With sumptuous palaces, exquisite artworks and stunning architecture, every great city offers a dizzying multitude of cultural highlights. So what should an art lover see on a flying visit? Art historians Dr Janina Ramirez and Alastair Sooke take us on entertaining and revealing cultural city breaks, offering surprising new insights into famous locations and uncovering hidden gems and untold stories, as they discover how religion, revolution and trailblazing individuals can shape the art - and soul - of a city.
Rauschenberg was the first artist to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1964, creating a crucial bridge between the abstract expressionists of the 50s and the pop artists who emerged in the 60s. Famous for his 'combines' that elevated the rich junk of life to the status of high art, he continued to work right up to his death in 2008, collaborating with dancers, scientists and social activists on a startlingly broad array of projects.
Alastair Sooke champions pop art as one of the most important art forms of the twentieth century, peeling back pop's frothy, ironic surface to reveal an art style full of subversive wit and radical ideas. In charting its story, Alastair brings a fresh eye to the work of pop art superstars Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and tracks down pop's pioneers, from American artists like James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg and Ed Ruscha to British godfathers Peter Blake and Allen Jones. Alastair also explores how pop's fascination with celebrity, advertising and the mass media was part of a global art movement, and he travels to China to discover how a new generation of artists are reinventing pop art's satirical, political edge for the 21st century.
Alastair Sooke explores the riches and unique legacy of Greek art.
The Haywain by John Constable is such a comfortingly familiar image of rural Britain that it is difficult to believe it was ever regarded as a revolutionary painting, but in this film, made in conjunction with a landmark exhibition at the V&A, Alastair Sooke discovers that Constable was painting in a way that was completely new and groundbreaking at the time. Through experimentation and innovation, he managed to make a sublime art from humble things and, though he struggled in his own country during his lifetime, his genius was surprisingly widely admired in France.
Alastair Sooke explores the evolution of the gentleman's suit, which has evolved from working man's Sunday best to the casual wear of royalty over the last 100 years.
Alastair Sooke tells the story of Ancient Egyptian art through 30 extraordinary masterpieces.
Art critic Alastair Sooke delves into the murky world of art theft. Despite the high stakes - and often daring - involved, many cases are shrouded in mystery and go unnoticed by the media. Around 47,000 works of art are reported missing each year, yet it is only the heists involving the world's most valuable paintings that hit the headlines. But high-profile or not - once gone, the works are rarely recovered.
Alastair Sooke takes us on an exclusive personal tour of the Roy Lichtenstein Retrospective at Tate Modern. Offering an in-depth look at one of the year's most talked about exhibitions, Alastair and guests explore the enduring appeal of Lichtenstein's imagery, debate the controversies around his work and his influence on today's generation of artists and tackle the big question - was Lichtenstein a Pop Art genius and one of the defining image-makers of the 20th century, or a one-trick wonder whose big idea was so powerful he could never let it go?
Art historian Alastair Sooke traces the humanization of the Devil figure in medieval art from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries.
Born 1981, Alastair Sooke is an English art critic, journalist and broadcaster, most notable for reporting and commenting on art for the British media and writing and presenting documentaries on art and art history for BBC television and radio.
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