Art of the Western World

- Season 1

(1989)

This episode looks closely at Greek sculpture, architecture, and art, and at the society that produced them. This seminal episode presages the effects that Greek art, style, and culture had on all Western civilizations that came afterwards.

Ancient Roman architecture, sculpture, art, and engineering and their roots and influences from Greece. The Roman Empire as expressed in its great public monuments. Roman art, like that of Greece, is the cornerstone of all Western art.

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This episode explores and celebrates the origins, development, innovations, and glory of Gothic cathedrals, including one of its highest achievements, the cathedral of Chartres.

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This episode explores the 15th-century Renaissance in Northern Europe, where artists like Van Eyck and Durer produced uniquely realistic effects.

This episode focuses on the supreme achievements of the masters of the High Renaissance in Italy: Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

16th-century Venice sought to present itself as the ideal city-state, and was infused with poetry and spectacle. Venetian art and architecture mirrored this and proclaimed it to the world.

This episode looks at the exuberant Baroque style of early 17th-century Rome, in the works of artists such as Cortona, Caravaggio, and Bernini.

This episode explores the art and societies of 17th-century Catholic Spain, the Spanish Netherlands, France, and the Protestant Dutch Republic. Artists examined include Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velasquez.

This episode examines the Neo-Classical revival which occurred in 18th-century France and England.

Napoleon's charisma and promise, and the changes he wrought, had an enormous impact on French artistic life. This episode includes the French Revolution and its aftermath, and Napoleon's rise and fall from power.

This episode examines the very beginnings of modern art, in those painters who rejected the academic conventions of Salon art and instead sought to engage directly with the world around them.

This episode focuses on the post-impressionists -- Gaugin, Seurat, Van Gogh, Cezanne, etc. -- who were part of the competitive avant-garde in France in the 1880s and 1890s.

This episode examines the works of the rebellious "Viennese Secession" artists and architects, headed by Gustav Klimt, beginning in the late 1890s.

This episode examines art in the years between WWI and WWII, and the close link between art and politics during that time. The styles examined include Dada, Art Deco, and Surrealism.

The aftermath of World War Two caused artists to turn away from the public and political domain and instead explore their inner, subjective world. Jackson Pollock and other artists chose abstract expressionism.

This concluding episode examines the great diversity of art in 1970s and 1980s, including its diversification, decentralization, internationalism, and quest for meaning and direction.