Video Documentaries

Art experts attempt to digitally reconstruct Monet's Water Lilies, a much beloved painting that was destroyed in a fire at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1958.   Mystery of the Lost Paintings ep. 2 - Mystery of the Lost Monet On April 15, 1958, a fire on the second floor destroyed an 18 foot long Monet Water Lilies painting (the current Monet water lilies was acquired shortly after the fire as a replacement). The fire started when workmen installing air conditioning were smoking near paint cans, sawdust, and a canvas dropcloth. One worker was killed in the fire and several firefighters were treated for smoke inhalation. Most of the paintings on the floor had been moved for the construction although large paintings including the Monet were left. Art work on the 3rd and 4th floors were evacuated to the Whitney Museum of American Art which abutted it on the 54th Street side. Among the paintings that were moved was A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte which had b...

The Riviera - A History in Pictures, two-part sun-filled series in which Richard E Grant follows in the footsteps of artists who have lived, loved and painted on France's glorious Cote d'Azur. The Riviera - A History in Pictures part 1 : Painting Paradise Revealing the intertwined relationship between modern art and the development of the French Riviera as an international tourist haven, Grant explores how Impressionist painters Cezanne, Monet and Renoir first discovered the region in the 19th century when the newly built railway arrived there. Captivated by the light and colour of this undiscovered landscape, the painters immortalised its shores on canvas and in doing so advertised the savage beauty of the region. For Neo-Impressionists Paul Signac and Henri Edmund Cross the region provided a vision of utopia, while for Henri Matisse the vivid colours of the area inspired him to adopt a new palette and in doing so set modern art en route to abstraction. With visits to L'Es...

The Impressionists and the Man who Made them: Monet, Cezanne, Degas and Renoir are some of the world's most popular artists. Their works, and that of their contemporaries, fetch tens of millions of dollars around the globe. Who were they and how exactly did they paint? To help answer these questions, this film focuses on the man credited with inventing impressionism as we know it - 19th-century Parisian art collector Paul Durand-Ruel. It was his brave decision to back these radical artists and then, on the verge of bankruptcy, to exhibit them in New York in 1886 that created impressionism as we know it. Thanks to his sales to enlightened wealthy Americans that subsequently filled US galleries with impressionist masterworks, Durand-Ruel kept impressionism alive at a time when it faced complete failure. This film tells his remarkable story, along with that of the impressionists themselves. Impressionism Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterised by relatively small, t...