The Art of Spain (2008–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - The Mystical North - full transcript

Travelling through
the north of Spain

feels like visiting another country,
and in some ways it is.

Many people who live here
don't feel Spanish.

And even speak a different language.

In the 20th Century, this feeling
of difference would break out
into violence, revolution and war.

And out of this conflict
would explode some of the most
astonishing modern art ever seen.

Primal, vivid and often violent.

The story of Northern Spain

is crucial to the
whole history of modern art.

I'll be travelling through
its physical landscape

but what I'm really interested in
is its psychological landscape.



A dark, troubling place,
but one that's lit up by
wonderful flashes of wild humour.

It's a journey that leads to the
darkest and the most fascinating
recesses of the Spanish imagination.

My journey starts here -

Fuendetodos -
a one-horse town in the heart of
Aragon in the north-east of Spain.

Nothing about this sleepy village
says much about the man
who was born here in 1746.

His name
was Francisco de Goya y Lucientes.

And he completely reframed
the way in which we see the world.

He asked totally new questions about
what it means to be a human being,
with profound and shocking results.

Goya spent his youth painting
light-hearted decorative
pictures for the Spanish Court.

As well as a series of celebrated
portraits of his royal masters.

But almost overnight his
art metamorphosed into something
dark and strange.

It's this work that fascinates me,

and it why he's now known as one
of the fathers of modern art.

In 1792 a mysterious, near fatal
illness left Goya completely deaf.



And he retreated from the revelry
and decadence of the Spanish court
into his own imagination.

The result was a far darker style -
nightmarish, grotesque,
increasingly pessimistic.

Goya was born in this house in 1746.

Almost 60 years later,
war ravaged his beloved Aragon.

In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain.

The French army vastly
outnumbered their opponents.

The Spanish response
was a new kind of guerrilla warfare
that relied on ambush and surprise.

The conflict that resulted was
without rules, chivalry or honour.

Women and children were murdered,
there was mass rape,
and corpses were mutilated.

And Goya saw it all.

Goya's response
was a series of 85 etchings
known as the Disasters of War,

which were considered too dark
and desolate to be published
in his own lifetime.

One of the things that's
brilliant about them is that Goya
has taken the medium of the etching,

the portfolio that you leaf through,

that traditionally
connoisseurs of art would
hand around at the dinner table.

He's taken that and given you
the last thing you want to look at.

What you get is this terrible
sense of building, growing atrocity.

As if Goya's saying,
"How bad can it get? You think that
it can't get any worse?

"I'll show you worse. Look at this.
"This is still worse", he writes.

In some ways the most
revealing image is the very first.

We see in an image
that immediately evokes

the religious certainties
of the Christian past.

It's a man on his knees
with his arms outspread,

and you think this looks like
Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.

But no, it's not.

It's just an old man
with a torn shirt,

kneeling

in a dark landscape.

And I think that's Goya's way of
saying the darkest thing of all.

Saying that God is dead.

There is no salvation -
just...just darkness.

In the Disasters of War,
Goya had invented a completely
new art for a new age of doubt.

But he was going to venture
even further into the void.

Deaf, bereft of God,
and convinced of man's inhumanity,
he withdrew from the world.

He moved into an isolated house
in a forest outside Madrid.

And directly onto its walls,
he painted an extraordinary
expression of his despair.

They are known as
the Black Paintings.

Black in subject matter
and black in colour.

They are full of
nightmarish visions of witches,

frenzied violence and devil worship.

The Black Paintings are Goya's most
deeply disenchanted pictures,

taking art itself into
completely new, uncharted territory.

Nobody really knows why Goya painted
the Black paintings,

and nobody
really knows what they mean.

But then,
that's part of their significance.

This is painting taken
to the brink of incoherence.

Goya paints a dog,

and suggests that perhaps that's
all that life amounts to in the end.

That's all we are -

a dog barking into the void.

The Black Paintings
have only survived

because they were painstakingly
transferred to canvas
70 years after Goya's death.

He never tried to exhibit them,
or even preserve them.

You get the feeling he painted the
Black Paintings for himself, and
himself alone - an audience of one.

Look at this!
Two men up to their knees
in some kind of primeval sludge,

smashing the hell out of each of
each other with wooden cudgels.

You've got the sense that
this is just going to go on forever.

