Everything about Simon Schama totally explained
Simon Michael Schama,
CBE (born
13 February 1945) is a
British professor of history and art history at
Columbia University. His many works on history and art include
Landscape and Memory,
Dead Certainties,
Rembrandt's Eyes, and his history of the
French Revolution,
Citizens. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part
BBC documentary series
A History of Britain. He was an art and cultural critic for
The New Yorker.
Biography
The son of second-generation immigrant
Jewish parents with roots in
Lithuania and
Turkey, Schama was born in
London in February 1945. In the late 1940s, the family moved to
Southend-on-Sea in
Essex before moving back to London. Schama writes of this period in his
Introduction to
Landscape & Memory (pp.3-4):
"
I had no hill [theprevious paragraph had talked of his enthusiasm for Puck of Pook's Hill], but I did have the Thames. It wasn't the upstream river that the poets in my Palgrave claimed burbled betwixt mossy banks. ... It was the low, gull-swept estuary, the marriage bed of salt and fresh water, stretching as far as I could see from my northern Essex bank, toward a thin black horizon on the other side. That would be Kent, the sinister enemy who always seemed to beat us in the County Cricket Championship. ..."
Schama won a
scholarship to
Haberdashers' Aske's and went on to
Christ's College, Cambridge, reading history under
J. H. Plumb and graduating with a
Starred First in History, 1966.
He worked on and off as a lecturer in history at
Cambridge, where he became a Fellow and Director of Studies in History, and at
Oxford where he was made a Fellow of
Brasenose College in 1976, specialising in the
French Revolution, and wrote his first book,
Patriots and Liberators. This won the
Wolfson History Prize. It was originally intended as a study of the
French Revolution, but eventually published in
1977 focusing on the effect of the
Patriot revolution in
The Netherlands, and its
aftermath.
His second book,
Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978), is a study of the
Zionist aims of
Edmond James de Rothschild and
James Armand de Rothschild.
In 1980 Schama accepted a chair at
Harvard. His next book,
The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), again focussed on Dutch history. In it, Schama interpreted the ambivalences that informed the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, held in balance between the conflicting imperatives, to live richly and with power, or to live a godly life. The iconographic evidence that Schama draws upon, in 317 illustrations, of emblems and propaganda that defined Dutch character, prefigured his expansion in the 1990s as a commentator on art and visual culture.
Citizens (1989), written at speed to a publisher's commission, finally saw the publication of his long-awaited study of the French revolution, and won the 1990
NCR Book Award.
Citizens was very well-received and sold admirably. Its view that the violence of the Terror was inherent from the start of the Revolution, however, has received serious criticism. In 1991, he published the strange
Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), a slender, novella-type work which looked at two widely reported deaths a hundred years apart and mooted some possible (invented) connections between the two cases, exploring the historian's inability "ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing the documentation," and speculatively bridging "the teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration." Not all readers absorbed the nuance of the title: it received a greatly mixed critical and academic reception. (Australia's
Keith Windschuttle, in his
The Killing of History, took particular exception to the book's overt fictionalizing). In addition it sold poorly.
His
Landscape and Memory (1995) focussed on the relationship between
physical environment and
folk memory, separating the components of landscape as wood, water and rock, enmeshed in the cultural consciousness of collective "memory" that are embodied in
myths, which Schama finds to be expressed outwardly in ceremony and text. While in many ways even more personal and idiosyncratic than
Dead Certainties, roaming through widening circles of digressions, this book was also more traditionally structured and better-defined in its approach. While many reviews remained decidedly mixed, the book was a definite commercial success and won numerous prizes.
Appropriately, many of the plaudits came from the art world rather than from traditional academia. This was borne out when Schama became
art critic for
The New Yorker in 1995. He held the position for three years, dovetailing his regular column with professorial duties at
Columbia University; a selection of his best essays on art for the magazine, chosen by Schama himself, was released in 2005 under the title
Hang Ups. During this time, Schama also produced a lavishly illustrated
Rembrandt's Eyes, another critical and commercial success. Despite the focus of the book's title, it contrasts the biographies of both
Rembrandt van Rijn with
Peter Paul Rubens.
The year 2000 saw Schama finally return to the UK, having been commissioned by the
BBC to produce a series of television documentary programmes on
British history as part of their Millennium celebrations, under the title
A History of Britain (Schama was insistent on the title beginning with "A" rather than "The", so as to underline that his was a personal subjective view rather than an academic,
didactic standard). Schama wrote and presented the episodes himself, in a friendly and often jocular style with his highly characteristic delivery, and was rewarded with excellent reviews and unexpectedly high ratings. There has been, however, some irritation and criticism expressed by other historians about Schama's necessarily condensed recounting of British Isles' history on this occasion, particularly those specializing in the pre-Anglo-Saxon history, of insular Celtic civilization. The series was eventually expanded to three, with 15 episodes produced in total covering the complete span of British history up until
1965; it went on to become one of the BBC's best-selling documentary series on DVD. Schama also wrote a trilogy of tie-in books for the show, which took the story up to the year 2000; there's some debate as to whether the books are the tie-in product for the TV series, or the other way around. The series also had some popularity in the United States when it was first shown on the
History Channel.
In 2001 Schama received the
CBE. In 2003 he signed a lucrative new contract with the BBC and
HarperCollins to produce three new books and two accompanying TV series. Worth £3 million (around $5.3m), it represents the biggest advance deal ever for a TV historian. The first result of the deal was a book and TV show entitled
Rough Crossings, dealing with stories of migration across the
Atlantic Ocean and including chapters/episodes on
Pocahontas, freed slaves, and the
Irish famine, in effect making him a
Superdon.
In 2006 the BBC broadcast a new TV series,
Simon Schama's Power of Art which, with an accompanying book, was presented and written by Schama. It marks a return to art history for him, treating eight artists through eight key works (
Caravaggio's,
Bernini's
Ecstasy of St Theresa,
Rembrandt's
Conspiracy of Julius Civilis,
Jacques-Louis David's ,
J. M. W. Turner's
The Slave Ship,
Vincent van Gogh,
Picasso's, and
Mark Rothko). It was also shown on PBS in the United States.
Prizes
Winner, 2006
National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, for
Rough Crossings.
Publications
Books
Further Information
Get more info on 'Simon Schama'.
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