architectural videos: Simon Schama's Power of Art(all episodes)

video topic: Architecture
entry type: Documentary

video title: Simon Schama's Power of Art(all episodes)
episodes: Caravaggio – David with the Head of Goliath
Bernini – Ecstasy of Saint Theresa
Rembrandt – The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis
David – The Death of Marat
Turner – The Slave Ship
Van Gogh – Wheatfield with Crows
Picasso – Guernica
Rothko – Black on Maroon
video series: Simon Schama's Power of Art
arist featured:Caravaggio,Bernini,Rembrandt,David,Turner,Van Gogh,Picasso,Rothko.
director: Simon Schama
producer: BBC
run time: 1hr
size: 750 mb
release date: 2008

Official web: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/powerofart/
Imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887235/
courtesy:
http://www.rslinks.org/docus/simon-schamas-power-art-dvdrip-xvid
http://subculturia.blogspot.com/2010/09/carl-hindmarch-simon-schamas-power-of.html
http://www.docs4you.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=50911&hl=schama

description and preview:
(click "read more" below)

Power of Art is a BBC documentary series written and presented by Simon Schama. The series was broadcast in October and November 2006 on BBC2. It aired in Poland on TVP2 in February and March 2008, on PBS HD in the US and re -broadcast in September 2008 on TVOntario in Canada, ABC1 in Australia, Australia Network in the Asia Pacific region, TV ONE in New Zealand and on ET1 in Greece. Each of the eight, one hour episodes examines the biography of an artist and a key work.

The Power of Art
by Simon Schama

The power of the greatest art is the power to shake us into revelation and rip us from our default mode of seeing. After an encounter with that force, we don't look at a face, a colour, a sky, a body, in quite the same way again. We get fitted with new sight: in-sight. Visions of beauty or a rush of intense pleasure are part of that process, but so too may be shock, pain, desire, pity, even revulsion. That kind of art seems to have rewired our senses. We apprehend the world differently.

Art that aims that high – whether by the hand of Caravaggio, Van Gogh or Picasso – was not made without trouble and strife. Of course there has been plenty of great art created in serenity, but the popular idea that some masterpieces were made under acute stress with the artist struggling for the integrity of the conception and its realisation is not a "romantic myth" at all. A glance at how some of the most transforming works got made by human hands is an encounter with "moments of commotion".

It's those hot spots in which great risks were taken that The Power of Art brings you. Instead of trying to reproduce the un-reproducible feeling you have when you are face to face with those works in the hush of the gallery or a church, the series (and the book) drops you instead into those difficult places and unforgiving dramas when the artists managed, against the odds, to astound. "Every artist thinks he's Rembrandt", Picasso once joked, but there would come a time when he thought so himself!

All the artists in our series – and some of the contemporary artists on our website who have joined in its spirit to reflect on them – have felt part of this craft of exhilarating trouble. I hope, when you watch the programmes, you too get to feel the heat.

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