That that's what life is,
men killing each other.

There's this feeling
that everything's fallen to bits.

Life is meaningless, the last one
out, please turn all the lights off.

How dark can painting get?

This is a picture
of a pilgrimage procession,

but...it's as if the lunatics
have got out of the asylum.

Look at these faces!

He's almost deliberately
stopped being able to
paint so that the faces...

They've been twisted.
It's like clay...

formed by a child. You can imagine

the eyes are made by sticking
your fingers in. But look over here.

This is my favourite painting
of the lot.

It's the darkest of them all,
but I think the mood
has suddenly lightened.

It's Saturn devouring
his own child, arrghm!

Taking this bite
out of that bloody corpse.

But it's got this orgiastic energy.

It's as if Goya's saying,
"Well, if everything's so black,

"let's turn it into a carnival
of death and gloom and despair."

The mad staring eyes.
And what's extraordinary
is that he hung this picture

on the wall of his dining room.

This is what he looked at
while he was eating his dinner!

Soon after he completed
the Black Paintings,

Goya's sight deteriorated to
the point where he could barely see.

Within five years he was dead.

Goya may have lit the fuse of modern
art but the painters who came
after him didn't follow his lead.

And artistically speaking,
Spain went to sleep
for the best part of 50 years -

the longest siesta in history.

It's as if Goya's successors
couldn't bear to peer into
the abyss that he'd opened up.

They painted picturesque peasants
toiling happily in the fields
or dancing at fiesta time.

And boy, was their work boring!

It wasn't until the start
of the 20th century that
the gauntlet thrown down by Goya

was finally picked up,
and Spain became one of the real
powerhouses of modern art.

But modern art was to take a
very particular course in Spain.

In a country steeped
in fervent Catholicism,

the doubt of the Modern age,
Goya's doubt,

would constantly come up against
the old beliefs and superstitions.

Spanish modern art
would be forged out of the friction
between these two opposites -

modern atheism, ancient religion.

This story was shaped here
in Barcelona, in Catalunya
in the north-east of Spain.

During the early years of the
20th century, the city was
undergoing an economic boom.

The people of Catalunya wanted to
declare their own sense of identity

and independence from Madrid,
the centre of government.

The man whose work exemplified
Barcelona's spirit of exuberance

at the start of the 20th Century
was the architect, Antoni Gaudi.

His wonderful Parc Guell is like a
permanent festive firework display

with it serpentine forms
and bright mosaics.

Gaudi was the first great artist
to emerge in Spain since Goya.

But he was very
much Goya's opposite.

His work shouts "Yes!" to the world

with its organic,
sexy shapes and its carnival spirit.

But Gaudi's style itself - organic,

sinuous,
growing out of the Catalunyan soil -

was also directly
inspired by God's natural world.

Unlike Goya,
who had assaulted religion,

Gaudi was a man who clung
to the certainties
of Spain's Catholic past.

His most famous building,
one which he spent almost
his whole life failing to complete,

was a cathedral -
The Sagrada Familia.

The silhouette of Gaudi's great
cathedral still looms large over
the modern cityscape of Barcelona.

And seen from you a distance,
you can really sense the spiritual
aspiration that lies behind it.

It almost looks like
the fingers of a human hand
reaching up towards the heavens,

towards the God
that Goya had denied.

Gaudi saw himself as
God's architect, and it was to God
that he looked for inspiration.

But the Sagrada Familia was to
be a deeply troubled project.

Even as Gaudi was building it,
the religious climate
in Barcelona was changing.

New ideas began to undermine
the ancient traditions
of the Spanish Church.

Funds for his
great Catholic cathedral
became ever harder to come by,

and the building remained
incomplete at his death.

From somewhere like here,
you get Gaudi's original
designs and nothing else.

And this park is a particularly
good place to look at it from.

And in fact you get double
your value for money -

you get the building's
reflection in water as well.

And I think that takes you to the
heart of what Gaudi wanted from it.

He wanted this to look
like a cathedral that had grown,
almost like a stalagmite

growing from the floor of a cave,
rather than something
that had actually been built.

I like Salvador Dali's idea,
who said that the whole thing

should have been left as it was
when Gaudi died,

and they should have simply placed
a huge glass bell jar over it.

Sadly, they're doing the opposite.

Since the architect's death, work on
the Sagrada Familia has trundled on.

