British Masters (TV series)
Encyclopedia
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
television series on 20th century British art
British art
British art could refer to:* Art of the United Kingdom - post 1707* English art* Irish art* Scottish art* Welsh art...
, presented by Dr James Fox
James Fox (art historian)
Dr James Fox is a British art historian and broadcaster. Fox is a Research Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and specializes in 20th century art at the University of Cambridge's History of Art Department....
and first broadcast in July 2011 on BBC Four
BBC Four
BBC Four is a British television network operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation and available to digital television viewers on Freeview, IPTV, satellite and cable....
. The series covers the period from 1910 to 1975.
The first programme explored the lives and works of Mark Gertler, Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, OM, RA was a Dutch painter.Born in Dronrijp, the Netherlands, and trained at the Royal Academy of Antwerp, Belgium, he settled in England in 1870 and spent the rest of his life there...
, Walter Sickert
Walter Sickert
Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century....
, Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
, Lawrence Atkinson
Lawrence Atkinson
Lawrence Atkinson was an English artist, musician and poet. He began by moving to Paris and studying musical composition, but moved back to London and began to paint, apparently painting mainly landscapes in a style influenced by Matisse and the Fauves...
, David Bomberg
David Bomberg
David Garshen Bomberg was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington...
, Richard Nevinson
Christopher R. W. Nevinson
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was a British figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer. He is often referred to by his initials C. R. W...
, Paul Nash
Paul Nash (artist)
Paul Nash was a British landscape painter, surrealist and war artist, as well as a book-illustrator, writer and designer of applied art. He was the older brother of the artist John Nash.-Early life:...
and Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer
Sir Stanley Spencer was an English painter. Much of his work depicts Biblical scenes, from miracles to Crucifixion, happening not in the Holy Land but in the small Thames-side village where he was born and spent most of his life...
. The second programme explored the works of John Nash
John Nash (artist)
John Northcote Nash CBE RA was a British painter of landscape and still-life, wood-engraver and illustrator, particularly of botanic works.-Biography:...
, Stanley Spencer, Alfred Munnings
Alfred Munnings
Sir Alfred James Munnings KCVO, PRA was known as one of England's finest painters of horses, and as an outspoken enemy of Modernism...
, William Coldstream
William Coldstream
Sir William Menzies Coldstream was a British realist painter and a long standing art teacher.-Biography:...
, Paul Nash and John Piper
John Piper (artist)
John Egerton Christmas Piper, CH was a 20th-century English painter and printmaker. For much of his life he lived at Fawley Bottom in Buckinghamshire, near Henley-on-Thames.-Life:...
. In the third programme, subtitled 'A New Jerusalem,' Fox explored British art in the aftermath of the 2nd world war, and examined the works of Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...
, Graham Sutherland
Graham Sutherland
Graham Vivien Sutherland OM was an English artist.-Early life:He was born in Streatham, attending Homefield Preparatory School, Sutton. He was then educated at Epsom College, Surrey before going up to Goldsmiths, University of London...
, Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England...
, Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton may refer to:*Richard Hamilton , Irish officer*Richard Hamilton, 4th Viscount Boyne , Irish MP for Navan*Richard Hamilton , American actor...
, David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....
and Keith Vaughan
Keith Vaughan
John Keith Vaughan was a British painter.Born in Selsey, Vaughan attended Christ's Hospital school. He worked in an advertising agency until the war, when as a conscientious objector he joined the St John's Ambulance. In 1941 he was conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps. Vaughan was self-taught...
. In this final programme of the series Fox explored how the themes of evil, brutality, dehumanisation, consumerism and optimism can be seen in the works of these postwar artists. Fox contends in this programme that the death of Lucian Freud and the emergence of conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
have marginalised, eclipsed and brought to an end the tradition of British figurative painting.
In each case, the backgrounds, techniques, subjects and interests of each artist are analysed against a backdrop of the social and political events of their day, especially the two world wars, the decline of Edwardian values and traditions, the poverty and economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s and the relative sense of optimism following both wars. The programmes also reflect a personal and national search for security in enduring but elusive British values, beliefs and identity in what Fox depicts as a century of crisis and upheaval, in which much more had perhaps been lost than gained.
Fox's provocative approach seems to have divided the critics: The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
called the series "superb television;" and The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
called it "absurdly lucid," but one critic criticised the series for its "grandiose, inflammatory statements," while Fisun Güner described Fox's revisionist case as "ludicrous."