September 1997: crowds flock to see rotting cows’ heads, pickled sharks and mass murderers. With two fingers up at the old art world, the Sensationalists’ exhibition caused a sensation. Contemporary art is the new rock-n-roll. Sensationalists: The Bad Girls and Boys of British Art, BBC 2022
It’s a story that starts in the 1980s art schools, dole queues and squats of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. ibid.
This combination of youthful bravado, fortunate timing and hard work results in = Freeze Exhibition 6th August 1988. ibid.
The world of art, music and fashion swaggers with attitude. A time of dramatic change and the world is watching. Sensationalists: The Bad Girls and Boys of British Art II: Is It Art?
Collector Charles Saatchi reaches for his checkbook. But to do something on this scale [pickled shark] comes with a £50,000 price tag … Saatchi also shows Hirst’s Thousand Years and Rachael Whiteread’s Ghost. ibid.
One young artist creating opportunity from hardship is Sarah Lucas. ibid.
The reaction to House thrusts Rachel Whiteread into the limelight. She’s nominated for the Turner Prize. ibid.
Two days before Sensation is due to open, the debate intensifies around Myra, and four Royal Academians resign amid protests. Sensationalists: The Bad Girls and Boys of British Art III: Fame & Fortune
Alongside Myra, the works that caused the most controversy are by brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman. ibid.
By 2007 Damien Hirst was invincible selling his art works for millions of pounds. ibid.
Caravaggio is on the run again ... This time it’s different; this time he’s wanted for murder. Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e1: Caravaggio, BBC 2006
This was Caravaggio’s Rome: cheap rooms and drunken nights ... Make something sacred out of the lives of the sordid. ibid.
Even his closest friends couldn’t work out how the painter of religious marvels and the psycho could inhabit the same person. ibid.
Sick and sober by what he’s done Caravaggio makes paintings. ibid.
Caravaggio gives us death twice over: The Death of John the Baptist, and the death of our most cherished illusion about art: that it can make us finer, more humane. Dream on, says Caravaggio. ibid.
David and Goliath: It’s a self-portrait unlike any painted before ... Decapitated head is Goliath, a bloody grotesque, a monster ... Here is Caravaggio who is the embodiment of wickedness ... The two sides of the painter painted here. ibid.
She is in ecstasy all right. Her head is thrown back, her mouth is open ... You have to look. You don’t know where to look. Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e2: Bernini
A nun in the throes of ecstasy ... Bernini knew all about passion: that’s what his art was about. It was this physical intensity that would transform sculpture. ibid.
He could like an alchemist change one material into another: marble into trees, leaves, hair, and of course flesh. ibid.
Bernini arrived in Rome in 1605 just at the time Caravaggio’s punchy street dramas were electrifying the Church. Giving it a new vision of how to move the flock. ibid.
This is Apollo and Daphne. A story of sexual huntings: Apollo wants the nymph Daphne. She definitely doesn’t want him. He runs after her and just as he is about to grab her the gods answer her prayers by turning her into a laurel tree. It’s all action sculpture – Apollo breaking his breathless run, his cape and his hair still flying in the wind. ibid.
Bernini is in his early twenties. A Superstar. Someone on whom the almighty and the powerful almost fawn. ibid.
Top that: no-one ever could ... We are looking at the most intense, convulsive drama of the body that any of us experience ... The visualisation of complete bliss. ibid.
Rembrandt: You’re a painter. What’s the worst thing that can happen to you? Disgrace? Derision? No, the worse thing – you have to cut up your masterpiece. What had brought Holland’s greatest painter to this moment of artistic suicide? Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e3: Rembrandt
He does Us. Flesh and Blood. You and Me. Art that exists to tell the truth of the human condition. ibid.
And portraits. Spectacular portraits ... Pictures. Especially pictures of themselves ... Look at this: Rembrandt’s portrait of an eighty-three year old woman. ibid.
Rembrandt looks behind the face: and this is why his portraits touch us like nobody else’s. ibid.
All his life Rembrandt seemed to love the filmy muck of his paint. ibid.
It was David who would give people the vision of what a true citizen was. Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e4: David
All his [David] life he was only really looking for virtue. ibid.
David’s Rome rebuilt as the New France. ibid.
His depiction of the Tennis Court Oath: it’s a picture filled with noise, the roar of the oath, the crash of a great electrical storm. The Revolution as an unstoppable force of Nature. And at the centre of it all an enormous space ... filled with light, the rushing wind, the furious energy of energy. It’s an idea. An idea so big it dwarfs the humans who enact it. ibid.
There was no going back. From now on David and his art belonged to the Revolution. ibid.
It’s an apparition ... Look upon him, David is saying, and you will see the highest type of humanity ... The white sheets seem shroud-like ... It’s a cult image. And it tells you to believe ... A story for the people. ibid.
So why do I like David? Well I don’t. He is a monster. But he makes ideas blaze in dry ice. ibid.
This is Art designed to make those who saw it virtuous citizens. And it’s all so perfect, so tragic, so poetic, you almost believe it. ibid.
When his wife disapproved of his zeal he divorced her. ibid.
The terror had begun. And David had become part of the great engine of killing. ibid.
David’s downfall was inextricably linked to the fate of Robespierre. ibid.
Turner wanted to paint that England too. For this was the early 1800s – the rockiest years in all modern British history. The time when the distance between the fantasy Britain and the reality was at its widest. The kingdom was supposed to be a model of political and social stability, but there was massive unemployment, hunger and anger ... There are hard times. Radical times. Simon Sharma’s Power of Art s1e5: Turner
There is another painting in the 1840 show about which the critics are also absolutely unanimous: in dismay and scorn. J M W Turner’s Slave Ship ... The greatest British painting of the nineteenth century. ibid.
He is after all the National Gallery’s all-time favourite. ibid.
The cockney poet. ibid.
With a dab of his brush he could wave fairy dust on the genteel British countryside. ibid.
He buys a West End house for his pictures, himself and his old dad. ibid.
Frosty Morning, 1813: Two men digging a ditch, or is it a grave? You can feel the tough work of it. That hard frozen soil. Everything impassive, unsentimental, dour. How things really are. When did Constable ever do winter in the north? ibid.
It’s not just what he paints that gets him into trouble with high-class critics, it’s the way that he paints it. ibid.