of getting out in the sunshine
and exploring the snow effect in the shadows.
He wanted to paint the blur of driving snow
in the teeth of the storm.
During that same winter, on the same street,
a similar scene was created
by another man who saw himself as an artist,
but he was using a camera.
This image is probably
the world's first successful photograph of falling snow.
Alfred Stieglitz was born in New York
but spent ten years as a young man in Europe.
When he returned to his native Manhattan,
he was fired with enthusiasm for photography,
convinced it was the art form of the future.
At a time when serious photography required a bulky plate camera,
Stieglitz purchased a smaller 4x5 inch model
and began to photograph life on the streets of New York.
His return to the city coincided with a run of terrible winters,
and many of his most famous pictures
are scenes of Manhattan in the snow,
like this photograph, The Terminal.
'Winter in New York is brutal.
'It is absolutely brutal.'
But what really happens in New York
in the winter is life slows down,
people stay inside as much as possible.
So I imagine that Stieglitz had...
I imagine he had a lot of fun walking around the city
and kind of seeing it laid bare a little bit more,
just like leaves fall off trees
and you get to see the skeletons of the trees,
you get to see kind of the inner workings of the city
a little bit more, because there's less life on the street.
In this picture you can see the curve of the tracks
where the streetcars made their turn
before going back north up to Harlem,
and actually, this bus right behind me
is following almost exactly that same curve,
as it too turns around to go north.
This picture is a window into the past.
It's a glimpse into New York
at a moment when it was changing incredibly rapidly.
The 1890s was really the period
where New York went from a local city to being a world capital.
It was winter that drove those changes
and really forced the city to become what it is today.
Like the enlightened Scots 100 years earlier,
19th century New Yorkers felt secure in their modern city,
immune to the perils of the natural world.
But winter likes to remind us of our frailty from time to time.
The Great White Hurricane,
a blizzard that hit the city on the night of the 12th March 1888,
killed 200 people and almost every form of infrastructure failed.
The city was left paralysed,
with no functioning transport or communication.
By the end of the 19th century,
lower Manhattan was turning into a financial capital of the world,
and it relied on communication.
Telegraph and telephone wires,
and then, soon after, electrical wires as well.
When they had a hard winter, like during the blizzard of '88,
ice would form on those wires
and the weight would cause the poles to come down or the wires to snap.
That made the city decide
to start enforcing the rules that were already on the books,
that the utility companies had to put these wires underground,
and you can see from these two pictures
the drastic difference that made, right?
It cleared out the street, which isn't very clear these days.
But for a while, it cleared out the streetscape.
For Stieglitz, there was no question what made the streetscape look best.
Whenever it snowed, he would set out with his camera
to capture New York transformed.
He photographed the birth of the city we recognise today,
like this view of the Flatiron building in the snow,
at the dawn of the skyscraper age.
Always experimenting, he dramatically cropped this picture
to emphasise the building's verticality.
"It appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster steamer,"
Stieglitz said, "A picture of a new America still in the making."
As a prodigal son of New York,
he returned to the city with a European modernist's eye.
This picture, City of Ambition,
helped to establish the Manhattan skyline
as a futurist utopian icon,
But the street plan still betrays
the original landscape it was built on.
There's a clue about what used to be here in the name.
Canal Street. It used to be a canal that drained lower Manhattan.
Now the drainage ditch is still here. It's today a sewer,
and it was actually New York's very first covered sewer.
When you get a big snowfall, for example,
and all of that snow melts
and you don't want it flooding the streets,
that has to go out to the rivers.
Steve describes himself as a guerrilla historian
and his explorations of lost urban infrastructure
are not always done
with permission from the relevant authorities.
So I try not to have an audience sometimes when I do this,
cos they wouldn't always understand.
To my mind, what's really cool is that when you go underground,
you can go into the past.
You can see how the city used to be.
Still flowin'!
SIRENS BLARE
Even today, blizzards can threaten loss of life,
but centrally-heated urban environments
insulate us from the harsh reality of extreme climate events,
and from the patterns of the year.
At the end of the 19th century
the population balance shifted rapidly.
More and more people became city dwellers,
and sought to remove the possibility
that climate could interfere with commerce.
Winter seemed irksome at worst, and as the last snow melted away,
the fatal power of the cold was forgotten.
In pursuit of the elusive connection to the seasonal rhythms,
the Italian painter, Giovanni Segantini
left the industrial city of Milan where he had grown up
for the more extreme climate of the Alps.
Painting in the mountains above the Swiss town of St Moritz,
he rediscovered the power of winter as a metaphor for death.
