Philip Dodd presents four programmes examining how children have been depicted in the arts in the 20th century and earlier and why the symbol of the child has been so potent.
|01||Crossing The Centuries||20000417||From Victorian idyll to `The Turn of the Screw' and fashion photography - how the 19th-century concern with the child became a distinctive modern preoccupation.|
|02||The Child Within||20000418||Psychoanalysis is born, and the search for innocence obsesses artists like Picasso, who said that he had to learn to draw like a child.|
But can childhood ever truly be recreated by an adult?
|03||Troubling Desire||20000419||In Britten's great operas and William Golding's `Lord of the Flies', children become a troubling and desirable presence.|
How and why does the symbol of the child become an eerie force in 20th-century art?
|04 LAST||Dark Nights Of The Soul||20000420||In contemporary culture, from horror films to modern novels, children are no longer angels, but damaged and dangerous.|
With children participating in acts like the murder of James Bulger, artists are now reflecting on whether they can be devils.