EYES OF ART | Simon Schama's Power of Art

Schama Dumbs Down | Simon Schama's Power of Art | Simon Schama

DVDs:


	• Simon Schama's Power of Art Simon Schama BBC Warner, 2007 average customer review:based on 56 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Power of Art

This is a very well done and informative look at the intimate lives of Simon Shama's choices of iconoclastic artists to represent eras in art history. He has chosen to focus on the ones who have come up with something new, who have changed the way we all view the world. His narrative is lively, infused with insight and humor.

Highly recommended!

EYES OF ART

Once again Simon Schama does his thing and brings to life a whole other aspect in the magical world of art. I bought this for my mother who can be a difficult DVD watcher and a particular art amateur, being an artist in her own right. She just loved it !!!! Schama's approach and presentation is as captivating as ever with so much to think through that she limited her first viewing to the first two segments. She had to call me the next morning to tell me what a wonderful gift it was and that it had even drawn in my rather busy father from his schedule. That in it's self says it all for me !!!!

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Schama Dumbs Down

It seems these days every British scholar's highest ambition is to be a TV star. Simon Schama, a historian best known for his excellent revisionist history of the French Revolution, has become a jack of all trades with series on "all" British history and now art. He provides some brilliant formal analysis, some less brilliant psychological analysis, and some real howlers.

In the Rothko segment he wildly overstates a half-century of American inflation: Rothko's $35,000 Four Seasons commission was not worth "two and a hahf million" 2007 dollars (as Schama misstates twice) but roughly one-tenth that amount. Furthermore, his grim painting of artists in the Depression fails to note that many were far better off in the Depression than earlier, due to FDR's Federal Art Project, which provided a regular paycheck to artists (including Rothko) who had never seen one before. In the Caravaggio section Schama states that "according to Christian tradition"--of which he knows next to nothing, evidently, starting with the chronology of the doctrine of the Assumption, defined no less than a quarter-millennium after Caravaggio--the Virgin did not die but "snoozed." (SS is clearly delighted to "inform" us of her demise.) The Bernini section belabors endlessly the displaced sexuality of his sculpture of Saint Teresa. This is hardly a revelation, and also somewhat reductive. Two days later I saw a performance by Michiko Uchida of Mozart; the same interpretation could have been applied to her rapt expression. Sex may be ecstatic, but all ecstacy is not necessarily sexual.

Nonetheless, Schama, playing to the TV groundlings, is determined to include all the sex and violence he can conjure up, starting with the facile trope of paint as blood that introduces each segment and proceeding with a tawdry swashbuckler on Caravaggio.

Schama himself is no swashbuckler but a more intellectual Austin Powers, bad teeth and goofy posture included. Perhaps his strained wit--he rattles off "hip" slang phrases (e.g., "Yeah, right") as proudly as if he were inventing them--has caused a hernia, or is it his very odd delivery (constantly inhaling deeply and puffing up his narrow chest, executing a kind of corkscrew with his shoulders and hips, etc.)? What is more subtly comical is that Schama reveals himself as a perfect example of precisely the snooty Brit he loves to parody regularly.

Kudos to the actors playing Rothko and Van Gogh! And kudos to Schama for introducing the art to those who've never heard of it! So let's make it three-and-a-half stars for Simplifying Simon.

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Applause, but a Good Kick in the Rear to Schama for Failing to List Music Credits

No doubt many are wondering: what was that haunting counter-tenor aria floating through the David episode: Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus in G Minor, RV 608: IV. In fact, there are a number of exceptional musical works that make up the soundtrack of this series, and that you should have to wonder what they are without mention of them in the credits is annoying. Mr. Schama's and his producer's failure to list music credits for each of the shows in the Power of Art, brilliant though the series was, was a grotesque oversight and they ought to be read the riot act. How such smart people could make so egregious and stupid an error as overlooking the power of the music they obviously spent so much time and attention selecting is beyond me. Quite infuriating! Details like these matter. After all, Mr. Schama has made a career looking at the details. He should know better.

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The best art realted DVD I have ever encountered

This is smart, deep, elaborate, funny, and as educated as well as entertaining as art related themes can ever get.
A real jewel - it will be the prize in anyone's collection.
I highly recommend it.

Beautiful. Fascinating. Emotional. Art is all of the above. But only a few are powerful. These are the works that not only lift you off your feet in their sheer artistry they forever alter the human psyche. Focusing on eight iconic works of art Power of Art reveals the history of visual imagination through the ages from the murderous world of baroque Rome to paranoid revolutionary Paris; from the carnage of civil-war Spain to the paradox of 1950s New York caught between Cold War jitters and Manhattan glitter. A combination of dramatic reconstruction spectacular photography and Simon Schama's unique personal style of storytelling transport the viewer back to the intense moments that great works were conceived and born. The eight works of art profiled in this series are: Caravaggio's David and Goliath; Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Theresa Rembrandt's The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis; David's Death of Marat; Turner's The Slave Ship; Van Gogh's Self-Portrait; Picasso's Guernica and Rothko's Seagram Building Murals.Running Time: 400 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES/MISC. Rating: NR UPC: 794051299628 Manufacturer No: E2996

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