Sister Wendy Leads Art Tours de Force

There are plenty of reasons to be cynical about television, but Sister Wendy, the bright-eyed, bucktoothed nun known to PBS audiences for her spirited art history lessons, is not one of them.

For all her gimmicky popularity, Sister Wendy hails from a world outside of irony--from a trailer on the grounds of a British monastery, to be exact, where she has lived in seclusion for 30 years. She comes to art with a heartfelt perspective that should soften even the most jaded critics.

In a new six-part PBS series, “Sister Wendy’s American Collection,” which begins tonight, she crosses the Atlantic to explore six U.S. museums: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Fort Worth’s Kimball Museum. The series reverberates with her enthusiasm for the cultural variety of America’s collections. In leading the viewer through these institutions, she focuses on her favorite works, which vary considerably in age, origin and renown.

What makes Sister Wendy important is not that she’s sincere, or that her programs and books are well-intentioned. Rather it’s that her gospel--a spiritually rooted, accessible form of art history predicated on personal connections to individual artworks--responds so well to the need for a real sense of kinship with art.

Museums tend to address this need by piling up historical facts and stiff scholarly statements. Sister Wendy, on the other hand, uses information to elucidate the immediate experience of looking, to open up a particular work and lead viewers into it. She positions herself as a sort of model viewer, describing her own experience of the work in a casual, personal way.

In someone else’s hands, this approach might result in the dumbing down of art--the evasion of real historical context in favor of an easy, feel-good description. But Sister Wendy is careful to avoid cliches that usually plague accessible renditions. Her lessons are rich introductions meant to ignite passions and inspire further research.

Sister Wendy is humble and open-minded, with a sharp and often self-effacing sense of humor.

She encourages the use of common sense but also gently warns against quick judgments. She leaves room for personal aversion (“This is a wonderful, unforgettable work,” she says of Georges de la Tour’s “The Cheat With the Ace of Clubs” [1620s], “and I’m sorry but I don’t like it”), but emphasizes that the experience of art is always susceptible to revisions.

Looking at a 1982 sculpture by Martin Puryear, she says: “At first I didn’t take all that much to this piece. I didn’t see much further until I came back and looked and thought and looked again. And then it began to open up to me.”

The rewards for all this humility, patience and good humor, she assures viewers, are immeasurable, and she describes them in overtly spiritual though not specifically Catholic terms. Whatever your reaction to such language, it’s difficult not to feel swept away by some of her more passionate accounts: the terra cotta head of a Nigerian king (12th to 14th century), for example, which she puts on the same “transcendent level” as Michelangelo’s Pieta; a 16th century Japanese wine flask of lacquered wood that is “as nearly perfect as humanity can manage”; or any of the Hindu and Buddhist figures she approaches with obvious awe.

She also blazes particularly memorable trails through a number of European paintings, particularly Velasquez’s “Juan de Pareja” (“the greatest painting ... in the greatest museum in the world”--the Met in New York), Vermeer’s “Allegory of the Faith” (1670) (“a touching example of a great artist daring to be vulnerable”), Caravaggio’s “The Cardsharps” (1594), and Rembrandt’s “The Raising of Lazarus” (1630). For anyone who has ever experienced a crisis of faith in art, the almost celestial light that she reveals in some of these works will come as a welcome reminder.

The series’ format does have its shortcomings--namely the lack of an overall historical framework with which to understand the relationship between, say, Chinese scroll painting and medieval European manuscripts. But it is clear that sacrifices were knowingly made to achieve the program’s greater goal: to get viewers into their local museums. Sister Wendy’s discriminating tour of LACMA’s permanent collection, which uncovers a variety of unfamiliar works, should tempt Angelenos to do just that.

Sister Wendy has stated that “American Collection” will be her last series. She identifies, in one of her more personal moments, with an exiled emperor depicted on a 17th century Japanese screen, understanding his longing to return home but maintaining that she “still can’t help wanting to tell the emperor ... [to] stay in solitude. Don’t lose it all for the excitements of the court.”

She will leave her own court--the baffling bustle of television--much improved for her efforts.

*

“Sister Wendy’s American Collection” will be aired, two one-hour episodes back to back, tonight, Sept. 12 and 19 at 8 p.m., KCET Channel 28.