Simon Schama's "Power of Art" on PBS is worth watching, and I did last night. Now I wish I hadn't missed the episodes that came before it. Schama knocks the socks off with his powerful observations, discussing wittily in each episode mainly one work by one great painter (he also looks briefly at their other work.) Last night he focused on David's "The Death of Marat," a choice that gave him lots of room to discuss some of the madness of the French Revolution (on which he earlier wrote an entirely readable book, Citizens. [I'd love to hear him comment on David's "Cupid and Psyche" at the Cleveland Museum.]
Sadly I've missed his comments on Picasso, Caravaggio, and others. But now I'm looking forward to what he has to say next week about Turner's "Slave Ship: Typhoon Coming on" which he characteristically says is the greatest English painting of the 19th century. As he said, it's all about killing slaves.
Below is a snippet from a Times review of the show. The reference to The History Boys reminds me that that's a movie worth seeing--it's at Netflix
Simon Schama justifies the title of his series by showing how these artists transformed and transcended their times; he rests his case with “Guernica.” That painting shatters even the thickest complacency and breaks what he calls “the habit of taking violent evil in our stride.”
Mr. Schama is a passionate and persuasive docent.
“Power of Art” succeeds not because of the power of the chosen masterpieces but because Mr. Schama masterfully weaves engaging mysteries around each artwork. And he walks and talks viewers through it all in a “History Boys” style that is so chatty and disarming that even the flintiest museumphobe wants to stick around to find out what happened next.
“Yeah, right, led astray were you?” Mr. Schama says with dripping sarcasm to Jacques-Louis David’s highly flattering 1794 self-portrait, which Mr. Schama explains was David’s attempt to airbrush out his culpability in the Terror of the French Revolution. “Just doing your job? I don’t think so.”
The series begins with two episodes shown back to back, on van Gogh and Picasso. It is understandable but unfortunate that Mr. Schama opens with the two most famous artists. It’s the less familiar stories that he tells best, from David’s agitprop to the Rothko murals that were commissioned by the Seagram Company to hang in the Four Seasons restaurant, but ended up in London instead.
Mr. Schama explains, with great gusto, that Rothko only belatedly understood that those great works would fade in the background décor, ignored by plutocrats gorging on foie gras and sole meunière. “Anybody who would eat that kind of food, for that kind of money,” an actor playing Rothko says on the phone before slamming down the receiver, “will never look at a painting of mine.”
The van Gogh segment opens with his suicide in 1890, soon after painting one of his greatest works, “Wheat Field With Crows,” which Mr. Schama describes as “the painting that begins modern art.”
But Mr. Schama can also be boyishly irreverent about genius. He characterizes van Gogh, a maniacal bookworm, as “the scary one who’ll buttonhole you in the parlor and bang on and on about George Eliot and Dickens, and you’ll be backing off from the awful pong.”
Picasso’s tale begins in his Paris studio in 1941, with the image of jackboots stomping up a staircase. Mr. Schama recounts the story, perhaps apocryphal, of a Nazi who barged in and poked around, picking up a postcard-size reproduction of “Guernica.”
The German officer said, “Did you do this?” Picasso replied, “Oh, no, you did.”
Mr. Schama ends the segment with another anecdote, describing the moment in 2003 when Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, went to the United Nations to make the case for war against Saddam Hussein, and United Nations officials covered the tapestry version of “Guernica” with a large blue cloth, concerned that Picasso’s dead children, weeping mothers and screaming horses might clash with Mr. Powell’s message.
Mr. Schama says this is proof that art has a power that even a superpower cannot defuse. “You’re the mightiest country in the world, you can throw your armies around, you can get rid of dictators,” he says. “But, hey, don’t tangle with a masterpiece.”
SIMON SCHAMA’S POWER OF ART
Tonight on most PBS stations (check local listings).
Basil Comely, BBC, and Margaret Smilow, WNET, executive producers; Clare Beavan, BBC, series producer; Kristin Lovejoy and Junko Tsunashima, supervising producers for Thirteen Culture and Arts; Bill O’Donnell, director of program development. Simon Schama, writer and host. Produced by WNET, New York, and the BBC.
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