100 Great Paintings

100 Great Paintings is a British television series broadcast in 1980 on BBC 2, devised by Edwin Mullins. He chose 20 thematic groups, such as war, the Adoration, the language of color, the hunt, and bathing, picking five paintings from each. The selection ranges from 12th-century China through the 1950s, with an emphasis on European paintings. He deliberately avoided especially famous paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa or John Constable's The Haywain. The series is available on VHS or DVD.

On the basis of the series, Mullins published the book Great Paintings: Fifty Masterpieces, Explored, Explained and Appreciated (1981), which contained about half of the theme groups.

From 1980 through 1994, the German broadcaster WDR produced a television series called 1000 Meisterwerke (originally named 100 Meisterwerke aus den großen Museen der Welt; "100 Masterworks from the Great Museums of the World"), which was broadcast by ARD, ORF and BR. In each of the 10-minute broadcasts, a single painting was presented and analyzed by an art historian. The Sunday evening broadcasts had five million viewers.

The Fine Arts Editor of WDR, Wibke von Bonin, developed the German version of the series. The series was produced by RM Arts, directed by Reiner E. Moritz, and narrated by Rudolf Jürgen Bartsch and the distinctive title melody was composed by Wilhelm Dieter Siebert.

Each episode showed and discussed one painting, with other paintings of the artist and of other artists being drawn in for comparison.

The German or the English version of the series was shown in West Germany, the USA, England, the Netherlands, South Africa, Austria, Scandinavia and Japan.

The German translation of Mullins' book appeared as 100 Meisterwerke in 1983. In 1985, a second volume came out, only in Germany, which discussed the remaining 50 paintings (see section Literature). The text in the books and the television series are largely the same.

...
Wikipedia