Alain Jaubert

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The Briton Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 - 1851) is one of the most productive painters in art history: he created around 32,000 works, mostly landscape paintings. At the age of 14, the Royal Academy in London accepted him as a scholarship holder, and he later became a member there and taught at it. The “master of light”, as Turner was called early on, is considered the most famous forerunner of impressionism. Alain Jaubert's film presents the themes and experiences that determined Turner's work and life: natural spectacles, ships and extensive study trips to France, Italy and the Alps.

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Gauguin was a sailor and then a stockbroker at the money market. Husband of a young Danish woman, Mette Gad, he became a father. Then, he started painting. In order to reach his “shades’ poetry”, he got around in Brittany, Panama, West Indies, “lands of primal liberties”. Always looking for human beings that hadn’t been “spoiled by progress yet” and were marked by “archaic religiosity”, he’d give the best of his painting in Polynesia. The Arearea (“Amusements”) painting was painted during his first stay in Tahiti. The red dog was a particular source of curiosity during the exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s place in 1893.

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By painting his monumental work The Raft of the Medusa, completed in 1819, Théodore Géricault elevated a news event to the level of modern history painting. A denunciation of cowardice, an admission of human brutality, a fascination with disaster—this ambiguous and unclassifiable work that obsessed the painter echoes one of the greatest scandals of the Restoration and, at the time, creates a new aesthetic.

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In 79 AD, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried the city and inhabitants of Pompeii under volcanic debris and preserved—until excavations in 1909—a vast fresco painted a century and a half earlier in a suburban villa. Populated by twenty-nine life-size figures against a vivid red background, this decoration, as famous as it is enigmatic, has given rise to several interpretations, which this film seeks to clarify with the help of documentary evidence.

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Around 1515, Master Mathis added painted panels arranged as double wings to a sculpted altarpiece created twenty years earlier for the convent-hospital of Isenheim in Alsace. Dedicated to Saint Anthony the Abbot, the work was intended for patients afflicted by ergotism—the “St. Anthony’s fire”—a scourge of poorly nourished Europe that the Order of the Antonines sought to combat under the spiritual protection of their healing patron saint.

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Ten similar faces are printed in black, in two rows, on a big canvas measuring 5,65 meters long by 2 high. Similar, these faces ? Not quite : the viewer can distinguish many little differences, like the variations that might come from a same mould. He can also recognise the face of a famous actress, Elizabeth Taylor, "Liz". Andy Warhol composed this picture in 1963 from a photo of the star and by repeating it ten times thanks to a screen-printing screen. Why this face ? Why this repetition ? Warhol does not reveal the keys to his work easily. He became a painter by chance and seems to choose his motifs arbitrarily. Working in New York in the 1960s, at the heart of the "pop art" movement, could he be a sort of negative reflection of consumer society ? A picture like this, which seems to break with traditional portrait art, can however be deciphered just as well as a more ancient painting...

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These three very big panels scattered in three different museums (London, Paris and Florence) are considered to be a sort of manifesto of the new art of the 15th century. The rediscovery of the principles of perspective of the ancient Greek treatises, the innovations of an architect like Brunelleschi or a goldsmith like Ghiberti were put to good use by painters to render space and depth. But, in Uccello’s work, in addition there is, besides the passionate quest for perspective, an intense curiosity for geometric shapes, for colour and above all for movement. The subject of The Battles of San Romano : an obscure battle in the Tuscan hills, in 1432, between the mercenaries of Florence and those of Sienna. Paolo made it into a feast for the eyes and the mind and invented paradoxical images which had consequences right up to the cubist and surrealist painters.

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The silhouette of a giant wave about to engulf fragile boats: this image of suspended fate has traveled the world in the form of postcards, posters, and advertisements. Why such success? How did an image so deeply rooted in a specific culture—that of Japanese prints—come to achieve such universality?

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Shitao, one of the most skilled painters of his time, was deeply imbued with Buddhist spirituality, as he was forced to take refuge in monasteries from a very young age. His painting relies on the simplicity of line and the pure white of the paper. Here, a mountain landscape is rendered in ink on rice paper mounted on a silk scroll. Beneath the apparent simplicity of the subject unfolds a whole universe of hidden correspondences that one must learn to decipher.

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Using a funerary portrait from the Fayum preserved at the Louvre Museum, this documentary explores the art of portrait painting in Roman Egypt during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. These strikingly realistic faces, painted on wooden panels and placed on mummies, reveal a multicultural society shaped by Egyptian, Greek, and Roman traditions. Through this single portrait, the film reflects on identity, memory, and the human relationship to death.

