The World's Most Expensive Paintings

Art critic Alastair Sooke tracks down the ten most expensive paintings to sell at auction, and investigates the stories behind the astronomic prices art can reach. Gaining access to the glittering world of the super-rich, Sooke discovers why the planet's richest people want to spend their millions on art.

Soup Cans and Superstars: How Pop Art Changed the World

Alastair Sooke champions pop art as one of the most important art forms of the twentieth century, peeling back pop's frothy, ironic surface to reveal an art style full of subversive wit and radical ideas. In charting its story, Alastair brings a fresh eye to the work of pop art superstars Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and tracks down pop's pioneers, from American artists like James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg and Ed Ruscha to British godfathers Peter Blake and Allen Jones. Alastair also explores how pop's fascination with celebrity, adver...

Constable: A Country Rebel

The Haywain by John Constable is such a comfortingly familiar image of rural Britain that it is difficult to believe it was ever regarded as a revolutionary painting, but in this film, made in conjunction with a landmark exhibition at the V&A, Alastair Sooke discovers that Constable was painting in a way that was completely new and groundbreaking at the time. Through experimentation and innovation, he managed to make a sublime art from humble things and, though he struggled in his own country during his lifetime, his genius was surprisingly ...

BBC One - Modern Masters TV docu-series

Journalist Alastair Sooke sets out to discover just how much artists like Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali have influenced our modern lives, and explains why their art is considered so great.

Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball

In Pride And Prejudice: Having A Ball, social historian Amanda Vickery leads the action as a team of experts recreate a Regency ball in honour of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s popular novel. Joined by Alastair Sooke and a coterie of professionals – a food historian, a costume expert, music history academics and a choreographer who trains a team of dance students to take to the floor– cameras will follow the recreation inspired by Austen’s Netherfield ball. This intimate country house ball drives the plot of the Pride And Prejudice, ...