0:00:11 > 0:00:15This is the most famous statue in the world.
0:00:15 > 0:00:18The Statue Of Liberty
0:00:18 > 0:00:23embodies the old American dream of freedom, free opportunity for all.
0:00:23 > 0:00:25But look beneath the surface
0:00:25 > 0:00:31and she's also a great symbol of modern America's economic and technological power.
0:00:32 > 0:00:35Liberty isn't quite what she seems to be.
0:00:35 > 0:00:39She's an American symbol, but she was in fact, a gift from the French.
0:00:39 > 0:00:44And while she might look like a classical statue, she isn't made of marble,
0:00:44 > 0:00:49she is formed from a copper skin stretched across an intricate network of iron girders,
0:00:49 > 0:00:52the very same cutting-edge technology
0:00:52 > 0:00:57that would soon transform the skylines of America's great modern cities.
0:00:57 > 0:00:59She is, herself, a skyscraper.
0:01:04 > 0:01:07From the moment that she was installed here in 1886,
0:01:07 > 0:01:11the Statue Of Liberty beckoned immigrants to America,
0:01:11 > 0:01:14they came in their millions.
0:01:14 > 0:01:17At the beginning of the 19th century, the population of the United States
0:01:17 > 0:01:19was less than four million.
0:01:19 > 0:01:24By 1920, it was more than 100 million.
0:01:24 > 0:01:27It was a transformation that redefined the American identity
0:01:27 > 0:01:30and which signalled the beginning of the modern age.
0:01:47 > 0:01:49SIRENS WAIL
0:01:53 > 0:01:56To be a new arrival in New York at the beginning of the 20th century
0:01:56 > 0:01:59was a bewildering experience.
0:02:02 > 0:02:07The constant influx of immigrants made for an extraordinary mix of nationalities.
0:02:09 > 0:02:14And simply by their presence, they made this the most dynamic city,
0:02:14 > 0:02:16in the most dynamic nation in the world.
0:02:23 > 0:02:28But it was also a place of slums, gang wars,
0:02:29 > 0:02:32exploitation and disease.
0:02:32 > 0:02:37Yet to a small group of young artists, it was precisely that contrast
0:02:37 > 0:02:40that seemed to encapsulate modern America.
0:02:40 > 0:02:45They abandoned their home city of Philadelphia and came to New York,
0:02:45 > 0:02:49not just to live, but to make the city the subject of their art.
0:02:57 > 0:03:01They wanted to depict the buzz and grit of Manhattan,
0:03:01 > 0:03:06the trashy sprawl of this ever expanding, over populated city
0:03:06 > 0:03:09and they became known as "The Ashcan School".
0:03:24 > 0:03:27The painters of The Ashcan School were fascinated
0:03:27 > 0:03:30by focal points, by meeting places
0:03:30 > 0:03:33and there aren't many of their places left in New York City today,
0:03:33 > 0:03:36but McSorely's Old Ale House is one of those places.
0:03:37 > 0:03:40John Sloan, who was one of the principal painters of the school,
0:03:40 > 0:03:43came here many times.
0:03:43 > 0:03:48I think what he was fascinated by in this place was the way in which ordinary life
0:03:48 > 0:03:52would, so to speak, arrange itself in a succession of different compositions
0:03:52 > 0:03:54before his artist's eye.
0:03:57 > 0:04:02He borrowed the swift, sketchy French Impressionist style of Manet and Degas,
0:04:02 > 0:04:05the pictorial equivalent of snatched glimpses and glances,
0:04:05 > 0:04:10and used it to capture the unique energy of American life.
0:04:13 > 0:04:17For all his passionate engagement with the fabric of the city,
0:04:17 > 0:04:21John Sloan tended towards sentimentality in his slices of life.
0:04:23 > 0:04:25He turned a blind eye to the poverty
0:04:25 > 0:04:30and the ruthlessly competitive ethos of Manhattan.
0:04:32 > 0:04:35He saw the people of New York as a vast extended family.
0:04:37 > 0:04:41And he depicted the city and its multitudes
0:04:41 > 0:04:43as if it was a non-stop street party.
0:04:48 > 0:04:54The art of Sloan's contemporary, George Bellows, however, was savagely critical.
0:04:56 > 0:05:01To him, New York was a city where people had literally to fight to survive.
0:05:02 > 0:05:05He made that his subject in a series of pictures
0:05:05 > 0:05:09that reflect the darker side of life in this new world.
0:05:17 > 0:05:22George Bellows was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed
0:05:22 > 0:05:27by what he saw as the maelstrom of New York city.
0:05:27 > 0:05:32The society where it really was dog eat dog, those who got on, got on,
0:05:32 > 0:05:35and those who didn't quickly fell into the gutter.
0:05:35 > 0:05:41And his great image of the cruelty of New York as a society and as a place
0:05:41 > 0:05:44was the illegal boxing match.
0:05:45 > 0:05:49These fights would take place in gentlemen's clubs,
0:05:49 > 0:05:54hence the grim irony of his title, Both Members Of This Club.
0:05:54 > 0:05:58These are desperate men fighting for the entertainment of others.
0:05:58 > 0:06:02Certainly far too poor to be members of any club but,
0:06:02 > 0:06:08in order to be able to fight, they are briefly made members of the establishment.
0:06:09 > 0:06:14It's a horrible image of human desperation.
0:06:16 > 0:06:21The black man appears not just to be punching his opponent, but kneeing him in the groin
0:06:21 > 0:06:24and he gives out this terrible yell.
0:06:25 > 0:06:28That mouth is like a raw wound.
0:06:30 > 0:06:33There is an extraordinary fleshiness about the way in which
0:06:33 > 0:06:35Bellows has painted the whole picture.
0:06:35 > 0:06:39Look at this sea of faces, this is the audience.
0:06:39 > 0:06:42A Goya-esque audience, but it also seems to look forward to
0:06:42 > 0:06:48Francis Bacon's depiction of man as meat, man as a blur of flesh.
0:06:51 > 0:06:57It's a really brutal image of what Bellows saw as a brutal, brutalised society.
0:07:03 > 0:07:08The contrast between the bruising images of George Bellows
0:07:08 > 0:07:10and the softer visions of John Sloan,
0:07:10 > 0:07:13anticipates the great conflict that American artists
0:07:13 > 0:07:18would find themselves caught up in during the first half of the 20th century.
0:07:22 > 0:07:25How do you respond to a new urban reality?
0:07:25 > 0:07:28The world changing at breathtaking speed?
0:07:30 > 0:07:33Do you idealise it, seek to see the best in it,
0:07:33 > 0:07:35or do you strip it bare?
