BBC Books £25 pp448

What’s good about Simon Schama is obvious. He writes with explosive and exciting energy in a hip and inventive prose that buttonholes you and forces you to listen. The world of art history can be sleepy. It can feel leisured, and unnecessary. But not when Schama enters it. Schama writes about art as if his life depended on it, or perhaps, more pertinently, as if your life depended on it. All this is good. It can even be valuable. But does it outweigh what’s bad about Schama?

I’m no longer sure that it does. Having had my chest prodded for nearly 450 pages by his pumped-up and relentless prose, as he noisily insists on the world-changing significance of eight of his favourite artists, I feel like someone who’s been stuck in a room with MTV playing at high volume in the corner. Yes, it’s fast-cut and sexy. Yes, it can quicken the pulse. Yes, it keeps you awake. But what a relief to switch the damn thing off. The man is becoming excruciatingly vain.

Simon Schama’s Power of Art — note the title, not any old power of art, but Simon Schama’s — was written to accompany his new series for the BBC. Having earned his opportunity to spout at us from the box as a plain historian of Britain, Schama has now stepped onto a significantly larger stage to display his cosmic understanding of the whole of art with an insider’s take on eight artists who changed the world. “Great art has dreadful manners,” is his opening line, and with it he gets into his stride immediately. Masterpieces are “thugs”. Merciless and wily, they “grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to rearrange your sense of reality”.

It isn’t every artist who can be written about this excitably and apocalyptically. Not even a writer as pathologically inventive as Schama could convincingly claim that Fra Angelico’s art is a thug that gets you in a headlock, or Leonardo’s or Vermeer’s. These kinds of noisy claims can only be made to fit a certain kind of noisy artist. And so the masters Schama has decided qualify for his pantheon of roughers-up are Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko. It’s a fierce and muscular cast, a man’s list. In art-historical terms, it makes no obvious sense. But Schama’s predilection for meat-eaters rather than vegetarians gives it a tangible personal coherence.

Having settled on his artists, Schama then selects a masterpiece to arrive at and unpick. With Picasso, it’s Guernica. With Van Gogh, it’s Wheatfield with Crows. With Caravaggio, it’s David with the Head of Goliath. The chosen artworks tend to come from the tail end of the artist’s career, giving Schama the chance to get us up to speed on them with some racy potted biographies. It’s a simple and legible format that betrays the potent impact of television. Television’s demands for legibility, sexiness and pat conclusions have duly infected Schama’s prose.

Chief among his stylistic faults is the relentless resort to a high-octane hyperbole that seems to have been learnt from rap records loaned to him by his students. The ludicrous professorial hipness is always amusing and sometimes excruciating. Caravaggio, “the bisexual goat, the murderer, the immense encyclopaedia of wickedness”, did not, it seems, “do” deep space, he didn’t “do” a big cast of characters either, and he certainly didn’t “do” fleshiness. Instead, this “tough guy poseur”, who prowled the streets of Rome “hunting down the action”, and pursued “a fly-by-night, testosterone-fuelled existence”, did, I surmise, the truth.

The book is packed with untoppable pronouncements. Thus Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Theresa in S Maria della Vittoria is “the most astonishing peepshow in art”, because Bernini “could do stone drama like no one else”. And an obscure marble portrait of Bernini’s mistress that has unaccountably tickled Schama’s fancy is “the most beautiful head in the history of sculpture”, and “the greatest tease in all of sculpture” and “the sexiest invitation in the history of European sculpture”, as well as a portrait “like none that had ever been sculpted”. Wow.

The problem with using this sort of prose to make these sorts of claims is not merely the horrible absence of grace but, more critically, the resulting lack of room for further ascent. Pumped up, partial and untrustworthy, this constant singling out of the best this and the most achieved that adds up to some very lazy art history. Has Schama really seen every other contender before declaring Rembrandt’s obscure fragment of the Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis to be “the most overpowering ruin in the history of European painting” or “the painting that more than any other in the 17th century is about homeland”? Of course not. The relentless claim to omniscience tells you far more about Schama’s appreciation of his own tastes than it does about the things you are examining.

The best essays are probably the ones dealing with the most unexpected inclusions. Unlike Caravaggio and Rembrandt, Bernini isn’t written about much these days, so Schama’s passionate defence of him has freshness on its side and feels genuinely stirring. Rothko, too, is a difficult and elusive artist to confront, and Schama’s fearless go at him is the best thing in the book. When he gets something right it is still a thrill.

But even then I couldn’t help feeling that I was hearing from a judge whose values had been made unreliable by the coarse hungers of television; and who might best be described, in his own style, as the vainest contributor to the history of televised art appreciation, ever.

SEEING DOUBLE

This is not the first venture by Schama, University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, into art books. Alongside Citizens (on the French revolution), and A History of Britain, he has also penned a book on Rembrandt and Hang-Ups, a collection of his art pieces for The New Yorker.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £23 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

READ ON...

books:
Rembrandt’s Eyes
by Simon Schama
(Penguin £18.99)
Exhaustive, colourful biography of the artist

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