Nice BBC series presented by Alastair Sooke, the Jamie Oliver of art. For sure a must see for all those enjoying art.
Sooke's thesis is that far from being remote and elitist, the influence of the great 20th- century artists – Picasso, Matisse, Dalí and Warhol – is everywhere in our multimedia world, from car design and children's books to the crassest celebrity magazines. In the case of his first subject, Andy Warhol, you might think this a case that hardly needed making.
As Sooke jetted into Warhol's hometown of Pittsburgh in a rock video whirl of music and fast-cutting, the show appeared to pander to the modern world's attention deficit- prone, celebrity obsession in a way that seemed neither ironic or directly related to Warhol's own preoccupation with fame. Yet all was not what it seemed. Sooke knows his art history, and talking about paintings to camera he homed unerringly in on the essentials. Heading off into the Pittsburgh tenements in which Warhol grew up, meeting the now elderly people who gave Warhol his first breaks as a shy, tweed-jacketed commercial artist in 1950s New York, the show gave a far fuller sense of Warhol the man than many more supposedly high-flown efforts. (The Telegraph)