Housed in a museum dedicated to his work,
the triptych, Life, Nature & Death
showed landscapes from the local Engadin valley.
"Death" is a winter dawn.
Giovanni Segantini, he was really attracted to winter
because it was such an extreme season for him.
The white of the snow fascinated him,
and he really played also with the light and the colours,
because the reflections in winter are so much stronger.
So for him, it was just something magic.
You can basically feel the crispy air in his paintings.
That Segantini became a painter at all was something of a miracle.
He lost his mother when he was only five years-old
and his father took him to a sister in Milan
and there he had a very gruesome and difficult childhood.
He was actually a street kid.
But he didn't feel comfortable in a big town like Milan
so he was looking for nature.
He just wanted to go higher up, and that was towards the light,
towards the mountains.
The picture shows a family group
watching as two undertakers carry a body to a waiting horse-drawn sled.
Above the mountains hovers a large, billowing cloud,
glowing in the dawn sunlight.
His art took the physical reality of winter
and gave it a strongly metaphorical form.
Romantic and mysterious, but always rooted in the landscape.
I think he chose to represent death in winter
because it's such a brutal and almost cruel season.
He wanted to show the grandiosity of the mountains, of nature.
That that would overcome the pain of the loss of this child.
I would say the direction of the horse,
that it would carry the child, the dead child, towards the light.
So there is some sort of hope after death.
Segantini would take his vast canvases to his subject
and work in the open, constructing a temporary wooden shelter
if the weather turned against him.
He became immensely successful in his lifetime,
with works exhibited all over Europe,
but his mother gave up Austrian citizenship
whilst omitting to replace it with anything else.
Stateless, Segantini was unable to leave Switzerland.
He was a very solitary soul and he wasn't able to travel,
so his only choice and passion
was actually to stay in his mountains
and try to get the beauty and the light,
this very, very special light,
and that was actually the quest of his life and painting,
to really show the world
the beautiful magic light of the Engadin and the mountains.
Whilst working to finish this picture
he spent long hours at high altitude in the mountains.
The strain weakened him.
He developed peritonitis and died in his painting hut
overlooking the Engadin valley that he loved.
He was 41.
THEY PLAY "TWIST AND SHOUT"
In St Moritz today,
it's difficult to see winter as a metaphor for death.
In temperatures of -20 degrees,
the frozen lake becomes a horse-racing track
to stage the White Turf Festival, and its accompanying party.
These revellers, like the Londoners on Hondius' frozen Thames,
or the Venetians at their carnival, are perfectly happy out in the cold.
But this cavalier attitude to the temperature
requires the certainty of a refuge from the cold.
For the homeless, winter was still a killer.
In the rapidly expanding city of New York,
a group of artists, later known as the Ashcan School,
gave winter an urban setting every bit as uncompromising
as Segantini's portrayal of death.
On the margins of society,
the bums of Manhattan,
the subject of this picture by George Bellows,
were still vulnerable to the cruelty of a bitter winter.
What I love about this picture is Bellows really captures
the eternal New York story,
which is, "Out with the old and in with the new."
The Queensboro Bridge, which we're standing under,
hasn't even opened yet.
It's about to open in, I would say, three or four months.
This is probably early 1909, and the bridge opens in May.
And the bridge signifies new New York.
The city is expanding and growing
and the subways are only about five years old.
These are all tremendous changes in the city.
And these men have no place in it.
These men are pushed under the bridge.
What Bellows is telling us is they're New York's refuse.
They're New York's trash.
The Ashcan painters saw themselves in opposition
to the whimsical impressionism of Childe Hassam
and had more in common
with the documentary photography of Stieglitz.
Winter was a frequent subject for both,
but for Bellows especially,
his art had a powerful social conscience.
I think winter underscores
the rawness and the cruelty.
This isn't fluffy, wonderful snow
that you're playing in or is exciting and beautiful.
This is a raw scene.
This is a cold, March day,
where the wind is coming off the river.
They're huddled by a fire, but it doesn't matter.
You know in their bones they are cold.
And if they have a torn boot, their feet are wet. They feel it.
This was a whole neighbourhood
of tanneries and breweries and slaughterhouses.
I mean, it was a pretty filthy, disgusting place.
You can just imagine how bad it smelled.
Nobody in New York City wanted to live near the rivers.
That's why Fifth Avenue became such a posh street at the time.
It's the centre of the island of Manhattan.
It's as far away from this as you can get.
The aim of the Ashcan School was to celebrate an urban vitality,
capturing spontaneous moments of everyday life.
But Bellows was also keen to document
the rapid change in New York,
and he knew that both the tenement building
and the men huddled in its shadow
would soon be swept away by the expanding city.