Nowadays, the cathedral is
funded mainly by Japanese
businessmen obsessed by Gaudi.

The results, however, are more
Disneyland than anything else.

The sad truth is that the Sagrada
Familia is being ruined day by day

by the very efforts of those
who claim to be completing it.

With its vile accumulations of
kitsch statuary and its pastiches of
Gaudi's original mosaic decoration,

it's in danger of turning in to
no more than Europe's largest and
most cynical job creation scheme.

It's not that Gaudi wasn't
one of the very greatest
architects of the 20th century,

it's just that if you
want to understand why,
you have to go elsewhere.

Looking forward to this.

This is the flat of Carmen.

Hello! Hello, Carmen, it's Andrew.

I've got some flowers for you.

Thank you. May we come in? Yes.

Come in, come in, and do whatever...

It's ironic that you get the
strongest sense of Gaudi's
spirituality and optimism,

not from his religious architecture,

but from a block of flats
he designed in the
first decade of the 20th century.

La Pedrera, or the Stone Quarry,
inspires a real sense

of awe and wonder that's missing
from the Sagrada Familia.

Carmen has lived in the building
for the best part of 60 years.

She's still utterly devoted to
the place, and still in love
with the architect who created it.

This is for you. Thank you.

And this is for me.

Gaudi built the building
for private families.

So every bedroom has next to
the bedroom, the bathroom. Always.

And it is,
when I show you the flat

you will see that it is
absolutely comfortable and useful.

Those are words, it's interesting,
because Gaudi, like many modern
architects, some people think,

well, it's very beautiful,
but you couldn't live in it,
it's not nice to live in.

No, no. Do you still love living
here as much as when you started?

Si, si.

He may have been dead for more
than 80 years but Gaudi
keeps Carmen very busy indeed.

You have not
closed the door of the lift!

Always the same!

Always! I am ashamed!

It's gone down now.

I am ashamed!

Because always that camp.

Tourists, friends of mine,
always leave the door of the lift...

badly...closed.

I didn't close it properly.

I think it's gone down.

Sorry. Would you mind if we
walked around the flat a bit? Yes.

So what do you call this room?

This is the living room.

This is the living room.

The floor is traditional.

Of course I have not polished it
but it is original.

And can you see the ceilings?

Look - faith! The cross.

Land, the Catalan flag.

Love. The heart.

Isn't that beautiful? And what
is that in the middle? The sun?

No. Just nice.

Just a beautiful thing.

Oh yes, it is beautiful.

It's very welcoming of light,
this house.

There's always light. In every room.

The sun is an inhabitant
in this house.

The sun lives in your house?

Yes, the sun lives here.
I love that!

Being with Carmen I couldn't help
feeling like a schoolboy who's
been called to see the headmistress.

So when she said we had to go
downstairs to look at something
else, I wasn't about to argue.

I live number seven.

We shall go to the first.
One flat below.

You will see the difference!

Close the door, please. Sorry, yes.

And look at the sculptures
up the top.

Look at the sculptures!

Like Henry Moore!

It IS like Henry Moore!

Like Henry Moore.
Modern, look, modern sculpture.

And here it says "Ave", "Ave".

And here it says "Ave Maria".

Because Gaudi was very fond
of Our Lady. Yeah.

Carmen certainly knows Gaudi
inside out, and she was dead right
when she mentioned Henry Moore.

If you look at the
exterior of the building,

you can see how Gaudi's achievement
went far beyond architecture alone.

I think that he reinvented
the entire language
of 20th Century sculpture.

These balconies are astonishing,
with their tangle of abstract forms.

And the roof of La Pedrera, well!

These chimneys anticipate
not just Henry Moore's sinuous,
organic sculptures,

but also the whole movement
towards the primitive
during the 20th Century.

All of modern art is here.

It's a paradox that Gaudi, an artist
so wedded to the Catholic past,

should have invented
the art of the future.

He embraced celibacy, yet his
buildings, with their phallic towers
their womb-like openings,

are seething with sexual suggestion.

Now the same tension between
spirituality and sexuality

would drive
the life and work of Gaudi's
most famous admirer - Pablo Picasso.

Picasso moved to Barcelona with his
family when he was 14 years old,

and he always said that he had
his first sexual experience here
in the city's red light district.

