A nun's story - TV program 'Sister Wendy'

Sister Wendy on PBS

I have to be honest. I'm a good teacher. No: I'm a really good teacher. But when I started showing my wife the tapes of "Sister Wendy's Story of Painting" - I'd already watched them through once - after about five minutes of the little nun's monologue on Caravaggio, Celeste turned to me, saying, "She's better than you are."

"I know that," I grumbled into my brandy and water. "Just watch the damn show."

Produced by the BBC and WGBH in Boston, "Sister Wendy" ran on Sunday nights, September 7 through October 5, on PBS. But if you missed any of it, relax, this great series should be shown again and again. In fact, it should be owned by anybody who cares about the history of Western art, the craft of teaching, or the possibilities for TV to be something - well - fine.

And it's all pretty simple. Sister Wendy Beckett, about whose interesting self more later, just talks about the course of painting from the cave drawings at Lascaux through Egyptian funeral murals to Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol, usually filmed standing before the original work under discussion. Just talks.

Sounds like the Prozac-friendly course in "art appreciation" a lot of us took in college to jack up the old GPA, nicht wahr? But nein; or, rather, it's that hoary approach raised, by a brilliant and passionate teacher, to the level of high, very high, performance art. Late in the series, Wendy, in an aside, says that she's sadly, not creative like the painters she explicates. And it's the only dumb thing she says in five hours of unremitting talk.

Because her talk, for me at least, is as much a joy as the great works she talks about. I didn't, actually, take that dreaded class in "Art Appreciation," and my visual imagination, and my sense of continuity of Western art, are both just a little stronger than that of, say, Bob Dole. But looking at the paintings, and listening to Wendy talk about them, I got a feeling I hadn't had in thirty years: that of an eager, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed student learning about a world he didn't even know was there.

Now Northrop Frye once said that you can't really "teach" literature - or music, or painting - the way you "teach" physics or chemistry: you can only convey a habit of attention to the work (there is no equation for a great poem). And Kenneth Burke, whom Frye admired, said that all a critic could do was "dance an attitude" before the work - King David before the Ark? And Frye and Burke were both great creative teachers. And by their standards, Sister Wendy is one good dancer.

She approaches a painting, gazes at it, and starts to talk about it, pointing out its details and its hidden story, gazes once more at it and walks on to the next shot. Of course it's a performance: great teaching has to be, at least, that. But there's an enormous difference between performing passion and impersonating it (watch a Michael Jackson video sometime). What's clear from the getgo is that this woman is in love with painting because for her painting is - as she says - one of the things that incarnate our common humanity. Like all mystics, she's possessed. And like the better mystics, she's articulate.

And it doesn't hurt - this is tee-vee - that she's cute as a parcel of buttons. Not Sally (yech!) Field "Flying Nun" cute, though. She's sixty-seven, small and stooped, speaks with a lisp, and owns a face so plain, so unfinished, as to have that metaphysically radiant ugliness that only the British get just right (every time I watch her I think of W.H. Auden's Dickensian phiz). In a word, she's irresistible. But there's a snake in the grass. Her charm masks, and none too well, an intelligence about, and love for, art that are, in their ferocity, scary.

Wendy Beckett was born in South Africa. At age sixteen - her family had returned to Scotland - she entered the Sisters of Notre Dame. The order sent her to Oxford, where she majored in English literature, graduating with highest honors. Thence back to South Africa where she taught - eventually becoming a Reverend Mother - until ill health forced her to retire and return to England in 1970. That year the pope declared her a "consecrated virgin" (thank God for popespeak). She now lives, a daily communicant, in a trailer on the grounds of a Carmelite convent in Norfolk, presumably adding to her already dozen or more books on art. All of which makes her sound so sweet. In fact, she's so funky.

LeRoi Jones once said that art is whatever makes you proud to be a human being. And it makes Wendy proud, obviously, because it also proves that human beings can have a little spark of God about them. Her taste is small-c catholic, and deeply sensuous: painting, more than any of the other arts, is about the glory of color, texture, and above all the endless glory of the human body. One of the multiple gems of the series is her discussion of Manet's scandalous Olympia, a painting of a naked prostitute awaiting her next trick. After Wendy's witty and precise discussion of the sexiness and pathos of the canvas, she pauses, gazes at it again, and, I swear to God, blows a little kiss to it before she walks out of frame. And you know she means it, and that is "dancing an attitude."