Art on the BBC

Art historian David Dibosa examines six decades of BBC archive material to create a television history of Salvador Dali. Often called art's greatest showman and the world's first celebrity artist, Dali shamelessly used TV to promote his art and himself. Dali's striking, dreamlike images made his name synonymous with surrealism, and he shocked the world through film, fashion, sculpture and architecture.

Art Historian Kate Bryan examines six decades of BBC archive to create a television history of the man who has become the embodiment of the ‘tortured artist’, Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh was 37 when he shot himself, but in the four years before he died, he painted some of the world’s most beloved works, using colour in ways that changed art forever.

Art Historian Katy Hessel examines six decades of BBC archive to create a television history of Claude Monet. Monet is known as the father of impressionism, the movement that arguably kick-started modern western art. But his work has become so commercialised – used on everything from chocolate boxes to wastepaper bins – that most of us have little sense of how radical an artist he really was. Now, by delving deep in the BBC archives, Katy will rediscover Monet as an artist driven by a burning ambition to relentlessly reinvent his technique and reshape art again and again. Katy learns how Monet set impressionism alight, a movement that shocked and confused the public and critics alike, created his series paintings in an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to capture the nature of time, and would go on to influence America’s mid-century artistic revolutionaries such as Jackson Pollock. The subject of Monet has fascinated many of the BBC’s greatest programme-making talents. We meet Monet

Art historian Leslie Primo examines six decades of BBC archive to explore what makes JMW Turner such a beloved name in British art. Almost everyone has good things to say about Turner - after all, he’s responsible for some of Britain’s greatest artistic treasures, like The Fighting Temeraire, and Rain, Steam and Speed. But exactly what makes him great is where opinions can differ.