Exploring America's Most Famous Art (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] [Music] so michelangelo has obviously never been to new york [Music] in new york the towering cliffs of the american metropolis do a decent job of standing in for nature in this awesome man-made landscape i'm down there by the way second canyon on the left [Music] when you're looking up at the city from down here and it's thrusting into the sky soaring into the light you can see immediately why it's inspired so much exciting art photographers in particular have thrilled at the site of the modern metropolis look how dizzy it made margaret burke white when she got up here and looked out across this grand canyon made of bricks and glass she lived up there in the chrysler building on the 61st floor and from her eerie up in the clouds she recorded the thrill she got from looking down on the city far far away and that is what this film is about the pulsing futuristic excitement of the american city thrusting into the heavens conquering the sky at least that's how it begins but then it turns into something else something darker and what that is you'll have to wait and see [Music] [Music] so [Music] this is where margaret burke white had her studio up on the chrysler building she specialized in technical photography and when the chrysler was being built in 1928 she was commissioned to photograph the building process but she liked it so much up here that she decided to live here got herself a studio and woke up every morning to that the chrysler building was named after the chrysler motor company and its owner walter p chrysler it was built it was the tallest building in the world deliberately streamlined and sleek the famous gargoyles that jut out of the balconies up here the ones margaret burke white is sitting on in those scary photos of her they were modelled on this the hood ornament of a chrysler car a soaring eagle representing the conquest of the skies and there were more of these futuristic gargoyles on the 31st floor a flying mermaid based on this the radiator cap of a plymouth coupe one of the best sellers in the chrysler range as for the gleaming silver spire that tops the chrysler building so majestically that was made from a new fabric imported from germany an amalgam of silver nickel and steel called nerosta developed by the crop company in essen better known for producing u-boats and tanks you know this view up here reminds me of that painting we saw in the last film the one about the wild west that stunning view of the grand canyon by thomas moran [Music] the one which critics said looked like a view into dante's inferno what's certainly true is that up here and down there are two different worlds and that down there another reality was taking shape america was on the cusp of the great depression it just didn't know it yet [Music] you know before the advent of the skyscraper the only tall thin bits of architecture in the western world were church spires or lighthouses symbols of hope poking up on the skyline that's why the chrysler building with that elegant pointy top looks like a futuristic lighthouse the modern metropolis was being invented but the message it was trying to convey was the old architectural message of hope and salvation this is another famous landmark of modern new york the brooklyn bridge which spans the east river between brooklyn and manhattan so this really is a bridge over troubled waters when it was built this was the longest suspension bridge in the world miracle of modern engineering but the famous arches of the brooklyn bridge have stolen their shape from a french cathedral their giant clear story windows soaring gothically into the heavens lots of artists have painted the brooklyn bridge with its looming gothic symbolism but there was one artist who took a special fancy to it and who painted it over and over again because it struck a haunting cord in him [Music] his name was joseph stella stella came to new york from a small town near naples he'd worked with the italian futurists and when he got to new york the modernity of the city bowled him over [Music] i felt deeply moved he wrote after seeing the brooklyn bridge as if on the threshold of a new religion this is stellar's masterpiece it's in the museum in newark and it's called the voice of the city of new york interpreted and as you can see it's arranged like an altarpiece with this big scene in the middle and the panels on either side flanking it so five panels in all and that's what they'd call in renaissance times apocalyptic [Music] these lower parts are positioned like the predellas of a renaissance altarpiece here's one by giotto so you can see what i mean [Music] mankind had something new to believe in it could believe in progress [Music] there's the brooklyn bridge with its looming gothic arches and here in the middle the towers of the city the skyscrapers rising up like lighthouses and over here broadway with its glowing halo of bright angelic colors and the whole thing is throbbing and pulsing with this new electric energy so it's an altarpiece to progress and the other thing it looks like is a stained glass window with these pulsing colors and the black tracery and that sense of light streaming through it [Music] it's the modern metropolis as the savior of civilization and that's how stella saw it but it's not how everyone else saw it looming up on america's horizon was the biggest economic meltdown in modern history the great depression where did progress really lead it's led to this i'm not a boxing fan but back in the early days of progress plenty of new yorkers were up in the sky the city was embracing the new modernity but down on the ground the old brutalities were thriving boxing had actually been illegal in new york since 1900 but to get around the ban fights were staged in private clubs saloons basically with a boxing ring in the back where one guy would beat the crap out of another guy and everybody else would bet on it fortunately for us a great artist was at hand to record these sleazy backroom clubbings and to witness the foreplay to the great depression he looked a bit like bing crosby smiley