James Payne 📺

My latest video on my YouTube channel looks at Francis Bacon and how he constructed his own image. It also looks at the history of his painting “Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X” (1953). Modern art videos don’t do so well on YouTube so it’s helpful if you comment on the video, and share it. The algorithm only promotes these films if it gets engagement. It’s a drag, but your comments (on YouTube) help! Thanks.

How do you get from Hogarth to The Beatles? Via David Hockney, of course. Here's (almost) every artwork mentioned in the new episode of Primo & Payne: Great Art Explained, all about David Hockney. Are there any surprises in the round up? 1. Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, c. 1660 2. Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434 3. Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, cover design for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967 4. Roger Fry, Self Portrait, 1928, courtesy of The Courtauld Institute 5. William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, c. 1733–35, Plates 1 (The Heir) and 8 (The Madhouse). 6. David Hockney, A Rake’s Progress, 1961–62, published 1963, Plates 1 (The Arrival) and 6 (Death in Harlem). 7. The Barcelona Pavilion (1929) designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. Reconstructed 1986. Photo: Alexander Hüls, 2017. 8. David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967 9. David Hockney, Drop Curtain and Mother Goose's Brothel stage design for The Rake’s Progress, 1975

This is an extraordinary show! Please do not miss! I knew Francisco de Zurbarán before and his st Francis (on display here) is one of my favourite works in the @nationalgallery - but there were so many paintings I hadn’t seen (the Hercules paintings were a revelation), and seeing them all together blew me away with how intense the experience was. His skill is otherworldly. The fabrics! The textures! The lighting! This show really made me reassess the artist I always thought of as the Spanish Caravaggio. I have one question I can’t find the answer to: why is Mary (in several paintings) standing on clouds made from baby’s (I presume cherubs) heads? Never seen that before. “Zurbarán” is at the National Gallery until 23 August 2026. Tickets are required.

New Episode Alert 🚨 Leslie Primo and James Payne dive into the life and works of David Hockney. Link in bio 👆 How did a young artist from Bradford become one of the most well-known painters, printmakers, photographers, stage designers and technical innovators alive today? 🎥 @fredcifuentesmorgan @davidhockneyfoundation @serpentineuk

Woohoo my book is out now in German translation and available in all good bookstores (and online of course)! Mein Buch ist ab sofort in allen guten Buchhandlungen erhältlich - Herausgeber Riva Presse. Danke schön @riva_verlag @thalia_buchhandlungen @thamesandhudson

Edward Hopper died on this day in 1967 (born 1882). This is a second clip from my film “Edward Hopper and cinema” that you can find on my youtube channel. In Hopper’s lifetime, the relationship between his work and pop culture was reciprocal - Hopper not only influenced cinema, but was also artistically inspired by the movies he saw. As the great film critic Philip French wrote, Hopper was interested in the “isolation of individual spectators waiting for the curtain to go up or the lights to go down.” It was Art historian @gail.levin.art (who wrote the definitive book on Hopper, who first suggested that Hopper’s masterpiece Nighthawks was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” about two hitman in a 24 hour diner. Levin believed that Hopper’s interest in “The Killers” was the “suspense of impending violence that never takes place,” much like Hopper’s paintings themselves. Then, as I show in my film, when “The Killers” was adapted into a movie by director Robert Siodmak in 1946, he directly referenced “Nighthawks” in composition! @edwardhopperhouse @edwardhopper_art @edward.hopper @edwardhopperpaintings

Edward Hopper died on this day in 1967 (born 1882). This is a clip from my film “Edward Hopper and cinema” that you can find on my youtube channel. In Hopper’s lifetime, the relationship between his work and pop culture was reciprocal - Hopper not only influenced cinema, but was also artistically inspired by the movies he saw. As the great film critic Philip French wrote, Hopper was interested in the “isolation of individual spectators waiting for the curtain to go up or the lights to go down.” It was Art historian @gail.levin.art (who wrote the definitive book on Hopper, who first suggested that Hopper’s masterpiece Nighthawks was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” about two hitman in a 24 hour diner. Levin believed that Hopper’s interest in “The Killers” was the “suspense of impending violence that never takes place,” much like Hopper’s paintings themselves. Then, as I show in my film, when “The Killers” was adapted into a movie by director Robert Siodmak in 1946, he directly referenced “Nighthawks” in composition! @edwardhopperhouse @edwardhopper_art @edward.hopper @edwardhopperpaintings

