A History of Art in Three Colours (2012–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - Blue - full transcript

This is the BBC Television Service.

We now present another programme

in our series of Experimental
Transmissions In Colour.

We live
in a kaleidoscopic world.

But colours are more
than mere decoration.

Colours carry deep and
significant meanings for us all.

In this series, I want to unravel
the stories of three colours.

Three colours which,
in the hands of artists,

have stirred our emotions,

changed the way we behave

and even altered
the course of history.



Gold.

Its lustrous shine has made this
the most intoxicating colour.

One we've used throughout history
to revere the things

we hold most sacred.

White,

once the virtuous colour
of ancient marbles,

came to embody
our darkest instincts.

And, in this programme,
a colour that, for artists,

has always been
the most beguiling of all.

The unique thing about blue is that

it is all around us and yet somehow
it feels for ever out of reach.

Because we can never touch
the blueness of the sea

or blueness of the sky,

and we can never reach the blue
horizon over there, in the distance.



And, for these reasons,
blue has captured our imaginations,

offering us the tantalising prospect

of entirely new worlds
beyond our own.

From the moment a mysterious cargo
arrived from the across the seas,

artists have used blue to transport
us to strange and exotic realms.

From Giotto's heavenly visions...

..to Titian's gardens
of earthly delight.

From Picasso's melancholy yearnings

to Yves Klein's dreams of escape.

Throughout his whole life,

his goal was to leave
this world behind him.

We'll reveal how these artists
searched for the perfect blue

to capture the great beyond.

And, finally,
how one powerful image showed us

that blue was not
the colour of other worlds.

It was the colour of our own.

Our story of blue begins
a thousand years ago

on the edge of Europe.

This is the Venetian Lagoon.

Across these waters
sailed merchants from the East.

They were hungry
for Venetian gold.

And, in exchange,
they brought a mysterious cargo.

It was a rare,
almost mythical substance

that could only be found
in one tiny mine

on the far side
of what is now Afghanistan.

And to get here, to Venice,
it had travelled some 3,500 miles,

across mountain ranges,
across deserts

and, finally,
across the Mediterranean Sea.

What the Arab sailors had brought
was a precious stone.

And it was called lapis lazuli.

And this stone possessed
a colour so enchanting

that it would change art
in dramatic ways.

So this is it.

Now, I must say, I have never seen

such a large chunk
of lapis before.

And I'm quite surprised
at how complex

and beautiful it is, actually.

You can see how rich and deep
and amazing this blue is.

And the whole impression
of this stone

is that it looks a bit like the sky.

It looks a bit like a fragment
of the sky

has just fallen down to Earth
and I've picked it.

So you can really understand why
people loved this substance so much.

As strange as it may seem,

blue hardly existed
in the history of Western art.

It's nowhere to be found
among the earthy colours

of prehistoric cave paintings.

The Greeks didn't even
have a word for it.

And the Romans had little time
for blue in their wall paintings

at Pompeii.

Even in the Middle Ages, the blues
they had were feeble and pallid.

And so the artists
of medieval Venice

couldn't wait to get their hands on
the wondrous blue of lapis lazuli.

OK, here we go. So you probably need
to be pretty strong, don't you?

Yeah, this is like sculpting marble.

I mean, this is a hard stone, I mean,
it's physically hard, it's heavy.

And you have to be very patient

and you're talking about a process
of one week to even two weeks.

Alan Pascuzzi is an Italian artist

who has studied
the ingenious process

that took his medieval forebears
centuries to perfect.

We're going to put it in the mortar

and, eventually,
what we have to do is

begin to grind this up.

And the thing is, you don't want
to waste one bit of this

because the lapis lazuli
is exponentially more expensive

than any other pigment.

Lapis, you know, took how many
months of travel to get there,

you don't want to lose
even one piece of it.

Days would pass,

slowly grinding the rock until
it was reduced to a fine, blue dust.

The blue dust was encased
in beeswax,

pine resin and gum arabic
to purge it of impurities.

And then placed into a mixture
too caustic to touch.

It really brings home to you
how important colour is to people,

that they would go
to this huge effort... Exactly.

