Curated Video
The Great Wave by Hokusai: Great Art Explained
In 1639 Japan closed its borders and cut itself off from the outside world. Foreigners were expelled, Western culture was forbidden, and Entering or leaving Japan was punishable by Death. It would remain that way for over 200 years. It...
Curated Video
Jean-Michel Basquiat's 'Untitled (Skull)': Great Art Explained
In 1982 at the age of just 22 years old, Jean-Michel Basquiat would produce this painting. A powerful and dazzling image that mixes text, colour, symbolism and mark-making in a raw and uncensored explosion. In a single painting, he would...
Curated Video
Picasso’s Guernica: Great Art Explained
Guernica is the most famous anti-war painting in history, and Picasso’s best-known work. It has gone from a piece that was created in protest at the horrific bombing of a small village in northern Spain, to an icon and a universal symbol...
Curated Video
Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson: Great Art Explained
You could say Land art existed thousands of years even before oil painting, but it would take a group of American artists to bring it back to the public gaze in the 1960s and 70s. Artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Nancy...
Curated Video
Frida Kahlo's 'The Two Fridas’: Great Art Explained
Frida Kahlo is the most famous female artist in history. She deviated from the traditional portrayal of female beauty in art, and instead chose to paint raw and honest experiences. A near fatal bus accident at 18 left Frida crippled and...
Curated Video
Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals: Great Art Explained
"Thoroughly researched and cleverly presented, with stunning visuals, Great Art Explained makes you realise that familiarity with a work of art sometimes makes us indifferent to its power" - Forbes Magazine, 9 July 2020
Curated Video
Andy Warhol's Marilyn: Great Art Explained
Andy Warhol made “Marilyn Diptych” in 1962, right after Marilyn Monroe’s death. By the 1960s Marilyn’s film career as a sex symbol was all but over. Warhol would effectively immortalize Marilyn as the sex symbol of the 20th century. The...
Curated Video
Michelangelo's David: Great Art Explained
"What a brilliant series this is" - Stephen Fry on Twitter 12 December 2020 "Thoroughly researched and cleverly presented, with stunning visuals, Great Art Explained makes you realise that familiarity with a work of art sometimes makes...
Curated Video
Caravaggio's Taking of Christ: Great Art Explained
The Taking of Christ is a painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The subject is the moment that the son of God is betrayed with a kiss, and arrested in the garden of Gethsemane. Caravaggio’s approach to religious art was shocking...
Curated Video
Monet's Water Lilies: Great Art Explained
"Thoroughly researched and cleverly presented, with stunning visuals, Great Art Explained makes you realise that familiarity with a work of art sometimes makes us indifferent to its power" - Forbes Magazine, 9 July 2020
Curated Video
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (Part One): Great Art Explained
In this video I look at Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Nobody painted Hell quite like Bosch. What we think of as Hell, and certainly what Bosch thought of as Hell is not based on the bible. What we think of as hell...
Curated Video
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper: Great Art Explained
Edward Hopper’s world was New York, and he understood that city more than most people. He understood that, even though you may live in one of the most crowded and busy cities on earth, it is still possible to feel entirely alone. This...
Curated Video
The Thinker by Rodin: Great Art Explained
The Thinker, captured in a moment of concentrated introspection has come to represent a multitude of ideas about the nature of man and his place in the world. For some it is a symbol of knowledge, others philosophy, even existence...
Curated Video
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (Part Two): Great Art Explained
In this video I look at Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Nobody painted Hell quite like Bosch. What we think of as Hell, and certainly what Bosch thought of as Hell is not based on the bible. There is no mention of Hell...
Curated Video
The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault: Great Art Explained
This is the story about the painting of the raft that shook the world and scandalised high society. Not only for its anti-royalist statements but also for its choice of a black man as the hero. In an age of slavery. In its brutality,...
Curated Video
Judith Slaying Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi: Great Art Explained
Women were excluded from almost all cultural and social resources in the centuries from 1400 to 1900 when so much of the world's great art was created. And visual art was almost entirely a male industry before modern times. Having an...
Curated Video
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (Part Three): Great Art Explained
The painting was just too complex and detailed to deal with in fifteen minutes, so I made it in three parts. There are no records to tell us what Bosch or his contemporaries were thinking. There are so many theories out there, some more...
Curated Video
The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck: Great Art Explained
The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck has baffled art historians ever since it was painted in 1434. It has been dissected and analysed, maybe more than any other painting in history, and in the process, become even more mysterious....
Curated Video
Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night: Great Art Explained
Vincent van Gogh was a largely self-taught artist who didn’t pick up a paintbrush until he was 30 years old. Just seven years later, he would be dead. It was really his last four years where he developed the style we would come to know...
TED-Ed
Why Is This Painting so Shocking?
Guernica stands as a masterpiece of anti-war art. The narrator of a short video examines the images in Picasso's massive, complex, and disturbing painting and offers an explanation of what the images may symbolize.