But there’s another Spain: Spain has produced some of the most startling and original art ever created. Art that has been unfairly overshadowed by the rest of Europe. Art that we know little about. But Spanish art is the art that we need to know about because it holds the key to understanding all of Europe and its culture. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Spain I: The Moorish South, BBC 2008
The story of how Islamic Spain became one of the most remarkable civilisations ever seen. ibid.
The Great Mosque of Cordoba … one of the first mosques ever built … You actually feel lost in here, truly disorientated, and that’s the point. ibid.
This was an art inspired by fervent Catholicism and a yearning for contact with God. Out of such fervour would come darkness and even savagery. Religion and violence intertwined. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Spain II: The Dark Art
The greatest artist of the age, El Greco – the Greek. ibid.
When the conquistadors returned home from Peru they were determined to show off that money. ibid.
Velazquez painted ordinary people living their lives. ibid.
And out of this conflict would explode some of the most astonishing modern art ever seen. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Spain III: The Mystical North
Goya: He painted an extraordinary expression of his despair: they are known as the black paintings, black in subject matter and black in colour. ibid.
The man whose work exemplified Barcelona’s spirit of exuberance at the start of the twentieth century was the architect Antoni Gaudi. ibid.
Barcelona gave Picasso the subject to which he would obsessively return. ibid.
Miro saw the soil of Cataluna as his own vision of paradise. ibid.
The new territory of the mind … the great surrealist and all-round showman, Salvador Dali. ibid.
From the ghouls and demons of the German Middle Ages to some of the most beautiful sculptures ever created. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Germany: A Divided Land, BBC 2010
The art of the Third Reich, where art was twisted into a tool for terror. ibid.
The influence of Flanders, of the northern renaissance. ibid.
No-one does ghouls better than the Germans. ibid.
For most of its history Germany was not a unified state, but an assemblage of disparate parts. ibid.
A love of nature, and also [sic] of the machine. ibid.
It’s the German Gothic Cathedral: Goethe likened it to: ‘A sublimely towering tree of God, with its thousand branches and millions of twigs.’ This is the Cathedral of Saint Peter. It was once the tallest building in the world. ibid.
Every step of that journey has been traced through art. The story of American art is as epic as the story of America itself. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America 1/3, BBC 2011
It’s the story of America’s struggle to find a sense of identity and a sense of direction. ibid.
John White made a whole series of breathtakingly vivid, deeply poignant water colours of the American Indians ... White used his pictures as advertisements. ibid.
American art was predominantly Protestant and inescapably provincial. ibid.
They turned to an artist called John Trumbull, an adequate portrait painter. ibid.
For much of the nineteenth century American artists would divide into two camps: those who supported government and all it stood for and those who questioned it. ibid.
And no painting depicts that myth more vividly than Emanuel Leutze’s picture Westward Ho! of 1865. ibid.
John James Audubon – he celebrated the beauties of America’s promised land, but also counted the cost of the push west ... One of the masterpieces of world art – The Birds of America. ibid.
George Catlin, the man who preserved these solemn, beautiful melancholy faces ... To Catlin these are the noblest surviving people in the whole world. ibid.
This is Kaaterskill Falls in upstate New York. And it was a favourite subject of Thomas Cole, unquestionable the greatest American landscape painter of the nineteenth century. ibid.
The whole series is shot through with a strong sense of Cole’s own bitterness, anger and irony. ibid.
This is a world of greed that Cole saw eating away at the heart of America. ibid.
Cole called the penultimate picture Destruction. ibid.
Eleven southern states formed the Confederacy ... It was the new medium of photography that produced the most compelling images of the Civil War. ibid.
[William Henry] Jackson’s photographs and [Thomas] Moran’s watercolours had an entirely unexpected outcome. Congressmen in Washington were so impressed by the spectacular images that they passed a bill designated the Yellowstone region, America’s first national park. ibid.
They abandoned their home city of Philadelphia and came to New York not just to live but to make the city the subject of their art ... They became known as The Ashcan School. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America 2/3
John Sloan tended toward sentimentality in his slices of life. ibid.
A brutal image of what [George] Bellows saw as a brutalised society. ibid.
Sullivan described the skyscraper as the perfect emblem of the proud upwardly aspiring spirit of American man. ibid.
International Exhibition of Modern Art: Association of American painters and sculptors 69th Infantry Regiment Armory New York City February 15th to March 15th 1913. ibid.
This is Voice of the City of New York Interpreted painted by Joseph Stella in the 1920s. ibid.
In American Landscape [Charles Sheeler] from 1930 a huge factory dominates the scene. (Art & Factory) ibid.
This celebrated painting by Grant Wood: American Gothic. ibid.
For more than forty years [Norman] Rockwell’s pictures were an almost weekly feature of life in the United States. ibid.
But in the paintings of Rockwell’s contemporary Edward Hopper, those unsettling undercurrents are brought to the surface – what’s wrong with America is what his art is about. ibid.
Hopper’s most cinematic painting and his most famous is Night Hawks painted in 1942. ibid.
He captures this oceanic emptiness of modern American existence. ibid.
Arshile Gorky was an Armenian immigrant with a passion for modern European art ... Gorky was a considerable artist in his own right though perhaps not a genius. Though he was the catalyst for a seismic shift in American art. ibid.
Meet the abstract expressionists: these were the people who responded to Gorky’s challenge. ibid.
Barnett Newman was one of the high priests of the movement. ibid.
No-one pulvarised the world of physical appearances more thoroughly than Jackson Pollock. ibid.
If ever a studio felt like an arena this is it. ibid.
What he’s trying to do throughout is actually eliminate any suggestion of representational form. ibid.
The feat of selling out also preyed on the mind of Pollock’s friend and contemporary Mark Rothko. In 1958 he was offered a lucrative commission in Manhattan’s most talked about new skyscraper ... the Four Seasons Restaurant. ibid.
They are made of pure colour laid in translucent layers and fields. ibid.
Once you’ve got Rothko on your mind you can find his spirit or at least find yourself seeing with his abstract eyes almost everywhere you go. ibid.
The Rothko Chapel... What kind of religious space is hard to say ... It’s almost like a hall of mirrors. ibid.
Las Vegas: it isn’t just a city, it’s the world’s largest, brightest, brashest neon work of art. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America: What Lies Beneath 3/3
In 1954 small-town southern boy Jasper Johns settled in New York City and began to paint the ultimate symbol of Americanness – the Stars and Stripes. ibid.
By the early sixties a new generation of artists was confronting the strangeness of consumer society. ibid.
Those who followed called themselves pop artists. ibid.
Claes Oldenburg made supersized floppily repulsive hamburgers out of stuffed cloth. ibid.
James Rosenquist created vast canvases of collage images. ibid.