Robert Hughes' `American Visions'

Don't cut the plug quite yet. Television is about to offer something truly grand that cannot fail to inspire a new generation of enthusiasts to see American art and antiques in a new way. And while profit and loss is the lifeblood of the art world's economy, appreciation for the spiritual qualities of art are its soul.

"American Visions," an eight-part series on American art written and narrated by Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, is both an account of American life and a tribute to American art that will likely propel thousands of the not-yet-converted into museums and galleries, antiques shows and auction rooms to see (and inevitably shop) for themselves. Filmed in 100 locations around the country, covering everything from Quaker to Shaker, George Washington to Bierstadt, Remington to Warhol, and the skyscrapers of New York City, Hughes has applied his considerable wit and imagination to the problem of revealing how art records and preserves both points of view and ways of life. It is American history told through art, not merely a history of art. It offers a perspective that is refreshingly elevating and inclusive.

In the first episode, "The Republic of Virtue," Hughes reveals how the classicism of Republican Rome gave the young nation a language of power and authority. Dashing from the Governor's Palace at Colonial Williamsburg, a symbol "government by proclamation," to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, a building "pervaded with enormous aesthetic ambition," Hughes explains how Jefferson, the "patron saint of all do-it-yourselfers," used architecture to "radiate the power of reason." From the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, "the most beautiful room in America," to the Virginia State House, "the first temple-form building in the modern world," Jefferson's imprint on the material landscape of America is richly realized.

With no little irony, Hughes descends on Washington, "a theme park representing tides of history." Language and art, so well-matched in this series, is the essence of the Lincoln Memorial. Daniel Chester French's figure of Lincoln, flanked by passages of language cut in stone behind a classical colonnade, gave visual form to national aspiration. The myth and meaning of the Lincoln Memorial earned a "new birth of freedom" as the setting for one of the most legendary events of the Civil Rights Movement. Credit the filmmakers for an awe-inspiring representation of the Vietnam Memorial. They featured gently invasive encounters with families in pain, talking and looking at art. Hughes calls it the "best public sculpture in 50 years," a "healing place."

From Benjamin West, the "first American to influence English art," to John Singleton Copley, "sober, workmanlike, materialist and obstinate," Hughes conveys the art of picturemaking as a quest for national honor. Charles Willson Peale as evangelist for national virtue? As the camera caresses Peale's representation of the landscape at Valley Forge, it testifies to the role of artist as activist and participant in the events of history.

With the second episode, "The Promised Land," Hughes explores American religiosity. In a nation that essentially operates from a mission statement, it is no surprise that religion has influenced our origins, our culture and, alas, our art. Hughes conversing with "pilgrims" in the living theater that is Plimoth Plantation, "where it is always 1627," is not to be missed.

From Plymouth Hughes cuts to modern New Mexico and its adobe heritage, which he satirizes as "pious ethno-kitsch." And how did Winthrop's "flock chosen by God" express itself in art? Hingham, Massachusetts' Old Ship Meeting House (1681), Henry Treat's decorated six-board chest, and the ubiquitous New England gravestones -- "their only religious art, their only sculpture" -- are woven with evocative descriptions of funeral rituals in a "world of omens and portends."

In Puritan portraits Hughes discerns "money as a sign of God's approval." Elizabeth Freake of Boston is a "trophy wife," whose "minxie little face registers delight in her status." And, finally, a version of American art in which objects are "as much a part of the story of high aesthetic effort as any painting or sculpture." Hughes cites Amish quilts as evidence that "refutes the idea that folk art is just innocent social birdsong." He calls the blockfront furniture of John Townsend of Newport "the first American art that began to lift into real originality."

Art history as travelogue, while hardly a new theme, has never been more colorfully expounded than by Hughes' roving camera. Interviews with the last remnants of Shakerdom at Sabbathday Lake, Me., and a bizarre vignette of unreconstructed Royalism among the foxhunting descendants of "squirarchs" and "cavaliers" in Middleburg, Va., reveal the expansiveness and surface texture of a resolutely diverse America.

