Manet is one of the main candidates for the title of the most important artist there has been. As the reluctant father of Impressionism, and the painter of Dejeuner sur l'herbe, he can probably be accused of inventing modern art. But his story is fascinating on many other levels. As a piece of compelling biography, Manet's is the unlikely tale of the stubborn son of the most highly placed judge in France who decides to become an artist and embarrass his father. The resulting family tensions are the stuff of legend. Then there was Manet's dramatic private life, including exotic romantic affairs and a particularly horrible death. Always cited as the father of the Impressionists, Manet stubbornly refused to show with them, and was careful to maintain an aesthetic distance from Monet, Renoir and the others. While they worshipped him, he looked down on them.

Painter Françoise Gilot shared Pablo Picasso's life from 1943 to 1953. This union nourished their re...

No understanding of the modern movement in architecture is possible without knowledge of its master ...

Alan Yentob profiles the most successful female architect there has ever been, the late Zaha Hadid, ...

This 56-minute documentary on America's most controversial and unique composer manages to cover a gr...

M.C. Escher is among the most intriguing of artists. In 1956 he challenged the laws of perspective w...

Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurri...

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrato...

This movement marks the beginning of modern art in Germany. It is the German equivalent of French Fa...

In this hybrid political thriller and verité portrait documentary, Sara Nodjoumi, working with co-di...

Narrated by David McCullough, this program examines the infamous Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) ex...

Many twentieth century European artists, such as Paul Gauguin or Pablo Picasso, were influenced by a...

The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes.

In the late 1980s, an era of great hopes and great disasters for Russia, art proved to be a social b...

A rural American town suffering economically from factory closures finds an unconventional route to ...

In the Russian Empire of the 1910s, a group of visionary painters revolutionized the aesthetic norms...

Loïe Fuller, stage name of Marie Louise Fuller: the American actress and dancer trained in burlesque...