..just to make a colour.
It's amazing. Exactly.

And I think that's the power of art.

And, by association, art is -

you know, you want to make it
as beautiful as possible.

And finally...

..after weeks of tortuous labour,

every particle of the precious
blue essence was released.

The hard stone of lapis lazuli

had been transformed.

And this is the finished product.

Ultramarine.

And they call it that
because that's quite literally

from where it came,
from across the seas.

Now, today, we're surrounded
by bright blue things,

but to the people of the late Middle
Ages, this colour was a revelation.

It was brighter and purer
and stronger

than any blue they had ever seen.

'Within just a few decades
of this remarkable discovery,

'blue began to seep
into Western art.'

It crept across the pages
of illuminated manuscripts.

It wrapped itself
around their sacred words.

And it slipped into the backgrounds
of Biblical scenes.

But blue would soon become more
than a decorative flourish.

Our story now takes us to Padua.

Here, a pioneering artist
would indulge in blue

like never before,

elevating this once lowly colour
to divine status.

'In 1303, Giotto, often called the
father of the Italian Renaissance,

'set to work at
the Scrovegni Chapel.'

While it looks austere
from the outside,

inside, Giotto had created
a masterpiece.

This may just be

one of the two or three most
important rooms in Western art.

And almost every square inch of it
is covered in paintings by Giotto,

dealing with the life of Christ
and the life of the Virgin Mary.

You can see, over there,
that's the Last Supper.

Come through and you can see here,
the washing of the feet.

But my favourite image in here, and
probably the most famous of them,

is this one,
Judas leaning in to kiss Christ.

Now, what amazes me
is this was painted 700 years ago

and still the suspense
is unbearable.

And that is
the brilliance of Giotto.

He took religious art
and he made it feel like

it was just something taking place
on the streets in every day life.

'These paintings are dramatic
and original.

'But I think Giotto's
most striking invention here

'is not on the walls at all,

'it's on the ceiling.'

Above us, we have
the most beautiful,

the most brilliant,
deep, blue vault,

that's dusted
with hundreds of golden stars.

And you may think that's the sky,
but it's not the sky.

This blue ceiling is, actually,
a depiction of Heaven.

This is how Giotto imagined Heaven.

For Giotto, Heaven is blue.

And, if you don't believe it,
have a look up

and you'll see
the Virgin Mary and Jesus

and various other prophets,
peeking out of the blue Heaven

and looking down on us.

And, for me,
this is just the most amazing thing

because, only a few years
before this chapel was painted,

blue was a really minor colour
in the history of Western art,

it really was, I mean, it didn't
have much of a big role to play.

But here, only a few years
after that recipe for ultramarine

had been mastered,

Giotto takes the colour blue

and he turns it into the colour
that is the most beautiful,

the most powerful,
the most sacred of them all.

The colour of paradise itself.

In the eyes of the Church,

blue was now the most sacrosanct
of colours.

TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:

But blue was now so divine

that the Church greedily sought
to control it.

They restricted its supply
and inflated its price.

Before long, blue became
even expensive than gold.

In the 1300s, laws were passed

that banned citizens
from wearing the colour.

Only one person, it seemed,
could always be robed in blue.

The Mother of God herself.

In this Madonna And Child,
Italy, 1420.

The Visitation, Flemish,

1445.

And here,

German, 1490.

But it was in Venice,
the spiritual home of blue,

that the colour would be liberated

from the suffocating grip
of the Church.

And one painter who dared
to do this was Titian.

Titian was born among the foothills
of the Alps around 1490,

but, as a young man,
he was soon drawn to Venice.

When Titian arrived here, Venice
was the undisputed world leader

in colour.

It had the raw materials,
it had the clientele

and it had the know-how.

So virtually every pigment
known to man

was available along this canal.

Titian was a colour addict.

And when it came to blue,
he wore his heart on his sleeve.

'For him, the Church's control
of the colour

'must have been deeply frustrating.'

And in one of
his first great commissions,

he made his feelings known
in a most explicit way.

So this is the Pesaro Altarpiece

and Titian started it in 1519,
when he was still a young man.

He's put virtually every colour,

virtually every single pigment
he can find here in Venice,

on that painting.