In episode three, "The Wilderness and the West," Hughes tackles the relationship between painting, national identity and Manifest Destiny. "The new world has something better than ruins and history," it has landscape through which "God had writ the immensity of his plan right here in America." On location at Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskills, we retrace Thomas Cole's search for the divinity in nature with Hughes suggesting the influence of art on generations of earth-loving environmentalists. John James Audubon he describes as a "brilliant stylist," whose images of the natural world were also, occasionally, "elegies for species facing extinction."

Twenty miles east, across the Hudson River, we visit Olana, artist Frederic Church's elegiac shrine to "nature as God's show." Church, remarks Hughes in a wry aside that rebuts the romantic myth of the tortured artist, "wanted what the public wanted and was rewarded for it." Devoutly Christian, like his mentor Cole, Church sought spirituality in nature with the aplomb of a carnival-barking showman. Church became America's "first celebrity artist."

The spiritual and the material were never more in conflict than during the age of Manifest Destiny, which artists from Currier and Ives to Albert Bierstadt and George Caleb Bingham helped glamorize by creating the mythscape of the American West. The way west left a trail of blood and broken dreams as American Indians were driven into exile and starvation. Hughes shows how the portrayal of Native Americans in art has mirrored national aspirations; from the high virtue of Charles Bird King's depiction of Native American chiefs as Roman noblemen (1821), to Charles Deas' images of Native Americans as demonic and doomed, to the anthropological empiricism of George Catlin, who created the best visual record of the Native American's vanishing world.

As the frontier vanished with the relentless expansion of men and machines, what remained in the public memory were the images made by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, William Henry Jackson, Frederic Remington and their peers. Their art has been enormously consequential, fostering everything from Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows and the national parks to Hollywood's westerns and the contemporary craze for "wilderness tourism."

In the fourth episode, Hughes ruminates over the meaning of "The Gilded Age," a time marked by the triumph of industrialization, a pursuit of aesthetic realism and rampant Europhilia. Two themes dominated the late Nineteenth Century and are widely apparent in its art: the Civil War and the machine. With an image of the war "swallowing men in blue and gray as a furnace swallows coal," Hughes shows how Matthew Brady's photographs changed the very idea of war in the public imagination. The human cost of a war that claimed 600,000 lives prompted artists and public alike to look inward and to explore new dimensions of human dignity.

Sculptor Augustus St Gaudens' Robert Gould Shaw and The 45th Regiment Memorial in Boston, which Hughes describes as the "most intensely felt image of a military subject made by an American," portrays African-American soldiers with empathic individuality. Likewise, St Gaudens' "psychological portrait" of a tired and war-weary William Tecumseh Sherman, which stands opposite the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, contrasts sharply with the Robert E. Lee memorial in Lexington, Va., and hints at differences between North and South still unreconciled after 130 years.

From Thomas Eakins' studied renderings of new expertise in a new modern world to Winslow Homer's mythological memory pictures of agrarian New England innocence, Hughes points to the rising capacities and aspirations of American art in an age more often remembered for its gilded excess. The Brooklyn Bridge as emblem of optimism and progress, and the elevators that make skyscrappers possible, broaden the scope and range of what constitutes art in America.

Hughes concludes "The Gilded Age" with reflections on the role of American women in the formation of American museums, which he describes as shrines to "unfettered lust for objects overlaid with moral and educational idealism and peppered with more than a hint of a department store."

Hughes introduces John Singer Sargent as "the Van Dyke of the Gilded Age whose greatest enthusiasms were work and social climbing," and the "truculent aestheticism" of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who reduced his own mother to an "Arrangement in Grey and Black."

In "A Wave from the Atlantic" (episode five) Hughes further explores the legacy of technology while considering immigration and urbanism in turn-of-the-century American art. As a transplanted Australian, Hughes has personal experience with the process of "turning foreigners into Americans." "Overlay and mixture," he asserts, "is fundamental to American life." But it inevitably breeds conflict and differing values.

