Hang-ups – Essays on Painting (Mostly); Simon Schama, BBC Books, £30

These days the name Simon Schama tends to appear as part of a matching set, paired with the (don’t spit) name of David Starkey. Responsible for the 2002 TV series, A History of Britain, Schama came under fierce attack for ignoring Scotland’s side of the story. Now that we’re trapped in the early stages of the prolonged and profitless agony that is Starkey’s Monarchy, Schama doesn’t seem half so bad.

Whether to describe Schama as a social historian or an art historian seems largely to depend on context. For the purposes of the BBC in 2002, he was a historian. Now that Auntie has brought out a book of his writings on art, quite unrelated to any broadcast past or future, he is “author and art historian”. Before selling his soul to the Corporation, Schama was art critic to the New Yorker for three years, and these reviews constitute three quarters of the book. The other quarter hails mostly from the Times Literary Supplement and The New Republic.

On the evidence of his book, Schama had access to a steady supply of top-notch retrospectives of some of the biggest names in art history: Rembrandt, Cézanne, Mondrian, Twombly. The essays are not, in newspaper terms, bite-sized; they’re whole banquets of thought, fact and poetry demonstrating the author’s enormous capacity for absorption. He frequently dismisses conventional histories, setting out to rewrite artists’ biographies from scratch, and his argument is so compelling that he rarely fails to take you with him.

Perhaps because of his dual role as historian and art critic, Schama is plagued from the outset by methodological self-flagellation. He is frank about these difficulties in the introduction, weighing up the relative merits of a purely historical approach with those of a formalist, aesthetic one. He can’t seem to find the answer, though, and this self-conscious debate bobs up again and again in his essays, like an unwanted kitten that just won’t drown.

Thus, a review of the (Washington) National Gallery’s Vermeer show in 1996 becomes a monologue on historical interpretation. The artist, according to Schama, was a master of “calculated obliqueness”, obfuscating any possible future attempts at historical analysis. The implication, that Vermeer’s primary motivation was to irritate exponents of the New Art History over 400 years later, demonstrates the rawness of Schama’s professional nerve.

The author is breathlessly excited at the idea of interpreting Vermeer’s paintings without recourse to an academically approved bank of documentary evidence. He should realise that there’s no need for all this fuss, because he’s actually very good at it. When Schama allows himself the luxury of enthusiasm, his voluptuous descriptions of paintings can enter the realms of poetry. From Chaim Soutine’s “glistening rivers of turbid glop” to Rembrandt’s “savage sabre-slash of flesh pink”, he leaves you hungry to devour the object of his lust for yourself.

That’s not always a good thing. With only one image provided for each of the 31 essays, it can be torture to read ebullient descriptions of unillustrated paintings, especially those which are less well-known or which are unlikely to appear in public again. The effect is something like reading a book full of mouth-watering descriptions of delicious meals, without pictures or recipes, when you’re hungry. The result is a temptation to skip over the descriptions to get to the next bit of narrative prose.

Schama’s greatest strength, unsurprisingly, is historical context. His encyclopaedic knowledge of places, people and times allows him to paint vibrant pictures, before he even gets to the pictures. Whole eras are summed up in a few well-turned phrases. Vienna before the first world war was “an exchange of fire between the shell-shocked trenches occupied by the ego and the id.” His essay on the pitiful sex-life of Stanley Spencer is unput-downable, and his discussion of Egon Schiele’s gauche, explicit nudes is totally uninhibited.

There is always a danger in summing up people and places with too much facility and humour. In his essay on Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Schama does little to improve his standing in Scotland. Scoffing at the idea that Miss Cranston might shell out for roses to decorate her tea rooms, he quips for his New York audience that to complete the effect of its interior one needs the smell of “industrial-strength tea and fried everything”. Its clientele, it seems, consisted of “porridge-clogged bourgeoisie”. For a man so studiously self-conscious about historical objectivity, he suffers still from serious post-imperial blind-spots.

Another real blind-spot – and this may be the fault of New York – is the absence of women in the book. Among 31 essays, one would expect more than one woman (book illustrator Anna Ruth Henriques) to be featured, particularly when 13 of the essays are on 20th century artists. Even the essay on haute couture talks exclusively of male designers, discussing the shape of women’s bodies as if the men had invented them. In earlier parts of the book, which is arranged roughly in chronological order, the best a woman can aim for is to be “pippin-breasted”. To give Schama his due, an equal number of young men are “lissome”.

Hang-ups is a thoroughly readable selection of art essays, but if Schama is hoping to match Robert Hughes’ 1980s classic, Nothing if Not Critical, he falls short. Hughes has that way of cutting to the chase, while Schama takes you the long way round. But on the whole, it’s a very scenic route.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 21.11.04