Civilizations

In December 1942, a Jewish teacher brings art supplies to children held by Nazis. They created art that would give them a momentary escape, if only in their imaginations.

For artist Ai Weiwei, the calamity of our time is the disaster of the multitudes of displaced. Those who are uprooted, through no fault of their own, and cast adrift on an infinite ocean of terror and despair.

In the autumn of 1914, Mondrian had an epiphany that would bring true abstraction into the world.

Explore art in the age of revolution, war and profound scientific change and consider the question: Should art create a separate realm, a place of escape, or should it plunge into the chaos, transforming the way we see and live in the world?

Some of the strongest contemporary art has the magical power of transformation, turning the ephemeral and destructive into something more enduring.

Thomas Cole regarded the American landscape as being what he called the undefiled work of Gods.

Otto Dix and his generation had borne witness to the horrors of World War I. They'd also been witness to the death of the nineteenth century faith in an inevitable, unstoppable progress.

In what's considered his last great work, Edouard Manet created a masterpiece famed as a masterclass in visual subversion.

Examine the rise and fall of “progress” as an ideology, and see how the “civilizing” project that arose from Enlightenment ideas was fraught with contradictions that troubled European artists in different ways.

Catlin was by no means indifferent to the suffering of the people whose faces appear in these paintings. But he didn't produce them in order to take part in some campaign to save the native Americans, instead he said they must perish.

Ukiyo-e began with only a few colors, but combined them in increasingly sophisticated ways to create vivid depictions of a rapidly growing urban life. Wildly popular in all its forms, it demonstrated that every day transitory objects could be considered art.

In his 60s, Goya abandoned his role as court artist to bare witness to the irrational forces unleashed by Napoleon's invasion of Spain.