4. Turner
Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On (“The Slave Ship”) (1840)
May, 1840. Turner brings seven paintings to exhibit at the Royal Academy Annual Exhibition, and faces the biggest critical onslaught of his life. The target of the most poisonous attacks is The Slave Ship: at once allegory, history and seascape, an explosion of scarlet and gold, lost in the ocean between history and fantasy. For contemporaries, it is “a kitchen accident”, “a detestable absurdity”; Turner’s art has abandoned what it is supposed to do – to look like things. Freed from the job of describing the mere look of the world, Turner shows that art can now go to the heart of the matter, to take the viewer right into the eye of the storm.

5. David
The Death of Marat (1793)
When the arch-denouncer and violent journalist Jean-Paul Marat, the ‘friend of the people’, is stabbed in his bath in July 1793, Jacques-Louis David – painter for the Revolution – promises to make an image of the martyr, for France and for the world. And so he does, creating an altarpiece for the new church of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. It is the work of a fantastic propagandist. Marat the fanatic is transformed into Marat the pure and selfless. Art has become, irreversibly, the accomplice of power.

6. Van Gogh
Wheat Field with Crows (1890)
“Painting,” wrote Van Gogh, “is the raft that can take us safely to shore after the shipwreck.” Painting sometimes calms him. Slashing now comes with the brush; convulsive energy becomes translated into the surging of his loaded brush; merciless insecurity and anguish throb in intensive, ecstatic colour. He is looking in a mirror, but it is as though he is painting from inside his head. However, painting can as easily sweep him up to the edge and over it. By the summer of 1890, there are no more self portraits; instead of levelling a brush at the reflection of his face, he levels a gun.
 
Van Gogh is played by Andy Serkis (King Kong, Lord of the Rings)

7. Picasso
Guernica (1937)
Picasso – self-indulgent genius, the artist for whom the condition of modern art was to separate itself from politics and history. But the brutality of the Luftwaffe when it bombs the ancient Basque town of Guernica makes cubism’s own little wrecking action seem trivial. What is the breaking of figurative art beside the breaking of bodies and the burning of homes? Picasso, anguished about the fate of his country, wants to do what was assumed could never be done – make a modern history painting.

8. Rothko
Black On Maroon (1958)
New York, 1958. Rothko is commissioned to paint a series of large abstractions for what will be the Seagram Building restaurant – the Four Seasons, mid-town Manhattan. It is, says Rothko, “a place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off… I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who eats in that room”. For Rothko, this will be the iron test of art’s power in the relentless drone of the modern world. Can it interrupt and startle, or will it just be waved away like an annoying waiter? Is it just another consumer durable, or the saving of our souls?
Mark Rothko is played by Allan Corduner (Vera Drake, Topsy-Turvy).