A History of Art in Three Colours (2012–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - White - 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.

And 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.

Blue. The arrival of lapis lazuli
from the East made blue

the colour of our dreams,

a colour that's transported us
to worlds beyond our horizons.

And this is the story of white.

Today we see white as the colour
of virtue, a colour

of cleanliness, of innocence, a
colour as pure as the driven snow.

'But in the history of art, white
isn't quite as pure as we think.'

Over the course of history,
it's been loaded with ideologies

that have been both divisive
and at times even dangerous.

So dangerous in fact that white
may just be the darkest
colour of them all.

This is the story of how

the purest colour
became corrupted.



From the refined elegance of the
Elgin Marbles to the pristine pots

of Josiah Wedgewood,

we'll reveal how white came
to symbolise an enlightened world.

But we'll see how, in the modern
age, this once virtuous colour

was used by artists, architects
and sculptors to divide,

to control and finally to conquer.

It was Sunday 25th
of September 1938.

The Director of the British Museum
was on his evening rounds.

Everything seemed to be in order,
but, unknown to him,
a disturbing incident

had been taking place
right beneath his feet.

In the basement, some
of the museum's sculptures

were in the process
of being cleaned.

But they were being cleaned with
copper chisels and carborundum.

To make matters worse, the objects
in question were some of the
museum's most prize possessions -

the Elgin Marbles.

The Elgin Marbles were a set
of ancient Greek sculptures

that had once adorned the Parthenon
in Athens.

They were widely seen as
the bedrock of Western art.

Like many ancient sculptures,
the Elgin Marbles were once painted
in rich colours

which, over the millennia,
had washed away.

Yet, at one point, we became
convinced

that these sculptures
had always been white.

And now, they were being made whiter
than they had ever been before.

The museum's director immediately
put a stop to the cleaning
and instituted an inquiry.

The culprit was one Joseph Duveen,
a rich and powerful art dealer

who had donated money for
a new gallery to house the marbles,

but had asked for something
in return.

Joseph Duveen thought
the Elgin Marbles were,
quite frankly, the wrong colour.

They were too brown and, like
the rest of antiquity,
they were supposed to be white.

Duveen persuaded the museum staff
to whiten the Elgin Marbles

and evidence of their handiwork
can still be seen today.

This is Helios the Sun Chariot
and it's one of the objects

the director saw being cleaned
that night in 1938.

You can see very clearly the effect
of that cleaning.

On the right, this is before the
cleaning. It's dark, it's brown,
it's sooty, it's shiny.

Here on the left, this is after
the cleaning. It's matt in texture,
it's colourless and it's white.

Back in the 1930s, Joseph Duveen's
cleaning job caused a scandal.

It has been said that the
British Museum trustees of the day

lost control of their museum.

In a sense, that's true.

The museum was unduly influenced

by the strength of personality
of Duveen

and the practice of
scraping the surface of
the sculptures was not approved.

That's the important thing

to get across.
It was not an approved action.

We must get this into proportion.

The surface removal,
we're talking of a fraction
of a millimetre

and of course it wasn't every
sculpture that was cleaned.

It doesn't much affect
the moral question

if we try to mitigate what was done.

I don't want to defend it.
What would be the point?

It was 70 years ago.

I wasn't alive and everybody
who was involved is dead.

But there was already a history
to the surface of the sculptures

and it is part of that
history that we add another chapter.

The debate over the cleaning will,
no doubt, go on,

but in our story of white, there's
a more intriguing issue at stake.

The big questions for me are these -

why was Duveen so desperate
for these sculptures to be white?

To even go to the lengths to damage
the sculptures to make them whiter

and why, when all the evidence
points the other way, when we know

that the ancient Greeks covered
their sculptures in colour,

do most of us still think,
secretly, that they should be white?

In my mind, one man
is above all responsible

for the whitewashing of antiquity
and, in doing so,

he planted white
at the centre of European culture
for centuries to come.

And his name was
Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

JJ Winckelmann was born in 1717
in a rural town

in what is now Eastern Germany.

His parents wanted him
to follow the family profession

and embrace the noble trade
of the cobbler.

But they should have known
that young JJ

was not well suited
to such a fate.