and american but george bellows knew darkness when he saw it joseph stella and margaret burke white may have trusted the myth of progress but george bellows didn't in his youth bellows had been a talented sportsman he was so good at baseball he was asked to turn professional by the cincinnati reds but he chose art instead and became one of the very rare artists who made sport the subject of their best work in fact he's the only one i can think of but bellows boxing pictures aren't just boxing pictures the black heavyweight winning this savage tussle in 1909 is jack johnson the first black heavyweight champion of the world by celebrating johnson's victory bellows was fighting his own brave fight against national prejudice [Music] bellows's studio was across the road from a dive called tom sharkey's athletics club what it really was was a drinking den owned by a former heavyweight champ called tom sharkey to fight there you had to be a signed up member of the athletics club so the travelling boxers who turned up there were given temporary membership and they were called stags and that's why bellows is most famous picture is called the stag at sharkies it's a scene of spotlet brutality two wild animals in a ring are locked in a deadly hold like a pair of rutting stags [Applause] bellows positions us in the audience looking up at the fight baying with the rest of them [Applause] much of the paint work is out of focus thank god these are not details you wish to see clearly when staggered sharkies was unveiled one of the critics complained that bellows had got everything wrong they didn't understand what was going on in the ring i don't know anything about boxing bellows replied i was just painting two men trying to kill each other [Applause] so no they're not really boxing pictures that's just their cover what they really are is dark proof of a primitive human appetite for violence coming up later in this film there's plenty of color and brightness and abstraction but it's not coming up yet and it never comes up in the art of george bellows [Applause] you know one of the things i like about american art is how many american artists started out as cartoonists bellows was a classic example at university and in his first few jobs he was a cartoonist bellows worked for a snippy socialist rag called the masses here's the white contender jess willard beating the black heavyweight champ jack johnson the savior of his race says the caption but he doesn't look like a savior to me [Applause] that sarki thing that instinct for wise cracks that's an american thing you see it in bellows paintings too [Applause] there's a marvelous one in los angeles county museum a view of a crowded new york tenement which he called the cliff dwellers [Music] in the modern city the poor and the disadvantaged were now living like prehistoric [Music] troglodytes remember thomas hart benton from the last film the one about the wild west he was another one benton ran away from home at the age of 17 to become a cartoonist look into the corners of those tremendous murals that benton painted up and down america and you'll see him displaying his cartoon talents in observations that are sake and pointed these american wisecrackers they're not funny cartoonists they're not trying to make you laugh these are grouchy observers of society pointing out the problems philip gustin was another one remember him from the last film gustin had a short spell as an abstract expressionist a delicate one at that but he had things inside him that he needed to say and in the end it all came bursting out in some of the slobbiest imagery in the whole of modern art at first his work strikes a humorous note but only for a moment and then the sense of tragedy and hopelessness and failure starts poking through [Music] guston started out as a cartoonist as a kid he was always drawing and when he was 13 his mother bought him a correspondence course at the cleveland school of cartooning and that was it the cartoon bug bit him [Music] half a century later at the other end of his career gustin proved how much cartooning fury he still had in him when he mounted a crazed assault on the american president richard nixon nixon had broken every promise he made on vietnam and look what guston did to him in revenge [Music] what a shame he's not around today now of course all this didn't happen in europe european artists were in the serious business of progressing modernism the new religion humor was never part of their armory but these wise cracking americans were different they worked in newspapers because they had to times were tough and you worked where you could to fund your art [Music] this is a painting by ad reinhardt perhaps the most hardcore of all american abstractionists art doesn't get blanker than this or more provocatively black so that was what reinhart was showing in the galleries but at the same time he was working for various new york newspapers as a cartoonist pouring out twisty observations on the subject of art [Music] what does this represent um what do you represent [Music] funnily enough my first job in journalism was doing cartoons they were awful of course so one day the editor turned around and said is there anything else you can do and i started writing art reviews but i still have faith in the cartoonist's vision and the subversive attitude that goes with it it brought something different and edgy to american art and particularly to a painter who specialized in depicting the sleaze and the decadence of new york in the 30s reginald marsh was his name so this is my idea of a funny new york cartoon [Music] and this is reginald marshes [Music] the great depression was triggered by events on wall street in 1929 and as the black clouds of economic misery settled on manhattan the poor and the disconnected headed for coney island it's where you went to get away from it all and it still is reginald marsh loved coming to coney island he loved watching the crowds of eager beachgoers who flooded here in the summer desperate for some fun and some sunshine remember those grim cliff dwellers that george bellows painted the urban troglodytes crowded into dark