There's something he's done here
that no artist has done before.

He's put the Virgin Mary
to the side of the painting.

Now, throughout history, the Virgin
Mary had always been in the centre.

To move her up the steps
and on the side

was tantamount to heresy, really.

And taking her place,
at the heart of the picture,

is a rich swathe
of ultramarine blue

with a very lucky Saint Peter
underneath it.

But Titian's obsession with blue
would only be fully understood

when one of his greatest paintings
began to fall apart.

I've been looking at this picture
now for over 20 years,

watching it deteriorate slowly.

Here I'm looking for minute blisters
which are very difficult to see.

0.09, experiment begins.

In 1967, 450 years
after it was painted,

Titian's Bacchus And Ariadne
was in intensive care.

After I do this, of course,
I have the whole picture X-rayed.

At London's National Gallery,

Mr Arthur Lucas was undertaking
a daring experiment

in art restoration.

0.59, focus cleared.

With a surgical hand, he began
to remove a thick skin of varnish

and dirt.

And as he did so, he made
an astonishing discovery.

Patches of the most brilliant blues.

Blues applied by Titian's hand
centuries before.

And when it's all finished,

do you think that this picture
is going to look

like the picture Titian intended?

Well, it'll look very near, I think.

The picture will look very beautiful
when it's finished.

And here it is, Bacchus And Ariadne,

a famous scene from Roman mythology.

Arthur Lucas's restoration
of Bacchus And Ariadne

shocked all who saw it
because no-one knew

just how colourful
Titian's paintings could be.

But, for me, the most dramatic
thing about this painting

is, of course, the blue.

Because this is
an utter barnstormer.

And you know when you look at
this painting, almost half of it,

if you look diagonally that way,

almost half of it is blue.

And it must have cost Titian
an utter fortune.

But, my word, it was worth the money
because it's so delicious

and he has used it all the way
through the painting.

He's used it in Ariadne's cloak,

he's used it
in this reveller's dress,

he's used it in the amazing
mountains on the horizon

and, of course,
he's used it in this sky,

this unforgettable sky.

As we've already seen, blue was
incredibly powerfully controlled

by the Church,
controlled by religious conventions,

how much you could use
and where you could use it.

And in this painting,
Titian has just blown that away

and said, "I'm going to use blue
wherever I like."

And, you know, there's something,

there's something heretical
about that as well.

Cos, as we have seen, blue was
usually reserved for the cloak

of the Virgin Mary.

And, look, the purest ultramarine
in this painting

is the cloak of this reveller here.

And she couldn't be further away
from the Virgin Mary,

she hasn't even bothered
to put her breast away.

And, for me, this is the moment when
blue gets stripped of conventions,

stripped of received wisdom,

stripped of hierarchical meanings,

and it just gets used for fun.

After centuries under
the strict control of the Church,

Titian seemed to liberate blue
from the shackles of religion.

'But let's now travel
to another time and place.

'A place where blue
would be transformed once again,

'turned into the colour
of our deepest emotions.'

We're no longer
in Renaissance Italy,

but Germany,
at the end of the 18th century.

It was the Romantic Age.

These were the days
of delicate sensibilities

and wild imaginings,

of brooding heroes
and wandering poets.

In 1799, a German Romantic writer
by the name of Novalis

began work on an epic novel.

Its eponymous hero was a boy,

Heinrich von Ofterdingen,

whose lucid visions
keep him from sleep.

"The young man lay uneasily
on his couch.

"'It's like a dream, as if I had
dozed off into another world',

"he said to himself."

His wild fantasies led him
on a journey

across the landscape
of his own imagination.

Heinrich was restless

because there was something
he couldn't get out of his head.

It was the most powerful longing
he'd ever experienced.

And it wasn't for money,
it wasn't for power,

it wasn't even for a woman.

What Heinrich was yearning for
was a small, blue flower.

"It's not material treasures

"which have awakened
such a powerful longing in me,

"but I long to look on
the blue flower.

"It feels my senses ceaselessly

"and I can think and breathe
nothing else.

"All emotions rose within him
to an unprecedented peak."

