‘We are living through a different kind of anarchy now’
Simon Schama – presenter of the BBC’S major new art-history documentary ‘Civilisations’ – tells Ben Lawrence why it had to be made, while his co-hosts choose their highlights from the series
In the febrile atmosphere of Paris in May 1968, Kenneth Clark was standing outside Notre-dame, filming his introduction to Civilisation, the BBC’S documentary about the history of western art. Not far away, a young Simon Schama was being “quietly gassed” by police in Montparnasse as he protested against capitalism, consumerism and American imperialism.
Schama was, of course, typical of that baby-boomer generation and has recently described himself as “a barbarically feckless youth, stoned on self-righteousness.” Now, 50 years later, he is one of three presenters of Civilisations, the BBC’S reimagining of Clark’s original work: the first TV documentary series broadcast in colour, in which Clark travelled 80,000 miles across the West in order to highlight those works that pinpointed the genius and the genesis of human creativity.
This new series widens the canvas to create a comprehensive history of art around the entire world from the year dot to the present day. Schama and his co-presenters, Mary Beard and David Olusoga, have visited 31 countries and taken in 500 pieces.
The original Civilisation felt like an urgent plea to sanctify our culture as revolution raged around the world. One might ask whether the new series is simply a grand gesture as the need for event television grows ever greater. Yet in episode one, Schama decisively makes a case for the series’s importance as he hones in on the desecration of ancient works in Palmyra by Isil. “Palmyra is an extreme case of the fear and paranoia [induced by] art,” says Schama. “But there is also a different kind of anarchy we are living through now.
“We are living in a flickering, digitally driven, short attention-span cyber world while, at the same time, there is a proven hunger for art.
“The great art museums have football-sized crowds thronging to shows every weekend. And that is a paradox when there is a Big Brotherish [in the reality TV sense, not the Orwellian sense] tyranny of the trivial. A case needs to be made for what endures, and it needs to be made from cultures that are not just European.”
Does he feel that art still poses a threat to the people in authority?
“Of course,” he says. “Look at Ai Weiwei’s endless combat with the Chinese government. He is a kind of imperial ego, but so was Michelangelo, He takes the commission and says: ‘I am the artist but you are the inferior institution who deals with power and money.’ Whatever you think about that, you can’t argue that he is creating a worldwide legacy.” A different sort of danger was made manifest to Schama while filming the series. He was desperate to travel to Isfahan in Iran to talk about the peacock mosque commissioned by Shah Abbas I of Persia in the 17th century. After weeks of diplomacy with the local police and Iranian film board, he received a letter from the US lawyers of Nutopia, the co-producers of Civilisations.
“We were told we would be in danger of criminal prosecution for violating sanctions,” says Schama. “I said: ‘We’re not selling oil rigs’ but we were told we couldn’t go.”
Another thorny issue during the making of Civilisations was whether it should deal with today’s art markets and the inflated prices that certain artists command.
“We had a debate about how much the last episode should deal with art and money and the grotesque prices paid for a Jeff Koons, for example. But then I thought that we all know about that already. Remember that the ultra-rich make generous donations to galleries,” says Schama. “Without wishing to be Pollyanna-ish about it, there is something to celebrate. There is also a democracy of exhilaration in modern art which Kenneth Clark could never have conceived of. He would have held his nose at the one-hit wonders which have crashed their way into the Turbine Hall or the Turner Prize shortlist. But contemporary art is really strong and I think we show that.”
I wonder if there is, in a sense, a reason to upbraid the perceived patrician views of Clark, to make it a trendier version of what had gone before. “What I don’t want this to be is a finger-wagging exercise in the deep meaning of cosmopolitanism,” says Schama. “But where we could empirically demonstrate connections between Japanese woodblock prints which inspired Van Gogh and Monet for example, then that is really powerful and something to celebrate.”
Schama, 73, also celebrates Clark. He bemoans the fact that Clark had 13 episodes to play with (Civilisations is only nine), describing him as “a lucky bugger”. “At many points, we finished the take and we would say: ‘Was that worthy of a son or daughter of Clark?’ We are not imitating him but we do feel he set an extraordinary benchmark. He is often thought of as condescending, but if you make something with his devotion and his seriousness of visual and rhetorical context, then you are paying the public the greatest compliment.”
Schama also flatters his audience’s intelligence, perhaps because of his previous non-media life, as an author and academic at Cambridge, Oxford and then at Harvard. His work on Civilisations shows an extraordinary knack for easy-to-understand erudition.
“You have to be a chum,” he says. “But you can’t be so egregiously matey that you become one of those awful people in pubs who comes over and talks drunkenly about Trollope for an hour and a half.” Schama’s enthusiastic, often lyrical style has been parodied (Harry Enfield’s is particularly wicked), and he admits that he does get “a bit gushy on occasion”.
“Of course, the cameras eat all that up but I don’t regret it,” he says. “I suppose the greater embarrassment comes when you are standing in front of something like Las Meninas. i remember waving my arms around and I suddenly felt the cold fishy eye of Velásquez on my back and I could hear him saying ‘I’ve had enough of people like you, sunshine.’ I feel a proper sense of embarrassment, particularly when discussing intellectually complex artists like Velázquez. They make what you say feel like leaden prose – however hard you try. That’s when the camera has to take over.”
I wonder if working on Civilisations made Schama think about his cultural identity. He describes himself to me as “notoriously Jewish or famously Jewish, however you want to put it”, and that the experience of being a boy and having relatives in Lithuania, Manchuria, Johannesburg and Dayton, Ohio, gave him an advantageous sense of other cultures.
“I remember having an emotional connection with places all over the world, but that was not mutually exclusive of feeling very British. I remember when I was a boy putting flags [on a map] of the Queen’s Coronation tour and then, when she was on the Britannia, we bought postcards from wherever she was visiting. That gave me a sense of what the world was and was utterly joyful.”
Kenneth Clark was asked whether he knew what civilisation was. He replied that he couldn’t describe it in the abstract but that he knew it when he saw it. How would Schama describe civilisation, or indeed civilisations? “I have an identical view,” he says.
“It’s a space in which your humanity can be richly realised.” Civilisations begins on BBC Two on March 1 at 9pm