Winckelmann was not the typical
18th century cobbler's son.

He was gay, his dress sense
was extravagant to say the least.

He had a penchant for skin-tight
leather trousers

and he was a fiercely ambitious
intellectual.

Naturally, he longed to set foot
in more cosmopolitan surroundings.

In 1748,
Winckelmann fetched up in Dresden.

It wasn't long before he made
a discovery

that would change his life.

Winckelmann had stumbled
on a vast storeroom

filled with ancient white statues.

And they came in all shapes
and sizes.

There was plenty to,
shall we say, feast his eyes on.

There were buttocks aplenty,
there were ripped muscular torsos

and there was even the odd genital.

These white sculptures
were the most wonderful objects

that Winckelmann had ever seen
and he decided there and then

to dedicate his life to persuading
the world of their beauty.

He knew that he had
to begin in Rome.

Winckelmann arrived here in 1755.

He found it littered with white
columns and marbles from antiquity.

He immediately set to work
on a tome in which he celebrated

all the wonderful white marble
that he found.

Words spill from his pen as
he swooned over the Belvedere Torso.

And the writhing limbs
of the Laocoon.

Winckelmann's scribbling eventually
attracted the attention

of the Vatican who appointed him
keeper of their antiquities,

a distinguished post once
held by Raphael.

And it was in the Vatican
that Winckelmann set eyes

on a sculpture that would
inspire him like no other.

The Apollo Belvedere
was thought to be a Roman copy
of a Greek original

made around 300 BC.

Rosy beauty wantons all down
the god-like figure.

Such organs human nature
knows not.

The liquid hair, like tendrils
kissed by zephyrs.

Winckelmann thought this was the
most beautiful man he'd ever seen.

In fact, just the mere sight of him
got Winckelmann hyperventilating

because Apollo seemed to have
everything -

the hair, the attitude, the body.

But the thing that Winckelmann
admired most about the sculpture

was its whiteness..

Look at it.

There are no garish colours,
there are no vulgar patterns.

It's stripped back, it's restrained,
it's intellectual.

This is art that's not there
to flatter the eyes,

it's there to stimulate the brain,
and this proved to Winckelmann

how sophisticated the Ancient Greeks
really were.

I think for Winckelmann, whiteness
symbolised all the great qualities

of Ancient Greek civilisation.

It symbolised beauty and health
and simplicity

and restraint and reason.

These were the values that he wanted
his age to take up

so his contemporaries could become
as great as the Greeks

and as beautiful as Apollo.

Winckelmann's celebration
of the whiteness of ancient art

may have been idiosyncratic,
but it was hugely influential.

Winckelmann's legacy lives with us
today.

It is one of the great things that
accounts for the way in which

we venerate the ancient world.

The veneration for buildings
like the Parthenon,

our admiration of antiquity,
in its civilisation,

its architecture, its law,
its government.

Everything must be indebted
to Winckelmann.

Winckelmann had pointed the way
to a new, white Utopia

based on antiquity, and in the years
after his death,

classically inspired temples
and sculptures came to adorn cities
around the world.

And more than anything else,
they were white.

There's a great deal of moralising

that lies behind the notion
of whiteness and purity.

Winckelmann said that we should
return to the purer style of the past

and that this would make ourselves
pure.

Didn't perhaps work very much
in his case.

But Winckelmann's dream of filling
the world with the pure white

of antiquity would be realised
not in Italy,

but in the north of England.

This elegant building and its
grounds is known as Etruria,

and in the 18th century,

it was the home of Britain's most
famous potter, Josiah Wedgwood.

Josiah Wedgwood was a giant
of the Enlightenment,

the kind of citizen that Winckelmann
dreamed of producing.

He was a philanthropist,
an educator, an antiquarian.

He was a scientist and an inventor.

He supported the French Revolution,
he supported American independence.

He campaigned for the abolition
of slavery,

and happened to be the grandfather
of a certain Charles Darwin.

It would be fair to say that Josiah
Wedgwood was a pretty special man.

Wedgwood was also a disciple
of Winckelmann,

and they shared a love
of white antiquity.

