America's Most Underrated Artists (Art History Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] when you're growing up in a small town when you're growing up in a small town when you're growing up in a small no one famous ever came from here you know no territory in america has had as much bad press in recent times as the american small town think of all the pop songs that have been written about getting out of places like this hitting the road and heading for somewhere different when you're growing up in a small town when you're growing up in a small town sang lou reed in his rousing musical tribute to andy warhol you hate it and you have to leave for a small town you hate it and you know you'll have to leave this idea that people in small towns have small minds that small towns hold you back restricts you has become one of our cultural certainties hasn't it and just recently of course there's been plenty of reason to believe that everything that's gone wrong with america can be traced back to the small town mindset with its ingrained intolerance and its trumpish politics well i'm sorry but it's just not true yes small town life can be tough and backward and it certainly has its dark side but if you look at the best evidence there is of human values if you look at art you'll see that the american small town has inspired marvelous things and that's what this film is about the marvelous artistic influence of small town [Music] america [Music] [Music] welcome to mount air in iowa population 1691. no make that 1692. it's a typical american small town in what they call the american corn belt because corn is what everybody around here grows in fact did you know that last year they grew 2.5 billion bushels of corn in iowa i didn't know it either till i got interested in the post office here in mount air from the outside it looks like thousands of other post offices you find in small town america and do you know what that's what it looks like on the inside too because look what they've got in here it's by an artist called or c fisher it was painted in 1941 as part of a government initiative to fill the post offices of america with murals up and down the land in pretty much every small town you go to there's a mural in the post office this one is called the corn parade it's a charming piece of small town surrealism featuring the biggest hunk of corn you've ever seen being paraded with great ceremony through the streets of mount air it's hilarious and rather brilliant orc fisher the artist is gently mocking the prominence of corn in iowa and of course corn has two meanings it isn't just this it's also something that's overly sentimental or banal corny's king proclaims fischer's mural with a cheeky wisecrack and i for one wouldn't want to argue with a lump of corn that big so altogether there were 1 400 murals painted in american post offices in the 1930s and 40s in 1 300 small american towns it was a gigantic artistic achievement this land is your land and this land is my land it was all part of a remarkable initiative by president franklin d roosevelt to combat the terrible economic depression that hit america in the 1930s this land was made for you and me by commissioning murals for post offices roosevelt was finding work for america's artists giving them support a lifeline is my land and that's the strange thing about the great depression economically it was disastrous artistically it was a golden age [Music] this car the model a ford was another success of the great depression between 1928 and 1931 they built five million of these and look how clean and spare its lines are how it seems to have inherited some of the leanness of its times this land was made for you and me [Music] it's the same with these don't know about you but i like a bit of salt on my corn and fortunately i can sprinkle it from this the charles sheila salt shaker and there's a pepper shaker that goes with it a fabulous piece of sparse sexy minimalist design created out of aluminium in 1935 to slap in the middle of the great depression but so astonishingly modern charles sheila the designer of the minimalist salt shaker had small town precision in his blood he was mainly a painter and only sometimes a designer and to make ends meet he became a photographer too and in everything he did he loved straight lines and unfussy effects and that's why he also collected this stuff shaker furniture [Music] the shakers were a millenarian christian sect who believed that the end of the world was nigh and that the modern world had grown too sinful so they cut themselves off from it they built their own houses grew their own food and made their own furniture [Music] no decoration no ostentation no frills [Music] you could buy it in ikea today couldn't you it's so pretty naturally modern and scandinavian the shakers were ahead of their times in all sorts of ways they believed in the equality of the sexes that women were as good as men and that god was both male and female and there's a warm quality to everything they made something very un-macho i'm going to call it wholesomeness because i can't think of another word for it [Music] it's a respect for simplicity an affection for things that are spare and humble you get it in shaker furniture and you get it as well in the angelic interiors that charles sheila painted this one is called home sweet home from 1931. it's strikingly modern with its clarity and its straight lines and see his photographs of the same space with that friendly stove which he called his companion throwing warmth and light into the room [Music] what quiet poetry sheila discovers in things that are simple and unadorned those five million model a fords i was telling you about we're all made up here at the river rouge ford plant in dearborn michigan completed in 1927 it was at the time the largest factory complex in the world we're not in the corn belt anymore this is now the infamous rust belt the broken post-industrial weeping ground of america that we've heard