The night watch
When Rembrandt painted Frans Banning Cocq's militia company, he imbued it with all the drama and gravity of a major moment in history. This program deftly deconstructs The Night Watch to understand the many conventions it broke through its suggestio...
Bacon's arena: an art of pain and beauty
Despite the carnage and horror in his paintings, Francis Bacon insisted that beauty was his inspiration. This program explores Bacon's life and work, from his troubled Edwardian childhood to his death in Madrid in 1992. Using rarely seen archival fi...
Truth or fiction?: photography and ethics
Photographs have the potential to present powerful truths - or to create convincing fictions. This program uses case studies involving Iwo Jima, Elian Gonzalez, and O. J. Simpson to show how images can be manipulated to influence the way viewers per...
The language of film
When Tim Supple directed the filming of Twelfth Night, he was a stickler for sticking to the words as the Bard penned them. Everything else, though, was up for grabs as he and screenwriter Andrew Bannerman shifted and intercut scenes and in general ...
David Hockney's secret knowledge
Why did paintings suddenly take on a nearly photographic realism around 1420? In this controversial program, noted artist and art critic David Hockney investigates how, 400 years before the invention of the photograph, painters were using simple cam...
The Greek awakening: art from the 5th century B.C.
Beginning about 500 BC, Greek artists and architects began working at an unprecedented level of sophistication, paralleling the rise of Athens as a Mediterranean power. This program illustrates the awakening of that classical Greek vision, from whic...
Jeff Koons: a man of trust
One of the most controversial artists working today, Jeff Koons follows in the footsteps of Andy Warhol's entrepreneurship, perfectionism, and appropriation of pop culture icons. This program provides an extensive look at Koons's background, profess...
Documenting the face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI photographers
Beginning in 1935, a group of New Deal-sponsored photographers roamed the American landscape, capturing the human face of the Great Depression. This film tells the story of the mammoth project, supervised by Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administ...
Photographic storytelling
This program examines how photographers work with images to communicate stories and ideas and how viewers interpret those images. Message manipulation deriving from point of view, context, editing, superimposing, cropping, recoloring, and captioning...
Power of art: Rothko
Life, death, heroism, tragedy - subjects that, until the latter half of the 20th century, propelled the canon of Western art. How do the abstractions of Mark Rothko figure in that tradition? Are they, in a sense, its swan song? This program depicts ...