James Fox & 'British Masters': the Finale?

Lucian Freud, Girl with a Kitten, 1947

Whatever the excesses of the previous episodes in this BBC survey of 20th century British art, the final part was - generally speaking - sober, thoughtful and lacking in those awkward Alfred Munnings moments. It wasn't a desperately jolly programme, but then neither Francis Bacon nor Lucian Freud, two of the evening's stars, were known for their levity. Nor was Graham Sutherland, for that matter. Dr Fox was spot-on when he described the impact of the Holocaust and the Bomb on post-war artists; it was a time to reflect seriously on the human condition, and these painters duly obliged.

Graham Sutherland, Thorn Trees, 1945

Fox and team must have had an anxious time re-editing the programme to take account of Lucian Freud's death last week. I wonder whether, if he hadn't died, they would have come back to him as they did or left us with that tantalising five minutes at the beginning of the show. On hearing the news they must have rushed off to find an easily accessible Freud, and recorded the refreshingly underwritten material on the glorification of cellulite.



Francis Bacon's studio

 Some odd moments aside - did Dr Fox have to gaze for quite so long at a sunlit twig? - this was the pick of the three shows, giving us cool appraisals of several indisputably great artists and plenty of marvellous archive footage. I'm not sure what I enjoyed more, watching Francis Bacon showing off his French (and his studio, surely the finest, messiest, most authentic studio EVER), or listening to Graham Sutherland's marvellous voice. Of course we also had to have Dr F in a Soho street and Dr F on the set of Corrie, but we're used to that by now.

Keith Vaughan, Eldorado Banal, 1976

Chris Ofili, No Woman No Cry, 1998

Contrary to the concerns of some, there was nothing flippant in his treatment of Keith Vaughan's life and death, although Fox might have noted that it wasn't so much conceptual art that people preferred to Vaughan's figures as abstract painting. But then abstraction didn't get much of a look-in during the three hours of 'British Masters'. Nor did women (except, for the most part, in the role of 'friend' or 'student'), which made Fox's targeting of Tracey Emin as a peddler of inferior conceptual art slightly awkward.

The programme concluded, not surprisingly, that a great period of British painting ended with the death of Lucian Freud. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but one or two living artists might disagree...

Elizabeth Magill, Close to Swansea, 2002

British Masters: Paul Nash

Paul Nash's grave in Langley

Paul Nash suffered a great deal in life but died peacefully in his sleep after making a final sketch from the balcony of a hotel in Boscombe, Dorset. His family had deep roots in Langley, a village still during his lifetime but today a sprawling suburb of Slough. It's hard to imagine from the picture, but housing estates press against this rural churchyard from every side, and entering it is like stepping into another world - not back in time, so much, as into Nash's world of characterful old trees, dramatic walls and unlikely structures.

The pillared grave he shares with his wife Margaret is a monument both modern and classical beside the mellow red brick of the wall that surrounds his family's ancestral plot. He lies close to them, connected under the earth, but apart, and watched over by a bird that might be a falcon out of Ancient Egypt. Is this the peregrine of 'Landscape from a Dream', placed here to keep an eye on the artist? Nash liked to tell people that death resembled flowers drifting in the sky. He'd experienced a vision, when he was 21 and his mother had just died after a long and distressing mental illness, of a woman's face floating in the evening sky. Or that's what he said, at any rate, and that's what he painted.

Then he abandoned the human face and figure for woods and trees, often with a bird or a flock of birds flying around. He felt very strongly, throughout his life, the personality of trees, of things and of places. Certain places seized his imagination. At Dymchurch in Kent, in the early 1920s, he painted and sketched the sea wall and the sea over and over again. More often, though, he moved restlessly from place to place, looking, sketching, trying out ideas. He and Margaret were almost constantly on the move, sometimes together, sometimes apart, and often in the midst of crisis.

And, strange as it may seem, Nash was at his most productive when life was at its darkest - in the years following his mother's death, and following his father's, and at moments when his own life hung by a thread. Whatever the debates about modernity and Britishness, about abstraction, surrealism and the rest, Nash was motivated by an awareness of and terror of death. He spent his life coming to terms with mortality, in his strange paintings of tree stumps and ancient stones and heaps of felled wood, using the language of natural forms to explore the processes of which, like it or not, we are part.

