This week I want to introduce a YouTube channel that I found recently and have thoroughly enjoyed. The channel is Great Art Explained (LINK), and the premise of the channel is to explain a piece of artwork in a fifteen minute video. While the concept may be highbrow, the channel has over a quarter of a million subscribers so I’m not exactly on the cutting edge in discovering it. 

I have watched videos about Mona Lisa, Guernica, The Great Wave, and The Raft of the Medusa. There are others on the channel. The videos analyze the paintings themselves (elements of composition, materials, lighting, and color are discussed), but more interesting to me is that the paintings are contextualized. I knew that Guernica was Picasso’s attempt to display war’s senseless violence and that I walked into the Reina Sofia with the sole purpose of seeing the room-sized canvas (I had my parents do the same thing when they visited Madrid—the De Goya paintings in the Prado are more to my liking), but I had no idea that the image had become such an enduring symbol across many conflicts in the century since Picasso painted it. I now also have a better understanding of how seismic a shift in painting Mona Lisa was, but this alone didn’t satisfy me concerning just how long I had to maneuver through the crowd in order to see the painting up close for myself at the Louvre. 

I doubt that high-school me would have enjoyed these videos, but college me might have benefited from watching them before seeing some of the works which are their topics. Now maybe in the coming months there will be a video on Jackson Pollock—some context there might help me justify some of the minutes I have stood befuddled before his finished canvases.