0:07:42 > 0:07:45Here, Bellows shows the city itself being torn apart
0:07:45 > 0:07:50in the construction of a new railroad terminus for New York.
0:07:53 > 0:07:56These were the places where most people in America would live,
0:07:56 > 0:08:00in the belly of an immense machine, the city.
0:08:01 > 0:08:04That would provide enormous wealth for some, but not for all.
0:08:06 > 0:08:09And this new city machine had an emblem
0:08:09 > 0:08:15that symbolised the social chasm that was coming to America.
0:08:15 > 0:08:17And it first appeared in Chicago.
0:08:30 > 0:08:34A terrible fire in the city in 1871 had cleared the way for architects
0:08:34 > 0:08:39to begin experimenting with a new form of construction,
0:08:39 > 0:08:43that would allow them to make buildings taller than ever before.
0:08:45 > 0:08:51These lofty brownstone buildings are some of the world's first skyscrapers.
0:08:52 > 0:08:56The main conceiver of the skyscraper, architect Louis Sullivan,
0:08:56 > 0:08:58lived and worked in Chicago.
0:09:02 > 0:09:06This is his Auditorium building, completed in 1889.
0:09:08 > 0:09:11Sullivan coined the phrase, "Form follows function",
0:09:11 > 0:09:18meaning that the new social and economic structures of America required a new architecture.
0:09:18 > 0:09:22But his manifesto on the design of tall buildings has endured as a blueprint
0:09:22 > 0:09:26for almost every skyscraper built in the last 120 years.
0:09:29 > 0:09:35"Let us state the conditions", wrote Sullivan, in the plainest manner.
0:09:35 > 0:09:40"First, a storey below ground containing the plant for power, heating, lighting.
0:09:40 > 0:09:45"A ground floor devoted to stores, banks or other establishments.
0:09:46 > 0:09:50"A second storey, readily accessible by stairways.
0:09:50 > 0:09:56"Above this, an indefinite number of storeys of offices, piled tier upon tier.
0:09:57 > 0:10:01"Last, at the top of this pile, is placed a storey that is
0:10:01 > 0:10:04"purely physiological in its nature. Namely, the attic".
0:10:07 > 0:10:11Sullivan described the skyscraper as the perfect emblem
0:10:11 > 0:10:16of the proud, upwardly aspiring spirit of American man.
0:10:17 > 0:10:21He might, more accurately, have said businessman.
0:10:22 > 0:10:27By 1920 there were over 300,000 corporations in the United States
0:10:27 > 0:10:34serving 100 million consumers in a vast, interconnected single market.
0:10:34 > 0:10:37The mightiest economy the world had ever seen.
0:10:39 > 0:10:43This is what the land of opportunity looks like.
0:10:43 > 0:10:47The opportunity to make a fortune in a free market.
0:10:57 > 0:11:03Skyscrapers stood, above all, for American corporate success.
0:11:03 > 0:11:07They transformed the appearance of American cities,
0:11:07 > 0:11:10cities the like of which had never been seen before.
0:11:12 > 0:11:16Skylines became like graphs, the tallest buildings representing
0:11:16 > 0:11:20the greatest concentration of commercial wealth and power.
0:11:40 > 0:11:44Travel away from the gleaming,
0:11:44 > 0:11:48bright, beautiful, skyscraping downtown
0:11:48 > 0:11:53of a city like Chicago in the early 20th century
0:11:53 > 0:11:57and you would encounter another city, a completely different place.
0:12:02 > 0:12:06Far more horizontal, lower in look, lower in spirit.
0:12:10 > 0:12:18The experience was described in a vivid, bleak, depressing passage in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel,
0:12:18 > 0:12:25The Jungle, where he talks of journeying south out of Chicago
0:12:25 > 0:12:32and travelling for 34 miles along the same one road and seeing nothing but ugliness.
0:12:41 > 0:12:47The reason the sprawl of the slums could continue for mile after mile after mile
0:12:47 > 0:12:52in a place like Chicago was simply because the American landscape is so enormous.
0:12:52 > 0:12:56It could just eat it up.
0:12:56 > 0:13:00Although the scenery's changed, I think Sinclair was being depressingly prescient.
0:13:00 > 0:13:04What he was describing was the formation of the modern American cityscape.
0:13:04 > 0:13:07While the details have changed, the contrast between rich and poor,
0:13:07 > 0:13:13between beauty and ugliness, are still exactly the same.
0:13:20 > 0:13:23Chicago epitomised a new reality.
0:13:23 > 0:13:28The task ahead for American artists, as it had been for The Ashcan School,
0:13:28 > 0:13:31was how to respond to this world of extremes.
0:13:50 > 0:13:56By 1913, as American artists began to face up to that challenge,
0:13:56 > 0:14:00a headline event in New York offered them one possible solution.
0:14:10 > 0:14:14I'm on Lexington Avenue, between 25th and 26th Street.
0:14:14 > 0:14:18What's really a landmark in the development of modern American culture
0:14:18 > 0:14:20because it was here in 1913
0:14:20 > 0:14:25that they staged the first international exhibition of modern art.
0:14:25 > 0:14:30A show that included some 1,250 paintings and sculptures
0:14:30 > 0:14:34by around 300 American and European artists.
0:14:34 > 0:14:39Above all, this was the American public's first opportunity
0:14:39 > 0:14:44to experience the incendiary series of revolutions that had swept through European art,
0:14:44 > 0:14:49from Fauvism to the work of Picasso and the Cubists.
0:14:49 > 0:14:53And it was staged here at the appropriately incendiary venue
0:14:53 > 0:14:58of the Armory of the 69th Regiment of the US Army.
0:14:58 > 0:15:00The show certainly had an explosive impact,
0:15:00 > 0:15:04but not in the way its organisers had hoped for.
0:15:11 > 0:15:16The show got plenty of press coverage and thousands of visitors
0:15:16 > 0:15:20but, by and large, people came not to look and be enlightened,
0:15:20 > 0:15:23they came to gawp and to mock.
0:15:23 > 0:15:30A painting like Nude In Motion by the founder of The Ashcan School, Robert Henri,
0:15:30 > 0:15:33might have been deemed acceptable.
0:15:33 > 0:15:37But Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase,
0:15:37 > 0:15:43actually painted a year earlier, was incomprehensible to most Americans.
0:15:43 > 0:15:49Other modern European artists, such as Matisse and Picasso, were also pilloried.
0:15:49 > 0:15:54But Duchamp's painting drew the most criticism and became the butt of most of the jokes.
0:15:57 > 0:16:03In all, around 300,000 people saw the Armory show in 1913
0:16:03 > 0:16:06but, as an exercise in introducing the American public
0:16:06 > 0:16:10to European contemporary art, it was a disaster.
