British Masters(2011)

British Masters is a three-part BBC documentary series exploring 20th-century British art from 1910 to 1975. Presented by art historian Dr James Fox and first broadcast on BBC Four in July 2011, the series examines how major painters responded to the era's upheaval. The first programme surveys early modernists including Mark Gertler, Walter Sickert, Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg and Stanley Spencer. The second focuses on interwar and wartime artists like John Nash, Alfred Munnings and John Piper. The final instalment, "A New Jerusalem," turns to postwar figures—Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, David Hockney and others—tracing how themes of brutality, consumerism and optimism shaped their work. Throughout, Fox contextualises each artist against the social and political turbulence of their time: the world wars, economic collapse of the 1930s, and the erosion of traditional British identity. The series argues that British figurative painting's decline coincided with Freud's death and the rise of conceptual art, marking the end of a distinctive artistic tradition forged amid national crisis.