Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2065 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-11-20
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 3
• Running time: 480 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Watching Simon Schama's Power of Art is like taking an Ivy League course in art appreciation, with the folksy but knowledgeable Schama as guide and interpreter. A collection of hour-long films on eight seminal artists and their groundbreaking works, which originally aired on British television, this boxed set is as entertaining as it is enlightening, with Schama doing for Western art what, say, Steve Irwin did for Australian natural history. Eight artists are featured--Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko--and each portrait of the artist weaves biography and historical context to help explain the true power of his works.

The segment on Van Gogh is, as expected, emotional, yet Schama convincingly portrays Van Gogh as not consumed by madness, but fighting off the episodes with painting. Van Gogh painted one of his most evocative works, Wheat Field With Crows, which even his brother, Theo, recognised was about to put his brother on the artistic map. Yet, as Schama points out, within weeks, Van Gogh had killed himself. "Now why would he want to do that?" Schama muses--and then proceeds to narrate the tormented tale of the answer. Along the way, the viewer gains new appreciation for Van Gogh's signature works, including his famous sunflowers. "Technically, these are still lives," Schama says, "but there's nothing still about them... the sunflowers [seem to be] organisms landing violently from a burning sun." If the reenactments of the artists' lives are a bit overdone, it's forgivable, since the cumulative effect, in an hour, is a new appreciation of the work and the man.

Extras include frank and very funny commentaries by Schama and his co-producer, and lots of behind-the-scenes dish on how certain scenes were achieved. The teeming French opera scene in the "David" episode, for instance, was cast using just 20 French extras and then the rest created by CGI--"the scene works better, really, than [the film] King Kong," Schama says with delight. --A.T. Hurley

Synopsis
Join Simon Schama as he journeys back through the ages to the time in which eight of the most famous works of art were created. It’s a story of intrigue, as many of these iconic works were created in turbulent times, with their artists living through the likes of the Spanish Civil War and the upheaval caused during the revolution in Paris.

Customer Reviews

Magnificent and erudite
Schama's portrayal of Rembrandt, Caravaggio and above all, Bernini, is masterly. Never dull, always pacey where necessary, his commentaries breathe even greater life into these three extraordinary artists.

If you like art and know why, or if you like art "because I know what I like" (both equally valid) this is a must-see DVD set.

excellent
Simon Schama's DVD set "The Power of Art" is an excellent intellectual try to make the connections between the art and the human perception of the world and with it, its influence on the world history. With it he tries to cope with the very important question, what art is for, and what purposes it fulfils except of being esthetical addition to our world. According to Schama the very best examples of politically influential artists are David, Goya and Picasso. Schama successfully shows the power of art in political troubled times, while according to him Goya and Picasso standed in the morally correct side of the fence, opposite to David whose paintings were part of the murderous machinery of the French revolution.

splendidly irritating
Schama is an irritating presenter -- "We all know the type," as he says in an aside while unaccountably chopping carrots -- but at least we have someone discussing art without using artspeak. And being irritated is better than being sent to sleep. For those who don't like the re-enactments, I can only say that this is a TV programme, not a book. Some are less than brilliant, and in this sense he's let down somewhat by his producer, but not so badly as in the History of Britain, where there were serious anachronisms between the reconstructions and the history.