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Henri Rousseau, referred to as "le Douanier", started to paint in Paris around 1880, at the age of 40. This self-taught artist was friendly with the poet Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay and Pablo Picasso, who recognised his genius, and yet his work was to remain under-rated during his lifetime.
However, with its dislocated compositions and profoundly dreamlike subject matter, it was to have a decisive influence on modern art, from surrealism to abstract art. This documentary film explores the secret inspiration and the little known influences of a painter whose canvasses are much less naive than they appear to be.
In joyous, early 20th century Montmartre, a band of penniless artists comprising Max Jacob, Picasso, Apollinaire, Derain and Vlaminck, among others, takes up residence in an old piano factory : le Bateau-Lavoir.
Soon enough, anyone who is anyone in the way of painters, writers, and art collectors is rubbing shoulders in the shabby-chic hallways of their warehouse. The bohemian lifestyle that they cultivate revolves around doing work, meeting muses, and making merry.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Seine, Matisse, known for leading a life of austerity, is busy turning the established order upside down at the Salon d'Automne of 1905, exhibiting works that burst with flamboyant color. Fauvism is born. From within the murky halls of the Bateau-Lavoir, Picasso prepares his response. Paying homage to their respective visions of modernity, the two painters ready their brushes for a contest of canvases.
The interwar period is significant for its tumults of enthusiasm and illusion. Communism is a tempting alternative, and the desire for social, moral, artistic, and political revolution hangs in the air¡K
In 1936, war erupts in Spain. Malraux and Hemingway are covering the Republicans' struggle as journalists, and photos by Capa and Gerda Taro get published in the international press, fostering a broader awareness of the conflict.
In April 1937, the Guernica massacre inspires Picasso to create a monumental canvas symbolizing the violence perpetrated by Franco's supporters and by fascism more generally. The Spanish Republic is lost, and one war ends as another begins.
World War Two erupts, and France mobilizes its war effort. After the debacle of June 1940 and the Occupation of Nazi Germany, Europe is in tatters, and artists and intellectuals flee in droves.
Old friends among those who stay behind are eventually torn apart. Some collaborate, some resist - many make do as they can, and others pay for their commitment with their lives. When the war at last is over, Paris reawakens to find that an astonishing work has been created from within its war-torn midst : the film "Les Enfants du paradis", an homage to freedom written by Jacques Prevert and masterfully directed by Marcel Carne.
On being released from the hospital, Apollinaire discovers what life is like in Paris during the war. In Montparnasse, foreign artists - most of whom are Jewish, having fled the anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe - are dying of hunger. They form the School of Paris.
Soutine, the poorest of the Russian artists, strikes up a friendship with Modigliani, the handsomest of the Italians. In 1917, Apollinaire stages a performance his play Les Mamelles de Tiresias using the subheading "surrealist drama."
The word "surrealist" is born. It catches on, becoming common currency in art circles around the globe. One year later, Apollinaire succumbs to the Spanish flu. Modigliani passes away on January 24, 1920. His funeral, attended by all the artists of Montparnasse, brings the age of bohemianism to a definitive end.
Picasso responds to Matisse with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The canvas causes a scandal and ushers in the aesthetic of cubism.
Not long thereafter, however, a series of rifts occur. Picasso, now wealthy from record sales figures, leaves the Bateau-Lavoir. Apollinaire moves into the heart of the Saint-Germain neighborhood. The poet Max Jacob, the poorest of them all, is one of the only bohemians to continue living in the hardscrabble misery of Montmartre.
When the First World War breaks out, yesterday's friends part ways forever. Braque, Derain, and Vlaminck go to the front. Picasso stays in Paris. Apollinaire is wounded on the front lines in 1916.
The war has ended, and the streets erupt in celebration. Montparnasse swings to the rhythms of jazz and hops to the buzz of lively cafes. Paris is a movable feast. Conceived as reactions against the absurdity of war, the Dadaist and Surrealist revolutions are underway.
Leading the charge are "the three musketeers": Breton, Aragon, and Soupault, backed by Man Ray, Desnos, Tzara, and many others. In 1919, one of the major works of the Surrealist movement is unveiled : Les Champs magnetiques.
The model Kiki, revered by every painter of the day and poised to be crowned queen of Montparnasse, has a tumultuous love affair with Man Ray before he takes off with Lee Miller.
Pierre Bonnard is one of the great masters of 20th century painting. A painter of the intimate, driven by an obsession with landscapes and domestic scenes, his timeless oeuvre earned him great criticism in his time.
How did Bonnard, a private, anxious man, who lived an ordinary day-to-day existence, become the incontestable painter of intimacy, capable of transforming reality into a unique and incandescent world?
Through his paintings, his personal notebooks, his correspondence with Matisse and Vuillard, the photographs he was so fond of, and the places he lived, which he painted and exalted time and time again, the film plunges viewers into the world of this master of colour.
The roots of COLORFUL LIFE (1907), just like those of Wassily Kandinsky himself, were firmly anchored in age-old Russian soil.
And yet the painting contains all the elements that were to accompany the painter in the greatest revolution in the history of art: the leap into abstraction.
In 19th century Paris, for both political and economic reasons, Parisian prostitution became a social phenomenon on an unprecedented scale. From the seedy part of town to the salons of the wealthy bourgeoisie, Paris became the capital of sex.
During this industrial revolution era, doctors and moralists, cops and robbers, bosses and workers all used prostitution ¡V and it inevitably attracted artists.
From the mid 19th century, it was as though prostitution had become a central, key theme of artistic creation. The film recounts the rise and metamorphosis of prostitution in the 19th century, through the eyes of artists, and the pictorial revolution that accompanied it. By exploring the representation of prostitution in 19th century arts, the film dwells on this very specific moment in the history of the "world's oldest profession".
Diego Velazquez, the artist ceaselessly in search of the human truth through the treatment of the light and the space and in the way he roams around things, is a documentary maker before his time. His work full of boldness marks an essential stage in the history of paint.
From the paints of Velazquez and especially what gets free of it, the movie goes off to explore the peculiarity of the "painter of the painters" and of the artistic and esthetic revolution which Diego Velazquez caused. Since the "Venus with a Mirror" up to the mirror of Menines, the movie escapes any didactisme and attempts to recreate the exceptional emotional link between the work of Velazquez and the look of the public, between the eye of the painter and the one of the spectator. Between his life and our lives.
A LADY IN HER BATH (circa 1571), by Francois Clouet, bears witness to a period in which the pleasure of the senses and the spirit were caught up in religious conflict.
The Revolution is rumbling: the foul pamphlets aimed at "the Austrian woman" must be eliminated.
With MARIE-ANTOINETTE DE LORRAINE-HABSBOURG, QUEEN OF FRANCE AND HER CHILDREN (1787), Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun attempts a campaign of seduction. But it is far too late to win back the love of furious public opinion.
With a tiny and delicate paintbrush, Jean Fouquet adds the golden threads of a tentative humanism to THE MARTYRDOM OF SAINT APOLLINIA (circa 1450) and unveils a glimmer of the modern era, crouching behind the horizon of the Middle Ages.
With the war of colonisation raging, Eugene Delacroix was the first artist to cross the Mediterranean.
The naturalism of WOMEN OF ALGIERS IN THEIR APARTMENT (1834) takes us into the calm and simplicity of a harem as Eugene Delacroix saw it with his own eyes.