Henry Moore: the son of a Yorkshire coal miner ... Three hundred sketches: the shelter drawings ... Moore had become a global phenomenon ... Moore produced over six thousand sculptures. ibid.
Francis Bacon: ‘These images of immediacy.’ ... viz: Arena 1984: Francis Bacon with Clement Freud BBC. ibid.
Jackson Pollock: Mural & Alchemy & Reflections of the Big Dipper. ibid.
The Abstract Expressionists: At the age of 44 he died in a car accident after a heavy bout of drinking. ibid.
Richard Hamilton: ‘One of the giants of twentieth century art.’ ibid. Waldemar Januszczak
Hamilton Pop Art: ‘I was trying to make an art that was figurative.’ ibid. Hamilton interview with Joan Bakewell
Andy Worhol: ‘I want to be a machine.’ ibid.
A new era of unrest was dawning. ibid.
They rejected the idea that art had to be a unique physical object to be venerated in the gallery or sold on the market. Great Artists in Their Own Words III: But is it Art? 1976-1993, Equivalent VIII 1966
What asked an incredulous pubic was a pile of bricks in one of Britain's most prestigious art establishments? ibid.
Minimalist: ‘A search for core values.’ (Art & Minimalism) ibid. Waldemar Januszczak
Richard Long: sculptor, rambler and nomad. ibid.
Christo's Valley Curtain CBS News 1971. ibid.
The World of Gilbert & George, directors Gilbert & George 1981: Living Sculptures ... ‘We like very much to be drunk’. ibid.
Sculpture Louise Bourgeois made art out of wrestling with her own very personal demons ... ‘I am a prisoner of my memories.’ ibid.
The work of Lucien Freud still had the power to startle but with the additional medium of paint on canvas. ibid.
Joseph Beuys: anarchic, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment. ibid.
For the past thirty years Jeff Koons has cultivated a reputation for pushing taste to the limit. ibid.
Damien Hirst: Mother and Child Divided. ibid.
I find myself a president of a body of men who are what I call shilly-shallying. They feel that there is something in this so-called modern art. If you paint a tree, for God’s sake try and paint it to look like a tree. Alfred Mullings, British Academy banquet broadcast by BBC
You’d think that things that are stolen – if everybody’s agreed they were taken under terrible circumstances – should be able to get them back wherever they are. But no. The justice you get depends on an accident of geography. Ann Webert, St Catherine’s House
Who would buy world-class works of art? ... Cahill put the word out in the underworld he was keen to sell the paintings. This gave the police the opportunity they needed: they set up a sting ... He got away with paintings worth over thirty million pounds. Underworld: Dublin Gangland
To get out. To be clean. To engage your mind, which could fill your mind during working hours ... It became an absolute obsession for them. William Feaver, author Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group
Paint From Your Experience. Robert Lyon, advice to pitmen painters
It’s the story about a group of men, some of whom worked in the same colliery where my dad was a miner. Jon Blair, Perspectives: Robson Green and the Pitmen Painters, ITV 2011
In those days they proudly called it [Ashington] the biggest mining village in the world ... What’s left behind is unemployment and a town looking for its soul. ibid.
Working men together deciding to do an art appreciation class, deciding to paint, deciding to improve themselves. ibid.
This was a tight-knit community. One that was killed when the miners died. Or were they murdered? ibid.
Imagine doing this for forty, fifty years of your life. Unbelievable. ibid.
At least there’s a record of how it once was thanks to the painters of the Ashington Group. ibid.
To get behind the artist and try to appreciate his purpose and methods. Aims of the Ashington Art Group
This is a film about trickery, fraud, about lies. F for Fake 1974 starring Orson Welles & Oja Kodar & Joseph Cotten & Elmyr de Hory & Clifford Irving et al, director Orson Welles
The author of Fake a book about a faker was himself a faker – Clifford Irving – and the author of a fake. ibid.
The restless souls being I guess Cliff Irving over there and Elmyr. Coincidence #1: that these two world leaders in fakery operated quite separately on the same tiny island. ibid.
A fake is a fake, and Elmyr himself is a fake faker. ibid.
Irving’s book about Elmyr is the story of a man of talent taking the Mickey over those who had rejected him. ibid.
Art dealers either in ignorance, innocence or simple greed have made themselves fortunes on the paintings of Elmyr. ibid.
For the past seventeen minutes I’ve been lying my head off. ibid.
We have been forging an art story. ibid.
If you want to understand a culture, see how its art tackles the subject of sex ... Its most compelling expression to be found where we least expect it in the art of the Victorians. Howard Jacobson, The Genius of British Art: Flesh, Channel 4 2010
British art of the nineteenth century was far more adventurous than it was given credit for. ibid.
It’s in the great provincial art galleries that some of our most provocatively sexual art hangs today. ibid.
Of all the Victorians’ depictions of desire, perhaps the hardest to get our heads around today is fairy art. When the Victorians painted fairies as some of them obsessively did they weren’t just indulging in cloudish whimsy; they were confronting their deepest, sometimes their darkest, desires. (Art & Fairy) ibid.
The Victorians were divided between the impulse to respectability and the impulse to abandon. ibid.
What is it we’re flinching from? ibid.
Landscape has been fundamental to English identity. Sir Roy Strong, The Genius of British Art
This best British art is challenging, threatening, controversial. Janet Street-Porter, The Genius of British Art: Modern Times, 2010
The Britain in fact that I grew up in: the stifling, narrow-minded country my parents embodied with their boring petty values. No wonder we were always arguing. ibid.
They actually transformed British society through a series of social and cultural revolutions. Their art said bollocks to British complacency. ibid.
The 1960s was the most marked decade of change Britain had ever seen ... Art was at the forefront of that renaissance. A new art that was revolutionary because it was made by young people. ibid.
Now Punk represented the ultimate in two fingers to the pompous self-satisfied pop that had gone before it. And the most important thing about Punk was that it was about attitude. Now everybody could be creative. ibid.
We often don’t want to confront the realities War leaves behind. But the more I look into Britain’s war art the more I think its overriding message is that the true cost of war is the price paid by the individual. The Dutiful Soldier and the sacrifice he or she is prepared to make. Jon Snow, The Genius of British Art: War, 2010
It was only later when I went to Glasgow School of Art that I learnt more about these paintings and who did them. They were by a group of radical young painters who came to be known as the Glasgow boys. They began working together in the city in an extraordinary burst of creativity in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Muriel Gray: The Glasgow Boys, BBC 2010
Crawhall. Dow. Gauld. Guthrie. Henry. Hornel. Lavery. ibid.
The boys were basically a loose-knit bunch of around twenty incredibly talented young men. ibid.
The tone was set early on by the so-called Father of the Group W Y MacGregor. ibid.
It was Guthrie who made the quantum leap in tone and confidence. His ambitious painting To Pastures New represented a huge step forward for the boys. ibid.