Alain Jaubert

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.

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.

A study of Veronese’s painting The Feast in the House of Levi (1573), originally conceived as a representation of the Last Supper. By transforming the traditional space and spirit of the subject into a grand Venetian banquet, the painter was accused of heresy by the Inquisition (reconstructed here through a voice-over of his dialogue with the judges). Ordered to correct the work, Veronese changed only its title.

Why have these two paintings, The Young Women and The Old Women, always been presented together? Historical investigation does not provide an answer. Alain Jaubert then sets out to follow the trail, patiently gathering clues: both paintings depict a lady and her servant. But while in The Young Women a “maja” is shown in a street scene that seems to belong to the European literary tradition, in The Old Women, Goya portrays an aging coquette and her servant, rendered as caricatures. The diamond arrow worn by the coquette is a clue that helps interpret these two paintings... As this “audiovisual autopsy” unfolds, the works come together to form a kind of fable about destiny—both that of Spain, devastated by the Napoleonic wars, and that of the painter himself, aged and disillusioned, who finds renewed energy in a new love.

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".

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is certainly the most mysterious painting of all the history of painting. Thirty different attempts of finding out the hidden meaning of it have been made without success. The Flagellation is not only the masterpiece of a great artist telling an enigmatic story, it is also the expression of Renaissance's new ideas and art. Piero had a great reputation as a painter and as a mathematician. A few of his paintings show his vast knowledge of perspective. The architecture, the paving, the ceiling, the whole setting of The Flagellation - up to its smallest details - is governed by the laws of perspective. By computing all these datas, it was possible to recreate in three dimensions the exact space that Piero had imagined.

Let us travel back to the 15th century and imagine the interior of the workshop of the painter Jan van Eyck: a porter delivers a wooden panel, one assistant grinds pigments, another mixes them with linseed oil, and a third arranges them on palettes. It is in this environment that Jan van Eyck was able to paint The Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin, a small-scale work depicting the Virgin Mary seated on a blue cushion embroidered with gold, holding the Christ Child on her lap, facing a man in his sixties who clasps his hands in prayer.

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.

Alain Jaubert uncovers the details, interprets the symbols, and analyzes the composition. Why did the painting spark such controversy when it was presented in 1831? Was it the nudity of this armed woman? Or the triumphant people depicted in a realistic staging?

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.

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.

From his very first paintings, Rembrandt stages himself. Thereafter, at least a hundred times, he would take his own face as the sole subject of an engraving, drawing, or painting. Such persistence, unique in the history of art, has been interpreted in many different ways. Some of Rembrandt’s self-portraits might appear to express an extravagant man. Yet the objects depicted in them can often be deciphered in quite another way. Through canvases and panels, one can indeed follow the entire history of Rembrandt’s face, but also read the full symbolism of a humanist Europe undergoing profound transformation.

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.

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

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?

The Crucifixion is a rather surprising painting of Picasso's. The painter has in fact very rarely painted religious subjects. And, in the place of a convertional representation of Calvary it shows very strange figures. The sacrifice becomes a sort of initiation ceremony or one of exorcism. Picasso uses, for him, unusual colours, reds, yellows, raw greens which combine in mingled shapes with violent contrasts of colours. Once again the graphic palette and special effects used in the film help to interpret the painting. The work is made up like a puzzle full of allusions and references to the profound personal crisis Picasso was living through at the time. His private and intimate life is joined to the universal drama.

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