The National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy all saw either radical architectural interventions or rethinks of their mission under Charles Saumarez Smith's leadership, making him uniquely qualified to explore the ways in which art museums have changed over the past century and examine where they might be headed in the future. For this book, Saumarez Smith has undertaken an odyssey to art museums across the globe. From...

At the beginning of the new millennium the Museum of Modern Art is trying to redefine itself for the twenty-first century by undergoing the largest expansion in its 75-year history. This film gives a sense of the museum's attempts at finding a new direction for itself, with emphasis on its astounding collection. It is presented to the camera by the curators of the three cycles of the 'end of the century' exhibitions. These were ‘Modern Starts’,...

Pop Art draws upon the style and imagery of advertising and popular culture to challenge our preconceptions about the nature of art itself. This film features one of the great pop artists of our time, discussing his work, his artistic process, and the sources of his inspiration. Also appearing are several leading authorities on contemporary art including: Diane Waldman of the Guggenheim Museum, Kirk Varnedoe of the Museum of Modern Art, Robert Rosenblum...

Giant hamburgers and soft toilets - his images of consumerism, executed in disorientating materials and dimensions, and environments made Claes Oldenburg a key figure in Pop Art. Today, his landscape art and large sculptures are modern monuments which have made this American artist famous far beyond the art world. Gerald Fox accompanied Oldenburg during the construction, in 1995, of one of these large-scale projects and the preparation of his Anthology...

When pioneering land artist Michael Heizer finds the giant boulder he's been searching for since 1968, it sets off an epic struggle to realize one of America's newest and largest public artworks, 'Levitated Mass.' The 340-ton rock's journey from a desert quarry to its perch atop Heizer's gigantic, walled slot in the earth at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art attracted international media and challenged the imagination of thousands as it crawled...

Henri Langlois is a legendary figure in film history. He co-founded the world’s first cinematheque, devoted to showing film classics and films by new filmmakers; he started film p &reservation, inspired the auteur theory so prevelant in film studies today, and was an eccentric character larger than life.. This loving documentary features Langlois discussing his ideas on filmmaking and film history accompanied by an array of film clips from the silent...

For the first time in history the Royal Academy of Arts in London, in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, brought together Lucian Freud’s self-portraits. The exhibition displayed more than 50 paintings, prints and drawings in which this modern master of British art turned his unflinching eye firmly on himself. One of the most celebrated painters of our time, Lucian Freud is also one of very few 20th-century artists who portrayed...

Pablo Picasso is one of the greatest artists of all time – and right up until his death in 1973 he was the most prolific of artists. Many films have dealt with these later years – the art, the affairs and the wide circle of friends. But where did this all begin? What made Picasso in the first place? The film thus explains how this young artist acquired his craft. Looking carefully at two key early periods – the so-called Blue Period and Rose...

In 2016, the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch city of Den Bosch held a special exhibition devoted to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who died 500 years ago. This late-medieval artist lived his entire life in the city, causing uproar with his fantastical and utterly unique paintings in which hell and the devil always played a prominent role. In preparation for the exhibition, a team of Dutch art historians crisscrosses the globe to unravel the secrets...

For nearly thirty years, from 1962 to 1991, John Szarkowski served as Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As organizer of more than 100 exhibitions - including landmark shows of the work of Andre Kertesz, Walker Evans, Jacques-Henri Latrigue, Gary Winogrand, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, and a four-book project devoted to Eugene Atget...he taught several generations how to think about and look at photographs....