Ann Turner

Sir Kenneth Clark guides us through the ages exploring the glorious rise of civilisation in western man. Beginning with the bleakness of the dark ages to the present day, we consider civilisation's articulations and expressions in some of man's finest works of art.

In Georges Seurat’s work, the viewer will surely never “miss the point”. The son of wealthy Parisians took modern life as his theme. Excited by recent theories of colour, he developed the technique of pointillism, whereby individual colour-dots, set side by side on the canvas, meld, in the eye of the viewer, into whole colour-surfaces. Dying suddenly at age 31, he left behind only a few large paintings, including A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. David Thompson investigates, with the aid of such artists as Henry Moore, the artistic and theoretical work of the man who founded Post-Impressionism in modern painting.

Ann Turner delves into the atmosphere of the works and reveals, besides Degas the gifted draughtsman and painter, also an experimental graphic artist, sculptor, photographer and poet.