Great art has bad manners, Simon Schama says.
It’s bold, angry, aggressive, sometimes ghastly and often intentionally unsettling.
Because art is housed in hushed, reverential surroundings like museums, we often get the wrong idea about what art is meant to do.
Similarly, because TV shows about art are often dull, overintellectualized odes to truth and beauty, we can get the wrong idea about what television can do with the subject when matched to a clever narrator-producer.
Heeeeeere’s Simon!
Schama, an internationally known scholar and writer, won major awards and accolades for his highly subjective “A History of Britain.” The British professor moved on to write profiles of various artists, which ran as a BBC series last year. Now a stunning PBS series, “Simon Schama’s Power of Art” debuts Monday at 8 p.m. on KRMA-
Channel 6.
The opinionated professor brings a passion to his subject that’s contagious.
Museum dwellers beware: Don’t expect anything to do with prettiness.
Really, the point here is passion: passion about politics, personal and global, passion about the artist’s personal experience, passion about the issues of their times and intense feeling as the driving force of great art. Not infrequently, the artists’ poverty, messy love life and intoxicants figure into the mix as well as more lofty concerns.
Not since the 1979 PBS series “The Shock of the New,” based on Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes’ book on modern art, has television delivered this sort of personal essay on art and artists. Like Hughes, Schama has a lot to say and says it with a witty, self-confident flourish.
“The power of the greatest art is the power to shake us into revelation and rip us from our default mode of seeing,” Schama says.
He leads a spirited cinematic tour of the works of eight artists, making use of actors in dramatic re-enactments to bring us up-close and personal into the studios and living quarters of the masters, witnessing the painters at historic moments.
Sometimes his spiel is a bit overwrought (A drop of blood on the floor – inspiration for a classic?), but Schama’s clever language is always worth hearing.
Monday’s installment begins with Vincent van Gogh and corrects the fable – it seems the artist didn’t lop off his ear, just part of an earlobe.
A second hour, Monday at 9 p.m., focuses on Pablo Picasso and how, with the classic anti-war painting “Guernica,” he sought to communicate catastrophe in black-and-white.
Mark Rothko, in his colorfully throbbing 1950s paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, wanted to make people lose their appetites, Schama says.
The series moves on to Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David and Turner. In each case, the focus is great art that never attempted to please. Instead, according to Schama, these classics were meant to jolt viewers out of comfort zones.
At a time when movies and television are able to produce digital art more stunningly and less expensively than ever, it’s reassuring to see the small screen find new ways to bring classic art to life.
“Frontline” on Iraq
Following another week of sectarian violence in Iraq and continual cable news images of bomb-blasted holy sites, viewers may want to step back and see the big picture.
PBS “Frontline” on Tuesday (at 9 p.m. on Channel 6) presents the fifth film in a series of war stories from producer Michael Kirk, “Endgame.”
In the film, “Frontline’s” season finale, Army Gen. Jack Keane, second in command at the time, admits, “We never even considered an insurgency.”
Karl Rove’s rhetoric is contradicted by vivid pictures, and the strategy of “clear, hold and build” is dissected.
Overall, the U.S. invasion and “surge” are chronicled as failures. The question is, is it already too late?
Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post and author of “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” sums up this way: “I think it’s a long way from here, whatever the endgame is. Shakespearean tragedies have five acts. I think we’re only in Act III.”
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