The light is brilliant, and what's interesting about the painting
is that at the top of the tenement,
and at the bridge and the sky, the light is very redemptive.
You can imagine the people who were on the bridge
or who will be on the bridge in a few months,
going across in this great, grand new city,
you know, everything's light and beautiful and promising.
And underneath it, where nobody can see,
these men are swept under the bridge.
Literally swept into the shadows of New York City.
Another Ashcan painter
with a romantic love for New York was John Sloan.
The great thing about painting the city, he said,
was that landmarks are torn down so rapidly
that your canvases become historical records
almost before the paint on them is dry.
Sloan loved winter.
He caught perfectly the impersonal and solitary nature of urban life,
and by setting his subjects in winter,
he gave them another reason not to linger on their journey,
hurrying home to the warm.
He recorded the last days of the El trains,
the elevated tracks that had failed in the blizzard of 1888,
and had been rendered redundant by the subway.
Sloan was fascinated by European movements like Cubism,
and struck up a friendship
with the pioneer of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp.
On a bitter, winter night in January 1917,
Sloan, Duchamp and several friends broke into the Washington Arch,
in the artistic ghetto of Greenwich Village.
It was snowing lightly
and the Arch Conspirators, as they called themselves,
decorated the roof with balloons and huddled in blankets,
drinking tea and moonshine, and letting off cap guns.
By having this party in what was supposed to be a serious monument
built by the city, they were making a claim on public space.
The event did have a serious purpose.
The United States was on the verge
of committing troops to the First World War
and the Arch Conspirators read a proclamation,
declaring the establishment
of the Free and Independent Republic of Greenwich Village.
There was a lot of fear at the time about saboteurs,
especially about potential anarchists.
The same thing has been happening since September 11th.
Today it's terrorists. Back then it was anarchists.
The fear is actually similar, and the way the city reacts
to people who want to try to make the city their own is often the same.
I see similarities with the way
that Sloan and his peers were painting at the time.
The Ashcan school of painting took
really, the existing landscape of the city and celebrated it,
things that seemed kind of banal.
So I love that. I think they were doing the same thing with this party.
They were taking this existing structure
and making it into their own, making it something fun.
I've always liked this thing a lot more, knowing that in 1917,
these crazy artists had a party all night at the top.
I wish I could have joined them.
The declaration of independence must surely have been written by Duchamp,
consisting as it did solely of the repetition of the word "whereas".
Whereas...whereas...whereas.
We declare the free and independent Republic of Greenwich Village.
The Independent Republic of Greenwich Village
failed to prevent the United States from entering the Great War.
Napoleon had abolished winter breaks in wartime
and there was no let-up in the slaughter on the Western Front.
The Battle of Cambrai in November 1917
saw the first use of large numbers of tanks by the Allies
but after a brief period of spectacular success,
the advance was checked,
the Germans retook most of the territory
and by the end of November,
things were back where they started.
Then it began to snow.
The German front line ran
just to the north of the hamlet of La Vacquerie,
with the British trenches the other side of an area of high ground
known as the Welch Ridge.
On the 30th of December, the Germans launched a surprise attack,
turning winter to their advantage.
The snow was two, three feet deep.
Everything was white and just before dawn, in the midst of a freezing fog,
they came over this slope,
all dressed in white camouflage.
And they were immensely successful.
And later that day,
the British decided to try and launch a kind of counter-attack.
This painting depicts the moment
when that regiment was ordered to go over the top.
Though later employed as a war artist, on this day,
John Nash was a serving soldier
fighting in the Artists Rifles Battalion.
You can see from the painting
that these guys didn't stand a chance
because everything here was white, everything in the painting is white.
Snow white, white clouds,
white mist, white surface,
and what are they wearing? They're wearing dark brown greatcoats
so the German gunners just pick them off.
80 men went over the top
and within just a few minutes, 68 of them had been killed
and, fortunately, one of the dozen men to escape unscathed
was John Nash, who painted this picture.
And I think one of the reasons he survived was
just before he went over the top, he took off his greatcoat
because he thought it was too conspicuous, too dark in colour,
and he wore a pale tunic instead, and that probably saved his life.
And this painting I just find incredibly powerful
because it's so...
It's so matter-of-fact, you know,
there's no sentimentality in it whatsoever
and it's the body language of these men in the row.
They're just sort of glumly trudging through the snow up this hill
towards what they know will be death.
These guys haven't even got out of the trench with their lives.
Other people have died the moment they've gone out.
This guy here has just been shot
and he's fallen down to his knees.
