The High Art of the Low Countries episode 3: Andrew Graham-Dixon shows how the Low Countries rose again to become a cultural leader in the modern age, with artists like van Gogh, Mondrian and Magritte. Despite its small and almost insignificant size it produced important forward-thinking artists like van Gogh, Mondrian, Magritte and Delvaux, who changed the face of art forever.
Andrew’s journey takes him to a remote beach in north west Holland that inspired Mondrian’s transition to his now-renowned abstract grid paintings. Andrew digs deep into the psychology and social history of the region, exploring how the landscape of the past has informed the culture and identity of the Low Countries today and the impossibility of the Dutch drive to turn the philosophy of Mondrian’s geometric order into a way of living.
The High Art of the Low Countries episode 3
Andrew Graham-Dixon
Andrew Michael Graham-Dixon (born 26 December 1960) is a British art historian and broadcaster. Graham-Dixon began work as a reviewer for the weekly Sunday Correspondent, before becoming the chief art critic of The Independent newspaper where he remained until 1998. Early in his career (in 1987, 1988 and 1989) he won the Arts Journalist of the Year Award three years in a row. As of 2005 he is the chief art critic of The Sunday Telegraph. Since 2004, he has also been a contributor to the BBC Two’s The Culture Show on a variety of subjects, and is often the main presenter of the programme.
In 1992, Graham-Dixon won the first prize in the Reportage section in the Montreal World Film Festival for a documentary film about Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa. He has since gone on to present many BBC documentary series on art, including A History of British Art (1996), Renaissance (1999), Caravaggio (2002) The Secret of Drawing (2005), The Battle for British Art (2007), Art of Eternity (2007), Art of Spain (2008), The Art of Russia (2009), Art of Germany (2010), Art of America (2011), British Art at War: Bomberg, Sickert and Nash (2014), Art of China (2014) and Art of France (2017). He is passionate about the Mona Lisa, appearing in the popular BBC documentary Secrets of the Mona Lisa (2015).