Describing the Statue of Liberty as a "giant Amazon" that was never meant as a monument to immigration, Hughes concludes that it "may not be a great work of art but, as an emblem, she's incomparable." Claiming that 40 percent of Americans are now descended from people who passed through Ellis Island, Hughes recounts how artists and photographers like Robert Henri, George Bellows and Jacob Riis reported from inside the growing ethnic enclaves of urban America.

Immigrants were the subject of art. But they also transmitted the art that shaped the Twentieth Century century most profoundly. Modernism, ridiculed as "Ellis Island art," had its American debut at the "International Exhibition of Modern Art" -- the so-called Armory show -- in 1913. Assembled by artists, apparently for artists, the public initially branded it as "weird, foreign and deeply un-American." Hughes identifies the star freak of show as Marcel Duchamps's "Nude Descending a Staircase." The icon helped give birth to the "idea that new art has to be stoned before ascending to museum heaven."

Abstraction was but one of many currents that animated American art at the beginning of this century. Joseph Stella, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand gave voice to what Hughes calls the "industrial sublime," with its "romantic adoration of the machine." The quintessential machine of the Machine Age was the automobile. It was at Henry Ford's River Rouge manufactory that the Machine Age reached its apogee, not only in the product it made, but in the whirling, pounding rhythms of the process itself.

Out of the West and Midwest came two of the century's greatest artistic legends. Frank Lloyd Wright's "ground hugging houses" had a "kinship with the flat earth of the Midwest." They were inspired by nature and Wright's fascination with the art of Japan. Wright devised a vocabulary of organic architecture involving space, furnishings and architecture interwoven with landscape.

Wright's masterpiece is surely Falling Water, which Hughes describes as the "most beautiful American house since Jefferson's Monticello." Visiting Falling Water is itself a pilgrimage that for most people involves flying, driving and a long walk through the rhododendrons to its secluded habitat. It is the ultimate play between nature and culture, in which "opposites held in a poetic synthesis" suggest a sort of interior sublime.

Describing Georgia O'Keeffe as an "icon of feminism" and the "most famous woman artist that America ever produced," Hughes revels in the quality of her intense reaction to the landscape of her beloved New Mexico, which her art has helped transform into a modern-day "high Sierra theme park."

In October, 1929, the optimism and promise of the Age of Immigration collapsed with the onset of the worst Depression in American history. "Steamlines and Breadlines" (episode six) recounts the effect of economic despair on the American psyche and art. The Depression gave rise to an egalitarian spirit that made heroes of the working class. Artists employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) were themselves now working class, producing art of blistering social content.

The 1920s and 1930s were a time of growing extremes in wealth, opportunity and hope. A kind of hyperactive idealism prevailed in the creation of public monuments that aimed to lift spirits by reaching skyward. For Hughes, New York's skyscrapers replaced the ever ready myth of frontier expansion by thrusting upward. Meanwhile, the Art Deco style put "romance back into Modernism" by infusing it with playful ornament.

In the Chrysler Building, Hughes finds a peerless icon of the age, a veritable "palace of vertigo and vain glory" featuring murals of itself being built, a celebration of corporate power in the spirit of past-meets-present-meets-future. Radio City Music Hall, New York's "amphitheater of pleasure," and even the Hoover Dam, a 726 foot-high work of sculptural civil engineering built in 1935 so Southwesterners might "water their ecologically impertinent lawns," celebrate their own creation in ornament that signals the "rising above Depression."

In Jacob Lawrence's "Migration Series," the story of northern-bound African-American labor, whose livelihoods had been crushed by the advent of mechanical harvesters, is told. So also is the growing tension between the competing artistic schools of Modernism and Social Realism. A new brand of Social Realism repudiated the city altogether, turning instead to a "vision of rural eden in heartland." According to Hughes, Thomas Hart Benton loathed abstraction and New York, arguing persuasively for "good honest American pictures."

In one of the series' best visual surprises, Hughes compounds artist Grant Wood's sardonic nostalgia by himself posing in front of the house made famous in Wood's "American Gothic." "Paint what is local," urged Wood. And hence to the heartland Hughes and his peripatetic camera traveled.

