Great Art Explained

The Mona Lisa is without doubt the most famous painting in the world, yet perhaps we are over familiar with her. Here I explain why I think it is not only a great painting but also a revolution in art.

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 of freedom from ALL wars. Picasso said, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth”, and like so much of Picasso’s work it can be difficult to decipher the ‘truth’ in the political, artistic and religious symbolism. James Payne looks at some of the more acknowledged interpretations along with techniques, composition and artistic inspiration. Guernica is a masterpiece that always leaves the viewer with more than they brought to it, and here, Great Art Explained, traces the work from its underwhelming reception when first seen in 1937, through to its status over eighty years later as one of the most influential and iconic works of all time.

Michelangelo was the first superstar artist. He was a sculptor, a painter, an architect, a poet and an engineer. An outsider touched by genius. His statue of David, the most famous statue in the world, personifies the aesthetics of High Renaissance art, the politics of Renaissance Florence, and the technical virtuosity of Greek sculpture. James Payne looks at the story of Michelangelo’s David, and discovers it is anything but the story of a teenage boy king who slew Goliath.

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, realism, and raw emotion it captures the essence of a historic event that shocked the French public, a Revolution-weary public that was not easy to shock. The story behind the painting is as devastating as the desperation on canvas.

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 in chronic pain her whole life, but she managed to make a virtue out of adversity, and astonishing original art out of her pain. She was a Mexican, female artist who was disabled, in a male-dominated environment in post-revolutionary Mexico. A feminist icon who broke all social conventions, and produced some of the most haunting and visionary images of the 20th century. James Payne explains 'The Two Fridas', her greatest painting, created during a period of deep instability fro Frida Kahlo.

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. During the medieval period, a rapid expansion in trade and commerce led to the rise of a new class, the incredibly wealthy and powerful merchant class. Bruges in the 15th century was the hub of international trade, and people came from all over the world, wanting to get rich. Including the Arnolfinis from Lucca in Italy. As those Merchants became richer, their appetite for social status grew. Consumerism was rampant and the ultimate way to show off your wealth was to commission a portrait. And by the 1430s, a portrait by Jan Van Eyke was the most exclusive status symbol

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 use his instinctive power of visual language to say everything he wanted to say. About America - about art - and about being black in both worlds.

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 and controversial in his time, his work was censored, dismissed and criticised, but it would lead to an entirely new kind of Christian art. The intensity of his paintings was matched only by his tempestuous lifestyle. The same year he painted this picture, Caravaggio was imprisoned for libel. A year later he was arrested for throwing a plate of hot artichokes at a waiter, a year after that, he wounded an official, and then finally, in 1606 he killed a man… and would spend the rest of his life on the run. More than any other painter in history, Caravaggio understood what it was like to be pursued by the authorities.

The Garden of Earthly Delights video was the most popular, voted on by viewers for me to make. I am still taking suggestions, so please put them on the comments of my video "what is your favourite work of art?" There are no records to tell us what Bosch or his contemporaries were thinking. There are so many theories out there, some more outlandish than others. I have sifted through most of them, and from a process of elimination, come up with what I think is a pretty good idea. I have also come up with several ideas I haven’t seen before.

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 was under these circumstances that a quintessentially Japanese art developed. Art for the people that was consumed on an unprecedented scale.

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 him by, and these were also his most prolific years. Once he found his way, he was making up for lost time.

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 painting, was completed on January 21st, 1942, just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbour and America’s entry into World War two. That’s not to say the war was a direct influence, but the feeling of dread many Americans had, surely infused the painting. Afraid of air raid attacks, New York had blackout drills, and lights were dimmed in public spaces. Streets emptied out and Hopper’s city was effectively dark, and silent.

Sandro Botticelli’s poetic sense of beauty captivated the Florentine court. But it was his subject matter which distinguished him from other artists. He was one of the first western artist since classical times to depict non-religious scenes, and Botticelli’s inclusion of a near life size female nude was revolutionary.

Yayoi Kusama lives in a psychiatric institution, which she entered voluntarily in 1977. She is now in her nineties and still works every single day. Known for her repeated dot patterns, her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from trauma. In this video, I show that despite her quirky personality and her status as the most popular artist in the world, she is one of the most radical artists of all time. This is not a film about a specific artwork. This is a film about the simple polka dot. A dot that has obsessed Kusama for nine decades, from her struggle for recognition, to her later years as an art world sensation.