tenements stacked up like chicken coops [Music] well those same urban troglodytes turned into something else when they got to coney island they turned into reginald marsh characters the new yorkers who populate reginald marsh's art seem temporarily to have forgotten that the economy's crashed they live in chicken coops and that there are no jobs out there for them cruising women with a spring in their step and a thrust in their hips may west playing in the cinema happy spears hanging around the box office great depression what great depression marsh was actually born in paris both his parents were artists and he studied art at yale and his first job was yes you've guessed it as a cartoonist first for the new york daily news and then for the new yorker as a cartoonist he was wry and sneaky and he made his points in an american way with a joke or a sake aside sticking in the knife with a wisecrack the cartoons were clever and sneaky but his paintings were something else the paintings seemed to reconnect him with his french origins and they're full of life and exuberance it's as if he'd opened up a large tap and all this new york energy came surging out so many people in such writhing crowds out to enjoy themselves what i like most about marsh's coney island pictures is the complete absence in them of a censorious tone there's no finger wagging or tutting all sorts of wild things were going on around him and marsh didn't disapprove of any of them it's as if he understood fully and openheartedly why new yorkers in the 1930s needed to come to coney island why they fled the tenements and the labor exchanges and flocked instead to the cinemas and the beaches the men in their sharpest suits the women in their brightest dresses descending on coney island to forget a fabulous painting by him of a woman from harlem strutting down the street like she owns it i'd love to show you the actual picture but it's in the bill cosby collection so i can't i can only give you a rough idea with some magazine photos from the era there she is strutting down the street in a dress so brazenly yellow it stings the eye [Music] in years to come issues of race would push to the front of american art but in these early decades they were largely silent though when diana ross starred as billie holiday in lady sings the blues she borrowed the brazen yellow dress painted by reginald marsh and the attitude that goes with it these days you don't hear much about reginald marsh that urban exuberance he captured here on coney island doesn't fit the usual storylines about new york in the 30s it doesn't fit what was going on up there in chrysler building america and it doesn't fit what was going on on the ground among the cliff dwellers so marsh has fallen between the cracks and been forgotten but not in this film this film salutes him and commends his eye for detail his independence and his exuberance because this too is the spirit of [Applause] america the l train the elevated railway that ran up and down manhattan wasn't just a way of getting to coney island or traveling around new york it was also a way of looking into new york from up on the elevated tracks you could peep into people's lives offices kitchens bedrooms flashed by with tempting glimpses and the most persistent of the artistic voyeurs who took advantage of this lofty viewpoint was edward hopper no one in art has peeped through as many windows as hopper before his painting started to sell hopper worked as an illustrator in and around manhattan so he traveled a lot on the l train and he'd look through the windows into the homes of all the strangers out there and he'd imagine things about them what's going on in this office he's the boss she's the secretary and something's happening between them but you don't know what it is and this woman here is home alone lost in thought and completely unaware that someone is spying on her there was definitely something creepy about hopper sitting on the l train staring through the windows and all those women out there but he wasn't a straightforward peeping tom it's not just voyeurism there's something else as well something edgy telling hopper's art seems always to notice the distance between people and how unbridgeable it is however hard he stares at the women he glimpses from the l he can never get inside their thoughts they're always over there and he's always over here you must have had that feeling when you look at someone a stranger and you ask yourself i wonder what they're thinking and of course you can never know because other people's thoughts belong to them not to you and that is what hopper painted it's a powerful sensation that sense of separation and distance he was like that as a man as well blank and unfathomable his wife described him brilliantly sometimes talking to eddie she said is like dropping a stone into a well except that it doesn't thump when it hits the bottom i think hopper understood better than any american artist how in the modern city you can be part of the bustling crowd yet still feel utterly alone and hopper was from new york he belonged here so imagine what it was like for all the foreign artists who arrived in manhattan in these shifty years looking for sanctuary and a home where to start there were so many of them willem de kooning came from holland in 1926 and became a painter of furious women on stormy canvases [Music] mondrian arrived from london and fell in love with the geometry of the city and its boogie woogie rhythms john graham began life as jan dombrowski or ivan grazianovic or jen gresham no one was ever sure who he really was or where he really came from when foreign artists turned up in america they were welcomed and sorted here at the infamous ellis island you know there aren't enough stars or stripes on the star-spangled banner to count the number of important artists who arrived on ellis island from somewhere else and became americans when it came to art immigration made america great again from thomas moran born in bolton lancashire who wowed us in the last film to mark rothko born in russia in davinsk who's coming up in a moment the impact of foreigners on american art has been game