The novel proved to be a sensation.

Throughout Europe,

it captivated the hearts and minds
of those who read it.

The Blue Flower quickly lodged
itself in the Romantic imagination

and it profoundly transformed
the meaning of the colour blue.

Because it was that story,
more than perhaps anything else,

that made blue the great colour
of our deepest feelings.

'Today, Novalis's book
has been mostly forgotten,

'but its legacy permeated
through the 1800s.'

So, when artists tapped into
their deepest feelings,

they repeatedly called on blue.

It dances in the dreams
of Gauguin's sleeping son.

It haunts the Starry Night
of Van Gogh's troubled soul.

And it embraces the private passions
of Edvard Munch's lovers.

But, as the 19th century
drew to a close,

one artist would harness
the emotional power of blue

like no other.

Today we remember Picasso
as a macho playboy

and brave abstractionist.

But as a young man,

he made his debut
with an astonishingly accomplished

series of paintings.

The works of Picasso's Blue Period
are known across the world.

But few know the real story
behind them.

A story of suicide, of despair

and the search for redemption.

Picasso was born in Spain in 1881.

'And, like many a young man,
he felt the urge to leave home.'

In October 1900,
when he was just 19 years old,

Picasso decided to leave Spain.

But he wouldn't make
the journey alone.

Sitting next to him, the whole way,

was his best friend
Carlos Casagemas.

And, together, they planned
to make their names

on the international stage.

And as far as they were concerned,
there was only one place to go.

Paris.

When Picasso and Casagemas
arrived here,

they stepped off the train and
into the very centre of the world.

All nations had converged
at the Universal Exhibition

to showcase their new ideas, new
architecture and new inventions.

Thomas Edison was there
to capture the extravaganza

on his pioneering movie camera.

And I always wonder if,
somewhere, lost in the crowd,

is a wide-eyed Picasso
with his friend Casagemas.

But while they marvelled at the
wonders of the exhibition by day,

when night fell, they indulged
in more salacious pleasures.

Now, Picasso and Casagemas
were all but penniless,

yet they took advantage of almost
everything that Paris had to offer.

They went sightseeing,
they networked,

they tried almost every drug going

and they seduced
as many women as possible.

But their fun would not last
for ever.

Paris was oblivious to two young
artists trying to make their way.

And while Picasso kept the faith,

Casagemas was consumed
with frustration.

He began to lose his grip on sanity

with disastrous consequences.

On the evening
of 17 February 1901,

Carlos Casagemas washed up
in a bar with his girlfriend.

But as the wine flowed,

an embarrassing scene developed.

People didn't know where to look.

And then things got ugly.

GUNSHOT, WOMAN SCREAMS

'Casagemas had pulled a gun
on his lover.'

Fortunately, Casagemas missed
his girlfriend.

She dived under the table
the moment he fired the gun

and she escaped virtually unscathed.

But he thought she was dead,

so he turned the gun on himself.

He brought the revolver
up to his right temple,

he pulled the trigger
and he shot himself dead.

'Picasso was horrified
when he heard the news

'of best friend's suicide.

'And he struggled to come
to terms with the death.'

Picasso was so bereft that he
started to behave rather strangely.

In fact, he set about taking over
his best friend's identity.

He started sleeping
with Casagemas's girlfriend,

he moved into Casagemas's apartment

and he started producing paintings

that compulsively - and,
I think, self-destructively -

revisited the tragedy.

He repeatedly painted Casagemas,
blue in his coffin,

the bullet wound still raw.

A mythical re-enactment
of the funeral soon followed.

Where prostitutes
and faceless mourners are engulfed

in a blue haze.

Such bizarre paintings
couldn't escape the eyes of a man

who made it his business
to probe the most intimate parts

of the human mind.

Carl Jung was one of the most
celebrated psychoanalysts

of his day.

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:

Dr Christian Gaillard
is a disciple of Jung.

And shares his master's interest
in Picasso.

The infernal path
that Picasso walked

was littered with harrowing figures
veiled in blue.

A skeletal musician is hunched
over his guitar.

A woman is lost in melancholy.

A blind actress stares blankly out
from the canvas.