Nash hated painting figures. He couldn't paint figures very well
but he knew he had to do it with this painting because it was so important.
He thought what happened on these slopes was murder, pure and simple.
Like so many other actions of this conflict,
the attack Nash painted was largely pointless.
No progress was made
by the sacrifice of the lives of his comrades
and the few yards of mud over which they fought
remained a part of no-man's-land.
When most people think about the First World War,
what do they think of? Well, they think of mud and they think of rain
and they think of lifeless landscapes, trees without leaves,
they think of long nights and freezing soldiers.
What they're thinking about is winter.
That was what the First World War was.
It was a really long, brutal, murderous winter
but it wasn't a natural winter.
It was a winter that we manufactured.
This man-made misery inspired Nash's contemporary,
the young futurist painter Richard Nevinson,
to produce his greatest works.
La Mitrailleuse combined his fascination for machinery
with a horror at the brutality of conflict.
It was described by Walter Sickert
as "the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on war
"in the history of painting."
Nevinson, the son of campaigning liberal parents, was a pacifist
and worked in the trenches as an ambulance driver.
After the war, he continued to use his art as a platform
for social commentary, but in order to reach a wider audience,
he became a regular columnist
for the Daily Mail and the Daily Express,
becoming more curmudgeonly as he grew older.
One of his pet hates was football.
He had been a profoundly unhappy schoolboy,
sent away to boarding school at Uppingham
to allow his mother and father
more time to concentrate on their various causes,
and he associated winter with compulsory organised sport.
The misery of afternoons on the football field
was still fresh in his mind
when he painted this picture
in 1930, at the age of 41.
Nevinson would be horrified
by the idea that this painting would now be being used
to promote football in any way.
He despised all sports.
Right from when he was at Uppingham School and he was bullied,
he considered that sport was something for brutes, basically.
Nevinson was very much associated with the Italian futurists,
and in the Italian futurist manifesto, they included sport
as something that they felt was really important
to put right at the heart of culture.
And Nevinson did put sport within his art,
but he put it within his art to show us what a waste of time it was.
Nevinson never indicated the location of Any Wintry Afternoon
but the dark satanic mills that form its background
are always assumed to be in Manchester,
a part of the country he had rarely visited,
and for which he had a stereotypical southerner's contempt.
This painting really shows
that Nevinson thought it truly was grim up north.
The closer you look at this painting, the more of that you see,
whether it's the gasometer in the background,
the train, the steam coming off it,
the darkness, the thunderclouds, the rain.
Football had previously been seen very much as a northerner's game.
No London club had won the league up until this point
and there's always been great discussion
about whether the football teams in the painting
are Manchester United and Manchester City, or not.
And Nevinson was furious at the idea
that anyone should even be discussing this
and you can see, the tops are red and
the socks are blue. He doesn't care.
He's not trying to say
this is a particular player, this is a particular team.
He would say, "Well, you know, that's not the point.
"The point is, stop watching football."
It's often said that the Premiership era is the first time
where there's really been a major tension
between the money that is in the game, and the fans of the game
but actually, a very similar thing was happening in the 1920s.
This was the time when the first £10,000 footballer
had just been sold. The clubs were turning into businesses
and Nevinson wrote extensively about this in his very provocative columns
in The Mail and the Express at the time,
you know, openly hostile to what this was doing to our culture.
This painting goes to show
that really, he thought that sport was the opium of the masses
and he wanted to the masses to stop taking opium, and to go
and do something else instead, that was a lot more cultured.
Nevinson's vision of winter is a far cry from Bruegel's.
400 years after the hunters' struggle for survival in the snow,
Nevinson's equally abject figures
are merely struggling to win a football match.
Had winter finally given up the fight?
During the 1930s, winters were noticeably milder.
Scotland experienced an almost complete absence
of significant snowfall in the winter of 1931.
The Reverend Walker's skates would have stayed in the cupboard.
For the first time,
scientists began to express concern that the world was warming up.
The US Weather Bureau concluded in a survey in 1934
that the winters were indeed colder and the snow deeper
when Grandad was a lad.
But winter wasn't giving up yet.
The euphoria that followed victory in World War II was short-lived.
Rationing continued, and there was a sense that
things weren't really working out for Britain in the post-war world.
In January 1947,
the country was plunged into the most severe winter of the century.
MUSIC: "Stormy Weather" by Billie Holiday
# Don't know why
# There's no sun up in the sky
# Stormy weather... #
Power stations closed down for lack of coal,
and even the Houses of Parliament operated by candlelight.
The magazine Picture Post published a special edition on the crisis,
and chose a dramatic image
by the photographer Bill Brandt for the cover.