changing [Music] what all these foreign artists brought with them was a range of influences and experiences that were new in american art a fresh compost that helped it grow but they also brought a sense of displacement a feeling that they were from somewhere else that they didn't belong here it's an attitude that planted itself in american art and became a driving force it inspired art that drifts and wobbles and seems never to be anchored it's great art and i love it but its molecules are unfixed the word karl marx used for it is alienation having no roots being disconnected and that's what happened to an especially brilliant arrival here at ellis island perhaps my favorite 20th century american painter the artist who called himself shield gorky [Music] gorky was an armenian from lake van in modern turkey born as vostanek in 1904 or perhaps 1902 or even 1900 this is him with his mother there are a lot of myths about gorky most of them spread by him when he came to america and changed his name he said he was descended from the great russian writer maxim gorky except that maxim gorky's real name was alexei peshkov so that was a lie gorky's art like his identity kept changing shape he started out as a suzanne fan here's one of his early still lives american fruit looking very french [Music] next up was a picasso phase where he clunkily copied the master's touch later still he did these for newark airport they were flying murals ten of them originally though only these two have survived they're good and there's definitely something aeronautic about them but they still feel derivative as if someone else invented the style but this doesn't this was painted in 1944 and it brought something completely new to american art this is gorky aged 40 or 41 or 42 who knows but he's finding himself at last it's abstraction but there's something figurative about it the mood is outdoor like a gorgeous armenian orchard remembered from his childhood but there's some walt disney in there as well isn't there and a bit of tom and jerry this was new and it was brilliant gorky had fused all the things that went into him and invented a new visual language for the first time in its history american art was doing something no one had done before a new kind of painting had slipped into the crack between figuration and abstraction and personally i'd be happy to keep showing you the gorgeous things that came pouring out of our shield gorky for the rest of this film but that might make you think there was a happy ending when there wasn't one art had triumphed but his life began now to fall apart 1946 his studio burnt down and he lost a clutch of important pictures and later that year he was diagnosed with rectal cancer and had to have a colostomy then he broke his neck in a car accident and damaged his painting arm and a few months later his wife left him and took the children gorky decided to commit suicide but he couldn't even do that properly he tied various ropes to various trees but none of them worked until eventually on the 21st of july 1948 he hanged himself from the roof of an old barn and finally finished it thus his end like his beginning was rootless and dark but the darkness and the rootlessness seeped also into his art and nourished it in human terms it was a lousy deal but artistically it led to greatness artistic talent wasn't the only thing brought to america by arriving visitors there were also new ways of thinking and new religions this is madame blavatsky the notorious spiritualist and founder of the theosophical society of america blavatsky was born in russia but she was a wanderer and having wandered through india north africa the middle east she fetched up in new york where she founded her new religion [Music] theosophy turned a lot of heads and a remarkable number of them were the heads of artists when mondrian died here in new york one of the few possessions he'd brought with him from europe was this photo of madame blavatsky it's one of the great untold stories of modernism how the mysterious cult of theosophy changed art [Music] remember in the last film how jackson pollock was bewitched by theosophy and how its mystic language began filling his pictures with arcane symbols and obscure numbers theosophy's influence was remarkable hundreds of significant american artists fell under its spell including thomas wilfred who made these paintings with light or lumia as he called them shimmering galaxies of color created in the 1930s but aimed very much at the future [Music] wilfred was originally from denmark he'd studied art in paris and then toured around europe performing minstrel songs on an archaic loot with his lumia which he played on an instrument called a claviluxe which he invented in 1919 he was seeking to blur the boundaries between art and music [Music] the big idea in theosophy is that underneath all the small and visible realities in the world there lies a divine super reality a limitless cosmic order that links everything together that's why gogan who lived next door to a theosophist in tahiti painted this strange picture of jesus and buddha sharing the path to enlightenment [Music] in theosophy the beliefs of the east and the beliefs of the west are the same thing i suppose it's what these days would call new age thinking and here in america this theosophical understanding of reality was particularly popular among the immigrants like thomas wilfred who washed up here uprooted and exiled when you're far from home and you don't belong how comforting to be told that there's something bigger out there a reality that unites us and makes us one the other thing theosophy did was to promote abstract art if you're a theosophist and you think all this stuff on the surface is irrelevant then your job as an artist is to search for the underlying order and to depict it even thomas edison who invented the light bulb was a [Music] bringing light into our world wasn't just a practical ambition it was a theosophical one as well of course these days it's totally unfashionable to point out that a mysterious occult religion founded by a russian spiritualist was the driving force behind the leap into abstraction