Swan Song, 1928/9

Yet he had a wonderful sense of humour, which he retained through everything. You can see it in his private letters, which are full of wit and wordplay, and also I think in some of the paintings we talk about in such solemn terms. He disliked having his picture taken and almost invariably looks stiff and formal in photographs, whereas contemporaries noticed the smile on his lips and an eye that was constantly looking for wonders.

In an age of omnipresent images it's hard to accept that we cannot rely on visual evidence for Nash's character - or even appearance. Instead we have to dig out old books and read both his descriptions of the world and other people's descriptions of him. He loved Henry Purcell and American jazz, Botticelli and the cartoonists of the New Yorker; the American humourist James Thurber said of Nash, 'At the time there was no one in England, or anywhere else outside the US, who knew our comic art so well, or appreciated it so heartily.’

Event on the Downs, 1935

This isn't to say that Paul Nash wasn't a serious artist - he most certainly was. He produced some of his best paintings in the face of, or in response to death, and he served as a war artist in both World Wars, and between the wars he got embroiled in all the artistic debates of the age. Yet he was also charming and funny, a pretty good singer of old songs, a lover of life both cerebral and earthy.

Parkland near Nash's family home at Iver Heath

British Masters: Pure Genius

Walter Sickert, Mornington Crescent Nude, 1907

Does the decade 1910-1919 represent the best period of British art EVER? Was David Bomberg the greatest painter on the PLANET? Is James Fox trying to bring our artistic heritage to life with an audacity and verve that BEGGARS BELIEF?

David Bomberg, The Mud Bath, 1914

If we discount the misery of golfers who tuned in by mistake, last night's 'British Masters' on BBC4 was an hour of almost unalloyed joy. Raised to believe in the superiority of French, German, Italian, American, Spanish and Russian 20th century artists to our own, it was pleasure indeed to see the youthful professor fix the camera with a steely eye as he described Paul Nash's 'We Are Making a New World' as the greatest war painting EVER.

Fox

A complete disregard for the broader streams of art history, such as the experiments of Picasso and Braque, allowed us to revel in the inventiveness of Bomberg and the dastardly Wyndham Lewis. With Dr Fox as a sort of art historical Dr Who we explored a parallel universe in which British artists invented modern art. Walter Sickert was the first artist EVER to portray poverty and crime in paint. Mark Gertler predicted the entire history of the 20th century in a painting of a merry-go-round.

Berger

If art history students were left slightly bemused by this interpretation, it was great TV, by turns dramatic, funny and moving. I thoroughly enjoyed being lured into Sickert's painting of a murdered prostitute, and then blamed for the killing. Nevinson's story was nicely told, as was Nash's. My favourite moment, though, was when the blinds were raised to reveal the painted interior of the Sandham Memorial Chapel. Looking at Stanley Spencer's extraordinary visions of friendship, hope and redemption, I was on the presenter's side - the chapel's interior is a work of art to rival any.

Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, Sandham Memorial Chapel, 1920s

By coincidence, I was watching 'Ways of Seeing' on Youtube last week and couldn't help but notice the contrast between James Fox's approach and John Berger's. You could probably watch them side by side in different windows if your computer's fast enough. In the first episode of his fabulous series - which was made in response to Kenneth Clark's equally great but rather less confrontational series 'Civilisation' - Berger sought to expose the ways paintings are exploited by all and sundry for their own ends. The essential qualities of a painting, he told us, are stillness and silence. Anything added, such as music, or the movement of a camera to pick out details, is added, whether by advertiser or art historian, for a reason.

Dr Fox spent an hour last night using every trick in the TV presenter's book to catch our attention, to make us look and to share his passion for British art. Good for him.

'Your Paintings': Celebrities vs Art Historians

Stanley Spencer, The Scarecrow (1934)

Yesterday I made the mistake of visiting the BBC website devoted to the 'Your Paintings' project. An hour later I was still there, touring the online galleries with Rory Bremner. Or was it Mary Beard? It doesn't matter. In the end I had to watch all of them, to find out who did the job better, the celebrities or the art historians.

