A nun's story.

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."

Ditto with her discussion of the funeral painting for the Egyptian magistrate Ramose, the mural The Baker and His Wife from Pompeii, the Mona Lisa (yeah - she even makes that tired icon come alive again), Warhol's Marilyn Monroe silkscreens, und so weiter. My personal favorite moment is her wildly funny examination of Gainsborough's wedding portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, where, just examining the placement of the figures, the landscape, and the vapid faces of the bride and groom, she paints her own verbal portrait of an oaf and a prig whose marriage is bound for the storm clouds looming over the scene. Somewhere, Jane Austen is smiling down on this segment.

Not that her catholicity is of the everything-is-everything-oh-wow-man sort. Never trust a teacher without strong crushes and firm grumps. She loves Caravaggio a little more than she logically should, allows her awe at Velasquez to reduce her to an elegant stammer over Las Meninas, and, most wonderfully, showing a work by one of my favorite painters, whispers, "I am besotted with Klee." And she admits to being unmoved by Renoir's relentlessly prettified universe; frankly states that Picasso's monstrosity as a human being is there in his deliberate uglification of the women he loved and hated; and, again wonderfully, after discussing the significance of Dali's The Persistence of Memory (you know, the melting watches), glances askance at it, mumbles, "Horrible painting!" and strolls coldly on.

But enough. This is a great series, showing a great teacher acting out her holy - a word I don't toss around - passion for a very great subject. "Yet I am the necessary angel of earth," writes Wallace Stevens, "since, in my sight, you see the earth again." That's a pretty good definition of what all art does, showing us the beauty that was there but that we'd missed. It's also, I've always thought, what a good teacher of art - painting, literature, whatever - should try to be. "Look!" you say (it's one of Wendy's most-used words), "it's there! It's bloody beautiful! You can make it yours, all you have to do is love it!" And that's all you can do. And by that token, Sister Wendy Beckett is one of our necessary angels: maybe, even, when she's not on the job.