Friday night, despite the rain, the screening room at the Wolfsonian FIU on Miami Beach was nearly filled to capacity, and once again I was pleasantly surprised by a program from a series called SIMON SCHAMA'S POWER OF ART.
I have to admit, when I heard the series title many months ago, I was afraid we were in for a summer long series that felt like a high school trip to the museum. If the audience's reaction to the program on Caravaggio is an indication, this is one school trip not to be missed.
With some dramatic recreation's Simon Schama quite literally helps history come alive and takes us inside the art and minds of their creators.
The series begins this Monday on WPBT/Channel 2 in Miami, at 9pm with the first of two programs that evening and continues each Monday at 10pm thereafter.
For those who braved the rain on Friday and those who didn't, a reminder to continue checking for future Channel 2 at The Wolf screenings, they are free and great way to share the experince of Channel 2 programs outside your living room.
The next film in July will be a biography of Les Paul, keep looking here or check our respective websites for more information.
As for The Power of Art, here is more on that series:
“Art is the enemy of the routine, the mechanical and the humdrum. It
stops us in our tracks with a high voltage jolt of disturbance; it reminds us
of what humanity can do beyond the daily grind. It takes us places we had never
dreamed of going; it makes us look again at what we had taken for granted.”
– Simon Schama
In 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Guernica.
The giant mural memorialized Germany’s
1937 aerial obliteration of a small Basque village. “Was it you who did this?”
the Nazi demanded of Picasso, to which he replied, “No. It was you.” In the
eight-part SIMON SCHAMA’S POWER OF ART, internationally acclaimed scholar and
writer Simon Schama recounts that story while challenging viewers with a
typically provocative query: “Shouldn’t art just stick to what it does best,
the delivery of pleasure, and forget about being a paintbrush warrior? Or is
it, when the bombs are dropping, that we find out what art is really for?”
A television history of the
creative moment, the series features eight narratives of embattled heroes
confronting disaster and triumph while making art that continues to resonate. Propelled
by Schama’s passionate storytelling, POWER
OF ART melds dramatic re-enactments, location shooting and art photography
to create a challenging series that explores the power and, ultimately, the
whole point of art. “This is not a series about things that hang on walls; it
is not about decor or prettiness,” Schama says. “It is a series about the force,
the need, the passion of art — the power of art.”
SIMON SCHAMA’S
POWER OF ART takes viewers on a sweeping cinematic journey to the turning
points in the lives of eight artists and a work that defined the career of
each. In broadcast order they are:
· Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Wheatfield With Crows,
· Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Guernica,
· Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610)
and David With the Head of Goliath,
· Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) and The Ecstasy of St. Theresa,
· Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under
Claudius Civilis,
· Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) and The Death
of Marat,
· J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On),
· Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and the Seagram murals.
In the series, Schama takes viewers to the murderous,
messianic world of Baroque Rome; opulent Amsterdam;
paranoid revolutionary Paris; righteous
Victorian England; the madhouses and brothels of
Provence;
the carnage of civil war Spain;
and New York in the 1950s, caught between Cold
War jitters and
Manhattan glitter.
In each place, an artist is backed into a corner and
facing a crisis of politics, poverty, passion, oppression or mental stress. In
each story, the drama of the creative moment unfolds with the suspense of a
crime, battle or love affair.
Caravaggio, whose raw physical aggressions spill
gloriously into his art, is at rock bottom when he tries to paint himself out
of trouble with a shocking self-portrait: his own face on the severed head of
Goliath. When a devastated Bernini needs a miracle to salvage his reputation,
he sculpts one.
POWER OF ART walks the streets, visits the
churches and imagines the studios. Through re-creations, viewers see the
blending of the paint, the drop of blood that spatters on the floor, the glint
of a steel blade and the death throes of a stricken bull.
Throughout the series, Schama zeroes in on a pivotal
moment in each artist’s life while confronting a broader question: Does art
triumph over commerce? What can art do in the face of atrocity? In the segment
on Rembrandt, Schama asks, “What’s the worst thing that can happen to a
painter?”
Each program charts a collision between the power of art
and a skeptical or indifferent world. And in each case, Schama builds on his
argument that art is a flood of truth, a flight of freedom — an argument that
makes an irresistible case for why art matters.
Rothko took a firm stand for art — sensuous, ecstatic,
revelatory art — over money. Picasso’s Guernica
forced
people to confront the brutality of war. Jacques-Louis David’s The Death
of Marat reinvented image-making as political propaganda.
In the series, Schama peels back the familiar to reveal
the genuine. In the case of Turner, Schama explores “my Turner, extreme Turner,
the cockney poet just short of madness. The Turner we ought to know. The Turner
we really ought to revere.” Instead of the familiar fable of Vincent van Gogh,
the tortured artist who lopped off an ear (in truth, merely part of an
earlobe), Schama delves deeply into the artist’s fertile mind, his relationships
with his adored brother Theo and the envious Paul Gauguin — all the way into
“the colors that barge into each other like drunks looking for a fight.”
In his own way, each artist sought art’s power to deliver
— for a moment or for a lifetime — the possibility of wonder. In their
masterworks, Schama finds the history of humanity’s creative spark and the hope
of its rekindled future.
The Native Arts of the Northwest Coast
from The Paul & Joan Gluck Collection
is on display February 23, 2008, through June 1, 2008 at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida.
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