so much about on recent news broadcasts [Music] before it became the rust belt this used to be called the industrial heartland of america it was where the great dream of a mechanized american future was born and where that dream was crushed when the rust set in but back in 1927 all this was brand new and charles sheila with his photography hat on was sent here by an advertising company to photograph the mighty ford manufacturing complex in river rouge [Music] this wasn't just the largest factory in the world it was also the most progressive 93 buildings and 100 miles of railway track everything you needed to turn raw materials into model a fords henry ford called technology the new messiah he believed in it on a religious scale and sheila's photographs of river rouge have a cathedral-like quality to them lofty soaring modernistically gothic but a few years later he began painting the factory as well and the paintings have a different mood it's as if the coke furnaces and the steel plants the power stations and the hammering yards have had a shaker makeover that's left them looking angelic and white [Music] in sheila's paintings of river rouge a thoughtful eye is noticing the harmonies and the balances in these giant factory sprawls [Music] what you don't get is the thunder the smoke the effort the destruction all that has been pushed aside nor is there any sign of any actual workers toiling in the labour yards [Music] sheila's factor is purring with industrial contentment seem to be running silently on art deco electric motors it's a shaker dream and of course it wasn't what was really going on for a true sense of the atmosphere of river rouge we need to switch artists and get in some immigrants the detroit institute of art and at its center a mural masterpiece by diego rivera the giant of mexican muralism [Music] these are called the detroit industry murals they were done in 1933 27 scenes in all painted by rivera in eight months of furious effort so furious was the effort that rivera who was excellently fat lost a hundred pounds in weight in detroit because painting ambitious frescoes is not a job for wusses [Music] remember we saw a lot of rivera and his frescos in the first film in this series the one about the wild west his speciality was big mexican histories but here in detroit he was commissioned to immortalize the giant ford factory at river rouge and by extension to celebrate the pioneering spirit of industrial america the money for the project was put up by henry ford's son edsel ford who'd taken over as president of the company in 1919 and who loved art [Music] rivera was invited to spend three months at the river rouge factory researching the technological dream [Music] what he came up with is a melange of reality and mythology a mix of time scales that lurches between the past and the present typical rivera of ancient mexico turn into fiery picturings of river rouge and its workforce technology the fresco seems to be saying has always been with us and it's always been a force for good but also for bad that scene up there with the baby that's about the pharmaceutical industry discovering new vaccines to save young lives [Music] but over here the same pharmaceutical industry is creating a deadly nerve gas to be used in war same industry different ambitions the whole thing culminates in these two momentous evocations of river rouge one on each wall this one here the north mural shows the engines being built the famous ford v8 flat head the first engine to be cast from a single block of metal the south mural meanwhile shows the actual car bodies being assembled so it's all together brighter and lighter there's the chassis being put down and up there the new ford model 18s rolling off the assembly line now these were very controversial when they were unveiled rivera was a notorious communist and some of the religious symbolism he included in typical mexican fashion was denounced by the local bible belters who called for the murals to be destroyed but edsel ford to his credit stuck to his guns and with the clout of the ford factory behind him he made sure the murals were preserved so they're still here a fiery explosive and complex tribute to the industry of america so these kinds of murals telling a big national story were a mexican import into america but it wasn't just one-way traffic with mexican artists crossing the border it also went the other way [Music] if you drive out of mexico city and brave the scary roads you get to a town called moralia where they've got this in the museum this was painted in 1934 by a couple of traveling gringos from la one of whom we've already encountered because it was philip goldstein jackson pollock's buddy who later became philip gustin you'll remember gustin from the first film how he and pollock were expelled from high school for attacking the school's sports department well in 1934 gustom turned up in mexico with his friend reuben kaddish and in moralia they talked their way into painting this [Music] it was originally called the struggle against terror and fascism but these days it's usually known as the inquisition [Music] the figure in the center the lumbering giant in the hood represents the forces of repression and evil they're trying to climb the ladder but they're being beaten back by the forces of righteousness basically it's a battle between good and bad with the good guys out there and the forces of repression down here torturing their victims like this unfortunate fellow on this side who's being electrocuted sent to his death in a death cap over here a naked woman has been abused and strung up she's the victim of the sinister hooded priest who's also trying to climb the ladder [Music] so the clambering bad guys are all dressed as the ku klux klan when this was painted in the 1930s the clan was at the peak of its power in small town america lynching terrorizing rounding up so when gustin and kadesh cast the kkk as the forces of evil in their mexican mural they were hoping