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It was a French prelate who commissioned the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of Saint Louis of the French in Rome, dedicated to his patron saint, Matthew. But he died long before he could know that the result would be three paintings, executed with astonishing speed around 1600 by a young Lombard painter known as Caravaggio, who was thereby creating his first religious cycle. The faithful enter between two large canvases facing one another: The Calling and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. On the high altar is a third, smaller work: Saint Matthew and the Angel. Three episodes intended to edify the Catholic conscience of the French pilgrim and to inspire emulation through the power of the image, in accordance with the principles of the Counter-Reformation during this era of religious wars.

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A square format market by the rhythms of its many obliques (the frame of the glass window, the guardrail in the foreground) and its brilliant colours (ultramarine, emerald, orange, pink and the bright yellow of the mimosa), L'Atelier is one of Bonnard's last great paintings. It is also one of his masterpieces, magnificient and enigmatic, meriting in itself a detailed analysis.

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From the Bagdad School (14th century) to the Qadjar School (19th century), Persian painting has always preserved an extraordinary vitality. Court art essentially involving book illustrations, it had its schools, its royal ateliers, its secret techniques, its great masters. The focus of this film is one of the finest work from the department of oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a collection of Five Poems (Khamse) by the great 12th century Persian poet Nezâmi. The examination of papermaking techniques, make-up, calligraphy, drawing and painting affords an opportunity to discover a fascinating civilization

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Blue period, blue traces, blue sponges... Yves Klein deserved his nickname of "Yves the monochrome". Even though he used many other colours, it is the colour of the sky that he chose above all, used over and over again and that he made into not just a mode of expression but a sort of spiritual energy. Klein had the idea of using directly the naked bodies of his models as "living paintbrushes", inventing by his strange sessions, between ritual and striptease, a whole catalogue of new forms. At the same time, intuitively, almost naively, he went through both the history of legendary pictures, the history of the peculiarities of nature and the noble history of nudes in painting. The Anthropométries are both a meditation on imprint, trace, disappearance and coloured variations on the theme of incarnation.

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A hanging composed of the six most famous tapestries in the world. These pictures, reproduced everywhere and in all possible forms, have become the emblems of a certain form of romantic art of the late Middle Ages. Beautiful ladies, fabulous animals, abundant flowers, sparkling colours, everything in these tapestries brings pleasure to the eyes. But once the first marvelling is past, the visitor asks questions. What are these blasons that are so obstinately repeated ? What scenes exactly are these hieratic ladies playing ? Why is there each time a lion and a unicorn ? What do these trees, flowers, various animals scattered all over the surface mean ? And who had these splendours woven ? And for what use? Which artist designed the models ? Questions burst out everywhere. Several of them have surprising answers.

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Dedicated to one of the major paintings by Auguste Renoir, created in 1876, this documentary combines a meticulous analysis of the artwork with engravings and photographs showing the true “face” of Montmartre Hill at the end of the 19th century.

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Scandal at the 1865 Salon. Édouard Manet shows a pale, naked girl lying indifferently on a divan. "What is this odalisque with a yellow belly, an ignoble model picked up God knows where, who represents Olympia? The crowd gathers as if at the morgue before M. Manet's overripe Olympia..." She is Victorine Meurent, one of the painter's favorite models. She posed for Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, for Woman with a Parrot, just as she would pose ten years later for The Railway. A peaceful body, yet a free and independent woman. The painting is a kind of homage to the traditional studio model who has haunted the desires of painters since the Renaissance. It is also a modernist provocation. The references, the mythological and classical allusions, are put to the service of a contemporary scene made all the more scandalous for its unmistakable evocation of the brothel.

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Who were they burying that day in Ornans ? A gathering of ordinary people, a priest, altor boys, all inhabitants of Courbet's native village. The secrets of a simple funeral ceremony which nevertheless created a scandal in the 1851 Salon.

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An educational French TV documentary series which goes into depth during each episode into the analysis of a single painting.

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Documentary of a network of caves discovered in 1940 in France. Inside are hundreds of depictions of animals painted approximately 17,000 years ago. The site is no longer open to the public, but can be seen here.

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A plunge into the strange and fascinating world of Francis Bacon, whose painting struggles to exorcise violence and death. The anguished and very intimate universe of one of the greatest 20th century painters reveals multiple allusions to classical painting.

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A still life featuring a large fish, painted in the Dutch manner, The Ray immerses us in the quiet life of familiar objects that the artist took pleasure in depicting. The careful search for the exact placement of each kitchen utensil and each piece of fruit was a long and meticulous process through which Chardin gave his work symbolic or historical meaning.

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Born in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne returns to settle there after some journeys elsewhere. He takes as his motif the Sainte-Victoire mountain close by and paints it more than sixty times in different ways and at every time of year. A strange kind of obstination which it was necessary to examine again.