For Jung, the blue in Picasso's
work signalled his descent

into schizophrenia.

But I think blue did
even more than that.

What we see here is this wonderfully
beautiful, porcelain-like girl

in this white chemise,

surrounded by this huge,
blue background,

almost as though she's drowning
in a dirty ocean.

And yet she's got this wonderful
evocative and mysterious,

wry smile on her face
as she stares out into the distance.

Now, Picasso painted this picture
in 1904, 1905,

so right at the very end
of his Blue Period.

And it is still smothered
in that dark, haunting colour.

And look at this passage
on the right,

this is not the lush, rich blue
of ultramarine,

these are the rancid tones
of the new, synthetic blues

that had just been invented.

And they give this whole painting
a really cheap, seedy,

cadaverous quality

and I don't think it would have
that quality in any other colour.

I mean, imagine this painting
in orange or in purple

or in red or in yellow,

it wouldn't be anywhere near
as unsettling as it is now.

But look closer at this painting
and you can see new colours,

new colours coming out
of the blue smoke.

The colours of life,
the flesh tones,

the incredibly fresh, white linens

and that absolutely stunning,
luscious pink

that he's put on the girl's lips.

And that, I think, is a sign
that, finally,

after three really difficult years,

Picasso is painting his way
out of that ordeal.

And it's almost as though the very
act of applying that blue paint

to the canvas
is an act of catharsis,

getting it out of his system
so, finally, he can move on.

Picasso finally left
his trauma behind

and set off on the path
to becoming the macho modernist

that we know today.

And the moment he did so,
his Blue Period came to an end.

Tres bien, c'est fini.

But in just a few decades,
a painter would emerge

who would never give up on blue.

He was a Frenchman
called Yves Klein.

And in the years before
his tragic, early death,

he would devote himself
to making paintings

that were not only in blue...

..they were about blue.

Klein would even invent
his very own blue.

And he believed
it could change the world.

Fittingly, his story begins amid the
dazzling blues of the Cote d'Azur.

'This was a place where
affluent sun-seekers

'mixed with the
glamorous celebrity set.

'But set apart from this
superficial razzmatazz,

'there walked three young dreamers.

'One summer, they were strolling
along the beach

'admiring the scenery.

'They lay down and,
in a moment of youthful idealism,

'decided to divide the whole world
between them.'

The first friend
chose the Earth.

The second friend chose language,

but the third friend chose the sky.

On doing so, he reached up
to the celestial dome above him

and signed his name across it,
and the name he signed

was Yves Klein.

Yves Klein was born
in Nice in 1928.

He was the son of
two bohemian artists

and grew up indifferent to the gaudy
glamour that surrounded him.

He tried almost everything
to escape.

He became a jockey,

he danced the night away,

and even started on a path
to becoming a judo master.

But Yves had another plan
up his sleeve.

He decided to become an artist.

He lost himself making paintings,
each just a single block of colour.

Red.

Slightly less red.

And yellow.

But the colour that captivated him
most was the colour of the sky.

Now, Yves Klein never forgot

that blue sky of his childhood
here in Nice

and I think for him, it was
a great symbol of escape.

Escape from all
the worldly concerns,

the consumerism, the materialism
of the world around him,

and it was in his late 20s that
he decided the best way to escape

from those concerns
was to create a new colour.

A new blue that was as deep
and rich and open

and liberating as the sky itself.

So, off to Paris he went.

He knew that here there lived
a legendary colour maker.

A man so steeped in the mysteries
and magic of colour

that Picasso, Bacon
and countless others

had entrusted him with preparing
their precious paints.

Now, Yves too made his pilgrimage
to the atelier of Edouard Adam.

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:

Here at the studio,
Yves explained the problem -

the traditional oil used
to turn blue pigment into paint

always adulterated the colour.

So to achieve the pure
luminous blue of the sky,

Edouard invented a secret ingredient
and he called it, cryptically,

the medium.

And there, right before his eyes,

Yves's dream of a new blue
was turning into reality.

Yves christened his new paint
International Klein Blue.

He was so proud that he wanted
to cast its spell

across the whole world.

