Arena — Season 1, Episode 240: Painting for Pleasure ... and Profit: Five Artists of the 80s
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
The artists Julian Schnabel , Markus Lupertz , Sandro Chia , Francesco Clemente and Georg Baselitz command some of the highest prices on today's booming art market. Their paintings, monumental in scale and mainly figurative in style, have begun to fill the walls of private collections world-wide. They have been hailed as the 'New Expressionists' - though some cynical observers accuse them of turning out their pictures to order. As they establish themselves in spacious New York premises, castles in Germany and even retreats in India, Arena examines the real driving force behind today's art world successes.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.