Now carnal experience,
carnal knowledge,
were always central to his art.

He once said that he wanted to paint
a woman who seemed so real you could
smell her as well as touch her.

I think that Barcelona's whores
and whorehouses always
loomed large in his imagination.

Barcelona gave Picasso
the subject to which
he would obsessively return.

Even though he was to spend most
of his adult life in France,

he remained devoted, like a lover,
to the sexy memories of the city
that had first inspired him.

This is the
Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

But it's a Picasso Museum
like no other, because it was
shaped by the artist himself.

Towards the end of his life,
he gave a remarkable collection
of his own work to the city

that had first
sparked his extraordinary career.

And I think if you read
his own selection of works
as a kind of coded message,

you can see this whole place
as a sort of confession chamber

in which Picasso set out
to show Spain that he himself
always felt Spanish to the core.

What's intriguing
about this collection, for me,

is the sheer weight of
religious works that it contains.

Look at all these studies
for religious pictures.

And look at this
wonderful crucifixion.

Again, it's done when he was just...

15, 16 years old.

It reminds me of Picasso's remark

that he could draw like
one of the old masters
of the Renaissance when he was 15

and he spent
the rest of his life learning
to draw like a five year-old.

But that religious theme,
that deep Spanish Catholicism at
the heart of Picasso's young life,

is very much the theme,
if you like, the coded message
of this collection.

And it reaches a kind of
early climax in this picture
of The First Communion.

And while he can't exactly
be described as a religious man
for the rest of his life,

this womanising bohemian,
I think that what he's
telling us in this museum

is that he never really
loses his attachment

to a profoundly superstitious way
of thinking about the world.

If you take that message to heart,
as I think Picasso meant you to,

all of his work suddenly
looks rather different.

Think of Cubism.

It's often said
to be the coldest, most rational
phase of Picasso's art.

An attempt to depict objects as you
see them when you walk round them.

But, think of Cubism from a
religious perspective,

and isn't it an attempt to do
what the painters
of old Catholic Spain had done?

To make people and objects hover
and shimmer,
like things seen in a vision.

To make the air itself
crackle with spiritual electricity.

Even his most famous painting,
Les Demoiselles D'Avignon,

based, despite its name, on an
experience in a Barcelona brothel,

is soaked in memories
of the Catholic past.

The angular style
may seem fiercely modern.

And the terrifying female faces
with staring eyes draw
inspiration from African masks.

But still, the painting presents us
with an ancient Christian theme.

A man tempted by fiends
and demons in sexual form.

A modern version of
the temptation of St Anthony.

A subject painted by generations
of Spanish Catholic artists.

I really think you can't understand
Picasso unless you understand
that he ALWAYS remains wedded

to a particular,
very deep and Spanish sense
of the superstitious powers of art.

And I think he's a man
who spent his whole life...

The whole Picasso project, if you
like, can be explained by his desire
to re-enchant the landscape

of the modern world,
to re-enchant modern art,

to give it
these figures with staring eyes,

to give it some of that power
of the ancient superstitious images
of the Catholic past.

And here you've got Picasso,
completely the Spanish Picasso,

taking on the greatest ghost
of the Spanish past -

this is his version of Velazquez's
Las Meninas,

the single most famous Spanish
painting of all.

Painted from the sitter's
point of view,

Velazquez's masterpiece turned
the traditional
royal portrait on its head.

What has Picasso done with it?
He's turned it into
something completely different.

It's become
a huge, strange, phallic celebration
of the power of the artist himself.

There he is,
wielding his paintbrush.

This is not Velazquez, it's Picasso.

And Picasso is a great totem pole
erected phallically
in the centre of the picture.

He's turned himself into the image
of the God he spent
his whole life looking for.

E bien, C'est fini.

Spanish modern art's so rich,
you get the feeling that anything
could have grown on Barcelona's

fertile ground during
the early years of the 20th century.

And in fact, Catalunya saw itself,
both mythically and literally,
as a kind of Eden.

Catalunya is one of the
most fertile parts of Spain.

It's a very important part of the
Catalunyan sense of identity
that you should never lose touch

with your roots in that landscape.

And that's why, for me,

the market takes you to the
beating heart of Barcelona.

Because it's here that you come
to see, to enjoy, to taste,

all the bounty of
that Catalunyan landscape
that lies beyond the city.