0:16:14 > 0:16:18So why did the Armory show meet with such an overwhelmingly hostile response?
0:16:18 > 0:16:23Well, I think part of the answer lies purely in all-American patriotism,
0:16:23 > 0:16:27large swathes of the press and the public deeply resented the idea
0:16:27 > 0:16:31that these newfangled Europeans with their newfangled ideas represented
0:16:31 > 0:16:35some kind of cutting edge with which they were not familiar.
0:16:35 > 0:16:39But it's also important to remember that a lot of American artists
0:16:39 > 0:16:43and their students had problems with the work in the Armory show.
0:16:43 > 0:16:49The truth is that even the most forward looking American artists of the early 20th century
0:16:49 > 0:16:55still remained essentially wedded to representational languages of painting.
0:17:07 > 0:17:12Even those who were drawn to the experimental and the avant-garde
0:17:12 > 0:17:16ultimately embraced a form of realism.
0:17:16 > 0:17:19This is Voice Of The City Of New York Interpreted
0:17:19 > 0:17:23painted by Joseph Stella in the early 1920s.
0:17:23 > 0:17:27Stella was an Italian immigrant who was passionately excited
0:17:27 > 0:17:31by the forms and shapes of the teeming American metropolis.
0:17:31 > 0:17:37In places, this picture must've seen bewilderingly modern to the American audience.
0:17:37 > 0:17:43Especially in the almost abstract passages meant to conjure up the lights of Broadway.
0:17:43 > 0:17:51Overall, he's framed his hectic celebration of the city in a sharp-lined, figurative style.
0:17:51 > 0:17:54Even the overall form of his work is traditional.
0:17:54 > 0:18:00It's a five panelled altarpiece, erected to the steel and glass gods of the city.
0:18:09 > 0:18:13The painter and photographer Charles Sheeler saw the same subject matter
0:18:13 > 0:18:16and conveyed the same excitement
0:18:16 > 0:18:20in the literal and representational language of moving pictures,
0:18:20 > 0:18:23themselves generated by a machine.
0:18:23 > 0:18:28Sheeler made Manhatta in 1921 with filmmaker Paul Strand.
0:18:30 > 0:18:37It's a powerful evocation of the drama and intensity of America's most dynamic city.
0:18:37 > 0:18:40Sheeler was struck by the idea that the new buildings and machines
0:18:40 > 0:18:43formed by big business and heavy industry
0:18:43 > 0:18:47were the most distinctive feature of American life.
0:18:47 > 0:18:54And in his work as a painter he chose an hauntingly cold, clinical, figurative style.
0:19:05 > 0:19:13In American Landscape, from 1930, a huge factory dominates the scene.
0:19:13 > 0:19:17There's an impersonal geometry,
0:19:17 > 0:19:20an unreal, unsullied look to everything.
0:19:21 > 0:19:26Especially the factory chimney and the wharfside train.
0:19:26 > 0:19:33Sheeler's painting was inspired by an earlier trip he'd made to Detroit
0:19:33 > 0:19:37which proved to be a turning point in his career.
0:19:45 > 0:19:50This steelworks was once part of the Ford River Rouge plant.
0:19:50 > 0:19:54Charles Sheeler arrived here in 1927 with a commission from Ford
0:19:54 > 0:19:56to produce a series of photographs
0:19:56 > 0:19:59and he was suitably impressed by what he saw.
0:20:01 > 0:20:03The subject matter, he said,
0:20:03 > 0:20:08"Is incomparably the most thrilling I have had to work with."
0:20:09 > 0:20:12And these are his photographs.
0:20:12 > 0:20:15At the time the River Rouge plant
0:20:15 > 0:20:20was the largest most technologically advanced industrial complex in the world.
0:20:20 > 0:20:25Raw materials like iron ore were processed and assembled in a continuous workflow
0:20:25 > 0:20:29on one enormous site to produce finished automobiles.
0:20:31 > 0:20:34It was called vertical integration.
0:20:34 > 0:20:39Sheeler photographed it all as if it were the modern equivalent of a Gothic cathedral.
0:20:39 > 0:20:43Towering structures reaching to the heavens.
0:20:43 > 0:20:47But he also saw it as a distinctly unwelcoming cathedral,
0:20:47 > 0:20:49hard, unyielding.
0:20:49 > 0:20:55That's why there is such an unsettling quality to so much of Sheeler's work.
0:20:55 > 0:20:58I think it's very telling that the one thing you almost never find
0:20:58 > 0:21:05in Charles Sheeler's images of the Ford River Rouge plant is any trace of human presence.
0:21:05 > 0:21:10It's as if he recognised that the vast edifice of big business in America,
0:21:10 > 0:21:14despite its cathedral-like magnificence,
0:21:14 > 0:21:20rested on an essentially cold and calculatedly impersonal view
0:21:20 > 0:21:23of the individual human worker.
0:21:28 > 0:21:34In America in the early 20th century people were chasing money as never before,
0:21:34 > 0:21:38streamlining production to maximise profits,
0:21:38 > 0:21:42and Detroit was one of the capital cities of this capitalist creed.
0:21:44 > 0:21:50The factory production line was a process that Henry Ford had personally pioneered.
0:21:52 > 0:21:55Human beings became biological machines,
0:21:55 > 0:21:58endlessly repeating the same mechanical actions.
0:21:58 > 0:22:03This endless vista of human labour underpinned the soaring structures of the factory,
0:22:03 > 0:22:06its chimneys and its plant.
0:22:06 > 0:22:09It's like the contrast between skyscraper
0:22:09 > 0:22:14and urban sprawl laid out at the level of industry and labour relations.
0:22:15 > 0:22:19Today, workers are assisted by computer-controlled machines.
0:22:22 > 0:22:25The business philosophy remains the same.
0:22:28 > 0:22:33Henry Ford's perfection of the production line process marks
0:22:33 > 0:22:38the apotheosis of America's old puritan work ethic.
0:22:38 > 0:22:43This is work purged of every last ounce of inefficiency,
0:22:43 > 0:22:47work rendered totally, purely,
0:22:47 > 0:22:51transparently, utterly productive.
0:22:51 > 0:22:56I think it's also the triumph of a certain type of utilitarian American attitude
0:22:56 > 0:23:00that's so profoundly embedded.
0:23:00 > 0:23:02You find it in the language,
0:23:02 > 0:23:05you find it in all kinds of unexpected places in modern America.
0:23:05 > 0:23:08You can go into a restaurant and, if haven't finished your meal,
0:23:08 > 0:23:11the waitress will say to you, "Hey, are you still working on that?"
0:23:11 > 0:23:16Everything in America, at a certain level, is work.
