Schama's (Somewhat Overpowering) Power of Art

Okay, I'm back from Venice. If you really need to read more abot the Biennale, here's a link to my overview piece in the new issue of Time International. Now on to other subjects.

Here's one. I had a chance recently to preview all eight episodes of The Power of Art, the Simon Schama documentary series that begins Monday night, June 18, on PBS. It's recommended viewing, but keep in mind that in places it's a bit of an oddball production.

Schama is both a historian and an art historian. The book that put him on the map, An Embarassment of Riches, about the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age, is a model of how to combine the two roles. The Power of Art is built around eight stories of artists facing some decisive moment and a single great work that emerged from it. The artists are Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko, which is another way of saying there's bloodshed, madness, severe depression, suicide, revolution and chain smoking.

I groaned when I learned that the series would include filmed dramatizations — "dramatic reconstructions" — a weakness in recent years of the BBC, which produced this series. But as it turns out the ones here are decently produced. In several episodes the actors playing the artists don't even speak on camera. (A relief.) Or hardly at all. So from time to time we see "Picasso" energetically (and wordlessly) painting Guernica. "Bernini" mostly just marches energetically (and wordlessly) around Rome, flaunting his good looks and making his rival Borromini seethe. And one role, a speaking one, is a keeper. Andy Serkis, the actor who did that the phenomenal CGI-assisted performance as Gollum in Lord of the Rings, makes a intense and moving Van Gogh, speaking lines lifted mostly from Van Gogh's magnificent letters to his brother. Angry, wittty and surprising, he's as good as Tim Roth in Robert Altman's film Vincent and Theo, which is setting the bar pretty high.

The problem turns out to be Schama. As a writer and critic — the eight scripts are all his — he's vivid and shrewd. ("You just can't beat the Dutch for wagging their fingers at your wicked ways.") As a talking head, he's more like a barking one, overwrought and theatrically pugnacious. You get the feeling sometimes he's concerned that when he talks to the camera, if he's not grabbing us by the lapels — or better still, the throat — we won't think that art is, you know, interesting. Did this man never see one of those Monty Python parodies of a BBC documentary? Or did he see too many? In the episode on Bernini he's so pitch-perfect Pythonesque that you fully expect Michael Palin to burst into the frame at some point shouting "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Worth noting — the PBS series is accompanied by a hefty and very readable companion volume, also by Schama, that was published last year. He manages to tell the same eight stories forcefully, without the plosives of his PBS delivery. You get his muscular prose and you're spared his strident vocalizing.