Simon Schama:The Great Gallery Tours

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Simon Schama: The Great Gallery Tours

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Simon Schama conducts a virtual tour of fourworld-class galleries.

Simon Schama conducts a virtual tour of four world-class galleries that, sadly, we shan't be able to visit for a while.

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Simon Schama: The Great Gallery Tours: The Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art

BBC Radio 4 - Simon Schama: The Great Gallery Tours, The Whitney Museum of American Art

In his home town of New York, Sir Simon Schama celebrates four great 20th century artists.

The new Whitney Museum  has re-energised New York's meatpacking district. It's exhilarating, says Sir Simon Schama, even before you get to great works of American art he chooses.

New York is Sir Simon Schama's home town. So it's approriate that his final Gallery Tour should be based in the Whitney Museum of American Art which he first experienced as a young man in the 1960s.

Since then, the museum his moved to an exciting glassy new building at the foot of the High Line in the former meatpacking district of the city. It's a welcoming place with wonderful terraces layering the building which afford splendid views over the city and the water.

Here Simon chooses American artists from the 20th century. They tell a New York story. The Mark Rothko colour panel called Four Darks in Red was one of a set intended for the restaurant of the flashy Four Seasons Hotel in the Seagram Building, but were withdrawn by Rothko who hated the conspicuous consumption of the place. Edward Hopper's New York Movie takes us inside a cinema where an usherette is lost in her own thoughts as the film plays. Simon also chooses work by Jacob Lawrence, the Harlem painter who catalogued the experience of African Americans in the Second World War, and photographer and chameleon Cindy Sherman whose Untitled 2008 offers us a grand dame - herself in yet another guise - moneyed and aloof, but staving off the ravages of time. 

It's a wonderful introduction to the museum which will not re-open until August 2020 at the earliest.

You can find the names of the paitings discussed and a link to the museum on the Great Gallery Tours programme page.

Written and Presented by Sir Simon Schama
Produced by Susan Marling
A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4

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