0:23:21 > 0:23:25But what happens when there is no work to be done?
0:23:25 > 0:23:31What happens when the apparently virtuous circle of mass production and mass consumption,
0:23:31 > 0:23:35the engine of American progress, is suddenly broken?
0:23:37 > 0:23:42The stock market crash of 1929 set the world economy on a downward spiral.
0:23:42 > 0:23:47Factories began to close and unemployment soared.
0:23:56 > 0:24:00Against the backdrop of what became the Great Depression,
0:24:00 > 0:24:03Americans began to look back to the values
0:24:03 > 0:24:05and familiar certainties of earlier times.
0:24:07 > 0:24:14And that's what you see in this celebrated painting by Grant Wood, American Gothic.
0:24:18 > 0:24:22Grant Wood submitted American Gothic to the juried annual
0:24:22 > 0:24:26Open Art Exhibition Of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1930
0:24:26 > 0:24:32and he won the Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal and 300 for it.
0:24:32 > 0:24:34Yet the picture has become, since that time,
0:24:34 > 0:24:40one of the most famous images in all of American art history.
0:24:40 > 0:24:43Wood painted it, I think, out of a deep sense of nostalgia.
0:24:43 > 0:24:46He was harking back to his own childhood in Iowa
0:24:46 > 0:24:51where he grew up among frontiersmen and women just like this.
0:24:53 > 0:24:57When the picture was reproduced in a local newspaper
0:24:57 > 0:25:01back in 1930, with the caption Iowa Farmer And His Wife,
0:25:01 > 0:25:07a real Iowa farmer's wife wrote in to the newspaper and said,
0:25:07 > 0:25:10"That's disgraceful, you're going to give people like us a bad name.
0:25:10 > 0:25:15"The picture should be hung in a cheese factory, that woman's face would positively sour milk."
0:25:15 > 0:25:17But I think the essence of it, for me,
0:25:20 > 0:25:23is it's got a kind of specimen-like quality to it.
0:25:23 > 0:25:30It's as if these are, if you like, the last representatives of old Victorian values in America
0:25:30 > 0:25:35and they represent, in a sense they are the homesteader equivalent of the last of the Mohicans.
0:25:35 > 0:25:37One feels that these people are on the way out,
0:25:37 > 0:25:41they are being squeezed out by the new urbanisation of America
0:25:41 > 0:25:43that is gradually depopulating the countryside
0:25:43 > 0:25:49and they are also being squeezed by the economic conditions of the Great Depression,
0:25:49 > 0:25:52which they can't control in anyway.
0:25:58 > 0:26:04Grant Wood's painting is a lament for the passing of a 19th-century ideal,
0:26:05 > 0:26:09decent people, living in small communities.
0:26:10 > 0:26:17But the dream of such a life continued to exert a powerful hold on the American imagination,
0:26:19 > 0:26:24and especially so in the darkest days of the depression
0:26:24 > 0:26:27when many Americans clung on to it, like a fantasy of escape from hardship.
0:26:31 > 0:26:36It's the dream of a wonderful life in a perfect world,
0:26:36 > 0:26:40a world not unlike this one, a small town somewhere in America.
0:26:42 > 0:26:45This is Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
0:26:45 > 0:26:47It might seem almost too perfect
0:26:47 > 0:26:53but it represents an idealised America, based not on chasing the dollar
0:26:53 > 0:27:00but on goodness, decency, shared troubles and human dignity.
0:27:00 > 0:27:03And, it had its own painter, a man called Norman Rockwell.
0:27:11 > 0:27:14For more than 40 years, Rockwell's pictures were almost a weekly feature
0:27:14 > 0:27:17of life in the United States.
0:27:17 > 0:27:20Delivered to the doorsteps of the millions of families
0:27:20 > 0:27:24who read magazines like the Saturday Evening Post.
0:27:24 > 0:27:28It's a benevolent, comforting myth of America as a place where people always help each other,
0:27:28 > 0:27:35where the sick are cared for and there's always someone looking out for you.
0:27:35 > 0:27:38It's a tonic for the white middle-class,
0:27:38 > 0:27:42the vision of a world where family always gets together at Thanksgiving
0:27:42 > 0:27:45and there's always a 20 lb turkey on the table.
0:27:47 > 0:27:53The Rockwell Museum draws huge numbers of patriotic American visitors.
0:27:53 > 0:27:57People who are nostalgic for that old dream of their nation
0:27:57 > 0:28:03and find it reflected back at them in these meticulously painted single frame stories.
0:28:03 > 0:28:07Stephanie Plunkett is the museum's curator.
0:28:07 > 0:28:10Stockbridge doesn't seem to have changed a great deal.
0:28:10 > 0:28:14Stockbridge is very much the same, that's really part of its charm.
0:28:14 > 0:28:20I think of Rockwell, in a sense, as an artist who paints a kind of ideal America.
0:28:20 > 0:28:21I think he once said,
0:28:21 > 0:28:26"My subject is America as I would like it to be rather than as it is."
0:28:26 > 0:28:29What do you think the values that he tried to capture,
0:28:29 > 0:28:31what are those values?
0:28:31 > 0:28:33I think Rockwell saw the best in us.
0:28:33 > 0:28:37His art is absolutely aspirational and he was really showing an America
0:28:37 > 0:28:42that I think represented the best possible human qualities.
0:28:43 > 0:28:48Ideas about kindness and care and community.
0:28:48 > 0:28:51It didn't have to be a big event to be important, it could be a small moment in life
0:28:51 > 0:28:54and in fact he said, "I was painting the America I knew and observed
0:28:54 > 0:28:57"for others who might not have noticed."
0:28:59 > 0:29:03I have the sense that there are certain groups
0:29:03 > 0:29:06that are not included in the Rockwell idyll.
0:29:06 > 0:29:08They simply don't figure.
0:29:08 > 0:29:12I imagine that Thanksgiving dinner, that table could go on forever this way.
0:29:12 > 0:29:17- Yes.- But would a black face ever appear at that table?
0:29:17 > 0:29:19Isn't that something slightly troubling
0:29:19 > 0:29:24about the exclusiveness of Rockwell's small town paradise?
0:29:24 > 0:29:29Rockwell felt very strongly about human rights,
0:29:29 > 0:29:31human dignity for all and equality.
0:29:31 > 0:29:34He would've loved to introduce those figures
0:29:34 > 0:29:39and, in fact, the publications of the era really did not allow that.
0:29:39 > 0:29:44The Post generally had an unwritten rule that said that if people of colour were portrayed
0:29:44 > 0:29:46they would be portrayed in service positions.
0:29:46 > 0:29:48So this is really, in a sense,
0:29:48 > 0:29:53his own sensibilities slightly being forced into that box?