He inaugurated a blue revolution

so that everyone could share
in the joy of his new colour.

He released 1,001 blue balloons
into the sky above Paris.

He planned to turn
Cleopatra's Needle blue.

In this revolution,
anything that took his fancy

was treated to his new blue.

And he even wrote a letter
to President Eisenhower

asking him to join in.

Dwight thought about it,

and decided it would be better
not to respond.

Undeterred, Yves continued to fill
the world with his blue art.

But my favourite part
of Yves's blue revolution

was a series of paintings,
all identical,

and each a devotion to nothing
but International Klein Blue.

This is one of Yves Klein's
blue monochromes

and, believe it or not,
a huge amount of time and effort

went into making this look
exactly the way it looks.

First of all,

Yves Klein was meticulous
about his choice of canvas,

so here, he has selected
a very thin-weaved cotton scrim.

Then, he has coated that
cotton scrim with a kind of milk

and then he painstakingly rolled
the paint as evenly as possible

onto this picture so it could be
as uniform as possible.

It's amazing -
when you look closely,

the textures are just fantastic
on this painting.

What it actually looks like

is looking down at a very blue sea
from a plane

and you can see just
those little waves

and the ripples in the light.

I must say, this is pretty much
the best blue I have ever seen.

Even better than Titian's,
because it's just perfect.

It's not too dark,
it's not too light

and it does this amazing thing.
It almost seems to be moving.

One second it recedes
into the distance like the sky

and the next second it comes towards
you and drowns you like the ocean.

But what does it mean?

I don't think Yves wants us
to try to work out what it means.

I think he simply wants us
to stand in front of it,

to experience it and to enjoy it.

He called these pictures
"open windows to freedom."

I think that's all
he's asking of us.

Just to set aside our everyday
lives for a few minutes,

to open our eyes, to open our minds

and to follow him just briefly
into the great blue beyond.

But Yves would go one step further

in escaping into
the great blue beyond.

'In 1960, he travelled out
to the most mundane suburb

'of Paris he could find.

'And it was there that he would
perform his most audacious feat

'of escapology.'

'On one quiet Sunday morning,
here on the Rue Gentil Bernard,

'he slipped into an apartment
building and made his way upstairs.'

When he reached a first-floor room
at almost exactly this point,

Yves Klein opened the windows
and leapt out.

In the distance,
a train rushes through the station

while a cyclist is oblivious to
the drama unfolding behind him.

Yves's artwork became known
as the Leap Into The Void.

And I think the black and white
photograph he took that day

reveals more about
Yves Klein's ambitions

than any of his other works.

Throughout his whole life,

his goal was to leave
this world behind him

and to voyage into
this utopian world above.

You can see here, his eyes are
locked onto the blue sky above him.

I also think it's a rather
desperate image, too,

because Yves never really
leapt into the void.

In fact, he fell down to Earth

and fortunately had a group
of judo friends there to catch him

on the pavement. They've been
erased by the photo-montage

so we can't see them any longer.

I think this proves in some ways
that the laws of physics

finally defeated the laws
of Yves's imagination.

'By the early 1960s,
Yves was on the verge

'of becoming the most exciting
artist of his generation.

'But then disaster struck.'

In 1962, he returned home
to the South of France

to attend the Cannes Film Festival.

During the premiere of a film
in which he starred,

Yves suffered
multiple heart attacks.

He was dead at the age of 34.

Yves Klein's blue revolution

was one of the most beautiful
moments in modern art,

but it was really fragile, too,
and when he died,

it seemed that his great dream
of this fantastic blue adventure

that could liberate humanity
from all its earthly concerns

would only die with him.

But here in America, of all places,

a new adventure was just beginning

and I think it would transform
our relationship to blue

in one astounding way.

For centuries, blue had been
used by artists to capture

the great beyond,
the forever unattainable.

But, as the Space Race between the
United States and the Soviet Union

reached its zenith,

'one man created
a single powerful image

'that brings our story to a close.'

His image would change the way
that artists, and all of us,

think about blue for good.

But he wasn't an artist,
he was an astronaut.

It was 1967 when America
was launching

its most daring space flight yet.

In five days' time,
these three men will fly to the Moon.

