Film
The Shock of the New
Art Critic and author Robert Hughes’s brillliant series The Shock Of The New is often considered the official sequel to the landmark BBC art history series Civilization, starting where Civilization left off, with the rise of Modernism in art. Employing a wealth of rare footage and documentary materials, including fascinating interviews with well-known artists, Hughes presents an illuminating personal examination of “The hundred-year history of Modern Art — its rise, its dazzling achievement, its fall…” Co-produced by RM Productions, Munich and Time-Life Films, New York. Each episode is screened at 12:30 pm in the Gallery and lasts 55 minutes.
27 September: Part 1: The Mechanical Paradise
From the 1880s to the Great War, Hughes charts the blossoming sense of Modernity in European culture, in which the myth of the Future was born in the atmosphere of milennial optimism that surrounded the high machine age and its symbol, the Eiffel Tower — an age that gave rise to Cubism and Futurism.
4 October: Part 2: The Powers That Be
Dada and Expressionism are set against the collapse of Germany after WWI, while the energies of the avant-garde, among them Constructivists and Suprematists, are deployed in the service of real political revolutions in Russia, Central Europe and Spain.
25 October: Part 3: The Landscape Of Pleasure
From Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism, this section focuses on the ecstatic contemplation of pleasure in nature, touching on the paintings of (to name a few) Monet, Cézanne, Gaugin and Matisse in Europe and Frankenthaler, Pollock and Diebenkorn in America.
1 November: Part 4: Trouble In Utopia
Visionary architects such as Mies Van der Rohe and Walter Gropius mix modernist-glass-box designs with looming social agendas; the elegant functionalism of the Bauhaus, along with Le Courbisier’s ambitious town plans and Buckminister Fuller’s grandiouse spectacles lead to the strange architectual wastelands of Brasilia.
8 November: Part 5: The Threshold Of Liberty
Surrealism was the last great revolutionary aesthetic movement of the 20th Century to sweep the art world like a religion. Along with writer André Breton, artists de Chirico, Dali, Ernst, Magritte and others strove to liberate the unconscious mind.
15 November: Part 6: The View From The Edge
Confronted with the horrifying realities of the Holocaust and the Atomic Bomb, Hughes argues that figurative expressionism lost its power to photography and documentary cinema. The growing secularization of the post-WW2 art world responds to an increasingly uncertain world.
22 November: Part 7: Culture As Nature
In the mid-20th century, symbols of modern culture reflecting the powers of the mass media, advertising, radio and television, became subjects for artists. Pop art deals with a world that we ourselves have made, where the contemplation of nature is replaced by the reflection of culture.
12 December: Part 8: The Future That Was
By the 1960s and ‘70s Modernism, once the avant-garde, had became the establishment. Considering conceptualism, performance art, minimalism and the incestuous interlocking structures of museums, dealers and art historians, Hughes sees Modernism mutate into the vagaries of post-Modernism and a questionable future.