0:29:53 > 0:29:57Yes, as beautiful as his paintings are, they were created for mass publication
0:29:57 > 0:30:01and the publications each had their own structures
0:30:01 > 0:30:04that guided what they would show.
0:30:09 > 0:30:15So there's more going on under the surface of these images than you might at first imagined.
0:30:17 > 0:30:20Look closely and you really can glimpse
0:30:20 > 0:30:22some of the cracks in the American dream.
0:30:25 > 0:30:28Even though Rockwell does his best to conceal them.
0:30:36 > 0:30:41But in the paintings of Rockwell's contemporary, Edward Hopper,
0:30:41 > 0:30:45those unsettling undercurrents are brought to the surface.
0:30:45 > 0:30:50What's wrong with America, was what his art was all about.
0:30:50 > 0:30:53Hopper's scenes are like glimpses, almost voyeuristic moments,
0:30:53 > 0:30:57that seem to capture the inner turmoil of lonely individuals.
0:30:59 > 0:31:02The angst in the soul of modern America.
0:31:06 > 0:31:09Hopper's world is not dynamic or dangerous.
0:31:09 > 0:31:13In its way it's as soulless as a Sheeler factory.
0:31:13 > 0:31:19Only this time we really can see the people and share their feelings,
0:31:19 > 0:31:21or at least think we do.
0:31:30 > 0:31:33If there's a contemporary equivalent to the art of Hopper,
0:31:33 > 0:31:38it must be the work of another New York artist, Philip-Lorca Dicorcia,
0:31:38 > 0:31:41whose photographs are shot through
0:31:41 > 0:31:45with that same sense of ambiguity and introspection.
0:31:47 > 0:31:51So, Philip-Lorca, what is it that draws your eye to Hopper,
0:31:51 > 0:31:53what do you value in his work?
0:31:57 > 0:32:00I value the contradictions, really.
0:32:00 > 0:32:05I think complexity often results from contradiction and
0:32:05 > 0:32:10he does create a lot of tension between what is there and what is not there.
0:32:12 > 0:32:15I find the images that I like the most
0:32:15 > 0:32:19do kind of have a narrative to them,
0:32:19 > 0:32:23a tension between reality and fiction.
0:32:23 > 0:32:26Can you give me an example of that?
0:32:26 > 0:32:29Well, I think the one that's strangely the most casual,
0:32:29 > 0:32:35though it's the most elaborate, is the movie theatre, The Usherette.
0:32:37 > 0:32:42You're looking at a movie, an audience watching the movie
0:32:42 > 0:32:47and then, in a place in the image where the usherette cannot see the audience
0:32:47 > 0:32:53and the audience cannot see her, she's in her own bubble.
0:32:56 > 0:33:01I think that's a very complicated picture, in terms of its psychology,
0:33:01 > 0:33:09because you can kind of empathise with her on a level that is very difficult to do, I think,
0:33:09 > 0:33:12because with narrative pictures
0:33:12 > 0:33:16you see the conclusion, always, to things
0:33:16 > 0:33:19and he never concludes anything.
0:33:19 > 0:33:24He is a master of what I call the elliptical narrative.
0:33:24 > 0:33:26There's an element always missing.
0:33:26 > 0:33:28When I think about your own work in relation to Hopper,
0:33:28 > 0:33:31I always think of that wonderful series you did called Heads
0:33:31 > 0:33:35which seems to me in there sort of catching of people
0:33:35 > 0:33:37in their own lonely bubble in the city.
0:33:39 > 0:33:44Almost like a photographic re-enactment of a kind of Hopper voyeurism.
0:33:44 > 0:33:51Well, I think that people in groups can be seemingly isolated.
0:33:51 > 0:33:54It really remains a mystery what they're thinking about.
0:33:54 > 0:34:00When people don't look directly at the camera,
0:34:00 > 0:34:04or at the nominal viewer in a painting, it's always seen as inward.
0:34:04 > 0:34:07It is a bit of a cliche, I guess,
0:34:07 > 0:34:10but it's also one of the reasons why his work
0:34:10 > 0:34:13and my work is described as cinematic at times.
0:34:24 > 0:34:27Hopper's most cinematic painting, and his most famous,
0:34:27 > 0:34:31is Nighthawks painted in 1942.
0:34:33 > 0:34:35It's an apparently simple scene,
0:34:35 > 0:34:39four figures in a New York diner at night.
0:34:39 > 0:34:45But, as a viewer, you are instantly gripped by the possibilities of what might be going on here
0:34:45 > 0:34:49and that, as always with Hopper, is far from straightforward.
0:34:52 > 0:34:57Hopper's pictures evoke aftermaths or preludes,
0:34:57 > 0:35:01moments when things have just happened or are just about to happen
0:35:01 > 0:35:05in lives that he deliberately leaves inscrutable.
0:35:05 > 0:35:11What I think is most distinctive about his vision of America
0:35:11 > 0:35:18is this pervasive feeling of emptiness, of transitoriness of rootlessness.
0:35:19 > 0:35:23I think what Hopper absolutely nails about a certain aspect
0:35:23 > 0:35:28of the modern American experience is
0:35:28 > 0:35:32that sense of a place where people
0:35:32 > 0:35:36who are perhaps travelling from different places in this vast continent,
0:35:36 > 0:35:39perhaps travelling salesman, hookers,
0:35:39 > 0:35:46someone from out of town, they suddenly come together in a diner.
0:35:46 > 0:35:50I love the way that Hopper's painted this diner almost as if it were an aquarium.
0:35:50 > 0:35:53I think that's exactly what he captures,
0:35:53 > 0:35:59he captures this oceanic emptiness of modern American existence.
0:36:00 > 0:36:03And Hopper said that he was the great figurative artist holding abstraction,
0:36:03 > 0:36:07holding modernism in all its forms at bay.
0:36:07 > 0:36:11I actually think his own language of expressing modern alienation,
0:36:11 > 0:36:15if you like, is full of touches of abstraction and modernism.
0:36:15 > 0:36:19Look at the way in which he's melted the walls
0:36:19 > 0:36:25behind the seated figures into this bruised, blue, empty void.
0:36:25 > 0:36:30Look at the way he's painted that stripe of a window frame
0:36:30 > 0:36:34and isolated it against that yellow expanse.
0:36:37 > 0:36:42The picture is full of little touches of abstraction.
0:36:42 > 0:36:45Little plays of light and shade that, to me, suggest
0:36:45 > 0:36:49that Hopper isn't nearly as far away
0:36:49 > 0:36:54from the first great generation of American abstract painters as he claimed to be.
0:36:58 > 0:37:05So who would at last defy the deep-seated American preference for realism and representation in art?
