Art on the BBC: Turner - Light and Landscape

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Art on the BBC

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

How has television influenced our understanding of the world's greatest artists?

Art historians delve into six decades of the BBC archives. How has television influenced our understanding of the world's greatest artists?

Turner - Light and Landscape

BBC Four HD

Leslie Primo

Jonathan Jones

Nicola Moorby

Francesca Whitlum-Cooper

Ed Stobart

Emma Parkins

Ben Harding

Art on the BBC: Series 2: Turner - Light and Landscape

Series 2

BBC Four - Art on the BBC, Series 2, Turner - Light and Landscape

Leslie Primo explores the BBC archives to create a television history of JMW Turner.

Art historian Leslie Primo explores the BBC archives to create a TV history of perhaps the UK’s most beloved artist, JMW Turner.

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.

Leslie discovers the TV art historians behind each theory. Was Turner great because he reinvented landscape painting, because he was a radical whose work marked the beginning of modern painting, or because he captured the extraordinary march of the industrial revolution? Through the archives, Leslie meets Fiona Bruce, Simon Schama, Andrew Graham-Dixon and Kenneth Clarke.

Leslie also finds that the disputed nature of Turner’s brilliance has made for some entertaining film-making, from a frock-coat- and powdered-wig-loaded reconstruction of his humble origins as the son of a barber in London’s Covent Garden, to modern art historian Tim Marlow lashing himself to a mast in the middle of a choppy ocean to recreate Turner’s inspiration for Fishermen at Sea. 

Even if you think you know Turner, the programme reveals fascinating surprises about the complex man behind some of Britain’s most revered works of art.

Art on the BBC: Series 2

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