Josiah Wedgwood was a giant of the enlightenment ... Wedgwood was also a disciple of Winckelmann ... Wedgwood’s true genius was pottery. ibid.
Whistler ... set to work on ... paintings all of women in white. ibid.
In Whistler’s hands white had become the cold and exclusive colour of the artistic elite. ibid.
Duchamp’s famous Urinal which he called somewhat euphemistically Fountain. ibid.
That canvas is for ever tainted with our own flaws and failings. White is the immaculate reflection of an impure world. ibid.
Most people think of Italy ... The Renaissance is supposed to have passed us by. But that isn’t true. Dr James Fox, A Very British Renaissance, BBC 2014
A handful of brilliant European artists brought the new ideas of the Renaissance to Britain. ibid.
[Pietro] Torrigiano’s tomb marked a turning point in British art. It brought a modern style to a medieval country. ibid.
Hans Holbein arrived in England in the autumn of 1526. ibid.
The art of a people obsessed with secrets. Dr James Fox, A Very British Renaissance II: The Elizabethan Code
A distinctive native art-form emerged. ibid.
[Nicholas] Hilliard’s little miniatures ... intimate, private, coded. ibid.
Rich and clever and sophisticated – art for an urbane and educated society. ibid.
John Dee: the man who led the country out of its isolation ... a renaissance man. ibid.
By the early 1600s Britain had undergone a cultural revolution; the medieval world had been left behind. Dr James Fox, A Very British Renaissance III: Whose Renaissance?
It was less about fantasies of ideal beauty and more about looking at new ways of reality. ibid.
Martin Creed Work no. 88. A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball. James Fox, Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art? BBC 2016
Welcome to the puzzling sometimes maddening world of conceptual art. ibid.
What is conceptual art? How should we approach it? And why should we care? ibid.
The object didn’t matter any more. What mattered was the idea, the concept. ibid.
Is it funny? Is it original? ... Does it make us think? ibid.
The Land of the Rising Sun, but we know it by a different name. Japan has fascinated me since I was a boy. It’s always seemed like a parallel universe ... I’ll seek out its greatest art works both old and new. But this is also a journey into Japanese life. James Fox, The Art of Japanese Life I: Nature, BBC 2018
These artists continue to work with Nature, to revere it and to drawn inspiration from the landscape that surrounds them. ibid.
This is Nachi Falls. It’s one of the tallest waterfalls in Japan. ibid.
Ritual is at the heart of Shintoism … Nature itself is being venerated … Its influence can be felt right through the history of Japanese art. ibid.
This is The Splashed Ink Landscape. Sesshu painted it in 1495. ibid.
Another art form that combines nature and culture: these are of course Bonsai. ibid.
The preoccupation with cherry blossom is part of a broader set of interests: Japanese culture celebrates all of the seasons, not simply the spring. ibid.
Irises: a pair of six-panel screens dating back to 1710. ibid.
Hokusai’s success came slowly; he’s best known for his woodcut prints … the diversity of his output was breathtaking. ibid.
Utamaro was a master of understatement. James Fox, The Art of Japanese Life II: Cities
As Japan changed the West so the West changed Japan. ibid.
Kusama has been creating her own brand of pop art since the 1960s. ibid.
The Pacific Ocean is the world’s biggest feature … Entire societies long hidden from the rest of the world. It was the beginning of an historic encounter between Oceania and the West, between indigenous people and those that went on to colonise them. James Fox, Oceans Apart: Art and the Pacific s1e1: Australia, BBC 2018
A cultural explosion that is still resonating today. ibid.
These aboriginal people developed a culture unlike any other. These societies were unusually dependent on what we call art. ibid.
This national identity was soon expressed in art … Arthur Streeton’s Golden Summer: Eaglemont. ibid.
Soon [Albert] Namatjira’s work was being shown in Australian cities. ibid.
These amateur artists … were inspired by the vast landscape of the Australian desert. ibid.
Aboriginal art is big business. ibid.
A long and complex story about how the West destroyed a world it had long seen as paradise … how they disrupted and destroyed indigenous communities but opened our eyes to a new world of images, reinvigorated Western art and irrevocably changed the global imagination. James Fox, Oceans Apart: Art and the Pacific s1e2: Polynesia
Hawaiian society was as complex as its engineering projects … This hierarchical society produced a singular art form … Feather work had many applications, and today indigenous Hawaiians are still using this old technique. ibid.
1770s when Cook returned to Tahiti on a second voyage to the Pacific and brought a gifted painter with him: his name was William Hodges. ibid.
A’a: this breathtaking object [British Museum] was made on the island of Rurutu. ibid.
Paul Gaugin had bought into an old myth about Polynesia … but it did inspire a number of intoxicating paintings. ibid.
His time spent in the Pacific was particularly controversial. ibid.
This episode tells the story of the Maori. Their first clashes with Europeans, collaborations of exchange that followed, how many Maori resisted colonisation and went on to stage an audacious cultural revival that has made its mark on many aspects of modern life. James Fox, Oceans Apart: Art and the Pacific s1e3: New Zealand
Their particular genius was for sculpture. From the fifteenth century the Maori began constructing large permanent household often adorned with elaborate carvings. ibid.
All around the meeting house are wall panels called poupou that depict ancestral history and myth. ibid.
By the beginning of the twentieth century the Maori population had dwindled to 40,000. They now accounted for just 1 in 15 New Zealanders. ibid.
This is a story about our relationship to Nature. For most of us the natural world is a place of beauty and wonder. Though all too often we are reminded of its terrifying force … Our relationship with nature is in crisis. James Fox, Nature & Us: A History through Art I: Out of Nature, BBC 2021
The ancient past: how our earliest ancestors invested the natural world with magic and power. But how we then tried to separate ourselves from nature and tried to control it. ibid.
We were all animists once, and many of us still are. ibid.
How humans tried to understand nature, and gaining knowledge led us to appreciate it in a whole new way. James Fox, Nature & Us: A History through Art II: Understanding Nature
Romantics wanted to do the opposite: the thing they liked about nature was they couldn’t control it, they couldn’t understand it, and the kind of nature the Romantics were after was wild. ibid.
I’m exploring the last hundred years, our own age, when we transformed nature and our relationship to it faster than ever before. James Fox, Nature & Us: A History through Art III: Future Nature
Mondrian: His rejection of nature might seem strange to us today but it came out of a transformative moment in our history. ibid.
That great sprawling ungainly but glorious art movement – the Baroque. Waldemar Januszczak, Baroque! – From St Peter’s to St Paul’s I, BBC 2009
It wasn’t a tidy movement but it spawned some of our greatest art. ibid.
Bernini was one of the key players of the Baroque. ibid.
The Baroque roped in all the other arts to work on you as well. ibid.
This master of dramatic darkness was of course Michelangelo Merisi o Amerighi da Caravaggio. ibid.