BBC - The Shock of the New (1980)

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BBC - The Shock of the New (1980)

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Robert Hughes' history of Modern Art from Cubism to Pop and the Avant-Garde. The popular art history sequel to the BBC's Civilization series, picks up at the threshold of the 20th century. It is written and presented by Robert Hughes, art critic and senior writer for Time. Hughes draws on a wealth of documentary materials from the archives of the BBC, including rare footage and interviews with noted artists. The range of major figures includes Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, le Corbusier, Maz Ernst, Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollock.

Part 1: Mechanical Paradise
The first episode shows how the development of technology influenced art between 1880 and end of WWI. Hughes discusses Cubism, a movement started by Pablo Picasso and developed by Georges Braque, in which multiple viewpoints of a subject were compressed into a single view. Hughes details how African carvings and Spanish culture had a key influence on works such as Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon.

Part 2: The Powers that be
Robert Hughes examines the relationship between art and authority by looking at Dadaism and the art of political movements such as fascism and Soviet communism. Featuring works by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Otto Dix and George Grosz.

Part 3: The Landscape of Pleasure
Robert Hughes examines art's relationship with the pleasures of nature, its place in them and man's understanding of them. Featuring works by Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin.

Part 4: Trouble in Utopia
This edition deals with the aspirations and reality of the art in which we live, architecture. Utopian visions rarely work in reality and Hughes examines the utopian in the parallel lines of concrete, towering verticals of steel and planes of glass of modernism in the buildings, built and planned, of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Gropius, which he contrasts with the paintings of Mondrian.

Part 5: The Threshold of Liberty
Robert Hughes's classic series about art in the twentieth century continues by looking at the avant-garde and modernism in the century of change. Hughes gets innocent and irrational as he examines the surrealists and their attempts to make art without restrictions. Features artists such as Di Chirico, Ernst, Miro and Dali.

Part 6: The View from the Edge
Expressionism sprung out of the harsh, secular atmosphere of the 20th Century and evolved, through the strong colours and often sombre moods of artists like Munch, to the non-figurative work of Pollock and De Kooning.

Part 7: Culture as Nature
Artists began to take man-made images as their inspiration, leading to the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as well as Stuart Davis' collages inspired by jazz.

Part 8: The Future that Was
Robert Hughes slips down the decline of modernism while visiting installations and watching art without substance. Once accepted as the dominant culture, the art of modernism found itself without an avant-garde and without the ability to shock or provoke other than as objects that cost absurd amounts of money. Hughes examines how artists have dealt with this commercialisation. Artists include Bridget Reilly, Joseph Beuys and David Hockney.

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BBC - The Shock of the New (1980)

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BBC - The Shock of the New (1980)

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BBC - The Shock of the New (1980)

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BBC - The Shock of the New (1980)

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