If David Olusoga's first film in Civilisations is about the art that followed and reflected early encounters between different cultures, his second explores the artistic reaction to imperialism in the 19th century. David shows the growing ambivalence with which artists reacted to the idea of progress, both intellectual and scientific, that underpinned the imperial mission and followed the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.\n\nAdvances in knowledge and technology imbued Europeans in the 19th century with a sense of their civilisation's superiority. It justified their imperial ideology. But it created among artists deep fascinations with other civilisations which in turn produced a scepticism about their own. By contrast, as European artists questioned their civilisation's 'advance', in America painters sought to capture an idea of their new nation's 'manifest destiny' in landscapes. And in their representation of the Native Americans, they sought to record for posterity the world and the cultures they were violently displacing. But this was not always the case. David show how in New Zealand one artist was co-opted by the Maori who used his sills to record their culture and celebrate their ancestors. As the 19th century came to an end, the certainties of industrial and scientific advance were increasingly questioned - many artists (Gauguin and Picasso amongst them) turned to non-Western art and culture for inspiration. And in the face of the catastrophic conflict of the First World War, the idea that progress, reason and industrial advance were guarantors of higher 'civilisation' was rejected. David ends the film with a powerful meditation on Otto Dix's nightmarish and ironic evocation of the horror of the trenches, the triptych Der Krieg (The War).
Source: BBC 2
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Simon Schama begins Civilisations with this premise: that it is in art - the play of the creative imagination - that humanity expresses its most essential self: the power to bre ...
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BBC 2
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Think Renaissance and you think of Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering. The two phenomena ...
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Professor Mary Beard broaches the controversial, sometimes dangerous, topic of religion and art. For millennia, art has inspired religion as much as religion has inspired art. Y ...
06-04-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 7. Radiance
Simon Schama starts his meditation on colour and civilisation with the great Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres. He then moves to 16th-century Venice, where masterpieces s ...
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BBC 2
Series 1: 3. Picturing Paradise
Simon Schama explores one of our deepest artistic urges - the depiction of nature. Simon discovers that landscape painting is seldom a straightforward description of observed na ...
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BBC 2
Series 1: 6. First Contact
In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear. And, as historian of emp ...
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Series 1: 2. How Do We Look?
In this episode of Civilisations, Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China. Mary seeks answers to fundame ...
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