This place is all about life,
colour, engagement with experience.

The Spanish have
a word for it, "allegria".

"Joie de vivre"
it would be in France.

It's why my favourite Catalan
proverb is very straightforward.

It simply goes...

"Eat well, shit strongly,
and you need have no fear of death".

The final member of Barcelona's
great trio of modern artists was,
above all, a painter of allegria.

A man whose whole being was bound up
with the notion of Catalunya
as a Garden of Eden.

His name was Joan Miro.

His museum is high in the clouds
overlooking Barcelona.

Fitting, because it really is
a chamber of dreams and fantasies.

And all of them rooted in Miro's
memories of his childhood home.

Miro was profoundly attached to
the place that he was born,
Montroig in rural Catalunya, which,

I think, when he was a child,
he felt that this was a place
charged with a sense of wonder.

Even when he travelled to Paris
to find out all about modern art,
to become a modern artist,

it's said that he actually took
earth and grass from the soil of his
village and put it in his suitcase.

And some of these early
pictures of Montroig -
this is a beautiful example -

they're his depictions
of where he came from.

And it's as if he's painted
every building of the village

with an intense hyper-real
attention to detail.

Every blade of grass,
every patch of earth.

It's almost as if these pictures
were another way of taking Montroig

and being able to roll it up and
put it in his suitcase.

Take it with him on his travels.

All his life Miro saw
the soil of Catalunya
as his own vision of Paradise.

And even after he moved
to Paris in 1920,

his art looked back to his idyllic
youth growing up in Catalunya.

One of the things that sets
Miro apart is the way
he manages to preserve

a childlike,
innocent sense of wonder.

This is one of his Constellation
pictures, and I think it exactly

captures that childhood experience
of lying on your back,

staring up at
the summer night sky full of stars,

and trying to imagine what shapes,
what forms, what patterns
might lie in that constellation.

He uses the language of children's
art in a very interesting way.

To me it's as if Miro
looks at the world through
both ends of a telescope.

On the one hand he captures
the cosmic grandeur of nature.

But on the other hand it seems
to me that he's fascinated by,

you could say, pond life.

He's fascinated by how much
existence, amoebic,
strange creepy-crawly existence,

might be there
teeming in a single drop of water.

I think that this is what
a picture like this is about.

What's interesting, what connects
the two is I think whether he's
looking up or looking down and in,

he always finds these
strange, wonky creatures.

To me they're very much like
his version of angels.

Where Picasso had treated sex
with a kind of religious intensity,

Miro found his own holiness
in images drawn from landscape.

And here, outside the building,
he placed a kind of earth goddess.

Like a guardian angel
forever watching over the city.

When you think back to what
happened here in Spain during the
early part of the 20th century,

it really was extraordinary.

You've got Gaudi, who's reinvented
the language of architecture.

You've got Picasso who's totally
transformed painting and sculpture.

And I can't help thinking,
well, why?

Why is it that when I think
about the great modern artists,

it's the Spanish
that I want to go to?

I want to go to these guys,
I want to go to Picasso.

Their work feels as fresh now
as it was when they created it.

But why?

I wonder if it isn't because
here in Spain they
never lost that deep conviction

that for a work of art to really
get you and keep you fascinated,

it's got to have
a sense of the mysterious.

The decline of religion didn't
mean that Spanish art was
stripped of its mystical power.

It just meant that artists looked
elsewhere for spiritual nourishment.

Psychoanalysis claims to offer
its disciples self-knowledge and
answers to life's big questions.

Surrealism was the great artistic
movement to explore
these ideas of the unconscious,

the irrational
and the world of dreams.

And in Spain, the greatest
Surrealist painter would find in
this new territory of the mind

the mythic power of the Scriptures.

I'm travelling north up the
coast from Barcelona

to the little town of Cadaques,
through this
remarkable coastal landscape,

full of
clefts, ravines and gullies.

Little suggestions
of the human body.

And that's appropriate
because this is the landscape
that inspired none other

than the great Surrealist and
all round showman, Salvador Dali.

Dali's called his pictures
"hand-painted dream photographs",

but I also think they're like the
sermons of some hellfire preacher.

In his most famous early work,
The Persistence of Memory,

there's the sense of time standing
still, as it does in dreams.

But also a fanatical
preoccupation with death.

