Venice: for twenty years off and on Turner made the floating city his soul mate. Turner was spellbound, and conjured from a wisp here or a daub there the gauzy radiance of the place. ibid.
He [Turner] looked at Venice and saw death. ibid.
Death on a Pale Horse, 1825-1830: But Turner paints his way out of the nightmare. Look closely: the skeleton is limp; Death is dead. Turner lives to paint on. ibid.
The Fighting Temeraire, 1838: The painting he calls his Old Darling ... A nation in upheaval as the industrial revolution gathers momentum. And Turner has perfect pitch for a British public torn between affection for the past and anticipation for the future. It’s so emotionally versatile this picture ... This could be the sunset of Nelson’s England ... This is the sun rise of your new industrial revolution. ibid.
Turner’s approach to this appalling tragedy was ... to summon an apocalypse, a typhoon. The Slave Ship pitches us into the midst of a fevering dream of catastrophe, terror, sin and retribution. ibid.
This is a day of martyrdom, retribution and judgment ... Slavery would be defeated. There is after all a patch of clearing blue at the right hand top of the painting. The critics went to town. Turner became the butt of jokes. ibid.
He thought of himself as a prophet then. And also a thinker ... Letters: hundreds of them. Mostly to his brother Theo: you’ll see that intelligence bubbling away. Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e6: Van Gogh
He appointed himself as a missionary to the destitute ... What he wanted to be was a preacher. ibid.
Art would succeed where the Church had failed. ibid.
The Potato Eaters is his first knockout masterpiece. It’s a resume of everything he has felt and thought up to now. ibid.
Van Gogh’s version of nature would always be earthier, clumsier, smellier, truer. ibid.
A great ejaculation of emotional energy ... of paint. ibid.
At the heart of all the greatest pictures from this prolific summer is the opposition between barren and fruitful worlds. Between comradeship and loneliness: welcome to The Night Cafe. ibid.
Not mad exactly but suffering. Vincent was an epileptic and struggled with deepening bouts of depression, made worse no doubt by the relentless bad news from Theo that still nobody wanted to buy his pictures. ibid.
He is translating mental upheaval into a revolution on the canvas. ibid.
They are anything but deranged: they are unflinching, tumultuous, heroic, and completely new. And here’s the most startling of them all: Wheat Field With Crows. ibid.
Vincent van Gogh creates modern art. ibid.
Theo held him as he died on the 29th July 1890. Gone. At the moment his entire life had been vindicated. ibid.
Vincent’s passionate belief was that people wouldn’t just see his pictures, but feel the rush of life in them. That by the force of his brush and the dazzlement of his colour they’d experience those fields, those faces, those flowers in ways nothing more polite or literal could ever possibly convey. His art would reclaim what had once belonged to Religion: consolation for our mortality through the relish of the gift of Life. ibid.
Every so often Picasso gets visits from the Gestapo. Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e7: Picasso
Guernica: What can art really do in the face of atrocity? ibid.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ... Portrait of Ambroise Vollard ... The Painter and His Model ... Large Nude in a Red Armchair. ibid.
In his own homeland Spain the old certainties were collapsing ... Violence regularly erupted between political factions on the right and the left ... Spain was about to be torn apart. It was already hopelessly divided. ibid.
Over five thousand bombs were dropped on the defenceless town ... Turning the town into an ashy cauldron. ibid.
He has become the impresario of anguish. ibid.
Guernica: Something that reaches deep into modern nightmares. Hectic. Terrifying. Burning. Screaming. There’s no way out. It’s defiantly modern. But it also pulls us back into the tragedy of the ages ... This picture achieves a miracle ... It makes us feel it. It gets under our skin. This for me is what all great art has to do: crash into our lazy routines. ibid.
What can art do when the bombs start dropping? It can instruct us in the obligations of being human. ibid.
Just how powerful is Art? ... Can it change the world? Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e8: Rothko
On February 25th 1970 nine paintings by the American artist Mark Rothko arrived at London’s Tate Gallery. A few hours earlier on the same, Rothko’s body was found lying on the bathroom floor. ibid.
Rothko said his paintings begin an unknown adventure into an unknown space. ibid.
When in 1958 the Canadian company Seagram wanted a painter to decorate their New York headquarters there was only one preferable choice – Mark Rothko ... He was the greatest living American painter. ibid.
What could Art do? Could it cut through the white noise of daily life, connect us to the basic emotions that make us human? ibid.
He [Rothko] was ambivalent, not just about the commission but about American capitalism, about his own American success story. ibid.
Rothko had come to New York in 1923 to wander around, bum about, and starve a bit, he later said. He enrolled in an art class. ibid.
The whole problem of Art, he said, is to establish human values here in this specific civilisation. ibid.
Rothko had always wanted to give his paintings the emotion force of the old masters. ibid.
His paintings would never hang in the Four Seasons [restaurant]. ibid.
Shadowed by melancholy, his art got darker and more intense, just as modern art was going Pop. ibid.
If some of those portals are blocked, others are opened into that unknown space that Rothko talked out, the only place Art can take us. Far away from the buzzing static of the moment, and towards the music of the spheres. Everything Rothko did to these paintings – the column-like forms suggested rather than drawn ... To make the surface ambiguous, porous. ibid.
Can Art be ever more complete and powerful? I don’t think so. ibid.
Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art protest Nan Goldin et al: ‘Sacklers’ lies, people die.’ Arena: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, BBC 2023
Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency 1983-2022 (35mm slideshow) ibid.
My relationship to Oxycontin started several years ago in Berlin. It was originally prescribed for surgery. So I took it as directed. I got addicted overnight. In the beginning 40 mg was too strong. But as my habit grew there was never enough. I went from 3 pills a day as prescribed to 18. ibid.
Crushing and snorting was my full-time job. When I got out of treatment I learned that the Sackler family whose name I knew from museums and galleries were responsible for the epidemic …. I started a group P.A.I.N. to hold them accountable. ibid.
‘There’s the family of the art world, and the museum world and philanthropy. And then there’s the grubby, unpleasant story of Big Pharma marketing and death.’ ibid.
My anger at the Sackler family. It’s personal. I hate these people. But it’s not about my own addiction. ibid.
All the museums, institutions, need to stop taking money from these corrupt evil bastards. ibid. Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art protest
A stunning treasure worth half a billion dollars lost without a trace … The disappearance of a work of art so remarkable that’s it known as the 8th Wonder of the World. History’s Greatest Mysteries s3e3: Amber Room
Will we ever be able to find the incomparable Amber Room? ibid.
‘After the Nazi siege of Leningrad, the Amber Room goes missing.’ ibid.