February 23, 1969 –
The BBC2 documentary series, Civilisation, hosted by Kenneth Clark, guided us through the history of Western art, architecture and philosophy, debuted on this date.
While popular at the time of its release, the Civilisation series has been criticized over the decades for presenting a 19th-century worldview of history being shaped by relatively few “highly influential and unique individuals” with extraordinary abilities. This historical theory had originally been proposed by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s, and remained fashionable until the 1920s. Both the original theory and the documentary series have been criticized for largely ignoring the impact of social history, economic history, and political history on art and art movements. The program also minimized the role of female writers and artists within the art movements covered in the show, because they did not fit in its main writer’s “traditional choice” of great artists, a group which he viewed as exclusively male.
The Haus of Dcaligari 