the folks back home were watching the interesting thing about the ku klux klan is that it's another western fantasy in fact these notorious clan outfits were also invented by hollywood [Music] the first appearance of the ghostly white hoods was in wd griffith's notorious origin movie the birth of a nation the first film ever to be shown at the white house griffith wanted to present the clan as modern knights of the round table so he got his costume department to invent some scary one-piece outfits that were based loosely on the costumes worn by flagelland societies in europe at easter time the griffiths look caught on and quickly became a must-have and you could order the clan one piece on mail order it only cost a couple of bucks and that's how it became the clan uniform and that too is how it came to haunt american memories of the 1930s look into the corners of all that small town art created in small town america you'll find plenty of disgust at the antics of the kkk the angry philip guston never forgot or forgave the clan three decades later he was still taking a pop at them turning them into figures of scorn and ridicule in a wicked cartoon art that was deadly serious this is a book everybody should read if they're interested in american art how the post office created america it explains why all that art was put in all those post offices and why the post office was so important that older storm killed my baby but you can't kill me basically america's post offices brought the nation together every town no matter how small or pokey had a post office [Music] hi there have you got the uh great depression stamps that were brought out yes sir we do five dollars thank you very much and it wasn't just the mail that was delivered here this was also where the newspapers were sent so all around the country people could keep up with the latest news [Music] the post office system was a kind of primitive internet that connected people and kept them informed and that's why all these murals were put in all these post offices this is by a dallas artist called jerry bywaters and it was painted for the post office here in farmersville texas in 1941. and although at first sight it looks like a happy farming scene what it actually is is a public service announcement [Music] this isn't any old farmer gathering the sheaths in any old field this is an informed farmer a rural progressive who hasn't plowed his field in destructive strips but who's chosen the much healthier contour ploughing method [Music] so it's all about the dust bowl that terrible rural tragedy which hit america in the 1930s by plowing up the great plains in strips the farmers here in texas broke up all the top soil so when the winds came in enormous clouds of dust would form in the sky black blizzards they were called dust so dense you couldn't see more than five feet ahead of you so the best way to plow the fields wasn't in strips which dried out all the top soil but in these clever contours which held the water and didn't dry out so quickly and that is what bywaters is telling the people here in the post office in farmersville to be a happy farmer in farmersville texas this is how you should plow your fields in jaunty an agriculturally progressive [Music] contours on the 14th day of april of 1935 there struck the worst of the storms that ever filled [Music] the dust bowl inspired a lot of art in small town america or in this case no town america from oklahoma this is jerry bywater's portrait of a dust bowl farmer gnarled and nervy down on his luck on his dried out land while a plague of locusts chews up his scrawny crops what a powerful image there was something biblical about the dust bowl a sense that it was god's payback for man's folly and there was one artist in particular here in texas who kept pointing it out in picture after picture [Music] alexandra hogue was his name alexandra spelt funnily with the r and the e back to front [Music] hogue specialized in dust bowl pictures and made art of a type no one had made before parched and full of death it's remarkable art but you never hear about alexandra hogue because he was a small town artist and small town artists get ignored [Music] hogue was from memphis missouri population 1822. his father was a preacher so there was religion in his blood and although he looked like a geography teacher at a parent's meeting or perhaps the chap who ran the local hardware store he was actually a painter with angry passions whose work was nervy and tense filled with accusations [Music] this one's called the crucified land a homemade scarecrow has taken jesus's place on the top of the hill the landscape around is scarred eroded and who's to blame that tractor on the horizon plowing up the land with mechanical ruthlessness [Music] hogue really had it in for tractors and plows because they were turning america into a desert and his most famous picture shows the texas landscape after the plows have been through it the top soil's gone nothing's growing and mother earth personified spookily as a naked woman buried under the sands has drawn her last breath and died while the plow that killed her looms up in the foreground like the skeleton of a dead steer so these small town artists brought something different to the party strange understandings unfamiliar attitudes hidden meanings and that's particularly true of the most famous small town artist of them all the one i'm going to need this for not many pictures get so famous that everybody knows them in fact you can probably count them on one pitchfork the mona lisa the scream and the one that's set here american gothic by grant wood it's the most famous american painting it's been on stamps and biscuit tins political posters and your dad's socks [Music] but no one is entirely sure what it's trying to say [Music] that's the thing with small town artists they're sneaky secretive keep it all to themselves so is american gothic a bit of a send up a cheeky prod at the door and stubborn citizens of iowa