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Private Notes
The first film in the series looks at the role that art and creative imagination has played in the forging of humanity itself. We attempt to define what civilization is – by identifying what it isn’t.
We look at the story of the first marks made 80,000 years ago and chart the first flowering of art in the West.
We see Petra - a city carved into rock – and uncover the mysterious and astonishing masks of Sanxingdui in China, before we explore how civilizations rise and fall. U.S. version narrated by Liev Schreiber.
This episode explores images of the human body in ancient art. We travel from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China, finishing in modern day New York, asking why human beings have always made art about themselves.
What were these images for? And what does a ‘realistic’ image of the body really tell us about the society that made it?
This program explores the place of the human body in politics and culture and in cultural representations of self, investigating the questions of how we have been taught to look. U.S. version narrated by Liev Schreiber.
This episode broaches the controversial and divisive topic of religion and art, from antiquity to the present day.
We travel the world’s temples, churches, mosques and ancient and symbolic sites through religions including Hinduism, Buddism, Christianity and Islam.
We look at the void that Christianity filled following the collapse of the Roman Empire and the growing skepticism about the older pagan gods, as we explore the role it played in changing the nature of religious art in the West and Near East. And we look at how modern artists embrace religious themes, searching to find a spiritual art relevant to the modern age. U.S. version narrated by Liev Schreiber.
In the late 1400s, technological advances in seafaring and a thirst for trade conspired to send human beings around the planet further and faster than they'd ever been before. The result was that distant and disparate cultures met for the very first time.
It provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear.
From the magnificent Benin bronzes, recording a relationship of mutual respect and exchange to the Japanese Shogunate famously bringing down the shutters and cutting ties with the outside world for over 300 years, this episode explores the way that initial encounters can produce a unique array of art. U.S. version narrated by Liev Schreiber.
In many European minds, the word Renaissance evokes ideas about the radical transformation in thought and art that took place in Italy starting in the 1400s.
But in the 15th and 16th centuries the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering and the two did not unfold in separate artistic universes.
This episode goes to both east and west: to Papal Rome, Mughal India and to Ottoman Istanbul exploring these connections and rivalries. U.S. version narrated by Liev Schreiber.
This episode explores how cultures have depicted the natural world in landscape painting throughout history.
We investigate the way that landscape painting is created as a response to the world around us, exploring such ideas as paradise, identity and the depiction of the vastness of nature to oppositional to industrialization.
We explore landscape photography, from Ansel Adams’ majestic depictions of Yosemite, to modern photography and a new kind of landscape which explores the cosmic sublime. U.S. version narrated by Liev Schreiber.
In this episode we explore the roles that color and light have played in the formation of art throughout history.
We explore the background of the European use of color and the masterpieces which embraced the radiance of gems and silks, from the use of brilliant colors like ultramarine and vermillion, through to the development of obsession with light and shade.
We explore the influences of east on west, and vice versa – and the notions of lack of color in western art, from Goya to Kapoor. U.S. version narrated by Liev Schreiber.
This episode is about the "Progress" as an ideology, and how the "civilizing" project that arose from Enlightenment ideas was fraught with contradictions.
During a time when many artists turned to non-Western art and culture for inspiration, artists like Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin and Gottfried Lindauer’s captured very different representations of the relationship between Europeans and indigenous subjects.
We explore how some artist followed in the footsteps of American Civil War photographers; with photojournalists like Jacob Riis turning the camera lens on the urban poor to help turn photography into a documentary art. U.S. version narrated by Liev Schreiber.
The last episode in the series explores the fate of art in the machine and profit-driven world and asks: should art create a realm separate from the modern world, or should it plunge headlong into the chaos while transforming the way we see and live in it?
Using the works of artists of the 20th and 21st Century, including Ai Weiwei, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol and Anselm Kiefer, we seek answers to these profound questions.
The conclusion is imbued with the hope that art still offers civilization an insight into the incomprehensibility of the world and a way to transcend its horrors with the enduring creativity of the human spirit. U.S. version narrated by Liev Schreiber.