Edward Hopper died on this day in 1967 (born 1882). This is a clip from my full length video available now on YouTube. In it, I look at ‘Nighthawks’ (1942), his most famous painting, and use that to explore other issues, such as how American art was affected by the war, where his inspiration came from, and how his abusive relationship (on both sides) gave a certain “lonely” and voyeuristic feel to his work. @gail.levin.art @artinstitutechi @edwardhopperhouse @edward.hopper

Have you followed us yet on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts? #greatartexplained #primoandpayne #podcast #art #class

Thomas Gainsborough was born on this day in 1727 (died 1788). This is a clip from my video on Mr and Mrs Andrews by him (full video on my YouTube channel), which is often seen as a charming double portrait of a wealthy young couple in the English countryside. But politically, it is also a painting about land, class, ownership, and power in eighteenth-century England. Painted around 1750, it shows Robert Andrews and Frances Carter shortly after their marriage. At first glance, they seem relaxed and elegant, sitting within an idyllic rural landscape. But the key point is that the landscape is not simply background scenery. It is property. The painting is effectively a celebration of ownership. The Andrews family had benefited from the Enclosure movement, a huge transformation of the English countryside in the eighteenth century. Common land that poorer villagers had traditionally used for grazing animals or farming was increasingly fenced off and privatised by wealthy landowners. The neat fields, orderly hedges, and carefully managed farmland in the painting represent this new system of agricultural capitalism. The land has been disciplined, measured, and controlled. That is why Robert Andrews stands with a gun under his arm. It is not just a casual hunting pose. The gun is a symbol of privilege and authority. Hunting rights were heavily tied to class and property ownership. His stance projects confidence and control over the estate spread out behind him. But as I show here, Gainsborough inserted a few criticisms, even a crude joke or two. One of the criticisms of my film is that I say it is corn in the field rather than wheat, but I am just following historical sources and in eighteenth-century Britain, “corn” did not mean American sweetcorn or maize. It was a general term for cereal crops like wheat, barley, oats, or rye. So when British art historians or writers refer to “cornfields,” they usually just mean grain fields. Oh well. It was great to see it at a very well attended exhibition @metmuseum recently for a superb Gainsborough show. Back at the @nationalgallery soonish I guess? @gainsboroughshouse

Joseph Heinrich Beuys (a future GAE) was born today in 1921 (died 1986), a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. This is a clip (more on YouTube) from the 2-hour-documentary “J.B. Public Dialogue”, directed by Willoughby Sharp (1974). The camerawork is a bit dodgy and the sound is not great so it is hard to follow at times but there is some genius in there, and as he once said: “I think nowadays, there’s a deep misunderstanding amongst people that art should be understood through logical sentences.” His own theory was that art was an intimate collaboration, that a work of art was the result of work and artistry on the part of both the creator and the viewer. “The work of art enters into the person and the person internalises the work of art as well, it has to be possible that these two completely sink into each other ... Art enters into the person and the person enters into the work of art, no?” Brilliant man. @joseph_beuys @centrepompidou @tate

Georges Braque was born on this day in 1882 (he died in 1963) so I put together some of his works with some clips of him I found (can’t find any interviews, in French or otherwise, so if you know of any please let me know) .The artist who famously said, “Art is made to disturb, science reassures,” became one of the defining figures of twentieth-century art. Painter, sculptor, and engraver, Braque helped shape two of modern art’s most important developments: the creation of Cubism alongside Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, and the invention of collage through his experiments with papiers collés, or “pasted papers.” Picasso and Braque, one of the greatest of art partnerships, met in 1907, introduced by the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire. The two artists were initially wary of one another, but it quickly became one of the most important creative partnerships in modern art. Braque was quiet, thoughtful, and methodical, while Picasso was intense, competitive, and endlessly ambitious. They were very different personalities, but both shared the same desire to break away from traditional ways of seeing and representing the world and they became extremely close friends and working partners. The First World War changed everything after Braque enlisted and was seriously wounded in 1915, suffering a severe head injury that left him recovering for a long time. By the time he returned to painting, both the art world and Picasso had moved on. The close artistic dialogue they once had never fully returned and they drifted apart. Braque rarely spoke publicly about the distance that grew between them, but his later work feels quieter and more reflective, maybe shaped by the experience of war. Picasso, meanwhile, kept reinventing himself at relentless speed, and while the split was never dramatic, the relationship cooled considerably. Picasso had rocketed to international superstardom, while Braque remained respected but less mythologised. Some say Braque resented being eclipsed, though he never publicly criticised his former friend. @georgesbraqueart @georgesbraqueetcompagnie @centrepompidou @tate