but it was and madame blavatsky's wacky ideas had their biggest impact here at the guggenheim museum in new york this is where abstraction triumphed solomon r guggenheim who founded this great museum made his money in alaskan gold pots of it which he then began to spend madly on art guggenheim was a gold man not an art man so he asks for advice about what art to buy from the woman who painted this portrait of him hillary bay was her name actually she was called baroness hildegard anna augusta elizabeth ribei von echren weissen and she was a genuine german aristocrat another transported european with deep theosophical roots rebay discovered theosophy when she was 14 and sneaked out of her castle to study it she started out as a figurative painter but the more she thought about theosophy the clearer it was to her that art needed a fresh start for rebay modern art wasn't a style it was a religion a calling something that would save the world and when solomon guggenheim put her in charge of his collection she began channeling all the guggenheim resources into what she called non-objective art kandinsky that keen theosophist was a big favorite so was rudolph ribei's lover and theosophist buddy who's pretty much forgotten today but whose work used to dominate the guggenheim collection and to display the new art rebay created a weird new museum the museum of non-objective painting where the pictures were hung at strange heights and the music of bach and chopin echoed through the galleries the collection of non-objective painting expanded so quickly that somewhere bigger was soon needed to house it so rebay commissioned an architect with theosophist leanings called frank lloyd wright to design a new headquarters for the guggenheim collection the temple of the spirit she called it somewhere where the light could spread up and out into the waiting cosmos originally the guggenheim was going to be red that's what frank lloyd wright wanted but for theosophists red is the color of materialism so rebay vetoed the pink and insisted instead on something more angelic a spiral of light that climbs towards the heavens thomas wilfred would have understood all that light was his material as well and in the catalogue for this astonishing show at the yale university art gallery there's an introduction by the contemporary light artist james tyrell who i think is the greatest artist currently at work in the world terrell tells us that when he was a kid his aunt who was into theosophy took him to the museum of modern art in new york to see monet's water lilies instead it was this work here by thomas wilfred that fascinated him and persuaded him to become an artist and that's why in 1979 terrell bought a volcano in the painted desert in arizona and began filling it with secret chambers where wondrous things happen with light the egyptians had their pyramids james tyrell has the rodent crater and right at the top ascending to the heavens is a golden stare climbing into the light thus in far away arizona madame blavatsky continues to pull the strings of american art this is the rothko chapel in texas a non-denominational space to which all religions are welcome so it's a chapel a place for spiritual and religious feelings but without any actual religion in it just these marvelous paintings by mark rothko transporting us with their color and their mood at the rothko chapel the stillness moves you and the nothingness fills you up as your spirit is replenished by art rothko was another immigrant from davinsk in russia his real name was marcus yokovlevich rothkovitz he was born in 1903 and arrived in new york in 1913 just in time to witness the outbreak of the first world war [Music] rothko spoke no english he was jewish and his shabby clothes marked him out immediately as a foreigner [Music] from the start to the end he couldn't belong and alienation was the city's gift to him as it was to so many [Music] it took marcus yocovlovich rothkovitz a long time to become mark rothko his early art is hard to look at it's so full of struggle [Music] first he dabbled in a bit of cabala then he mixed in some freud some myths some surrealism and a stew of union archetypes a vulnerable psyche had signed itself up for all the voyages into the self that were going [Music] finally though after all the battles he came out at the other end with these pulsing fogs of color that loom over you and envelop you so you sink into their mood when rothko began painting his famous frogs at the end of the 1940s it was among the most radical steps that art had ever taken the size of his art was new so was its emptiness and the courage to take this momentous step into the unknown was the great gift of the american city to its new arrivals you turn up on ellis island where you don't belong you've got no ties no anchor no tradition you're on a gang plank above the void and that's scary but it's also full of possibilities if the old rules no longer apply you're completely free to invent some new ones rothko painted his glowing masterpieces with a courage and an intensity that speaks to all but he was also irredeemably unhappy the new freedom was the result of disconnection and a sense of estrangement and it was hardly a surprise when in 1970 rootless and unfixed rothko like gorky before him committed [Music] suicide so there was a heads and details to arriving in the metropolis in the golden age of american art the heads was that you were free like no one before to make art that no one had ever made the tales was that you didn't belong no one did just enough for the city in the next film i'm jumping into a model a ford and heading for that much maligned american territory the small town they say nothing much happens in a small town but they're wrong [Applause]

Channel: Perspective

Views: 222,856

Rating: 4.8025055 out of 5

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, modern art, visual arts, art history, documentary movies - topic, tv shows - topic, art history lessons, waldemar januszczak, waldemar januszczak documentary, famous art, famous paintings

Id: uD9J3lhFzpU

Length: 58min 55sec (3535 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020