Summary: The Rhine valley-a treasury of medieval art, and, as this program shows, the cradle of what we now think of as distinctly German imagery. Foremost among Cologne's late-Gothic painters was Stefan Lochner, who injected drama and excitement into familiar biblical scenes. At about the same time, Johannes Gutenberg pioneered a printing revolution in the Rhine town of Mainz, leading to one of the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Throughout history, one type of individual has instinctively grasped art's power to persuade and manipulate-and indeed, images have become at least as deadly as swords or guns in the hands of political and military leaders. This program revolves around a basic question: when did art mutate from a vehicle of the imagination into a tool of the ruler? Beginning in Britain, the program looks at the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Painting America was his life's work, and Thomas Hart Benton was at the apex of his career when he painted Social History of the State of Missouri. This program explores this, the most ambitious mural by America's foremost muralist, and its depiction of Missouri's history from pioneer days to the Depression era. The program is narrated by Benton (using recorded interviews), with additional...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Northern Spain has produced some of the world's most celebrated artists, including Picasso, Miro, Dali-and Goya, who foreshadowed modern painting with his dark political consciousness. This program studies the artistic and social turmoil that engulfed Spain as the 20th century loomed, dawned, and rolled forward. Recounting Franco's tyranny against free expression, the program looks at Spanish...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: This program focuses on Berlin, where Hannah Hoch, George Grosz, and John Heartfield politicized the anarchist Dada movement, uniting it with the extreme Left. Nearby, the newly formed Bauhaus School, led by founder Walter Gropius and other influential architects and artists, encouraged students to reject history and embrace new techniques, materials, and styles. The film also features Gerhard...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Instead of offering an idealized or ennobled vision of humankind, modern art-an instrument of the tumultuous 20th century-communicates chaos, anxiety, and above all, uncertainty. In this program, Matthew Collings contrasts the works of Pablo Picasso with the abstracts of Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian and the architecture of Le Corbusier; tells how the Nazis tried to eradicate modern art's...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: It was in the Bavarian mountains that much of Germany's sense of nationhood and identity was forged. Caspar David Friedrich became the Romantic movement's first great painter, creating perhaps its defining image in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. More explicitly nationalistic was the Nazarene Brotherhood, a group of young artists, including Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Philipp Veit, who lived...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon continues his travels from southern to northern Spain, revealing a stunning and informative array of artworks. In this program, he journeys to the provinces surrounding Madrid-where, during the 16th and 17th centuries, many of the world's great artists flourished against a backdrop of imperialism and fervent Catholicism. In Toledo, El Greco's mystical style is...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: Under Muslim rule, Spain became the most advanced, wealthy, and populous country in Europe, with great leaps forward in art, architecture, and many other fields. In this program, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon travels from Cordoba to Seville and on to Granada as he tells the story of art in Islamic and medieval Spain. Richly designed and decorated buildings such as the Great Mosque in...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: What happens when the artists becomes the art? In Transformation, three artists satirize society and reinvent icons of literature, art history, and pop culture by inhabiting the characters they create and capturing the sensibilities of our age. It is a personal portrait of Yinka Shonibare MBE, Cindy Sherman, and Paul McCarthy-three contemporary artists refashioning their identity by way of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Can art antagonize? Seduce? Inspire transformation? And if so, how might desires and taboos shape our ability to imagine? Fantasy, featuring contemporary artists Jeff Koons, Mary Heilmann, Florian Maier-Achen, and Cao Fei, explores a defiant and unconventional world of sculpture, painting, video and photography-a techno-inspired collection that is at times hallucinatory, irreverent, and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Might a work of art move us to temper our more destructive impulses? In what ways do artists’ feelings of empathy contribute to works that tackle problematic subjects and address the human condition? Compassion, features three contemporary artists-William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems-whose unique works and experimental methods explore the conscience and the possibility of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Journeying back to the dawn of Italian theater, this program unmasks the intriguing and often underappreciated tradition known as commedia dell' arte. Viewers will discover the history of Italian masked theater, the origins of commedia dell' arte and its various iterations, and the nature of its performers' improvised style. The program explains how the tradition's inspired...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: This final episode describes the Cold War as a continuation of the “war of the world” in which millions died in proxy wars conducted by the two superpowers. World War II may have been the central act of an epic struggle between rival empires, but the Cold War continued the turbulence that marked the entire 20th century as the most violent period in history. The end of the Cold War led to great...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: Backed by a Church struggling to connect with the faithful, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted images imbued with physical immediacy and in-your-face drama. As this program shows, there was a trade-off: Caravaggio's biblical scenes frequently eschew, in the words of presenter Simon Schama, "any vision of consolation or redemption." Exploring the artist's humble origins, penchant for...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Life, death, heroism, tragedy-subjects that, until the latter half of the 20th century, propelled the canon of Western art. How do the abstractions of Mark Rothko figure in that tradition? Are they, in a sense, its swan song? This program depicts Rothko's engagement with timeless themes that dominated his thinking long after the mythic grandeur of Abstract Expressionism had yielded to the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: If the French Revolution had an official painter, it was Jacques-Louis David-although "official propagandist" is a much more accurate term. This program follows David's career from his early ambitions as a Prix de Rome scholar to the actions that defined him, morally and artistically, during the reigns of Robespierre and Napoleon. With The Death of Marat as its centerpiece, the program studies...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: As life among the aristocracy in Damascus and Baghdad attained its zenith of refinement, another important cultural center was developing in Islamic Cordoba. This program focuses on the remarkable cultural contributions of Ziryab, a talented young musician who fled the East for Andalusia and became the era's preeminent arbiter of style and taste. After creating a popular new form of music and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Where do abstract painters and fashion designers find their muses? To what extent does the creative process differ between video artists, sculptors, and fine art embroiderers? How do illustrators and mixed media artists handle the business side of their work? Using capsule interviews with contemporary figures on the U.K. visual arts scene, this program draws viewers into the studio space and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Beginning about 500 BC, Greek artists and architects began working at an unprecedented level of sophistication, paralleling the rise of Athens as a Mediterranean power. This program illustrates the awakening of that classical Greek vision, from which emerged the most influential sculptures and buildings of Western culture. With detailed visual analysis of the Parthenon, its frieze in the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Far from disappearing after the Hellenistic age, Greek art flourished with the rise of Christianity and the Orthodox church. This program explores the development of icon painting, the influence of Greek artists on later European movements, and the advent of neoclassical architecture as a manifestation of an age-old cultural legacy. With historical context from the conversion of Constantine...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: The horrors of World War II are the subject of this episode. We’ve been told all our lives that this war was our greatest triumph, the moment when the forces of light - the Western democracies and the Soviet Union - prevailed over the forces of darkness, the Nazis and the other Axis powers. It was a conflict that began in Europe in September 1939 and ended with the dropping of the atomic bomb...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: Begun partly as a European reaction to the fussiness of Art Nouveau and influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Deco found its fullest expression in America, where it was applied to everything from jukeboxes to diners, from radios to swimming pools, and from skyscrapers to seaside hotels. This program presents the lively history of the Art Deco style. With no founder, philosophy, or...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This program studies cultural transformations that began in the fifth century BC as Greek art discarded religious functions and moved toward human-centered concerns. Views of Cycladic sculpture and Koiros statues demonstrate an evolving realism, leading to stunning examples of the idealized human figure: the Kritios boy, the Temple of Zeus pediments, Praxiteles' Hermes, and others. With...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005