From his factory near
Stoke-on-Trent,

Wedgwood produced a series
of white portrait medallions,

which conferred classical nobility
on the heroes of the Enlightenment.

The philosopher Voltaire...

..the botanist Joseph Banks...

..and the explorer, Captain Cook.

But Wedgwood's true genius
was pottery.

Wedgwood was determined to bring
the white of antiquity

into homes across the land.

But there was a problem.

British pottery had traditionally
been turned out

in the earthy colours
of the native landscape.

The secret to perfect white pottery
remained a mystery,

eluding almost everyone
but the Chinese.

Yet Josiah Wedgwood was undeterred.

Here at Stoke-on-Trent, the greatest
traditions of the pottery industry

are being maintained
by craftsmen using, in many cases,

methods and knowledge
passed down over generations.

Let's look now at a cross-section
of the processes

that go into this lovely china.

Wedgwood slaved for years
and conducted over 5,000 experiments

in his search
for the perfect white glaze.

And all of them
are recorded in an experiment book

written in his own hand.

So this is Josiah Wedgwood's
private experiment book.

And it's filled with hundreds
and hundreds of experiments,

as he tried to create
a perfect white glaze.

And it therefore tells the kind of
secret story behind that process.

And what he has got here in the book
are numbers of all

the different experiments
he's made.

406, for instance, when he says
it has got a rather good colour

but is still a little greenish.

407, 408, 409 is rather better.
410, rather worse.

So you can see what a difficult job
it was to really perfect

a very simple, clear,
pure and smooth white glaze.

But then, in 1761,
Wedgwood made his breakthrough.

Experiment 411, he cracks it,
and he writes here,

"The best of all these trials.

"Uniform, transparent
and nearly colourless"

And best of all, above it,
he writes in really big text

with an exclamation mark at the end,
"A good white glaze!"

That was written about 250 years
ago, yet the excitement,

Wedgwood's excitement,
is palpable still.

And I'm not surprised he was excited
because what he had stumbled upon

was the first great white glaze
in the history of European pottery.

And before long, Wedgwood was
turning out a series of beautiful
white pots.

He called his sparkling new range
Queen's Ware.

So this is the fruit of Josiah
Wedgwood's tireless labour,

an absolutely exquisite group of
18th century Queen's Ware objects.

And there is a huge variety.

We can go from these really
rather wonderful grand vases,

to these terrific pot pourri pots.

There are salt dishes, there is
a honey pot, wonderfully fluted

all the way around, but I think
my favourite of them all

is this absolutely delightful
covered egg-cup.

And, of course, they are all
in some way neo-classical in design.

They have the fluting, the columns,

so there is this sense of reviving
antiquity through tableware.

But for me perhaps the most
important thing of all

when it comes to these objects
is their colour,

their absolutely flawless,
immaculate whiteness.

Wedgwood took this great
Winckelmannian idea of simplicity,

taste, beauty and whiteness
and he gave it to everyone.

Thanks to Wedgwood
and Winckelmann before him,

white had conquered Europe.

By the end of the 18th century, it
had become a symbol of good manners

and good taste that promised
to unite the citizens
of the Enlightenment.

But in the mid-19th century,

one man took it upon himself
to transform the way we see white,

to make it not the colour
of unity and equality,

but exclusivity and elitism.

In 1859,
a young man arrived in London

hoping to make it as an artist.

He was an American by the name
of James McNeill Whistler.

And Whistler was a snob.

From a wealthy Massachusetts family,
he had been booted out

of the exclusive West Point
military academy

and, like many a rich kid
with more money than motivation,

he decided on a career in art.

Whistler would later be celebrated
for the paintings
he made from the Thames Embankment.

But when he first moved here,

Whistler was horrified
by what he found.

He thought the people here wore
ghastly clothes, ate ghastly food,

but, most unforgivable of all,
they had a ghastly taste in art.

The Victorian public
were hooked on paintings

that showed scenes
from well-known stories.

Myths and legends of Britain's past.

Tales of courtly love.

And damsels in distress.

And Whistler was determined
to set himself apart

from this repulsive art
and the public who loved it so much.

His inspiration came
from a novel published the very year

he arrived in London.

In sitting rooms
up and down the land,

Victorians revelled in a melodrama
written by Wilkie Collins...