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Composed in Nice, at the Hôtel Régina where the painter had been living since 1949, The Sadness of the King, a 1952 painting nearly four meters by three, is one of the last great works of Matisse. It was created using the cut-paper technique: the painter, immobilized by illness, cuts shapes from sheets of paper previously coated with gouache. He directs an assistant who pins them and moves them on the wall until the desired balance is achieved. Scissors, handled with dexterity, thus henceforth replace pencils and brushes. The pure tones used in the composition eliminate all shading and allow the painter to play solely on the relationships between colors and, above all, on contrasts: black and white (considered by Matisse as colors in their own right), red and blue, green and yellow...

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The Pilgrimage to Cythera's island is one of the glories of the Louvre Museum. Praised by Baudelaire, Nerval and Proust, copied by countless painters, continually analysed, it is both legend and utopia. What are those dancing couples doing ? Are they leaving for or coming back from the island of love ?

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Born in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne returned to settle there after some travels. The nearby Sainte-Victoire mountain became his subject, which he would depict more than sixty times in different styles and in every season. This strange obsession warranted further investigation.

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An image that appears ordinary, with a highly explicit subject, can carry troubling undertones. Is it not most strange that this painting may have been created during a religious scene? This final variation on the opposition between sacred love and profane love brings several centuries of religious painting to a close and opens a new era: eroticism is no longer the domain of ancient gods but is shared here and now, in the most everyday setting. With Fragonard, the bedroom and the bed become the most fantastical settings, where accessories—lingerie, cushions, drapery—reshape, on the margins of the action, the folds and recesses of a new, metaphorical geography of love.

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In 1630, Rubens who is settled in Anvers marries in a second marriage Hélène Fourment. In the huge studio he has had built, he paints several portraits of Hélène, in the garden, in furs, in a carriage, which are minutely analysed in this film. For he does not content himself with making a simple portrait but tries to portray she whom her admirers had compared to Homer's Helen and to transcribe in allegoried form, all the attributes of the femininity.

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At the time Wassily Kandinsky painted Yellow-Red-Blue (1925), he was a professor at the Bauhaus. In this work, the painter applies the principles of color and analytical drawing that he also taught to his students and developed in several theoretical writings. The paintings of this period are highly colorful and highly geometric. The three primary colors and the artist’s favored shapes—triangle, square, circle—become true epic characters. “Form is the outward expression of inner content,” Kandinsky said.

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Raphael strives to capture the open and sympathetic face of his friend and deliberately simplifies his composition. Yet the image is filled with clues and can be interpreted today using both traditional laboratory analysis and historical archives. The technical details of the pictorial surface, the choice of colors, and the hidden symmetries of the image already reveal how the painting was created. But the clothing, the hairstyle, the materials used, and even the model’s gaze—or the way the reflections are placed in his eyes—each carry a precise meaning within this composition.

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Is the painting by Giorgiorne or by Titien ? It is difficult to distinguish the work of Giorgione (who died in 1510 at the age of 33) from the early works of Titien (who, for his part died in 1576 at a great age). The Rural Concert which for a long time was attributed to the former is now more willingly attributed to the latter. Analysis of the style, scientific analyses may allow for the hand of one or the other. The mysteries of the scene have done more for the fame of the painting than its uncertain authorship. Why these two naked women beside the two clothed men ? What is the meaning of their gestures ? What music are they playing ? Why that landscape and that flock of sheep ? In order to understand the story and its allusions one must penetrate the learned culture of Venice at the beginning of the 16th century. And also perhaps to compare it with the somewhat contradictory interpretations which modern painters have given such as Manet with his Partie de campagne.

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In october 1888 Vincent Van Gogh who has been living for eight months in Arles, paints his room. A year later, when he is at the Saint-Paul de Mausole Hospice near Saint-Rémy, he feels compelled to paint two copies of this picture which he is especially fond of. It is deliberately simple and yet seems very strange. Vincent wanted to see it as a symbol of rest but the objects in it seem to retreat and space seems to become deformed. Detailed researchs, as in the series "Palettes" has made it possible to reconstitute exactly the room in Arles. Vincent painted it in fact with the detail which fascinated him in the work of the old Dutch Masters. But he brought to it the extraordinary gift of his brush stroke and his new range of colours. That autumn, between the sunflowers, the harvest and the room in Arles Vincent reached the "higt note in yellow".

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It is with regard to the painting "Nude descending the staircase" that Alain Jaubert has chosen to evoke the work of Marcel Duchamp. It is 1913, in New York, and the work of this 25-year-old young man, which depicts different moments of the action of the same character, is causing a stir. Cubists do not recognize it as one of their own, and traditionalists see it as a dangerous iconoclast.

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