Egon Schiele has become one of the most celebrated artists of the last hundred years. He was a controversial figure in his own short lifetime who was jailed on an obscenity charge. His work is starkly honest and provocative, intensely powerful images where the human figure is stripped down, both sexually and psychologically. He’s one of the great […]
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Mary Cassatt is one of only a handful of women artists up to the beginning of the twentieth century who have managed to forge a reputation in the male dominated story of art history. She was an American by birth but lived in France for sixty years and helped to develop the first great movement in Modern art
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Delacroix Delacroix is France’s greatest romantic painter – an artist who challenged to rigid classicism of the previous generation, injecting a degree of fluidity and unpredictability to his art. He established a taste for the exotic in European art, influenced by his travels in North Africa, as in his famous Women of Algiers in their Apartment. He is
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Constable There have been few more powerful painters of landscape than John Constable. He brought a scale, ambition and impact to a subject long considered amongst the lowest forms of art. Constable is often celebrated as a nostalgic painter of a lost England but look a little harder, though, and you discover an intense and radical vision at work which
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Jacques-Louis David Jacques-Louis David was a revolutionary artist in every sense. He was also fully committed supporter of the French Revolution and Napoleon using his art as a powerful instrument of political propaganda. As the originator of a hard-edged form of neo-classicism, he gave contemporary life something of the grandeur of ancient Rome or Greece. But his involvement
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Goya Goya has often been described as the last of the great old masters and the first of the new. He painted sublime portraits of the Spanish royal court and celebratory pictures of the good life in Spain. But he also produced some of the most harrowing images of human cruelty ever created, an unflinching vision that set
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Stealing Van Gogh: Andrew Graham-Dixon confronts the worlds of high art and seriously organised crime to uncover the true story behind the greatest art heist of the 21st century. In December 2002, two priceless and historically important paintings were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in a brutal and audacious robbery by experienced, professional thieves. But
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Holbein Hans Holbein the Younger has claims to be the greatest portrait painter who ever wielded a brush, a central figure in the spread of the Renaissance in Northern Europe whose deftness and remarkable accuracy captured the spirit and faces of the court of Henry VIII. He made the human individual seem more real and more exposed than any other
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The life of Pablo Picasso is an exciting story of rebellion, riches, women and great art. In this episode of a four-part series dedicated to Modern Art, journalist Alastair Sooke travels through France, Spain and the US to see some of the artist’s great works and recount tales from his life story. Talking to architects, fashion experts and
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Journalist Alastair Sooke sets out to discover just how much the artist Henri Matisse has influenced our modern lives. Tracing the biography of this fascinating artist, and travelling through France, America and Russia, the programme explores some of the painter’s greatest works. Sooke explains why Matisse’s art is considered so great and also looks at how Matisse’s brilliant use of
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In Civilisations episode 3, Simon Schama explores one of our deepest artistic urges – the depiction of nature. Simon discovers that landscape painting is seldom a straightforward description of observed nature – rather it is a projection of dreams and idylls, as well as of escapes and refuges from human turmoil, the elusive paradise on earth. Simon begins
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The spectacular sculptures and paintings of Michelangelo seem so familiar to us, but what do we really know about this Renaissance genius, and who was this ambitious and passionate man? A virtuoso craftsman, Michelangelo’s artistry is evident in everything that he touched. Spanning his 89 years, this episode takes a cinematic journey from the print and drawing rooms of Europe
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