Paul Delvaux
When Paul Delvaux died in 1994, he was the last surviving member of the first generation of surrealist painters. This definitive portrait of the Belgian artist was made when he was in his nineties. He reminisces about his family and his art, and Charts his career from his Student days in Brüssels up to the time when failing eyesight forced him to give up painting. His memories of childhood and women play key roles in his visual ideas and the film explores both these aspects of his work.
Henri Matisse
Matisse’s brilliantly coloured work inspired many twentieth-century painters and is a source of infinite enjoyment to all who love art. This film shows the richness of his oeuvre and uses archive footage of the man himself and extracts from his Notes ofa Painter, to explore his legacy. It highlights the influence of his travels to Tangie, Tahiti and New York, looks at his use of decorative patterns and textiles.
The Caravaggio Conspiracy
To research a book on art theft, journalist Peter Watson assumed the identity of a shady art dealer for almost three years. In this guise and with the help of Sotheby’s, Christie’s and the police, he pursued stolen paintings and was instrumental in the recovery of a del Sarto and a Bronzino – though not the Caravaggio he was hunting. This film, shot in London, Italy and New York, tells the story through extensive reconstructions.
Marc Chagall
The artist Marc Chagall died in March 1985, at the age of ninety-seven. For nearly eighty years he painted in a unique style that captivated generations of art lovers and both fascinated and infuriated his critics. This programme was made very shortly before Chagall’s death and is the last film made about this great artist during his lifetime. It looks at his work through the eyes of a young English painter whose curiosity about the artist is aroused when he finds he is living in Chagall’s old studio in Paris. The camera follows the young man as he travels through France on the trail of the enigmatic artist.
Eduardo Paolozzi
Five Themes and Variations in the Work of Eduardo Paolozzi This film on one of Britain’s major contemporary scuiptors surveys his evolving creativity since the 1940s. Paolozzi’s art and his obsessions are explored under five headings: Surrealism, Classicism, Waste, Ethnography and Time. He is seen at his work bases in London and Munich and through the eyes of associates.
Raoul Dufy
Dufy (1877-1953) is perhaps best-known for his colourful and joyous paintings but he also produced a dazzling array of ceramics, wall-hangings, dress fabrics and furniture designs. This film, which includes interviews with patrons, dealers and models who knew Dufy puts the case that he was one of the finest draughtsmen of the twentieth century a designer whose influence is still much in evidence and a painter of genius to rank alongside Matisse and Léger.
John Piper
English artist John Piper (1903-92) is best known for his romantic pictures of the country’s architectural heritage and landscape. This film surveys his long career – his early abstract paintings, his work as a war artist, his return to representational art – and explores a talent which was expressed in watercolours, oils, ceramics, stained glass, tapestry and opera designs.
Ben Nicholson
Together with Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) shook English art out of the doldrums of the 1930s, helping to bring it back into the mainstream of international development with his uncompromisingly abstract art. This survey of his life and work includes personal observations and reminiscences from artists, friends and associates.
Cassily Kandinsky
Russian-born artist Kandinsky (1866-1944), one of the most prominent pioneers of abstract art in the early twentieth century, was widely influential both in Germany, where he taught at the Bauhaus in the twenties, and in France, where he settled in 1933. Extensive filming at a major Kandinsky retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou and at the Lenbachhaus in Munich forms the basis for this rich visual reappraisal of his work, which also draws on his essays, considered classics of artists’ writing.