0:37:06 > 0:37:10Who would tease abstraction out of the back ground of American painting
0:37:10 > 0:37:12and put it centre stage?
0:37:12 > 0:37:16The answer is a man called Arshile Gorky.
0:37:16 > 0:37:19Two of his most influential paintings hang here
0:37:19 > 0:37:26in the slightly unlikely milieu of the Newark Museum's cafe and restaurant.
0:37:26 > 0:37:29The paintings were only rediscovered in the 1970s
0:37:29 > 0:37:32after spending more than 30 years under layers of whitewash.
0:37:38 > 0:37:42Arshile Gorky was an Armenian immigrant
0:37:42 > 0:37:46with a passion for modern European art
0:37:46 > 0:37:52and he just couldn't understand why America, this exciting, new, modern country,
0:37:52 > 0:37:56had failed to embrace the true language, as he saw it, of modern art.
0:37:56 > 0:38:00So he, in this picture, one of the two long forgotten
0:38:00 > 0:38:03murals that he painted for the Newark Airport Authorities,
0:38:03 > 0:38:07he is almost singlehandedly trying to introduce Americans,
0:38:07 > 0:38:14everyday Americans, to the exciting language of European avant-garde art.
0:38:14 > 0:38:20The picture's like a kaleidoscope in which Gorky has whirled round
0:38:20 > 0:38:23the different aspects of avant-garde European style.
0:38:23 > 0:38:27There are traces of surrealism, of Cubism's flattened space,
0:38:27 > 0:38:30of Fernand Leger's machine age aesthetic.
0:38:30 > 0:38:35This is a painting in one sense that takes you inside the cockpit of the American aeroplane.
0:38:36 > 0:38:41So, he's given us the deceptive forms of aeronautical instruments.
0:38:43 > 0:38:46On the other hand, if you look at those instruments, they also actually form
0:38:46 > 0:38:51the upside down body of a female traveller by plane.
0:38:51 > 0:38:54There she is, there's her head, with a rather fashionable boater hat on,
0:38:54 > 0:38:57and there's her high heeled shoe.
0:39:00 > 0:39:04There were originally ten of these grand murals painted for Newark airport
0:39:04 > 0:39:06but only two have survived.
0:39:06 > 0:39:11The other one's just over there and it shows a kind of diagrammatic map of America
0:39:11 > 0:39:13as a continent crisscrossed with flight paths.
0:39:13 > 0:39:18I think a kind of emblem of Gorky's sense of America as an exciting place,
0:39:18 > 0:39:22or a place where you could literally take wing.
0:39:23 > 0:39:26What Gorky was saying to Americans with these pictures,
0:39:26 > 0:39:28he was asking them a piercing question, he was saying,
0:39:28 > 0:39:32well, you live in this land of opportunity, this land of excitement,
0:39:32 > 0:39:33this land of technology,
0:39:33 > 0:39:36this land where so much seems to be flying off into the future,
0:39:36 > 0:39:38how come your art, up until now,
0:39:38 > 0:39:41has remained so mired in the past?
0:39:41 > 0:39:45Tied to the old languages of representational, figurative art.
0:39:45 > 0:39:49Why are all your artists, people like Hopper or Rockwell,
0:39:49 > 0:39:54why not explore the languages of the avant-garde, of Picasso, of the modern?
0:39:55 > 0:39:58Why not take that language and make it your own?
0:39:58 > 0:40:02In fact, Gorky would spend the rest of his career saying that message to Americans,
0:40:02 > 0:40:07to American artists, saying it again and again and again
0:40:07 > 0:40:09until it got through.
0:40:13 > 0:40:16Gorky was a considerable artist in his own right,
0:40:16 > 0:40:22though perhaps not a genius, but he was the catalyst for a seismic shift in American art
0:40:22 > 0:40:28and his followers would create one of the most exciting movements in all of 20th-century painting.
0:40:33 > 0:40:35Now meet the Abstract Expressionists.
0:40:35 > 0:40:39These were the people who responded to Gorky's challenge
0:40:39 > 0:40:44and set out to create a genuinely new and modern art for a new modern society.
0:40:49 > 0:40:53The one point of difference between them and Gorky,
0:40:53 > 0:40:57who loved modern America, was that they hated it.
0:40:57 > 0:41:01Barnett Newman was one of the high priests of the movement.
0:41:01 > 0:41:06His signature the flickering zip of paint, penetrating a void
0:41:06 > 0:41:12which he saw as a vibrant assertion of human free will against the dead machine.
0:41:12 > 0:41:14"If my work were properly understood,"
0:41:14 > 0:41:19he proclaimed, "it would mean the end of state capitalism."
0:41:20 > 0:41:22Franz Kline said,
0:41:22 > 0:41:27"I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me."
0:41:27 > 0:41:31And Clyfford Still said that, "A limited mass of paint on a canvas
0:41:31 > 0:41:36"is nobler than an acre of decorations in a rich man's mansion."
0:41:36 > 0:41:41Their art was, in effect, a resounding no to America's materialism,
0:41:41 > 0:41:45consumerism, obsession with money and things.
0:41:45 > 0:41:48That's why they turned away from things altogether,
0:41:48 > 0:41:51from the figurative to the abstract.
0:41:54 > 0:41:57And no-one pulverised the world of physical appearances
0:41:57 > 0:42:00more thoroughly than Jackson Pollock,
0:42:00 > 0:42:06the first American abstract painter to achieve international fame.
0:42:13 > 0:42:19This unique footage of Jackson Pollock making one of his drip paintings
0:42:19 > 0:42:21was shot by Hans Namuth in 1951
0:42:21 > 0:42:25when Pollock was at the peak of his success.
0:42:25 > 0:42:27The technique which Pollock made his own
0:42:27 > 0:42:30was an attempt to express the true nature of existence
0:42:30 > 0:42:35by turning art into a record of the artist's gestures.
0:42:37 > 0:42:42It also fixed Pollock in the public imagination as Jack The Dripper.
0:42:43 > 0:42:48'When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about.
0:42:50 > 0:42:53'I can control the flow of the paint,
0:42:53 > 0:42:58'there is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.
0:43:00 > 0:43:03'Sometimes I lose the painting
0:43:03 > 0:43:07'but I have no fear of changes,
0:43:07 > 0:43:09'of destroying the image because a painting has a life of its own
0:43:09 > 0:43:12'I try to let it live.'
0:43:17 > 0:43:22Remarkably enough, you can still visit the studio where Pollock
0:43:22 > 0:43:26broke through to his signature style of hectic drips, splashes and spatter.
0:43:37 > 0:43:39It is kind of extraordinary.