or is it a patriotic tribute to the unbending spirit of rural america this is the house in the picture with that pointy gothic window that sets the tone the woman is his sister nan wood and he's made her face longer and thinner unhappy and stern the man is his real-life dentist a fellow called dr byron mckeeby apparently wood had a really sweet tooth and even put sugar on the lettuce in his salads [Music] so he saw a lot of his dentist and would have spent many a foggy anesthetized moment staring up at the disapproving face of byron mckeevey [Music] i'm pretty sure it's a send up all of grant wood's art seems to have more going on in it than you think he was complex and his art was full of coded observation and hidden meanings [Music] this road picture for instance looks at first like a jaunty motoring poster from the 1930s but look closer and you'll see there's a bend coming up and hurtling round it is a big red lorry there's going to be a crash and the telegraph poles that line the road have turned into crosses of death so while everyone else in the 30s was celebrating the joys of motoring grant wood was outing the car as a weapon of death and as we all know now he was right for most of his life wood lived here in cedar rapids iowa he put the town on the map so they're keen to celebrate him here iowa style [Music] his studio was up here this was a mortuary and up there was where the hearses were kept for transporting the dead bodies and up in the attic that's where american gothic was painted [Music] woods friend the local undertaker david turner let him use the loft above the hearses to live in and work his sister nan moved in as well and so did his mother he painted her in this studio and made something sacred of her presence [Music] so there were three of them squeezed into this tiny attic and wood who was a man of many talents built clever bits of furniture for them which folded away and saved space the front door meanwhile was converted from a reused coffin lid and he put a charming glass dial on the front telling people where he was he was handy he could make things rustle them up with small town ingenuity it's not like art students today who go straight to college and read books about deconstruction wood trusted his hands and relied on them he made jewelry furniture and wacky household decorations bashed together from stuff he found in the alleyway outside his studio the other thing he began doing was making prince they're brilliant some of his best work this one here shows the ancient arabic order of the nobles of the mystic shrine or shriners as they're usually called fez's trembling the shriners of cedar rapids have gathered under the egyptian pyramids to belt out their masonic his greatest print shows something you don't often find in regionalist art a male nude tipping a bucket of water over his head in an empty field in iowa according to his sister when wood was a kid he loved taking his clothes off during a thunderstorm and feeling the rain gliding down his naked body and that's what this print is about sultry night it's called a strange and ecstatic memory from an artist who saw things differently i've been thinking about that sleek black car that's about to crash into the red lorry in grant woods car picture i wonder if it was one of these [Music] in the last film the one about the big city i showed you the paintings of rudolph bauer the abstract artist from germany who wowed them in new york well bauer had another life he was crazy about cars these days you don't hear much about rudolph bauer as an artist he's largely forgotten but back in the 1930s he was thought to be hugely important and his artistic reputation was sky high everyone wanted a bower he sold so many pictures to the guggenheim museum that he had guggenheim cash coming out of his ears so he bought himself a place in the country and spent his money on cars bauer the artist may be forgotten but bauer the car nut is definitely not and this car here the duesenberg sj town car cabriolet built between 1937 and 1940 the last duesenberg ever made this car is considered to be the mona lisa of cars in america [Music] all duesenbergs are impressive but this one here which bower commissioned and designed is as they say a doozy 20 feet long 320 horsepower it's a vehicular masterpiece from the golden age of country driving [Music] everything about it emphasizes its speed and its power look how long and low it is with this bonnet that goes on and on and on and see there's no running boards to disturb these clean lines an artistic mind is expressing itself extravagantly in a car body [Music] michelangelo did it with marble bauer did it with his duesenberg [Music] so the outside is stunning but for me the real joy of this car the knockout artistic touch is the interior when you look at the color of that it's move yes move but a move of thrilling directness selected specially to surprise and delight whoever sits down on it [Music] it's a brilliant artistic touch [Music] so no rudolf bauer doesn't have much of a reputation anymore in the art world but in the world of cars he's king of the road cars weren't the only form of mechanical transport which honked the horn of the small town american artist they also had a thing about trains thomas hart benton jackson pollock's teacher was a train enthusiast he kept putting them in his murals the iron horse at full gallop snorting and roaring its way through the story of america [Music] benton produced this strange lithograph as well of a train and a horse having a race for the time being the horse is winning but for how long [Music] trains were part of america's origin myth it wasn't just the post office that brought the nation together it was trains as well crisscrossing the land from the atlantic to the pacific joining up america's dots there was something haunting about trains turning up on the small town doorstep seemingly from nowhere long before the american imagination came up with the extraterrestrial it already had