The Power of Art is an eight-part BBC series which sees Simon Schama putting the case for just why his chosen artists and their art matters. His approach is explicit, it is 'not a series about things that hang on walls, it is not about decor or prettiness. It is a series about the force, the need, the passion of art…the power of art.'
The subject of his first programme, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was well chosen, and Schama wanders Rome and Naples, painting vivid word-portraits of the painter's physical and mental circumstances, while reconstructions do the work of establishing the look familiar from Caravaggio's canvases, of faces in chiaroscuro lighting in alehouses and cramped, dingy rooms. Schama finds in Caravaggio a man who rejected copying from old masters in favour of using models he had around him in the streets and dives of the city, a man who in his art made gods into humans, rather than the other way around. In doing so, he communicates some of the force of the man's art and brings Caravaggio to life as a man - and a psychotic one at that - taking him out of the pages of a history book and doing the valuable job of giving him a context and making him real and interesting to modern audiences. Caravaggio, he says, was born to 'make something sacred out of lives of the squalid'. In its presentation, the programme is rather confrontational and is peppered with Schama's lively phrases - 'Caravaggio's art crashes the safety barrier of the frame' being just one.
The series also looks at the lives of Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko. There are copious supplementary materials to the series on the BBC website, including links to places in the UK where you can see works by the artists featured. If the series inspires people to discover or re-acquaint themselves with the art at first-hand, and crucially, gives them a context in which to place it, then this series will have done its job.
Audio commentary with Schama, Clare Beavan, David Belton and Andy Serkis
Film Description
Not just a stroll through a gallery, this is a great journey combining reconstruction, spectacular photography and Schama's unique style as he transports the viewer to the decisive moments of eight great artists producing their masterpieces.
Thoroughly enjoy the theme as a novel way of introducing fascinating history. Very much resent the reference re Van Gogh to "millions of us". All that is required [at ... more >
Thoroughly enjoy the theme as a novel way of introducing fascinating history. Very much resent the reference re Van Gogh to "millions of us". All that is required [at the very most] is " many people". Anything else is pretentious inferring that the rest of us are philistines. We do not wish to be patronised. < less