0:43:39 > 0:43:43I was half joking about this being a shrine to St Jackson Pollock
0:43:43 > 0:43:49but it really is and it's even got, it's even got a reliquary case on the end.
0:43:50 > 0:43:53These are the sacred pots of paint
0:43:53 > 0:43:58and the sacred brushes once wielded by Jackson Pollock.
0:43:58 > 0:44:02I think what's immediately most striking,
0:44:02 > 0:44:06I don't think I've ever quite seen a studio that is as revealing
0:44:06 > 0:44:12of an artist's unique idiosyncratic practices as this one
0:44:12 > 0:44:17because Pollock's great invention, or his great thing, was to paint on the floor.
0:44:17 > 0:44:22Other artists had done it but not quite with the abandon that he did it.
0:44:22 > 0:44:25He could work here on a scale like he could never work before.
0:44:25 > 0:44:27This is where he painted his greatest pictures,
0:44:27 > 0:44:30this is where he made his breakthrough to his monumental canvases
0:44:30 > 0:44:37and what we see here are the aftermaths of his creation,
0:44:37 > 0:44:43these are the spatters of paint that missed the canvas and ended up on the floor.
0:44:44 > 0:44:48Harold Rosenberg, the critic, wrote that the action painter,
0:44:48 > 0:44:54and he had Pollock in mind, is like a gladiator entering the arena of his studio
0:44:54 > 0:44:58and if ever a studio felt like an arena, this is it.
0:45:06 > 0:45:11What came out of these battles were enormous, imposing canvases
0:45:11 > 0:45:16like this one, Autumn Rhythm, painted in 1950.
0:45:18 > 0:45:23I think what this picture represents is an extraordinary X marks the spot moment.
0:45:23 > 0:45:29This is the moment of America's appropriation of the modern language of art.
0:45:29 > 0:45:33Pollock, in one fell swoop, has taken this whole revolution
0:45:33 > 0:45:38that begins with Cezanne and Cubism and pushes on through to surrealism
0:45:38 > 0:45:41and he's taken, he's taken the language of modernism,
0:45:41 > 0:45:45he's taken that language and breaking with conventional representation.
0:45:45 > 0:45:50He's brought it into a whole new field of calculated incoherence.
0:45:50 > 0:45:53Somebody asked Pollock, "Why don't you paint appearances,
0:45:53 > 0:45:55"why don't you paint objects?"
0:45:55 > 0:45:59He said, "Well, we've got machines to represent objects.
0:45:59 > 0:46:04"I want to get at a more modern essence of the nature of experience, the nature of reality.
0:46:04 > 0:46:08"I want to depict what's inside a person."
0:46:08 > 0:46:12So, when you look at this picture I suppose, in a sense,
0:46:12 > 0:46:16Pollock wants you to think of the picture as the experience
0:46:16 > 0:46:19of almost watching him pour himself out onto the canvas.
0:46:19 > 0:46:23What he's trying to do throughout is actually eliminate
0:46:23 > 0:46:27any suggestion of representational form.
0:46:27 > 0:46:32So whenever his hand accidentally might almost make something that would look like a face,
0:46:32 > 0:46:36or a hill, or a river, he would sabotage that
0:46:36 > 0:46:40and make sure that nothing in the image looks like an image.
0:46:43 > 0:46:48The question you have ask yourself is, what does it say, what does it mean?
0:46:48 > 0:46:51After all it's painted on the scale of an altarpiece.
0:46:51 > 0:46:54The scale of the picture suggests that you're going to be told something
0:46:54 > 0:46:59very important, very powerful, very meaningful.
0:46:59 > 0:47:04Yet when I look at it, when I try to distil it down to what it actually says about life,
0:47:04 > 0:47:07it presents an image of man,
0:47:07 > 0:47:15Pollock himself, as this inchoate, incoherent assembly of impulses
0:47:15 > 0:47:19and energies and it depicts the universe in the same sense.
0:47:19 > 0:47:22This is very much the universe as the blind watchmaker,
0:47:22 > 0:47:28with no logic, no purpose, just sheer being, sheer existence
0:47:28 > 0:47:31but without any logic to it, without any meaning to it.
0:47:31 > 0:47:35It seems to me it's a pretty dark statement, it's a pretty nihilistic statement.
0:47:35 > 0:47:40I don't really see where Pollock could have taken this.
0:47:42 > 0:47:44Pollock himself had his doubts.
0:47:44 > 0:47:49In fact he'd only paint in his most extreme drip style for a few short years
0:47:49 > 0:47:53and those doubts were only enhanced by his growing fame.
0:47:56 > 0:47:59When Life magazine showcased him and his work,
0:47:59 > 0:48:04the experience of seeing his pictures reproduced in the glossiest shop window
0:48:04 > 0:48:11for America's new consumer culture, alongside adverts for instant frozen dinners
0:48:11 > 0:48:16and Ford's latest motor cars, made Pollock feel profoundly uneasy.
0:48:18 > 0:48:21He'd sought to stand against the new market-driven world
0:48:21 > 0:48:23but feared he was a sell-out.
0:48:26 > 0:48:32The fear of selling out also played on the mind of Pollock's friend and contemporary Mark Rothko.
0:48:35 > 0:48:40In 1958 he was offered a lucrative commission in Manhattan's most talked about new skyscraper,
0:48:40 > 0:48:44Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building.
0:48:44 > 0:48:47Specifically, The Four Seasons restaurant.
0:48:49 > 0:48:54Over the course of a year, Rothko's initial excitement for the project
0:48:54 > 0:48:58gradually gave way to growing scepticism.
0:48:58 > 0:49:03The turning point is said to have come when he actually turned up here to eat a meal,
0:49:03 > 0:49:06he came for lunch. And he looked around at his fellow diners
0:49:06 > 0:49:10and saw that everyone in here was a banker, a businessman,
0:49:10 > 0:49:15everyone in here represented lots and lots and lots of money.
0:49:15 > 0:49:19And he's said to have remarked, "Do I really want my work to be
0:49:19 > 0:49:23"the amusement of people who pay 50 a plate?"
0:49:24 > 0:49:29That wasn't, in the end, what Rothko decided his work was all about.
0:49:31 > 0:49:34He was determined to keep his art pure.
0:49:36 > 0:49:42These are some of his pictures and pure seems the right word for them.
0:49:42 > 0:49:47They are made of pure colour, laid in translucent layers and fields.
0:49:47 > 0:49:51Oil paint with the shimmering fugitive qualities of watercolour.
0:49:51 > 0:49:56But I think they are also full of that old American love
0:49:56 > 0:49:59for the continent's vast sublime nature.
0:49:59 > 0:50:02When I look at these paintings I see sunsets over a dark horizon,
0:50:02 > 0:50:06I see seas and sky.
