Along with looting, the Nazis unleashed a modern war that destroyed historic European architecture. The Rape of Europa II
The Roberts Commission warned President Roosevelt of a grave problem facing the Allied armies: how to save Europe without further destroying its historic buildings and cultural treasures. ibid.
Rome’s people and ancient monuments were spared. ibid.
Daily, the Monuments Men were rescuing thousands of vulnerable art works. ibid.
Three staggering hordes of stolen art. ibid.
In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important. Luis Buñuel
Nothing is original under the sun. Art and Craft: Mark Landis, Sky Arts 2015
I was in the habit of saying I had a sister. ibid.
I just like to copy things. It’s reassuring. ibid.
‘I found 46 museums in 20 States; but more than 100 pieces he’s offered up to these institutions.’ ibid. curator
I live by the code of The Saint ... Such a great show. ibid.
Copying pictures is my gift. ibid.
‘He gave it to the museum for free.’ ibid. rozzer
Germany November 2013: the world is stunned as more than 1,500 lost artworks seized by the Nazis are found safe in a small run-down apartment in Munich. Hunting Hitler’s Stolen Treasure, National Geographic 2014
The story of the Monuments Men – a group of art experts who in the last years of the war set out to solve the greatest art theft in history. ibid.
The return of 5,000,000 objects. ibid.
As many as 200,000 masterpieces remain missing. ibid.
None of these faces can be taken at face value. Because no portrait is as simple as it first seems. Every portrait is the result of a three way contest ... the sitter ... the artist ... not least the verdict of the public. Face of Britain by Simon Schama, BBC 2015
Winston Churchill by Graham Sutherland: ‘This clash of the titans, this duel of the egos’. ibid.
Sutherland is distraught and humiliated by the whole thing. ibid.
One of the great masterpieces of British portraiture. ibid.
But then came the Reformation ... paintings became condemned here as Roman, idolatry, they had to go. ibid.
Elizabeth I’s Rainbow Portrait: This one pulls you into a labyrinth of signs and symbols. ibid.
Charles I by Van Dyck: Here he is then, the British Caesar riding high above mere mortals. ibid.
A revolution in art: attack portraits ... The lethal weapon was laughter. Comic satire twisted the face of power and exposed it to the snigger of the streets. ibid.
Photography came to Britain in the 1840s and it captured the public imagination. ibid.
Tonks’s drawings [World War I] challenged everything we think a portrait should be. Face of Britain by Simon Schama II
West London: With an insider’s street knowledge, Charlie [Phillips] made portraits that are strikingly intimate. ibid.
No-one went after street stories like William Hogarth. ibid.
The silhouette – the very first authentic portraiture of the people. ibid.
Hill and Adamson: this was undeniably great [photographic] art. ibid.
The Singh Sisters ... socially inclusive and expansive ... a riotous technicolour of expression. ibid.
Diana: She touched people. Literally. So when Diana died we were bound to take it hard. What happened to the British? Face of Britain by Simon Schama III
Our first national hero was no prince but a diamond in the rough … Drake. ibid.
Portraits bring you into their own company. ibid.
Hogarth and Garrick: he [Garrick] was our first star … ibid.
Cigarette Cards: a democratic pantheon … Movie stars, cricketers, footballers were the new kind of famous … As addicted to fame as they [smokers] were nicotine. ibid.
Van Dyck was the greatest portrait painter of his day, the King’s painter. Face of Britain by Simon Schama IV
Thomas Gainsborough: mighty of mind comes through feelings. ibid.
Francis Bacon: he chews up the face. ibid.
We live in a confessional age. But the confessional is now a different kind of box. Exposure to the max. Privacy is so over. Face of Britain by Simon Schama V
Laura Knight was to become a frontline warrior who’d use the self-portrait to violate gloriously all the confining conventions that the men who ruled the art world had imposed. ibid.
I’ve always felt at home in the past. For after all what is the present except an endless chain of memories? Some of them are translated into stone. We are all the inheritors of those memories. And we look after them as best we can. All this so we can pass on their revelation to the future. Simon Schama, Civilisations I: Second Moment of Creation, BBC 2018
The significance of Palmyra was at once both local and universal. ibid.
We know what civilisation is: we know it from the shock of its imminent loss as a mutilation on the body of our humanity. ibid.
We are the art-making animal. ibid.
When did it begin that second moment of creation, the dawning of human creativity? Where did it begin? ibid.
Europe’s first great civilisation: the culture of the Minoans … This is the first truly social art the world had seen. ibid.
The Nabataeans had what you might call an instinct for cultural ecology; they worked with the rock in their desert home … This is Petra. ibid.
A garden city of fountains, swimming pools, groves and orchards … A city of 30,000 people … A cosmopolitan playground. ibid.
Mayan art and architecture was a prayer – an appeal to the weather … But Mayan art wasn’t all enormous and formal – far from it – it was hugely varied. One of the most spectacular flourishing of creativity in human history. ibid.
All civilisations want what they can’t have – the conquest of time. ibid.
When your world is collapsing, when everything is closing in, what you want is to be somewhere else, somewhere you can breathe in peace, a scrap of beauty far from the noise and the ugliness. But if there is no escape then you get there in your dreams and you paint that landscape into existence. Simon Schama, Civilisations III: Picturing Paradise
Landscape art has always been an antidote to the anarchy brought by the hand of man. ibid.
The Chinese tradition landscape painting first blossomed as a great subject of art. ibid.
In 1565 the Flemish master Peter Bruegel painted a set of landscapes which reinvented that traditional medieval cycle – the labours of the months. ibid.
A new class of jobbing artists emerged to service this popular demand for landscape art. ibid.
Heavenly vaults but made by the earthly hand of man. The imagined form of the universe: a circle, no beginning, no end, just wheeling eternity. Domes had appeared in antiquity and the medieval centuries but never with such compulsive grandeur. Simon Schama, Civilisations V: The Triumph of Art
The great flowering we call the Renaissance owed much to Arab scholars … the outpouring of creativity would flow both ways between Islamic East and Christian West. ibid.
St Peter’s: Michelangelo toiled away into his 80s on this. ibid.
Cellini’s outrageous miracle in bronze … Perseus, head down … with the ultimate trophy … Cellini is a sorcerer, an alchemist. ibid.
On the outer wall of Lahore Fort, Jahangir set a vast display of mosaic tiles. ibid.
Caravaggio was a bisexual murderer with major anger management issues … but if he acted like a devil he painted like an angel. ibid.