"Tomorrow Now?" Why not? In the new art of industrial design, the Depression era may well have found its most enduring artistic expression. Hughes reserves his widest Cheshire Cat-like grin for the Chrysler Airflow, the Electrolux vacuum cleaner, and the world of New York's 1939 World's Fair, with its Futurama and the promise of shiny fins and sleek surfaces racing toward a vision of tomorrow. Social Unrealism, kitsch, the art of denial? These images of American life stick and have never been portrayed with greater delight. That the Depression was relieved by world war provides a fitting end to this richly ironic chapter in American art.

The explosive break with the past is chronicled in the seventh episode, "The Empire of Signs." Hughes surmises that war and the advent of the nuclear era cast a cold shadow over the American spirit while also confirming the persistent notion of American exceptionalism. With the growing irony of modern life, art and popular culture began a long, cold separation.

The 1950s, with its faith in the supremacy of American culture and its economy "swollen with production and pleasure," spawned the alienated New York school, an artistic avant garde intentionally disengaged from politics and popular culture. Jackson Pollack and his peers explored the power of the unconscious mind. On location at the museum/shrine that was Pollock's Long Island studio, Hughes points to the "holy brushes and sanctified shoes" on display.

Hughes may be permitted generational bias in his infatuated account of Pollock as the "puffy James Dean of American art" whose continuous surface paintings created a new scale, a new kind of surface and a new form of American romanticism -- an expansive "congestion of signs and scribbles," influenced by Navaho painters and evoking nothing less than the mythic space of the American West. Pollock wanted to "be nature, not just paint it," gushes Hughes, with the same wry smile of a man whose work is play and whose handling of this epic is, well, joyously playful.

Hyperbole yielded to hype in Mark Rothko's "yearning for transcendence" in his search for "timeless landscapes of color," but, Hughes concludes, the "hope that abstract art could carry the tragic weight of King Lear was bound to fail." The line between artist and critic blurred in the rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism, which was self-inflated and ultimately self-inflicting.

"Did everything abstract artists painted live up to the rhetoric about it," asks Hughes? "Of course not." And yet, despite the bombastic pretensions of Barnett Newman's "Stations of the Cross," the 1950s produced some art of great power and delight. Who cannot now admire the extraordinary versatility, inventiveness and technical skill of sculptor David Smith, whose welded steel sculptures made of carefully chosen discarded things Hughes describes as a "fusion of cubism and surrealism."

Hughes inevitably finds his way to the reigning symbol of American post-war life: Detroit's mega-monstermobiles, which he describes as the "rolling baroque public sculpture of an America gone forever." They shine amidst "rockets and chromium breasts," with "triumph, lust and aggression, and tons of room for the entire family."

The idea of painting the United States flag, which Hughes calls the "most recognizable abstraction in the world," came to artist Jasper Johns in a dream. The striking anatomy of his color and the beauty and texture of his painted surfaces, applied to both flags and targets, provided the Cold War era with aesthetic bookends that are simultaneously pretty and chilling.

Johns' contemporary and friend Robert Rauschenberg broke down barriers between painting, sculpture and dance, while seeking "hopefully non-logical...juxtapositions of imagery." "You make the meaning," extolled Rauschenberg as he conceived a new form of anti-didactic, anti-dogmatic history painting; a forward looking prelude to our age with its inclusive but disabled sense of purpose.

Romare Bearden captured the energy and aesthetic of jazz with pictures inspired by Matisse, Picasso and African Art that spoke of and for the rising voice of Americans of African descent. To be white and middle class in America in the 1950s "was to have too much most of the time." And hence Hughes' essay on the glorious vulgarity of the American sandwich provides a testy and tasteless segue into the world of Claes Oldenburg, whose pop art celebrations of American food and junk is an aesthetic inspired by commonplace things.

The art of the Cold War era thus turns ideas of heroism and glamour upside down, repudiating the role of artist as celebrant. It culminates in the work of Andy Warhol, whose voyeuristic fascination with death and fame led to the glamorization of fame as an American industry, surely a long way from Frederic Church's Olana.

