The one pop artist whose work seemed to embrace consumerism was Andy Warhol ... An art of numb repetition. ibid.
It’s variety but it’s also a trap ... This is your world, America. ibid.
Richard Diebenkorn saw the city’s [Los Angeles] bright planes of colour. ibid.
The minimalists ... What the minimalists hated about pop art was its apparent celebration of the bright, gaudy tacky packaging in which American consumerism wrapped itself. ibid.
Equivalent V – Carl Andre. ibid.
In 1963 artist Dan Flavin began creating sculptures using nothing but that ubiquitous modern lighting unit – the fluorescent tube. ibid.
Untitled: Keith Haring: art became a means of exploring those newly formed identities. ibid.
Anyone could make it ... The artist who most perfectly captured that idea was Jeff Koons ... His work has since commanded some of the highest prices of any living artist. ibid.
Brooklyn – home to a hive of younger artists’ studios. ibid.
Jackson is one of several artists in America today who seem to exude anxiety through their work. ibid.
American artists have played a vital part in shaping the American sense of nationhood. ibid.
What does the future hold? ibid.
Welcome to the Low Countries ... An enormous tangible influence on the whole course of western civilisation. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The High Art of the Low Countries: Dream of Plenty, BBC 2013
It’s the art of an Atlantis in reverse. ibid.
Created a sophisticated society from almost nothing ... a great flourishing civilisation. ibid.
Tapestry was number one luxury item. ibid.
[Jan] Van Eyck did in effect invent oil painting. ibid.
Hieronymus Bosch: the Garden of Earthly Delights c. 1500. ibid.
Bruegel’s work was popular ... warmth and empathy to these people. ibid
Peter Paul Rubens: The supreme master of a new bold style – the Baroque. ibid.
The Netherlands: The Golden Age – this tiny country boasted the most powerful empire on Earth. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The High Art of the Low Countries II: Boom and Bust
The first truly free art market. ibid.
The cycle of boom and bust would be repeated throughout Holland during the Golden Age. ibid.
A furious anti-Spanish backlash that began in the 1560s: The Iconoclastic Fury. ibid.
An art dedicated to the depiction of daily life ... It’s first great star was an artist called Frans Hals. ibid.
Landscape was one of the great subjects of Dutch art. ibid.
Rembrandt: he painted more self-portraits than any previous artist. ibid.
Vermeer who most memorably more hauntingly depicted the interior spaces of the Dutch household. ibid.
Dutch art would be dominated by two towering figures. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The High Art of the Low Countries III: Daydreams and Nightmares
You can see Van Gogh’s faith in Nature as a religion. ibid.
A work that is so dark, so murky: The Potato Eaters. ibid.
Piet Mondrian: Mondrian moves closer to grid-form abstraction. ibid.
Mondrian took his dreams elsewhere: New York. ibid.
Magritte seems to place us on the threshold of another world. ibid.
A country the size of a continent ... The art of China: for four thousand years it’s expressed the spirit of the Chinese people – their struggles and their hopes. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of China, BBC 2014
Early China was a patchwork of competing tribes. ibid.
The Shang dynasty used language to govern, to educate and to write the laws. ibid.
Each soldier is an individual. ibid.
These two bronze chariots have to be the most remarkable. ibid.
The Golden Age of Chinese Art: from the Song to the Ming Dynasties, from roughly 1,000 to 1,600 A.D. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of China II
First there was art of the dead ... Then there was the art of the living ... Brilliant hybrids but also portents of disaster ... One of revolution and rebirth ... A new generation of artists are striving to give it shape and meaning. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of China III
What is Gothic? A word that implies the sinister, the supernatural, horror. It’s also a medieval style of architecture. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Gothic: Britain’s Midnight Hour 1/3: Liberty Diversity Depravity, BBC 2014
A secret history of Britain itself during its greatest age of change. ibid.
The house he [Robert Walpole] built at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham – like his Gothic novel it’s a theatrical interpretation of the past. ibid.
Whimsical Gothic follies – eccentric medieval fantasies. ibid.
The cult of Ruins fell naturally into the cult of Nature. ibid.
As the modern world began to take shape it would be that dark side of Gothic which fed on anxiety and alienation – all the bad stuff – that really came into its own. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Gothic: Britain’s Midnight Hour 2/3: The City and the Soul
Mary Shelley: a novel about progress and the dangers that come with it that still sends a shiver up the spine today ... Frankenstein. ibid.
According to Blake, art was the tree of life, science was the tree of death. ibid.
They were nicknamed Penny Dreadfuls, and they were popular because they tapped into working class fears about the modern city. ibid.
‘These ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards and coils itself to sleep in maggot numbers where the rain drips in and comes and goes fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint.’ ibid. Dickens’ Bleak House
The Victorians loved Gothic colour, pageantry, chivalry, heraldry; they loved the idea of Gothic as a return to a spiritual world ... a fantasy of escaping from the present and into an idealised past. ibid.
Pugin: Contrasts – an argument for the superiority of the Gothic style. ibid.
The Houses of Parliament are the buildings for which Pugin is best remembered. ibid.
Vast institutions often became dumping grounds for problem people. ibid.
Gothic: it began with the desire to revive something that was dead: a style of medieval architecture. But it grew like graveyard ivy – more sinister at every twist and turn. By the mid-nineteenth century Gothic had spread in all directions. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Gothic: Britain's Midnight Hour 3/3: Blood for Sale: Gothic Goes Global
Nowadays it’s everywhere. ibid.
‘The red scar on the forehead showed on the pallid skin like a palpitating wound’. ibid. Bram Stoker's Dracula
‘My revenge is just begun. I spread it over centuries and time is on my side.’ ibid.
In the world of the Gothic all roads lead to Dracula. ibid.
It held up a mirror to a society full of foreboding. ibid.
You can’t fault Morris’s idealism though ... he became more political ... the more militant Socialist League. ibid.
John Ruskin: The Nature of Gothic ... The industrial revolution was a blight ... Printed by William Morris. ibid.
The greatest Gothic painter of the twentieth century is Francis Bacon. ibid.
We’re all Gothic now. ibid.