0:50:14 > 0:50:19Once you've got Rothko on your mind you can find his spirit, or at
0:50:19 > 0:50:24least find yourself seeing with his abstracting eyes, everywhere you go.
0:50:25 > 0:50:28Even on an airport travelater,
0:50:28 > 0:50:32in a departure lounge or looking through an aeroplane window.
0:50:32 > 0:50:37Gazing at the heavens from 20,000 feet you might almost be travelling
0:50:37 > 0:50:42through some vast three-dimensional version of a Rothko painting.
0:50:48 > 0:50:52In fact, I'm on my way to the most ambitious of his works.
0:50:53 > 0:50:55An entire secular chapel in Houston, Texas.
0:51:01 > 0:51:05It was the culmination of his lifelong desire to see his pictures exhibited
0:51:05 > 0:51:10in a series under controlled light conditions.
0:51:12 > 0:51:15And this is the result, the Rothko Chapel.
0:51:49 > 0:51:54The building's name suggests that what you're going to find when you come in here
0:51:54 > 0:51:56is some kind of religious space,
0:52:00 > 0:52:04but what kind of religious space, it's hard to say.
0:52:04 > 0:52:11He's clearly got the form of the altarpiece in his mind.
0:52:11 > 0:52:16There's one, two, three triptychs in here.
0:52:16 > 0:52:20And there's this question of where should you look
0:52:20 > 0:52:25because in a regular church or chapel there's a principal point of orientation,
0:52:25 > 0:52:29you know, you'd look there at the main altarpiece and yes, 0K, here
0:52:29 > 0:52:33that is the biggest picture but there's...
0:52:33 > 0:52:37You do not have the sense that that is where you look for your enlightenment,
0:52:37 > 0:52:40for your clarity, all the answers are going to be over there, no.
0:52:40 > 0:52:45Here you've got this sense that maybe I should look there, or there,
0:52:45 > 0:52:48there's another triptych there, there's one here.
0:52:48 > 0:52:53So, where do you look? It's almost like a hall of mirrors.
0:52:53 > 0:52:57And, 0K, the pictures don't reflect you back
0:52:57 > 0:53:03but, in a sense, they do because they're quite resistant to the gaze,
0:53:03 > 0:53:05they are not as misty,
0:53:05 > 0:53:08they don't take you in as much as some of Rothko's earlier work.
0:53:08 > 0:53:10They seem to
0:53:10 > 0:53:12come back at you
0:53:12 > 0:53:16with their materiality.
0:53:16 > 0:53:19And Rothko said something, or hinted,
0:53:19 > 0:53:22I think to a friend, that
0:53:22 > 0:53:26when he was thinking about creating these pictures he was thinking about creating pictures that,
0:53:26 > 0:53:29when you look at them,
0:53:29 > 0:53:32what you're actually looking at is yourself.
0:53:57 > 0:54:01So, what do you see when you look at these paintings,
0:54:01 > 0:54:04you look into that glimmering void,
0:54:04 > 0:54:09was that God, or just a trick of the light?
0:54:09 > 0:54:12Are these pictures windows
0:54:12 > 0:54:16through which we can glimpse some sense of transcendence,
0:54:16 > 0:54:21some sense that there is something beyond
0:54:21 > 0:54:28or are they walls that bear down on you, are they symbols of the fact this life is all we've got
0:54:28 > 0:54:31and that there's no way out?
0:54:31 > 0:54:39I think the beauty of it is that Rothko leaves it perfectly completely ambiguous.
0:54:40 > 0:54:44There are no answers in here, only questions.
0:55:07 > 0:55:10Almost all of the artists I've looked at in this film
0:55:10 > 0:55:15were responding to the behemoth of the modern American city.
0:55:15 > 0:55:20Some loved it, some hated it and the Abstract Expressionists
0:55:20 > 0:55:23claim to have risen above it completely.
0:55:23 > 0:55:26But I'm not so sure.
0:55:26 > 0:55:30If you believe the rhetoric of the Abstract Expressionists
0:55:30 > 0:55:33their's was an almost priestly art movement
0:55:33 > 0:55:40entirely dedicated to transcending the banalities of daily life here in the city of New York.
0:55:40 > 0:55:44There was Clyfford Still writing about the act of painting as a form of ecstasy.
0:55:45 > 0:55:48In The Creation Of A Canvas Still wrote,
0:55:48 > 0:55:50"It's as if I achieve a form of resurrection,
0:55:50 > 0:55:56"I rise above the mundanities that oppress me in ordinary life."
0:55:56 > 0:56:00One critic even wrote of Barnett Newman's principal signature device,
0:56:00 > 0:56:04that strip dividing his canvases,
0:56:04 > 0:56:08one critic compared that to God's primordial act of separating light from darkness
0:56:08 > 0:56:10in the book of Genesis.
0:56:12 > 0:56:16To me, when I am in a taxi travelling round New York,
0:56:16 > 0:56:21everywhere I look I see evidence of the physical residue
0:56:21 > 0:56:25this city left on the canvases of the Abstract Expressionists.
0:56:25 > 0:56:30Think of Franz Kline's girder-like shapes,
0:56:30 > 0:56:34like the shapes of a skyscraper under construction,
0:56:34 > 0:56:37think of Rothko's great bruised walls of canvases
0:56:37 > 0:56:41and I think of the bruised walls of New York's tenements.
0:56:41 > 0:56:47Even Clyfford Still himself, you know, you can see those shapes of colour
0:56:47 > 0:56:51as examples of patently excellency but you can equally well see them
0:56:51 > 0:56:57as comparable to the visual experience of looking up in New York
0:56:57 > 0:57:00and trying to see the sky past these slivers of skyscrapers,
0:57:00 > 0:57:04these slabs of form that seem to be obscuring the light.
0:57:04 > 0:57:07Even Pollock, I think of Pollock, yes,
0:57:07 > 0:57:10I can think of him as an artist who evokes nature.
0:57:10 > 0:57:15I can also think of an artist who evokes
0:57:15 > 0:57:17the spatter of oil on asphalt
0:57:17 > 0:57:21left by some car's shattered sump.
0:57:24 > 0:57:28In one sense they wanted to rise above consumer culture,
0:57:28 > 0:57:31capitalist culture, the culture of the city
0:57:31 > 0:57:36and everything that that stood for in New York historically, economically, politically
0:57:36 > 0:57:40but, on the other hand, their's was an art completely of the city.
0:57:40 > 0:57:43Idealism and materialism
0:57:43 > 0:57:45inextricably intertwined.
0:57:48 > 0:57:52That's America.
0:58:21 > 0:58:24Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
0:58:24 > 0:58:27E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk