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28/04/2026

Joseph Beuys was a German artist and one of the most influential figures in postwar European art. A former Luftwaffe pilot, he claimed to have been shot down over Crimea in 1943 and rescued by Tatars who packed his body in fat and felt to keep him alive. This experience would became the foundation of his entire artistic practice.

By 1974, when this dialogue was filmed in New York, Beuys had already staged some of the most provocative actions in art history, including lecturing to a dead hare, spending three days locked in a gallery with a wild coyote, and filling a room with 500 kilograms of fat.

For Beuys, creativity was not a gift reserved for artists. It was a political right that belongs to everyone.

24/04/2026

Jackson Po***ck was an American painter and a central figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Born in Wyoming, he spent most of his working life in New York and later in Springs, East Hampton, where he developed the drip technique that made him famous — pouring and flinging paint onto canvas laid flat on the floor, moving around and across it, working from all four sides.

He gave almost no interviews, and was notoriously difficult to draw out on the subject of his own work, making this clip a rarity.

"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about."

21/04/2026

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a New York-born artist who rose from painting graffiti on the streets of Lower Manhattan to showing in the world's most prestigious galleries - all within the space of a few years. He was 27 when this interview was filmed. He died the following year.

State of the Art was a Channel 4 documentary series from 1987. In this clip, Basquiat speaks about the lack of Black representation in art history. Throughout his career Basquiat spoke openly about experiencing racism within the very art world that was making him rich -- being followed by security guards in galleries that were selling his work, and feeling that his Blackness was being exoticised rather than his talent being taken seriously.

18/04/2026

Lucian Freud was one of the most significant figurative painters of the 20th century. Born in Berlin - the grandson of Sigmund Freud - he moved to Britain in 1933 to escape persecution as a Jew. He spent the rest of his life in London, rarely giving interviews and protecting his privacy with unusual ferocity.

In this rare piece of footage, Freud is in conversation with art historian John Richardson. He speaks about his wartime youth - and a more playful, candid side of the man emerges than the one his reputation suggests.

17/04/2026

Gerhard Richter is one of the most significant living painters in the world - and consistently one of the highest-selling. Born in Dresden, he fled East Germany in 1961, days before the Berlin Wall was built, carrying almost nothing. He has spent the sixty years since making work that resists every attempt at definition or commodification.

In the past, Richter has called the art market “hopelessly excessive”, and complained that “we artists get next to nothing from such an auction. Except for a small morsel, all the profit goes to the seller.”

From ‘The Price of Everything’ (2018).

14/04/2026

Jonas Mekas was a Lithuanian-born filmmaker and video artist, widely considered the godfather of American avant-garde cinema. He fled Soviet occupation in 1944, spent years in displaced persons camps, and eventually settled in New York, where he spent sixty years filming his life on a Bolex camera - friends, strangers, moments of ordinary beauty. He called it a diary. He said it was the only way he knew how to survive.

Mekas became a central figure in the downtown arts scene of the 1950s and 60s - founding Anthology Film Archives, writing for the Village Voice, and filming everyone around him: Warhol, Ginsberg, Jacqueline Kennedy, John Lennon, Yoko Ono.

"I don't think there is such a thing as mental illness among artists. I think there are people who are more alive than others."

13/04/2026

Robert Hughes was an Australian art critic and the chief art critic of Time magazine for nearly four decades. His 1980 BBC series ‘The Shock of the New’ remains the most watched documentary about modern art ever made.

In it, Hughes argues that the avant-garde - the idea that art could be genuinely radical, that it could shock, challenge and change the world - is over. The conditions that produced it no longer exist. The market absorbed it. The institutions neutralised it. The revolution failed. "The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive”, he laments.

But his conclusion is not all despair. However degraded the art world becomes, however much money and celebrity distort it, the human impulse to make art - to find form for what cannot otherwise be said - is ultimately not something that can be killed off.

08/04/2026

David Sylvester was a British art critic and historian, best known for his series of recorded interviews with Francis Bacon, published as 'The Brutality of Fact'.

In this 1969 BBC interview, Sylvester argues that the growing public spectacle around contemporary art - the attention, the excitement, the exposure - is actively working against the creative process itself.

Maggi Hambling is a British painter and sculptor based in Suffolk. She studied at the Slade School of Art and in 1980 be...
31/03/2026

Maggi Hambling is a British painter and sculptor based in Suffolk. She studied at the Slade School of Art and in 1980 became the first Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in London. She is known for her expressive portraits, North Sea paintings, and coffin portraits - paintings of friends, lovers and mentors made after their deaths. Her public sculptures include 'A Conversation with Oscar Wilde' (1998) in central London and 'Scallop' (2003) on Aldeburgh beach, both of which attracted significant controversy. Her work is held in the collections of the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and Tate. She was appointed CBE in 2010.

"Making a work of art is making a work of love."

26/03/2026

Frank Auerbach lived and worked in the same Camden Town studio from 1954 until his death in 2024. He painted the same small group of sitters - friends, family, fellow artists - returning to the same faces for decades. Each painting was built up and scraped back repeatedly, sometimes over months, until he considered it resolved.

He is known for painting over his best work and starting again. Of the thousands of sessions he has conducted, he has said he has only ever felt he succeeded a handful of times.

"I think one has to be a little obsessive to be a painter at all."

25/03/2026

Yayoi Kusama was born in Japan in 1929 and began making art as a child, covering canvases in repeated patterns of dots and nets. She moved to New York in the 1950s, where she became a pioneering figure in installation and performance art.

She returned to Japan in the 1970s and has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo ever since, commuting to her studio daily. She is now 95 and still works an eight-hour day.

Kusama is the highest-selling living female artist in the world. She has said that every dot she paints is an expression of love - for the viewer, for the world, for life itself.

"I want to send love to the entire world from my heart."

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