..The Woman In White.

"I wound my way down slowly
over the heath when, in one moment,

"every drop of blood in my body
was brought to a stop

"by the touch of a hand laid
lightly and suddenly on my shoulder.

"There as if it had at that moment
sprung out of the Earth

"or dropped from the heaven stood
the figure of a solitary woman,

"dressed from head to foot
in white."

Did you hear someone calling
after us?

No, no, no.

The Woman In White
was a sensation in every way.

It gripped the Victorian public
like a modern-day soap opera, and it

became a hugely successful franchise
as well, spawning spin-off musicals,

plays, fashion ranges and even
two Woman In White-themed perfumes.

The success of The Woman In White
gave Whistler a crafty idea.

He would use white
to mock crass Victorian taste.

He set to work on a strange series
of paintings all of women in white.

The Victorian public
turned up to see them,

expecting to find
their favourite story told in paint.

But Whistler had them
completely baffled.

Who is this woman?
Is she the woman in white?

Why is she standing on a bear?

What on earth is this girl thinking?

Is she happily married
or soon to be alone?

But the most baffling painting
of all was Whistler's third.

And here it is, and it depicts
two beautiful young women.

The one on the left, the redhead,

she was the woman who was depicted

in Whistler's two previous
white paintings

and she's even wearing
the same white dress.

And she is reclining,
ever so elegantly on a sofa,

which is, of course, also white.

Now some thought
it must be about a wedding.

Was this woman about to get married?
Had she just got married?

If she had just got married,
where was her husband?

Or was there no wedding at all?

Was the white dress and the little
white flower underneath it

simply a symbol that she was
a kind of a Virgin Mary?

Or were the two girls
ancient Greek goddesses

in their beautiful pale drapery?

Or were they simply two
prostitutes in their nightdresses?

Well, the public was desperate
to know the answer,

but Whistler wouldn't give it them.

All he gave them was this
infuriatingly vague title,

Symphony In White, Number Three.

So what was the subject
of this painting?

Well, it wasn't about a bride,
it wasn't about a virgin,

it wasn't about a whore, it wasn't
even about a Wilkie Collins novel.

The subject of this painting
was white itself, nothing more.

This picture was simply
about different kinds of whiteness

being put together
and mixed together on a canvas.

It was a symphony in white.

For that reason
it's a really elitist painting,

because what this painting sets out
to do

is to divide the Victorian public,

to divide them between those
who don't understand the painting

and those who do,
and those who didn't understand

the painting were pretty much
everyone, the working classes,

the middle classes,
the Establishment,

and those who did understand
the painting were Whistler

and his tiny intellectual elite
based in Chelsea.

Whistler basked in the controversy.

In fact he enjoyed it so much

that white became something
of a signature.

Whistler wore white trousers,
white waistcoats and white jackets.

He cultivated a big curly lock
of white hair

right here at the front of his head.

He took to walking white Pomeranian
dogs through the streets,

and when he finally built his own
home, he called it, unsurprisingly,

the White House.

But Whistler wasn't finished.

He despised the public's taste
so much

that confusing them was not enough.

He wanted to banish them
from the art world altogether.

In 1883, Whistler opened
an exhibition of new pictures

he'd made on a trip to Venice.

But it wasn't the paintings
that caused the sensation this time.

It was the way he displayed them.

The walls were white,

the picture frames, which Whistler
himself designed, were white.

The art works themselves
were monochrome, and he hung them

so far apart that the gallery
felt almost empty.

But it didn't stop there.

Whistler was so determined to
control the look of his exhibition

that he even kitted out his gallery
attendant in the same colour scheme,

and the unfortunate individual
became known as the poached egg man.

For those people who came
to Whistler's exhibition

it must have been a really strange,
alien and discomforting experience.

But I think that's precisely
what Whistler wanted.

Why do arty people
make me feel inferior?

Bloody great club,
and I can't get into it!

Whistler called his exhibition
a masterpiece of mischief.

And it proved to be
his lasting legacy,

a defining moment in the story
of modern art.

Try and be more careful, sir,
and not allow your clothing
to drip upon the floor.

Whistler's exhibition
was hugely influential.

Because what it did was basically
pioneer the white gallery space,

the white cube
that now seems all-but compulsory

in today's art world.

No whistling,
no babies in prams or in arms.

It was a powerful legacy.

It was also a divisive legacy,

because white gallery spaces like
this may be beautiful and elegant

but the whiteness here
is also cold and sterile.

And austere.

Do not touch the exhibits.
The gallery will close promptly.

Do not wear your hat in the gallery.

The gallery cannot be held...

And, quite frankly,
completely unwelcoming.

Do not come here again! The gallery
does not welcome visitors.

In Whistler's hands,
white had become

the cold and exclusive
colour of the artistic elite.

Keep out! Go away! Do not come back!

And the modern artists of the early
20th century continued the trend.

# Blank Frank is the messenger of
your doom and your destruction... #

Making impenetrable white works
of art

that few but themselves
could understand.

# ..And he is the one
who will set you up as nothing... #

And of these modern artists,
no-one was more perplexing

than Marcel Duchamp.

A man determined to confuse
the punters at every turn.

# ..And he is the one who will
look at you sideways. #

Duchamp calls these objects
readymades.

Were they a comment
on the ridiculous price

paid for a painter's signature?

Were they drawing attention
to objects which are just as much

works of art
as accepted works of art?

Or were they a joke?

But one of Duchamp's readymades

is more notorious
than all the rest.

So this is Marcel Duchamp's
famous urinal,

which he called,
somewhat euphemistically, Fountain.

Now, when he first exhibited
this work in 1917,

it was hugely scandalous.

And it remains the subject
of intense debate today.

But there's one thing that people
don't talk about

when they discuss this work and
that's its colour, its whiteness.

And I think its whiteness is
absolutely central to its meaning,

because I think it is
supposed to remind us

of all of those elegant white
artworks of the past.

So it reminds me of the great
marble sculptures of the past,

the idea of
a great white almost-nude

on top of a plinth in a museum.

It reminds me of the great
neo-classical busts

and you almost have that head
and shoulder shape.

And it reminds me,
in its elegant surfaces,

of the great Wedgwood porcelains.

But it reminds us of those things
precisely in order to ridicule them.

Because what this object is doing

is mocking
the great white history of art.

And you know, it's almost as
though Marcel Duchamp is urinating

over the corpse of JJ Winckelmann.

But in the hands of one of Duchamp's
contemporaries,

white would be tainted further.

And it would become central
to a dark plot

to cleanse and control the citizens
of the world.

This dream that originated in the
mind of a painter-turned-architect.

His name
was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret

but he had an alias, Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier grew up in the clean
Alpine air of rural Switzerland.

His father was a watchmaker

and Le Corbusier
ran his own life like clockwork.

Every day he woke
to a regime of rigorous exercise,

striving to cleanse
both body and soul.

But, for him,
exercise was not enough.

In 1925, Le Corbusier
wrote a manifesto

that sought to show how architecture
could cleanse the world.

And in that manifesto
was a secret weapon.

A white emulsion paint
called Ripolin.

Every citizen is required to
replace his hangings, his damasks,

his wallpapers with a plain coat
of white Ripolin.

"When you put Ripolin on your walls
then comes inner cleanness.

"Without the law of Ripolin
we lie to ourselves every day,

"we lie to others."

The law of Ripolin would bring
the joy of life -

the joy of action give us
the law of Ripolin.

IN FRENCH:

In 1928,
Le Corbusier was given a chance to

put his Law of Ripolin into action.

He was commissioned by the wealthy
Savoye family to build them

a summer house
on the outskirts of Paris.

And they gave Le Corbusier
carte blanche.

After three years in the making

Le Corbusier believed he'd
created a masterpiece.

"As you enter on the ground floor
you are involved in a magnificent

"symphony of pure forms
and shapes."

This is the entrance hall
to the Villa Savoye

and it's a beautiful white,
modernist space.

But there's one thing
that's very peculiar about it.

This - a wash basin.

Now what in heaven's name is this
doing here right in the centre
of the entrance hall?

Almost the first thing you see
when you come inside.

I think it's Le Corbusier telling us
that this house is about

the act of cleansing,
the act of purification,

the act of becoming cleaner,
better people.

Running through the heart of this
house like a great zigzagging spine

is this ramp, which must have been
a very strange thing to see

in a house of the 1930s

and I must say it is
surprisingly steep.

That reveals a lot I think.
It reveals that Corbusier

designed this building
for the healthy body and this house

is not only about relaxation,
it was also about exercise.

"Demand bare walls in your bedroom,
your living room,

"and your dining room."

The culmination of this entire
building, I think, is up here.

It's where all these ramps
have been leading us

like we're on
some kind of spiritual pilgrimage,

and the destination is the solarium.

It captures the sun as it moves
throughout the day.

And these white concrete walls,

these only serve to bounce
the sunlight back in again.

Le Corbusier thought the Villa
Savoye was a work of genius.

But his client, Madame Savoye,
wasn't so sure.

The white wall may be
fantastic on the drawing board,

because it's pure and it's precise
and it's simple and it's clear.

But white walls are also cold
and somehow sterile

and I don't think they make
much room for the individual.

But Le Corbusier had lost
interest in individuals.

He wanted to impose his white
walls on something much bigger.

"The design of cities",
Le Corbusier wrote,

"is too important to be left
to the citizens".

In fact, he believed
that only one person

was important enough to design
cities - Le Corbusier himself.

And he felt that by doing so,
he could reform

not just the lives of a few,
but the lives of millions.

Le Corbusier reeled off designs
for city after city.

Paris, Berlin, Stockholm,
even Algiers.

In virtually all of them,
his monolithic white walls overwhelm

and often destroy
the historic cities beneath them.

Thankfully most of his plans
were dismissed.

"Some men have original ideas",
he said, "and are kicked in the arse
for their pains".

But as the 1930s progressed,

Le Corbusier's dream of whitewashing
the world was not yet over.

Across Europe, new political leaders
wanted to cleanse
their own countries.

MUSIC: "Kicker Conspiracy"
by The Fall

There was Hitler in Germany.

Franco in Spain.

And in Italy, Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini and his Blackshirts
had marched on Rome in 1922

and then set about transforming
Italy into a fascist state.

In 1934, Mussolini invited
Le Corbusier to Rome
to discuss architecture.

Le Corbusier was deeply
impressed by Mussolini's Italy.

"The present spectacle," he wrote,

"announces the dawn
of the modern spirit.

"Her purity and form illuminate
the paths which have been

"obscured by the cowardly".

But for all Le Corbusier's hopes,

for all his sycophantic rhetoric,
Mussolini never employed him,

because Mussolini had other plans.

Benito Mussolini was
born in 1883 near Ravenna.

He started out as a stonemason,
then a schoolteacher,

before transforming
himself into a thug philosopher

advocating the violent
overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

But, on taking control of Italy,
he cultivated a new image.

"Stop thinking and believe in me,
Mussolini,

"and I will restore
the glory that was Rome."

Mussolini saw himself
as a modern day Roman emperor.

And his goal was to make modern
Italy as imperious as it had
been in the past.

I think it was when he looked out
over the great Roman ruins

that surrounded him that he realised
that one of the best ways to do this

was to do what the Romans
had done before him

and that was to transform
the city of Rome itself.

Over the course of his dictatorship,
Mussolini embarked

on a series of grand projects,
each one bigger than the last.

All of them in white.

And white would come to symbolise
Mussolini's

maniacal plans for a new Italy.

And there was only one place that
offered the whiteness

that Mussolini craved.

It lay high up in the mountains,
250 miles north of Rome.

I'm driving along these winding
roads to Carrara.

In the mountains above me
are perhaps the most famous

marble quarries in the world.

IN ITALIAN:

For centuries the pure natural
whiteness of Carraran marble

had drawn artists and architects
from around the globe.

Now Mussolini too had
been seduced.

And when his agents came here
they were looking for

one piece of marble in particular.

Mussolini was planning an obelisk.

The ancient Roman emperors had had
them so he felt he needed one too.

It was going to be his signature
piece, his towering statement

to the world that he was bringing
Rome back to its former glory.

Mussolini ordered the largest single
block of marble

ever to be quarried here.

Getting the marble to Rome
was like a biblical epic

and Mussolini had it
captured on film for posterity.

30 pairs of oxen
worked day and night

to pull the stone down
from the quarry.

70,000 litres of liquid soap
lubricated its movement,

and a ceremonial flotilla greeted
the monolith when it arrived in
Rome.

MARCHING FOOTSTEPS

Finally, in 1932,

Mussolini's towering white obelisk
was raised to the sky.

So this is Mussolini's obelisk
and it is huge

and on it there's his name

in huge Latin letters,

"Mussolini Dux",

it means "Mussolini Leader".

So this is his big phallic attempt

to make his mark
as a modern Roman emperor.

The thing that really surprises me
about this is the fact that

it's still here.

We're decades on, Mussolini's been
completely discredited,

and his monument is still here.

They haven't even
chipped his name off it.

With his obelisk,
Mussolini had carved his name

into the history of white in the
most monumental and enduring way.

But this was just the beginning.

Mussolini would go on to build
an even larger white monument

to his fascist regime.

This sports ground was built for
the youth of Mussolini's new Rome

and is known as
the Stadium of the Marbles.

The base was built
out of white travertine,

but on top of the base there
are 60 monumental statues

that were carved out of pure white
Carraran marble.

Each of those statues came from
and represented

a different city in Italy.

It's therefore a deeply
symbolic space.

This space symbolises a strong,
healthy Italy being united

under the fascist state

and under Mussolini.

These statues remind me
of the ancient Greek figures

that Winckelmann had admired
centuries before.

But here their white forms
are tainted with much darker
connotations.

This statue represents
a runner from the town of Novara.

He's a huge, monumental,
muscular figure who is striding

quite forcefully,
almost into the stadium itself.

I must say I think this is utterly,
utterly ghastly,

because this is Mussolini's
poisonous fantasy

of an ideal Italian citizen...

..because in the 1930s, Mussolini,
very much inspired by Hitler,

decided that the Italians were
Aryans in origin.

They were white people.

And what better to represent
white Italian people
than white Italian marble?

In the white of these sculptures
I can no longer see grace

or purity or reason.

This is a white of fear, of racism

and of tyranny.

And, in his most ambitious project,
Mussolini planned to impose

that tyrannical colour on yet
more of his people.

Though the Second World War
was still raging,

Mussolini continued to remake Rome.

He dreamed of a
vast white metropolis,

the nerve centre
of his fascist regime.

Mussolini chose a malarial swamp
on the outskirts of Rome

as the site for his new city.

Spread over 1,000 acres,
it became known as EUR

and it still stands today.

All around are
the white marble monuments
of Mussolini's urban fantasy.

But the focal point
is this building -

the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana.

We are right smack bang
in the centre of EUR

and this really does embody

Mussolini's grand ideas
of rebuilding

a new, brilliant, purer,
whiter Italy.

Le Corbusier would have loved
to have done this -

to remake the world and to remake
it as white as possible.

The Palazzo was conceived
as a giant white display case

celebrating all the ideals
of Mussolini's fascist regime.

It's flanked by two marble statues
of mythological heroes

and around the base
are 30 more sculptures.

Each one represents a different
industry, art or science.

But what's most striking

is its unwavering
oppressive whiteness.

What you see here is whiteness
as a totalitarian colour.

A colour that brooks
no disagreement,

brooks no dissent
and brooks no disorder.

It is the enemy of individuality
and it is the enemy of anyone

or anything that threatens
to corrupt its purity.

And that, I think, is the reason why
fascists like Mussolini

loved it so much.

Mussolini was ousted in 1943
and was lynched by his own people

shortly before the end
of World War Two.

And it is he who
brings our story to a close.

From the 18th century we believed
white could enlighten us all.

It could inspire us, improve us
and delight us.

But, in the modern age, it became
a tool to divide, to exclude,

and ultimately, to control.

The purest colour had become
the darkest colour of them all.

Today we remain blind
to white's darker side.

We still think of it
as a clean, blank canvas.

But look closer and that canvas
is for ever tainted

with our own flaws and failings.

White is the immaculate reflection
of an impure world.

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