January 31
Paolo Uccello: The Battle of San Romano
Among the greatest of all depictions of battle, these three panels were break throughs in painting technique, so that contemporaries must have viewed them in awe. Also they were the victims of an audacious art crime.
February 7
Leonardo da Vinci: The Last Supper
The story of probably the most renowned painting in the world. The Last Supper revolutionized Western art and its power reverberates to this day in the courts and the bookshops and cinemas. Just how Leonardo Da Vinci broke with traditions in creating his supremely dynamic masterpiece is recounted, together with the tale of his disastrous attempt to use a new technique in wall-painting.
February 14
Rembrandt van Rijn: The Night Watch
Why should a painting of a group of part-time Amsterdam militiamen, dressed up for an occasion that wasn't serious anyway, have become the most revered painting in Holland? The full story of Rembrandt's masterpiece.
February 21
Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting
Of all Vermeer's paintings, it was probably this picture that he held in greatest esteem. It was the painting he used to show off his skills to customers. A customer three centuries after he died was none other than Adolf Hitler
February 28
Francisco Goya: The Third of May 1808
Arguably the most powerful painting about war ever achieved. It portrays the slaughter of civilians after Napoleonic troops entered Madrid in 1808. The programme reveals the historical truths behind the painting and shows exactly how Goya achieved this masterpiece of protest.
March 6
Eugène Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People
The great revolutionary masterpiece, painted by a man who soon complained that revolutions got in the way of dinner parties. Shunned by the government of the day, it has endured to become the symbol of the French republic and an icon of later revolutions.
March 13
Katsushika Hokusai: The Great Wave
Perhaps the most celebrated of all Japanese pictures, the Great Wave's portrayal of a huge wave about to overwhelm three boats was only produced by Hokusai when he was old and broke and needed money badly. A print that cost little more than bowl of noodles to those who first bought it, the image has been hugely influential on later art.
March 20
NO CLASS -- SPRING BREAK
March 27
Édouard Manet: Le déjeuner sur l'herbe
Two men sitting on the grass, with a picnic nearby. They are not looking at a naked woman seated nearby, who stares brazenly out of the canvas at the viewer. In the background a second woman is doing something hard to quite see. Just what is going on? The full story of the painting that many believe is the beginning of modern art.
April 3
James McNeill Whistler: Portrait Of The Artist's Mother
The stark portrait, mainly in greys and black, that James McNeill Whistler painted of his mother is now a picture that is widely lampooned as a portrait of a prim Victorian lady. She is shown smoking reefers, wearing trainers, having a tatoo. But Whistler's approach was revolutionary in its time, wholly departing from the Victorian tradition of sentimental narrative painting. His relationship with his mother was also an intriguing study in contrasts.
April 10
Edvard Munch: The Scream
The Scream tells the life-story of the painting more widely reproduced than any other, even the Mona Lisa. It shows exactly how and why the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch arrived at his extraordinary image and how that image of the screaming person has reverberated down the decades to become an icon in modern culture.
April 17
Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers
Perhaps the most reproduced of all 19th century paintings, The Sunflowers has a story that lies at the crux of the complex relationship between Van Gogh and Paul Gaugin. The programme reveals how Van Gogh started to paint sunflowers soon after he moved from Holland to Paris and how they became the emblem of his embrace of Southern France, warmth and the sun. It looks especially at the 8th of the Sunflower paintings, the one in the National Gallery in London which is arguably the best in the series. It was most admired and desired by Gaugin but denied to him by Van Gogh as their relationship deteriorated.
April 24
Auguste Renoir: Dance at the Moulin de la Galette
This painting was once described as the most beautiful of all the artworks of the 19th century. Certainly it seems the happiest. But beneath renoir's joyful portrayal of working class Parisians at leisure is another, darker story.
May 1
Georges Seurat: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
A popular masterpiece and yet an enduring enigma. It seems to show a quiet scene in a Paris park but there are hints at the demi-monde, if you know where to look. The most remarkable aspect of this vast canvas however remains Seurat's technique his revolutionary pointillism.
May 8
Gustav Klimt: The Kiss
One of the most sensual of paintings, achieved in the extraordinary intellectual climate of turn of the century Vienna by a male artist of prodigious sexual appetite. Yet it may portray the shift of sexual power towards the female.
No comments:
Post a Comment