The Apollo 8 mission aimed to send
three men out of the Earth's orbit

and to circle the Moon
for the very first time.

As we depart the Earth
and head on out towards the Moon

and the Earth becomes
smaller and smaller,

not only will the continents
blend together,

but I think man's problems
will hopefully blend together,

and maybe we can start things off
generating a spirit of co-operation

and good will towards men
with this flight.

All the talk was of world peace,
but that fooled no-one.

This was the era of the Cold War,
and I was a Cold Warrior.

We were really intent on beating
those dirty Commies.

Bill Anders was one of the chosen
men on the Apollo 8 space rocket.

It was Christmas Eve, 1968, when
he and his two fellow astronauts

boarded the aircraft.

We've now passed the 10-minute mark
on our countdown.

Nine minutes,
51 seconds and counting.

All aspects of the mission
go at this time...

You're on Saturn V, you were
strapped in on Saturn V,

how did you feel?

Sitting on top of the Saturn V,

which was a mini nuclear bomb
itself, caught your attention,

but eventually I fell asleep
briefly, while we sat there.

But again, this was the Cold War.

We were going to show those dirty
Commies that we were better.

So the danger of that
I had erased out of my mind.

Now, when the rockets lit off,
that was a different matter.

We have lift-off.

It was violent. There was nobody
on it beforehand to tell us.

It was like being shaken sideways
as these giant engines

were steering to keep this
broomstick straight up.

And so it was a violent
and surprising event.

Thrust is OK.

Apollo 8 pierced through
every hue of the big blue sky

and the whole world watched on.

Those watching most intently were,
of course, the NASA technicians

here at Mission Control in Houston.

'We have you go for orbit,
go for orbit.

'Welcome to the Moon, Houston.'

The mission was going better than
anyone could have expected. In fact,

almost without a single glitch.

For three whole orbits,
Anders and his team

gazed down on the surface
of the Moon

and photographed
the terrain beneath them.

It was exactly what they'd been
asked to do.

On the fourth orbit, as they came
out from the dark side of the Moon,

the team saw something truly
breathtaking.

I was shooting pictures
out the side of the spacecraft

when, I don't know who said it,
maybe all of us at once,

"My God, look at that."
Up came the Earth

and that caught me by surprise.
We hadn't expected it.

I had the long lens
Hasselblad camera.

No light meter, no instructions,
but as an engineer, I thought,

well, if I take enough pictures,

maybe one of them will come out,

so I used what I refer to
as the machine-gun approach,

and I just clicked away
and just kept turning.

Took at least a dozen,
maybe 50, pictures,

one of which was selected by others
to be Earthrise.

'This is phenomenal.'

This is the shot that Anders took.

Speaking as an art historian,

I think that this image
almost on its own

made the Apollo missions worthwhile.

I also think that it's the one image
perhaps of the 20th century

that humans will keep coming back
to again and again and again.

Even though we were hard-bitten
test and fighter pilots,

this thing was beautiful.

We'd been staring at this
relatively ugly Moon

and suddenly,
out of the lunar horizon,

came this beautiful blue.

I must say, the hair went up on
the back of my neck a little bit.

Earthrise showed our planet
as a beautiful, colourful jewel

suspended in the blackness of space.

Published around the globe,

it caught the imagination
of everyone.

It was the first time we had seen
the Earth from another world,

and it dawned on us that ours
was, more than anything,

a blue planet.

Seeing this image really brings
home a great irony to me.

For most of history, blue was
this great colour of the beyond.

It was the colour of the horizon,

the colour of the thing that
so many of us were aspiring to

and hoping to escape to.

But when in 1968
that dream finally came true,

when in 1968 we finally
went beyond the horizon,

we discovered that blue
was actually the colour of home.

'I don't know if you're reading,
but we're right over Houston!'

In the next episode,
the most virtuous colour of all

becomes tainted.

From the grandeur of ancient marbles
and Wedgwood's pristine porcelain,

to the wiles of Whistler's women,
Le Corbusier's sterile walls,

and Mussolini's towers of tyranny.

It's a colour that reveals
our darkest instincts.

It's the story of white.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd