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Ecco
November 2006
On Sale: November 7, 2006
448 pages
ISBN: 0061176109
EAN: 9780061176104
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
"Great art has dreadful manners," Simon Schama observes
wryly at the start of his epic and explosive exploration of
the power, and whole point, of art. "The hushed reverence of
the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are
polite things; visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but
actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest
paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure,
and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of
reality. . . ." With the same disarming force, The Power of Art propels us
on an eye-opening, breathtaking odyssey, zooming in on eight
extraordinary masterpieces, from Caravaggio's David and
Goliath to Picasso's Guernica. Jolting us far from the
comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, Schama closes in on
intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight
great artists who, under extreme stress, created something
unprecedented, altering the course of art forever. The embattled heroes—Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David,
Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko—each in his own
resolute way, faced crisis with steadfast defiance, pitting
passion and conviction against scorn and short-sightedness.
The masterpieces they created challenged convention,
shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way
we look at the world. With vivid storytelling and powerfully evocative descriptive
passages, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the
artists and the spirit of the times they lived through,
capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in
Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris,
and the carnage and pathos of Civil War Spain. Most compelling of all, The Power of Art traces the
extraordinary evolution of eight "eye-popping" world-class
works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works
"tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be
inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can
deliver. And when they do that, they answer, irrefutably and
majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant
art-conscript . . . 'OK, OK, but what's art really for?'"
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