Velazquez produced images of the royals on demand … with sparkling naturalism. ibid.
Think of the Gothic cathedral and you think of the austerity of stone. Rows of saints and angels and angels ushering the righteous into heaven and thrusting the damned into the haws of hell … The whole of the architectural design was meant to optimize that flood of heavenly-coloured light. Shining down on you in Chartres cathedral were the stories of the Bible. Simon Schama, Civilisations 1e7: Radiance
The first great colourist to set Venetian art on this path and to do it with the dazzling luminousness of oils on wood was Giovanni Bellini. ibid.
The largest ceiling fresco ever painted: painted in the 1750s by Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo it’s a vision of Apollo the sun-god. ibid.
Another culture’s rapturous embrace of colour … the ancient Hindu festival of Holi. ibid.
The black paintings seem to me to be an endgame for Goya. ibid.
Eventually, a new generation of Western artists would put colour back into European art. But their inspiration would come from another culture on the other side of the world – Japan. ibid.
It was Vincent van Gogh who’d reach most feverishly towards an even more radiant redemptive in paint. ibid.
What can art do when horror comes calling? What can art do when civilisation itself is lost? Simon Schama, Civilisations s1e9: The Vital Spark
Is the art of our own time just so much buzz and fashion? A hot investment for the rich? Or is it an absolutely necessity? A light from humanity’s vital spark? ibid.
It wasn’t until autumn 1914 that Mondrian had the epiphany which would bring true abstraction into the world. ibid.
Abstraction pumped up with the vitality of expressionism: Jackson Pollock’s pictures were monumental in scale and ferociously physical in execution. ibid.
Yet it’s this visual greediness which has made contemporary art such a hit: the sense that the quality of the art and its subtlety isn’t necessarily compromised by its playfulness. ibid.
The strongest contemporary art has this magical power of transformation. ibid.
Ai Weiwei: Law of the Journey 2017 … Cast adrift on an infinite ocean of terror and despair. ibid.
You may think our modern world was born yesterday. But it wasn’t, not even the day before yesterday. Democracy in the streets and the rise of people power. The raw passion of national belonging. Good and bad. Our obsession with the self and our own psychology and the dark recesses of the human mind. Even our love of nature, our concern for the future of the planet, all of this was the creation of the romantics: a generation of artists living and working two hundred years ago around the time of the French revolution. Their art was created over nearly a century of upheaval and change. And it speaks to us now with as much ferocious power as it did then. The Romantics & Us with Simon Schama, BBC 2020
The Romantics lived hard, worked feverishly, and many of them died young. ibid.
If you’ve ever been on a march for whatever cause, you’ve experienced one of the great inventions of the Romantics brought into the modern world … A new religion of insurrection and agitation in which everyone can take to the streets to fight for freedom, equality and justice. ibid.
Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Delacroix: It’s been a focal point of intoxicated devotion ever since … Delacroix was born into an age of revolutions in which the monarchy and aristocracy was under siege from the ideals of liberty, equality and the rights of man. ibid.
Delacroix’s image had its most famous resurrection during the Paris Uprisings of 1968 when students and workers came together on the barricades to break apart the rigid conservatism of French society under [Charles] de Gaulle. ibid.
The students took over the most prestigious art school and covered Paris in revolutionary slogans, poetry and street art. ibid.
William Blake: His head swam with visions. As he walked through the streets of his city he saw angels in the trees and amongst the haymakers in the fields. He was always reaching for that bit of heaven and he sees everyone as potentially wonderful. ibid.
Perhaps the most surprising or at least the bravest was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1792, fired up by the revolution, Mary had written A Vindication of the Rights of Women … And so she arrived in Paris. ibid.
Over the next two years Mary witnessed the worst excesses of the Jacobean government. ibid.
You could see how the will of the people and the language of liberty became increasingly debased into the propaganda slogans of unlimited state power. ibid.
In 1811 while he was a student at Oxford, Shelley wrote and published a series of anonymous texts in defence of atheism and the freedom of the press. ibid.
He gets thrown out of Oxford and elopes with a 16 year old. ibid.
Shelley: The Masque of Anarchy (1819): ‘As I lay asleep in Italy, There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me, To walk in the visions of Poesy.’ ibid.
Romanticism was born looking for trouble. Some airy change in taste: what many of the Romantics wanted was to change the world by revolution if it came to it? But what happened … when the romance of revolution ended in political failure and bloody disenchantment? The Romantics & Us with Simon Schama II: The Chambers of the Mind
Long before the invention of psychology, it was the Romantics who became the first explorers of the darker deeper regions of the human mind. ibid.
We go with Coleridge into this deeply penetrating world of the creative mind … Coleridge believed that it was in our dreams assisted by opium that our true self was revealed to us. ibid.
It gets you every time doesn’t it … It was the Romantics who gave us this intense passion for the nation. Who in their poetry, music and art transformed the sentimental fondness we all feel for our place of birth into something bigger and deeper – the secular devotion of national belonging. The Romantics & Us with Simon Schama III: Tribes
Nationalism is above all the emotion of longing to go back or stay where you came from. ibid.
My generation was determined to make sure the postwar world lived up to the ideals for which millions had lost their lives: the defence of democracy against tyranny, the promise of true equality and the dream of prosperity for all. We knew they’d be brutal battles ahead. Simon Schama’s History of Now I, BBC 2022
In times of crises it’s not always politicians but artists, musicians and writers who rouse us from indifference. ibid.
‘So how can you be an artist and not reflect the times?’ ibid. Nina Simone
A weapon of offence and defence against the enemy. ibid.
Rage: Nadia of Pussy Riot. ibid.
If there ever was a time when we needed to understand what great art can do for the future of humanity then that time surely is now. Simon Schama’s History of Now III: The Price of Plenty
The story of the French Revolution through the destruction of art, buildings and symbols. Richard Clay, The French Revolution: Tearing Up History, BBC 2016
It’s the power of the people. For the first time in their history the people have a representative government. ibid.
This moment of unrest, violence … is meaningful. ibid.
To actually topple a statue is no mean feat. Anybody who’s seen the footage of the Statue of Saddam Hussein being brought down by American marines during the Gulf War will understand the scale of the task. ibid.
Statues of kings were toppling across the city … The statue was as hollow as the power of kings … All royal symbols were at risk. ibid.
Fascii is that symbol of Roman unity, also Roman law and order, that eventually becomes the symbol, that gives the name, to fascists. ibid.
We have been tasked to find and protect buildings, monuments and art. The Monuments Men 2014 starring George Clooney & Matt Damon & Cate Blanchett & Bill Murray & John Goodman & Jean Dujadrin & Bob Balaban & Hugh Bonneville & Sam Hazeldine & Dimitri Leonidas et al, director George Clooney
It’s exactly what we’re fighting for – for our culture and for our way of life ... But if you destroy their achievements and their history then it’s like they never existed. ibid. Clooney to men
There were over five million pieces recovered. ibid.
In 1978-79, Peggy Guggenheim gave what was to become the last interview of her life for Jacqueline B Weld’s biography, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenhiem. Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, BBC 2016, opening caption
Interviewer: You’ve often said your greatest achievement was your discovery of Pollock.
Guggenheim: Yeah, I think so.
Interviewer: And your collection?
Guggenheim: That was my second achievement. ibid.
L’Etoile de Mere, 1928 director Man Ray; Vormittagsspuk, director Hans Richter; Emak-Bakia, director Man Ray; Spellbound sets by Salvador Dali. ibid. captions
‘She actually helped artists to leave Europe, to New York, to the United States.’ ibid.
Peggy once gave a lunch for Pollock at the Chelsea Hotel. Pollock as belligerent and got so drunk that he threw up. A guest told Peggy, ‘You should frame the carpet; it could be worth millions someday!’ ibid.