Between 1863 when Munch was born and the years before the first world war, European cities were going through unprecedented change. Industrialization and economic change brought anxieties and obsessions, political unrest, and radicalism. Questions about society and the changing role of man within it, about our psyche, our social responsibilities, and most radical of all, questions about the existence of God. This is a period of Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzche. This is also the period that Munch painted The Scream.

By the mid 17th century, the art being produced in Catholic countries had become a powerful tool of propaganda, characterized by a heightened sense of drama, movement, and theatricality that had never been seen before. But in the Protestant Netherlands, a new wave of realism was sweeping across the country. Johannes Vermeer was producing simple domestic interiors of middle-class life. His paintings were quiet, private, and unassuming. Secular works that contained stories of real human relationships.

In this full-length film, I look at Francisco Goya's later works. At the age of 46, Goya suffered from a severe illness that caused loss of vision and hearing, tinnitus, dizziness, right-sides paralysis, weakness and general malaise. Although he recovered from a cerebral stroke which accompanied it, he went completely deaf. From this point on his work took a darker tone.

Georges Seurat once revealed that he had been ‘interested in finding an optical formula’ for painting since he was just 17 years old. Seurat spent most of his adult life thinking about colour, studying theories, and working out systematically how one colour, placed in a series of dots, next to those of another, creates a whole different colour when it hits the retina of the human eye. How one colour can make another appear luminous bright, and vibrant.

For seven decades Georgia O'Keeffe was a major figure in American art. She was a female artist who refused to be pigeonholed. An artist who stayed true to her unique vision and remained independent from all the shifting art trends of her time. Her paintings, now loom so large in the collective imagination, that it is easy to forget just how radical she was for her time. In 1935, O’Keeffe produced this ground-breaking image. The artist was already known for her series of sensuous flower paintings, but this was different. That year, her life and the type of work she created would drastically change.

John Singer Sargent was the most successful society portrait painter of the Belle Epoque, and having one’s portrait painted by him was seen as an indication of impeccable good taste. In this episode, I look at two paintings created by Sargent. Two paintings united by scandal. One of them is of Doctor Pozzi, a celebrity gynaecologist and infamous ladies' man, who was referred to by many of his clients as L’Amour médecin, or Doctor Love. The other is Madame X, or Virginie Gautreau, who, like Dr. Pozzi, had a colourful love life, and is also shown in a provocative pose. The paintings have been written about and discussed as separate works of art, but instead of looking at them as two separate paintings - maybe it’s time we talked about them as a pair?

Haring had championed the poster format as a traditional form of political activism. He saw in them the immediacy which we now think of when we think of his aesthetic. It was in 1982 that he created one of his first posters. He printed and paid for 30,000 of them, which he gave out for free during an anti-nuclear protest in New York. He would use his platform to get us talking about socio-political issues often ignored, by employing a tradition used by political agitators since printing began.

At first glance, Thomas Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews, looks like just another classic painting of the 18th century, celebrating the dynastic marriage of the upper classes in all their finery. On closer inspection, two things stand out. One, is that Mrs Andrews has the most curious expression of contempt on her face. The other thing that stands out is the strange area in the middle of her lap which is unfinished. The rest of the painting is complete, so it makes it even more peculiar. In a painting that is heaving with tension, it is almost certain that at some point Mr and Mrs Andrews were so unhappy with the painting, that they put a halt to the proceedings, and sent Gainsborough on his way. The painting would then disappear and wouldn't be seen again for over 200 years. Why was this painting kept so secret for so long?

The age of Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, and it focused mainly on the power of human intelligence to explain the natural world. Romanticism emerged as a response to the cold science of the Enlightenment, with Romantics maintaining that art emerges from divine inspiration, and the artist’s role is as the mediator between the creative and the divine. The romantic age was characterised by a sense of drama and by the sublime spirit, a philosophical tradition, where a power or a force, an event or even beauty is so overwhelming, so awe inspiring and infinite, that it is beyond our comprehension. Nature, wild and uncontrolled became a major subject and the focus shifted to reconnecting with emotion and spirituality. The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich is a perfect embodiment of these ideas.