a stranger at the door [Music] my father worked on the railways and i remember lying awake at night listening to the trains going by where were they going what were they doing there's this mysterious poetry to trains and something freudian about their presence [Music] one american artist in particular fell deeply in love with this nocturnal strangeness he's the short one with the glasses oh winston link was his name [Music] the greatest american photographer of the train link started out as a commercial photographer he had a degree in civil engineering and specialized in clever technological photography and one day on a job in stoneton virginia he found out that the last steam trains in america were about to be phased out and replaced by diesel so he appointed himself the guardian of the steam train [Music] what he did was set up these huge arrangements of flashlights 50 bulbs at a time all set up to go off at once i can't move the sun he explained it's always in the wrong place and i can't move the tracks but at night i can control the lighting and create my own environment all the flashes would explode at once and that was it he had one go at each picture one shot in the dark to capture the last moments of the american steam age this photo here by the way is something he gave me to thank me for writing about his work that's how modest he was but it's america that should be thanking o winston link for recording the final act of its origin myth and for doing it so brilliantly this american appetite for trains and cars for junkyard textures and industrial forms was new in art for the artists of small town america machines were an opportunity not an enemy you know i can't imagine salvador dali being able to fix a puncture that's something he would have left to his chauffeur but american artists could american artists had some oil in their veins they could drive a tractor or tune an engine machines and technology were part of their lives and it led to an art that was pioneering and different this is by edward hopper a garage scene set at twilight of a lonely bloke at a pump huh no one had made art about that before and small town art could also be fiercely progressive this was made in 1951 by david smith the greatest american sculptor of the 20th or any other century it's called hudson river landscape and it depicts a landscape glimpsed from the window of a passing train remembered in welded steel imagine that a landscape made of steel smith was from decatur indiana population nine thousand four hundred and seven when he was fifteen his family moved to polding ohio population three thousand six hundred and five but it was here that he ended up in bolton landing in upstate new york population 513 as a student he'd worked at the studebaker factory in indiana assembling cars smith could weld and rivet before he could draw and during the second world war he welded together trains and tanks for the american locomotive company and it was in new york at the art students league that he discovered modern art [Music] his early work is basically an extended homage to picasso smith was the pupil picasso was the teacher but then he graduated he picked up his oxy acetylene torch with a vengeance and became truer to himself truer to his american past no one in art had ever welded as freely as david smith could weld no one had ever had the raw materials rusting in the backyard that were rusting at bolton landing [Music] this is called song of an irish blacksmith it's a tribute to a fellow welder from the locomotive company so it's a ballad made of steel and i think that's the seat of an old tractor and that's been cut out of a boiler [Music] smith would collect all this stuff bits of old plows old tools unwanted tractor parts left over from the dust bowl and he'd weld and bend and cut them into something new [Music] where others saw uselessness he saw beauty what others threw away he collected and transformed with marvelous small town ingenuity so here's this big american bloke six foot three built like two truck drivers squeezed into the same pair of trousers but making art of exceptional delicacy out of things he'd found by the side of the road [Music] this one's called the letter what a crazy idea to make a letter a piece of paper with words on it out of chunks of welded steel sculpture was one thing before david smith came along and another thing after him when he first came here to bolton landing he was married later he had children here with his second wife but by the end he was on his own and he'd put his sculptures out there in the field outside his studio and he'd sit here watching them growing out of the small town earth like corn growing in a field in iowa here's this fierce modernist one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century living on his own and creating metal friends for himself to keep him company like a small town father cheering up a small town child this one is called star cage it's the sky at night the cosmos evoked in modern metals what a thing to do to weld yourself a new galaxy out of brushed industrial steel small town america the land of junkyards and post offices trailer parks and garage pumps gave its artists new textures and an independent way of thinking it made them handy good at building things and it made them cussid maybe even a bit unbalanced as for david smith he died tragically in 1965 in a car crash he was 59.

Channel: Perspective

Views: 104,375

Rating: 4.7714286 out of 5

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, art history, waldemar januszczak documentary, waldemar januszczak, art documentary, art history documentary, history documentary, art (collection category), visual arts, contemporary art, modern art, art history documentary perspective, waldemar januszczak bbc documentary, waldemar januszczak american art, waldemar januszczak perspective, american artists, american art

Id: IeUQcSfNar0

Length: 58min 57sec (3537 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020