Power of Art

Simon Schama's introduction to Caravaggio -- who he was, what he was doing, how other people felt about that -- is sometimes rudimentary, but truly hypnotic. The hypnosis is only broken when Schama looks closely at a painting (his looking NOT being rudimentary) and says something super gut-busting with his weird cadences and intimacy.

For instance, in the Caravaggio ep, Schama dives into The Musicians, a piece featuring a cupid, a boy sadly tuning a stringed thing and baby Caravaggio himself, at the back of what Schama calls "this tight little group". Schama's ensuing analysis of the painting includes the lines "The lead singer is crying his eyes out, and he's just tuning up," and "(intruder) Oh yes, four youths in a closet. Exuse me, so sorry, don't mean to intrude! (tight little group) No no, come on in, darling, pull up a cushion, join us, we're just rehearsing." All of this is said in the most coy VO anyone has ever produced. He calls the painting "fleshy" and "claustrophobic". Really he just crushes it.

This series is worth watching for the re-enactments (many, many good re-enactments), but worth suggesting for Schama's magnetism and keen observations. We should probably make sure this is finding the farthest reaches of space. 9/10!

Update: I know some viewers are hot and cold on his unfolding of Bernini, but Schama's comments on the folds of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa ARE enjoyable and that ep. IS dope.

Update 2: He calls Rembrandt "Mr. Clever Clogs"!

Update 3: Make it to the end of this series and you get to actually watch someone reenact Simon Schama himself as a 20 y/o ruffian staring at a Rothko. This man is a genius.

If Mr. Schama spoke any more slowly, more painstakingly divided his syllables, I might not recognize the language he speaks in.

More importantly, the writers and directors of pieces like this should recall what information is available at almost every viewer's fingertips. One can access a summary of most documentary subjects literally within a few minutes. I tested this hypothesis with the hour long piece on Turner. In a few keystrokes, I was able to find two summaries on the web that included most of the data Schama presents. Perhaps ten, 15 percent of what Schama tells or shows us remained harder to find, and what consisted of original analysis was nearly absent.

And what is the purpose of the cinema-like shots that suggest some sort of hint toward reenactments? There is often little rhyme or reason to when or why they occur. They last a second or two and seem selected based on their potential for filler and gloss. At one point, we see a hand in shallow focus scraping at a canvas. This is supposed to help us imagine Turner doing his work as a painter? Gimme a break.

Watching something like this is nearly a waste of time. I suppose you could turn down the volume and imagine your own narration. Better still, go to a museum or library instead. At least you'll get off your couch.

Whose Van Gogh is more nauseous, Kirk Douglas's or Andy Serkis's? Oh dear lord, how I wish I would have stopped watching this episode of Simon Schama's series, much as I stopped watching "Lust for Life"! How long before I can again look at one of his paintings without thinking of one of the worst examples of British overacting ever recorded? On top of this despicable performance, we are subjected to frenetic editing and oppressive sound effects. Deafening slurping of paint, pounding the canvas with the brush--I know painting and this is not painting. This is cheap pastiche after the video in the movie "The Ring". What a grotesque version of what was surely a beautiful-beautiful thing. Lastly and most reprehensibly, Mr. Schama takes advantage of the ignorant by presenting subjective opinion as fact. Van Gogh's Wheatfield is really the first piece of modern art? You say it so confidently it must be true--gimme a break. This is art history gone horribly wrong.

This is a fake series on several levels. It features Simon Schama, whose credentials as an historian have been long suspect, and who has no credentials at all as an art critic with any aesthetic sensitivity. Instead he has a substantiated record as a propagandist, for modern western establishment and regimes, especially as a war mongering one. As for the content, series has less to do with works of art themselves, but is more concerned with retelling of anecdotes, of very doubtful veracity, about artists, their patrons, and rivals. These anecdotes, some of them entertaining, were obviously selected to prejudice the viewer favorably, or unfavorably, according to views of Schama or his producers. Anecdotes are illustrated with badly acted reenactments. In contrast, artworks themselves are shown only in badly lighted very short cuts. As an example, take episode on Bernini and 'Ecstasy of St Theresa'. It has lots of ad hominem attacks against the sculptor (and his patron popes and cardinals) through unsubstantiated anecdotes, but sculpture (which is a whole chapel in fact) is never shown in full on location. Its relations to other art works at the time or before (word 'baroque' is never used even to discard it), its composition from variety of media and materials, and its methods and techniques of creation, are barely referred to, if at all. While reference is made to St Theresa's own words which inspired the work, Schama seems to be unaware of the long tradition in Roman Catholic Church (and outside) of equating physical ecstasy and sexual union, with Divine Love. St. Theresa's words, while better expressed, are in line with that tradition, and with words of other saints, but this episode erroneously paint them as exceptional, and even unique.

Schama's series is highly watchable, and I enjoyed his History of Britain as well, but I must vehemently protest to his Bernini episode, which is, admittedly, visually rich, masterly filmed - but Schama makes the unforgivable mistake of basing his biographical material (which takes up half of the episode) on 17th century muckraker Filippo Baldinucci. Baldinucci, who aspired to be another Vasari, generously lent his ear to all the most envious gossip about the artist, and he went out of his way to be spectacular. Thus, we are treated to the disgraceful story of a megalomaniac Bernini whose genius went to his head, who nearly killed his own brother in a jealous rage, and arranged for a bravo to slash the face of Costanza Bonarelli, Bernini's unfaithful mistress, to ribbons, as Schama so vividly puts it. A Bernini whom even his own mother detested. All of this, however, is based on Baldinucci's low-minded attempt to vilify Bernini, and is written, not as Schama seems to suggest, by a biographer who closely followed his subject around in Rome, but by a biographer who was two years old at the time of the Bonarelli scandal related in so vivid details, and Baldinucci's scandalous book was not published until two years after Bernini's death - for very good reasons. It is totally inadmissible. Even the unsympathetic Pope Innocent X was forced to exclaim: "They say bad things about Bernini, but he is a great and rare man". Man - not only artist. For a truthful biography on Bernini, we must go to Howard Hibbard (who carefully gleans from Baldinucci all that is trustworthy). Among the despicable features of Bernini, Schama & Baldinucci report that he never credited his co-workers - the people doing the hard work for the artist - but which artist did? Michelangelo? Rembrandt? Da Vinci? Certainly not. An art historian like Schama should know that the artist was always turned into a brand name, and never laid claim to wield the chisel or the brush himself.

It's a shame about Schama's episode, for his treatment of Bernini as an artist is admirable, and I do agree that Bernini - as Schama says - transcended dualism and deliberately put erotic aspects into his portraits of saints, simply to show a transport that people can relate to. But the biographical yellow press diatribe of the program, collected with immoderate glee from fishwife Baldinucci - really, historian Simon Schama ought to know better!