paintings

Egon Schiele

Great Artists episode 12 – Egon Schiele

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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 draftsmen in art history and perhaps the most obsessive painter of the self. In the programme Tim Marlow examines Schiele’s vision in works such as Death and the Maiden and Seated Male Nude. Great Artists – Egon Schiele This major 26-part […]

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Mary Cassatt

Great Artists episode 11 – Mary Cassatt

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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 – Impressionism. In works such as The Boating Party, Cassatt articulates her bold, vivid vision. Great Artists   This major 26-part series takes a fresh look at the most important artworks of some of the greatest artists in history. Shot

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Delacroix

Great Artists episode 8 – Delacroix

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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 often considered to be the last great history painter of European art, producing the iconic Liberty Leading the People, a work which encapsulates the revolutionary turmoil of his day. Great Artists This major 26-part series takes a fresh look at

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Constable

Great Artists episode 7 – Constable

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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 changed the course of British art.     As well as looking Constable’s most famous works, such as The Haywain and Flatford Mill, Tim Marlow explores lesser known works such as the expressive sketch for The Leaping Horse Great Artists

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Great Artists episode 7 – Jacques-Louis David

Great Artists episode 7 – Jacques-Louis David

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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 in politics at one point almost cost him his life, and in the end forced him into exile. Works featured in this programme include The Oath of the Horatii and The Death of Marat. Great Artists This major 26-part series

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Goya

Great Artists episode 6 – Goya

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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 him apart from almost any other painter in history. Tim Marlow explores works such as the Naked Maja, the Disasters of War and Saturn Eating his Children. Great Artists – Goya This major 26-part series takes a fresh look at

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Holbein

Great Artists episode 3 – Holbein

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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 artists before him and is the father of a tradition of portraiture which continues to this day.     In the programme Tim Marlow looks at works such as Holbein’s portraits of Erasmus and Henry VIII, as well as one

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Picasso

Modern Masters – Picasso episode 3

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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 artists, he investigates how Picasso’s influence, particularly that of his Cubist work, continues to pervade modern life today, in the shape of buildings, interior design, clothes and of course contemporary art. Tracking down former Picasso model Sylvette David to her

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Modern Masters - Matisse

Modern Masters – Matisse episode 2

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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 colour and simplification of form continues to inspire illustrators, designers and of course artists today.     Acknowledging the debt the famous couturier Yves St Laurent owed the painter, Sooke also talks to British designers Sir Paul Smith and Tricia

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Civilisations episode 3

Civilisations episode 3 – Picturing Paradise

Art, History / 2 minutes of reading / / By

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 in the 10th century, in Song dynasty China. The Song’s scrolls are never innocent of the values of that world – the landscapes depict immense mountains projecting imperial authority. But as that authority was threatened and overwhelmed, majestic mountains are

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Michelangelo

Great Art: Michelangelo – Love and Death

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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 through the great chapels and museums of Florence, Rome and the Vatican to explore the tempestuous life of Michelangelo.     Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni Or more commonly known by his first name Michelangelo (6 March 1475 – 18

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