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