That tragic puddle of flesh,
Dali's own self-portrait,

is his way of saying that we're
all doomed to rot in the grave.

Ants, symbolising corruption, crawl
over the casing of a pocket watch.

Solid objects melt like cheese.

Dali actually said his inspiration
was a plate of over-ripe Camembert.

People are as subject to decay
as the food they eat.

The Catalunyans have always
famously been obsessed by food and
Salvador Dali was no exception.

This was his favourite restaurant
in Cadaques.

And the wonderful thing about it is
that if you order a selection
of his favourite things to eat,

what you end up with
are the raw materials
for a Salvador Dali painting.

Except it's one that you
can eat, and that's
exactly what I intend to do.

Dali's endless
clowning around is revealing.

It's as if his own youthful
visions were so sharp and morbid

that he spent the rest of his life
shying away from them.

That tension between genius and
self-parody lies at the heart of the
bread and egg-encrusted building

that he erected in his
birthplace of Figueres.

Both museum,
and a zany burial place.

Dali himself
is buried under the floor

and this really
is just a gigantic, kitsch mausoleum

to the degraded memory
of what Surrealism had once been.

With its huge theatrical pastiches,
its Liberace fag-end papier-mache
Surrealist objects,

its absurd waxen Christ, it's almost
as if he's emasculated himself,

held up his own testicles
and said, "Look,
this is how bad I can really be!"

This is the Mae West apartment.

Look, all the images resolve
into the face of Mae West.

Fantastically clever.

Dali claimed that his museum was the
world's largest Surrealist object.

But the trouble is that it isn't
actually very surreal at all, in the
sense of being genuinely disturbing.

It's more like a giant
amusement arcade.

There's a car
where it rains on the inside,

but only if you throw in a coin.

The truth is that, although Dali
was, briefly, one of the greatest
painters of the 20th century,

he'd lost the plot
as early as the 1940s.

And by the '70s, he was doing
adverts for Alka-Seltzer.

First, it dissolves.

Then the Alka-Seltzer
shoots into the stomach!

Here it neutralises that
bad excess acid and those beautiful
places will be beautiful again.

Alka Seltzer is a work of art,
like Dali!

And yet, and yet, and yet, tucked
away in this rather obscure corner

of Dali's
architectural orgy of self-hatred,

there's a remarkable shrine to
his genuine genius as a young man.

If I had to choose one picture out
of those assembled here,

it would be this one,
The Spectre of Sex Appeal,
which he painted in 1934

absolutely at the
mid-point of his brief,
golden moment of inspiration.

It shows us a young boy,

perhaps Dali's memory
of himself as a young boy,

contemplating this strange
image of female sexuality.

As so often in Dali, sex,
death and food are all combined.

The figure is made out of blood,
bones, flesh

and bizarrely, sausages.

If we think of the 20th century
as the great century of
self-obsession, self-exploration,

as the century of the Self, you
think of Jung, you think of Freud,
who actually admired Dali

although he found him, "A very
annoying young man," he said.

You have to say that the great poet
of that century of self-exploration

was Salvador Dali.

He gave us the language of dreams.

During the 1930s Dali had fast
become a controversial figure.

Spain had become increasingly split
by a political struggle

between the Communist left
and the Fascist right.

Dali himself was kicked out
of the Surrealists for having
suspected Fascist sympathies,

or at least for not being Communist
enough for the rest of the group.

Despite these accusations,
he was to create a work of art

that would sum up the gathering
storm soon to engulf his homeland.

It's called
Premonition of a Civil War,

Soft Construction in Boiled Beans.

Spain is seen to be ripping
its own body apart,

strangling the life out of itself.

In 1936, just six months after
the completion of the picture,

artistic prophecy became reality
and the Civil War began.

It was a war that would tear Spain
to pieces, destroying families,

and leading to horrific atrocities
committed by both sides.

Key battles between the Fascists,
led by General Francisco Franco,

and the Communist Republicans were
fought out on the Aragon plains.

I've come to the town of Belchite,
that was ravaged
by fighting in 1937.

Left exactly as it was
after the last shot was fired,

it's Spain's great memorial
to the disasters of modern war.

It would be insensitive to call it
a work of art.

What happened here
was far too bloody for that.

But I do think that it's one
of the most extraordinary
monuments of the 20th Century.

Between two and three thousand
people died here in Belchite
in the course of just 12 days,

and you can still feel
the violence that
tore the heart out of this place

in the shattered remains
of its architecture.

What's really haunting is the scale.

It's a whole city preserved in
the moment of its annihilation,
like some 20th Century Pompeii.

But what did for this place wasn't
an act of God, it was an act of war.

The Battle of Belchite was more
than 70 years ago, but the wounds
that it opened up have yet to heal.

Paco Naval grew up in the town,
and endured
the turmoil of the Civil War.

So this is the old church?
Las Iglesias? Las Igles.

"There will be no more young people
coming in here and you'll never hear
the songs your fathers sang before."

Paco, how old were you
when the Civil War came to Belchite?

15?

And what do you remember?

What are your most vivid memories
of what happened here?

The people of this region,

do you think they've recovered
from the trauma of the war yet?

No.

In April 1937,
one of the worst atrocities
of the Civil War took place.

Picasso recorded this godless act -

the carpet-bombing
of a northern Spanish town -

in a monumental work of art.

Guernica.

Yet again, Picasso is drawn
back to the religious past.

The painting's a great altarpiece,
full of horror, but also a sense of
hope and even potential salvation.

As if, even in its darkest hour,
Picasso believed that his
beloved Spain might one day be saved

from Franco and his devils.

During the Civil War, Franco had
authorised a failed bombardment
of the world famous Prado Museum.

I think that says a lot about his
attitude towards art in general.

The fighting finally ended
in 1939 with victory
for Franco and the Nationalists.

By the time both sides had put
down their weapons, approximately
half a million people were dead.

He ruled Spain
for the best part of 40 years,

during which time there would
be precious time room for
self-expression or free-thinking.

It's not that there
would be no great artists in Spain
during the Franco years,

it's just
that they'd live in exile.

But many of these exiled artists
would find new ways to
express their creative visions.

Painting, in the hands of
Luis Bunuel, moved off canvas
and onto celluloid.

Spain's greatest film-maker was
also one of art's true subversives.

He spent his childhood here
in Aragon, but lived in
exile for most of his life.

His work is full of savage, anarchic
humour and surreal flourishes.

In 1960, Franco's regime
decreed that Bunuel should

be allowed to make any film
he wanted on Spanish soil.

An attempt to entice
artists back to Spain.

The following year
Bunuel released Viridiana,

climaxing with a blasphemous
parody of Leonardo's Last Supper.

It wasn't the film Franco
had hoped for.

Pere Portobella was the
executive producer of Viridiana,
and a close friend of Bunuel.

Was Bunuel straightforwardly
an atheist,

or was it
more complicated than that?

If you had to put your finger on
Bunuel's single greatest ambition
as a film-maker, what would it be?

To understand the singular
vision of this cinematic artist,

you have to travel
to the place where he was born.

A place, he said, where the Middle
Ages lasted until World War One.

Bunuel's youth was one of blind
faith and it was spent here in
Calanda, in the heart of Aragon.

Bunuel was the living embodiment of
everything Franco would have hated.

A radical liberal intellectual,
who detested organised religion

and was fascinated by the wilder
extremes of human sexuality.

In fact, these three great
obsessions - sex, left-wing politics
and Catholicism,

were all shaped
by his childhood here in Calanda.

Miguel Juan Pellicer was
a 17th-century inhabitant of Calanda
who was run over by a cart.

And his leg was so badly damaged
that it had to be amputated.

Now, Pellicer was a deeply
pious man and he hobbled
his way on a pilgrimage to Zaragoza,

where he prayed to
a famous image of the Virgin.

And he took oil from the lights
that burned before that image
and he rubbed it on his stump.

Now the story goes that one night
in 1640, while he lay sleeping,
the Virgin, attended by angels,

flew down from heaven with
the missing piece of his leg

and attached it.

From that moment on he could walk.

The miracle of Calanda is remembered
as the single most exciting thing

ever to have happened
in this rather sleepy town.

Bunuel's 1970 film
Tristana goes to the heart of
his fixation with the missing leg.

A strange mixture of intense
eroticism mingled with disgust.

Every time I look at it, I can't
help wondering if Bunuel's obsession

wasn't his way of expressing
how he felt about Spain itself.

A beautiful cripple, mutilated
but still exerting
a powerful hold on him.