At last we arrive at "The Age of Anxiety" (episode eight), which portrays the art of our time as evidence of a society cut loose from its moorings. Vietnam and the assassination of President Kennedy mark the headwater of our modern malaise. And yet the art that has piled up in the 30 years since requires a sense of humor, if not an annotated scorecard, to appreciate.

Given that Robert Hughes earned a big part of his reputation by deflating the inflated rhetoric of the contemporary art scene, his observations are hardly objective. Indeed, few aspects of this series are, which is why I suspect that viewers who tune in for the opening episode will hang on to the end. This op-ed piece as home entertainment is hard to resist.

What's not to love about Hughes' glib, grinning account of Ed Kienholz's social satire in three-dimensions, his descriptions of Donald Judd's "impersonal and anti-sensuous" neo-Puritan aesthetic or the notion of the "artist as nuisance" in the work of Bruce Nauman? Describing pictures of the "Color Field" movement as "huge lyrical canvasses" that are "intelligently pretty," Hughes cites them as evidence of the declining relevance of painting.

To Hughes the 1980s was a "low, dishonest time in American art." A movie star who occupied the White House spawned an economic boom that in turn sired an art boom featuring "dealers floating on clouds of sanctimony." Julian Schnabel: a "monument of self-esteem." Jeff Koons: "syrupy, gross and numbing." Eric Fischl: "Hoppersque narratives" documenting the "discontent of the white tribes of America," featuring the middle class as "deranged and incestuous." Only "an America besodden with hype," Hughes concludes, "could swallow their pretensions."

Egregiously offensive as Hughes finds much of the art of the 1980s, it was a golden age when compared with the 1990s, with its "narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which the quest for victim credentials triumphs over aesthetic achievement." Hughes snaps at political correctness, arguing that because an "artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than if it is about mermaids."

Yet even the "Age of Anxiety" produced some work Hughes finds praiseworthy. Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" marks the rise of ecological, "site-specific art." Hughes describes Louise Bourgeois' "identity art" as "work of real intensity."

So, again we ask, and not a minute too soon in my book, what is American about American art, or at least why should busy people with purposeful lives care about American art? Hughes admires what he calls the "plain empirical speech and spiritual hopes" embodied in much American art. There is also the capacity for change that too often valorizes change for its own sake.

Big, expansive and inclusive. Who'd have guessed we could get through an entire survey on American art without whining about sources of influence and America's failure to embrace its own dependence. True though the case for dependence may be, the big story is not in the salons and studios but in the way real people connect with the powerful language of visual expression. The interplay is between ideals and environment, products and markets, people and their times.

For the dealers, collectors and museum folks who are the primary readers of Antiques and the Arts Weekly, it is worth asking how "American Visions," or any performance that aims to encapsulate our world or the things we love, may affect that world.

On that, the news is both good and bad. Bad, perhaps, that television and movies so dominate popular culture. Bad, also, that Hughes and his associates never got all the way across the divide between the "fine arts" and the enormous, and growing, world of antiques and just plain stuff. A profile on Brimfield, or any of our better bazaars, would surely have added an important dimension to this series. Antiques as antiques are typically missing in action from most national media accounts of "the arts." It's a big mistake.

Hughes' take on American art registers three unnecessary biases: too much "New York as center of the universe"; too much contemporizing when, in fact, yesterday's art has always contributed vitally to the cultural and aesthetic life of the times; and too much emphasis on fine art. Why do art critics, who love to bash contemporary art, cover it to the exclusion of everything else?

Art lives! If we are a diverse nation bound by a mission statement, culture will inevitably shape attitudes as much or more than legislation does. A broader range of work, places, and things would have added another dimension to "American Visions," but it might also have added another three hours.

At a time when inquiry is becoming narrower, not broader, the encompassing views of BBC, Time and Robert Hughes are welcome. They have reinvigorated the story of American art, asserting its capacity to both shape and convey our experience as a nation. Whether doing so will have a measurable effect on the market, I cannot say. But it cannot help but open a great many eyes to the power of visual expression. In doing so "American Visions" offers hope that the joy we share as long-standing converts will reach a new generation in a new way.

William Hosley is the Richard Koopman curator of American decorative arts, Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.

'American Visions' on PBS