Shock of the New (1982)

I recently finished watching the thoroughly engaging Shock of the New. This 8 part series on Modern Art has Robert Hughes explaining the key movements and players. Like other great documentary series hosts such as Sagan or Cousteau, Hughes has a style and delivery that is as hypnotic as it is trustworthy. I was happy to find that Open Culture has links to all 8 episodes on YouTube. As Colin Marshall writes on their site:

Clear, bold, concrete, and always, in a bluntly stealthy way, more nuanced than it seems, Hughes’ textual persona stands against what, in his autobiography, he calls the “airy-fairy, metaphor-ridden kind of pseudo-poetry” that he sees as having flooded the field. As a guide through the history of artistic modernism, he proves as no-nonsense yet dryly entertaining on film as he is on the page. Whether turning our attention toward special details of Braque and Picasso’s canvasses or zipping around in a 1900s roadster, Hughes presents with the assurance of authority but not its intellectual overreach, pulling you along to Fernand Léger, the Futurists, and Marcel Duchamp.

He’s quite right. Hopefully, others will spend the time – it goes by fast – to endulge in a gem of a public televisions series. Just watch that you don’t get the theme music stuck in your head.