# Life is bare
# Gloom and misery everywhere
# Stormy weather, stormy weather... #
This was one of the great notorious winters in my lifetime, 1947.
I was only a 12-year-old boy in that winter.
I thought it was great fun but it was a wicked winter.
What this picture is
is the suffering of stones in silence.
During 1947, there wouldn't have been
the constant stream and flow of traffic.
That kind of traffic didn't exist,
so this would have been a total wilderness here.
SHEEP BAA
This atmospheric picture was not the sort of thing
Picture Post would usually have used for a cover image.
When you were talking about
one of the most dramatic winters for many generations,
you could have used something much more symbolic
like the struggle of a human being, you know,
trying to keep themselves warm and safe from this atrocious winter,
but they chose to use this poetic image of Stonehenge.
I mean, there's nobody in it, nothing in it.
I'm sure that Bill Brandt persuaded the editor
to go in another direction.
This is not the kind of thing that Picture Post was known for.
It's such an epic photograph.
Captioned "Where stands Britain?",
it's a monumental proposition here.
"What does this country stand for? Who are we?"
And so Brandt's picture is waiting
for the spirit of the nation to come rising up in some way,
and what does he use to depict the spirit of the nation but Stonehenge,
our most ancient monument? This is a going-back to first principles.
This is thinking about our very first identity
and what we might want now.
What are we going to build over the desolation of war?
And so what Brandt is brilliant at doing
is looking at the material reality of Britain and making it speak.
His pictures talk.
This very stark, very monumental, photograph of Stonehenge
seems just pausing,
waiting for the kind of dialogue of modern Britain to start.
This was published as a sort of state-of-the-nation picture
but, actually, it's a piece of abstract art.
The way that Stonehenge divides the picture in two.
You have the whiteness below it
and then that exploding, apocalyptic sky above.
But that sense of three layers
makes me think of Mark Rothko's abstract paintings
of exactly the same time, when he was painting vertical abstractions
that were divided into three layers of colour
and here, Brandt has managed to do that in a photograph.
Brandt began his career in Paris in 1929
and worked for a while as a studio assistant to Man Ray.
The thing about Bill Brandt was that really deep down,
I think he considered himself to be an artist
much more than a photographer.
Bill used to print his own pictures
and inject a huge amount of drama and blackness and darkness,
and that was his hallmark.
Everybody knew a Brandt print when they saw it,
but this is...much more tender.
Bill Brandt was quite notorious for posing up, creating things
that are not totally the truth, but there's nothing deceitful about this.
It's haunting, in a way.
Having made his reputation as a war photographer
in some of the world's most inhospitable places,
Don McCullin is now concentrating on landscapes,
but his love of winter still makes it an uncomfortable calling.
I see the wintertime as my moment of drama.
I spend hours standing in waterlogged fields,
watching the light.
I love the nakedness and I love the harshness of the light,
the drama of the light, which we've seen today here,
the skies, the sun going down early in the afternoon, you know,
our afternoons in the winter, they don't last very long,
but for me, that's the magical hour
when I can be alone in a field somewhere.
I don't mind standing for two or three hours in the same place,
knowing that if I stick it out, I'm going to get what I want.
It has to be remembered that I looked at Bill Brandt's pictures
as a young photographer, before I could call myself a photographer.
I took a lot of my disciplines from his composition
and almost felt sometimes that I was stealing his eye as well,
but nevertheless, I owe him a great deal.
Every picture that we're looking at here
is a kind of dialogue with the elements.
Art itself is a kind of defence mechanism
because if you can paint cold and snow,
you're exercising a kind of command over nature.
You're trapping it within a frame and coming to understand it,
and I think we've used art across the centuries as a way of coping,
as a kind of extra coat we put on.
The more we can understand winter,
the better equipped we are to get through it.
Human beings, I think,
have a habit of painting the things they're most scared of
and for so much of history, we were terrified of the winter
and I think that's why we kept coming back to it.
We felt that by painting it, by somehow putting it down on canvas,
we were controlling it.
We were coming to terms with it, we were understanding it,
and I think that's why
winter inspired some of our most powerful and beautiful artworks.
Today, our relationship to winter is ambivalent.
The terror has gone.
If the weather is not forthcoming,
we can create our own winter wonderland,
and skate on the ice in the centre of London
as if the Thames had frozen once more.
The seasonal shopping frenzy builds towards Christmas,
and leaves us with a drawn-out battle of endurance
as the grey light and short days
drag towards the promise of spring.
But the images of winter that art has left us for consolation
can still evoke that elemental sense of awe
we felt when the hunters set out in the snow.
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