A cripple who one day
might be made whole again,

though probably not by anything as
miraculous as an angelic visitation.

It may not have been an act of
divine intervention,

but Franco's death in 1975
was certainly a huge liberation

for those who
had endured his 36-year rule.

More than half a million people
went to see his body lying in state.

To check, so the joke went,
that he really was dead.

But, although Franco was gone and
Spain was once more a democracy,

the nation would still
be haunted by violence.

And once again,
the north of the country was at
the heart of the conflict.

I'm heading into the Basque country.

Now the Basques, like the
Catalunyans, see themselves very
much as a nation apart within Spain.

They also have their own language.

But the fight for independence here
has been much bloodier.

The separatist group ETA
still carries out
terrorist attacks to this day.

And the sense of Spain as a nation
essentially riven
by conflict and violence,

that's right at
the heart of Basque culture.

Until the late 1990s, Bilbao
was a fading industrial town
with few distinguishing features.

And then in 1997, a new building
broke with the past, and although it
was designed by a man from America,

it seemed to usher in not only
a new form of architecture,

but a new future for Spain
and its art.

ETA were so outraged by the very
idea of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim

that they tried to blow up artist
Jeff Koons's flower-covered Puppy
sculpture in front of the museum.

The policeman who
disturbed them was shot and killed
by the Basque separatists.

I think the violent response
to the building goes to
the heart of its significance.

For the Basques, it wasn't Basque
enough. Many Spanish hated it cos
it wasn't designed by a Spaniard.

But for the authorities at Bilbao,
that was the point. They wanted
something that wasn't Spanish.

They wanted to get a New York
architect in to put their city
on the international map.

But I think that the wonderful
paradox is that they ended up
with something

that's Spanish to the core,
because Gehry's a clever bloke.
He knows his art history.

And I'm sure that when
he was designing this building
he had somewhere in his mind

Picasso's constructions and pictures
of the Cubist period.

We know because Gehry said so, that
he had in his mind a picture called
The Accordion Player by Picasso.

So, yes, it's a great
Frank Gehry building.

But I can't help thinking - and
maybe I should keep my voice down

in case some of Gehry's people
are listening,

(it was really
designed by Picasso)!

The early years of the 20th century

had seen the north of Spain
produce some of the
world's greatest painters.

But at the centre of that movement
there had always been the
phenomenal architecture of Gaudi.

And now at the start
of the 21st century,
I think it's architecture once again

that holds the key
to the future of Spanish art.

Santiago Calatrava
is at the forefront of
the new wave of Spanish architects

taking the nation forward.

The building that really sums up
his approach is a winery
that lies in the Rioja region.

To my mind, this is the perfect
end to a journey that's taken me
through 1,000 years of Spanish art.

While Calatrava might have created a
building that looks totally modern,

it's also steeped in tradition.

I think this building's an absolute
knockout and what I love about it

is the way it seems to contain
so much of Spain's cultural past.

Yes, it's a masterpiece of modern
architecture, like a great abstract
sculpture erected in the landscape.

And there is a specific
reference to modernism
in the shape of these Gaudi tiles.

But I also think
it's extremely Moorish.

Look at the way he's used water
and reflections. That's very Arab.

You can see the entire structure
as a kind of Arabesque
drawn in the air.

It reminds me
of Islamic calligraphy.

And look at this!
It's the prow of a ship.

Looking at that I feel
I'm in the presence of the ghosts
of the Armada,

the Conquistadors,
Christopher Columbus.

There's so much of Spanish history
in this one building.

And yet he's not left that
history safely in the past.

He's taken it and he's sailing off
into the future.

The double helix shape of the
building puts me in mind of DNA,

and I think that Calatrava is saying
some pretty interesting things about
what it can mean to be Spanish.

He's saying, "Yes,
I've got Arab-Moorish ancestry.

"I'm a little bit Catalunyan,
I've been Catholic."

But he's also saying that you
can put all those things together

and they don't necessarily
have to be in conflict.

The long, bloody history of Spain
is one in which
these different elements

of the national character
have forever been in conflict.

North versus South,

Arab versus Christian,

Nationalist versus Republican.

But now I think there's this new
spirit of inclusiveness,

and it's absolutely
summed up by this building.

He's saying we can accept our
differences and we can use them

and, from that,
there is this extraordinary
new sense of possibility.

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