First up was James Fox, the debonair art historian who is fast becoming the BBC's go to man. He gave us a brief preview of the upcoming series 'British Masters', which sounds like a golf tournament but is in fact a wholesale reappraisal of 20th century British art. Stanley Spencer's 'Scarecrow' (1934) is a treat, although surely it is less a prediction of coming turmoil, as Fox suggests, than it is a reference back to the abiding influence of the Great War.

A good start for the experts, but here comes Frank Skinner, veteran comedian and footie fan. He is not, he tells us, an art historian, but he does like to visit galleries and that - he thinks - is enough. Is it? He takes for the theme of his tour a specific subject, The Annunciation, as depicted by sundry artists. Botticelli's version is stunning, and Skinner's commentary - 'Mary looks like she's opened the front door to put the milk out' - entertaining. He gets in a bit of a pickle later on with a discussion of Paul Delvaux but ends on a high note with an actual pickle, or gherkin, in Carlo Crivelli's painting of the subject.

Botticelli's Annunciation - Mary 'putting the milk out'

In all, a bright, entertaining survey from Skinner, so let's try another celebrity, Monty Don. It's clear from the outset that the gardener's gardener Knows What He Likes in a painting. He likes Cezanne so much that he spent a year in France experiencing the landscape, and he likes Ivon Hitchens and he likes Stanley Spencer. The latter's 'Wisteria at Englefield' (1954), Don tells us, was painted from a child's viewpoint, adding 'Spencer was a very small man, famously'.

Time for another art historian: Gus Casely-Hayford. Here's someone who knows what he's talking about, although his tour of artists on the edge plots a rather odd route from Richard Dadd and Blake to a discussion of slavery. Solid from the experts, though. I think they're winning.

For the celebrities, here's Rory Bremner, with a selection of paintings accompanied by impressions of the Royal Family and others. And some interesting info too, sneaked in among the laughs. Peter Blake made of the printer's mis-registration a new technique in 'The Beatles 1962' (1963-8).

Elizabeth Magill, Close to (Swansea), 2002

A delicate touch from Bremner, then, followed by solid performances by Matt Baker (a TV presenter with a fairly conservative taste in landscape painting) and historian Dan Snow. Yinka Shonibare presents a wonderfully eclectic selection including Elizabeth Magill's gorgeous 'Close to (Swansea)' (2002), then The Reduced Shakespeare Company ups the tempo with a whistlestop tour of bard-related painting. The art experts need something good here. Can critic Alastair Sooke deliver?

He has a good subject: money. A tour of the nation's free-to-view masterpieces gives us Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Titian and some big fat numbers to go with them. The National Gallery and the National Gallery of Scotland came up with £50 million to buy Titian's 'Diana and Actaeon' from the Duke of Sutherland. But it could be worth far more.

Titian's 'Diana and Actaeon' - a cool £50 million

It looks like the experts have it, but wait! Here's sex and relationship expert Tracey Cox - sorry, boys, she's definitely not an art historian - with a fascinating, sensitive tour of paintings depicting love in the widest sense. 'During orgasm, men's brains completely fire during the moment of pleasure, and the female brain, actually shuts down and lets go.' Could this be the clincher?

Only one to go, and it's Mary Beard, a Professor of Classics, but not an art historian. Is she a celebrity or an expert? Or a centaur-like combination of the two? Who cares. She's bold, erudite and straightforward and her tour is by turns illuminating - Classical artists showed Perseus nude and Andromeda clothed, whereas Renaissance artists did the opposite - and shocking. It ends with a picture of a young woman suckling her starving father - a popular Roman theme, we are told, although the painting shown of Cimon and Pero is by Abraham Bloemaert not Carlo Cignani.

When in Rome... Abraham Bloemaert, Cimon and Pero (early C17)

So who wins? I'm not sure, but old-fashioned art history (focusing on technique, influences and so on) seems to be the loser. And who should the BBC hire to front an hour-long version, if such a programme were to be made? It would have to be Professor Beard. How about a BBC4 special on Classical themes in painting?