From The Wild West To Jackson Pollock: America In Art (Art History Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] right away [Music] [Applause] this is a film about a place people used to call the promised land [Music] they came here to follow their dreams and change their lives but i'm here to look for art because the spirit of a place is always in the art [Music] that's the spiral jetty it's a famous piece of land art made in 1970 by the american artist robert smithson smithson turned up here with a few thousand bucks in his pocket hired some bulldozers and created this giant stone spiral jutting out mysteriously into the great salt lake in utah the thing is smithson couldn't have made this anywhere else it had to be made in these conditions by this lake in this landscape because that's what land art is all about fitting the art to the place and that's what this series is about as well it's about how the spirit of america soaked into the art that was created here and made it unique [Music] [Music] if you keep going across america you eventually get to the wild west and that's where i'm starting because the wild west did strange and powerful things to american art these days with all the bad cowboy movies that have been made here places like this no longer surprise us they've become a cliche but imagine seeing all this for the first time imagine coming over the mountain on your trusty mule and this looms up in front of you your legs would have turned to rubber and your heart would have gone boom buddy bum buddy bum although most of the american west had officially been part of the united states since 1803 70 years later it was still largely a mystery getting there was dangerous and difficult until in 1869 this thing came along the iron horse with its relentless gallop and its dragon's breath [Music] with the construction of the transcontinental railway the american west was finally open for business and all kinds of shady characters piled onto the trains to take advantage of the opportunities [Music] gamblers bandits gold diggers they all got on the train and so too did those especially dangerous desperados the artists [Music] this is green river in wyoming and that is the so-called castle rock made famous by this fellow here thomas moran from bolton in lancashire was seven years old when his father packed his family onto a boat in liverpool and swapped the satanic mills of lancashire for the promised land little thomas grew up to be a talented artist and in 1871 just after the railways got here he turned up in green river as part of an official government survey that had arrived here to map the newly opened lands of the west when moran painted the green river this was already a squalid little town with a railway running through it one of those feral frontier throw-ups they called hell on wheels but you wouldn't know it from his sublime evocations of it one of his tricks was to build a scaffold from lightweight bamboo and from the top of it he'd look down on the land a god's eye view that made the west look even more awesome than it already was the indians he painted trekking through the valley were invented where they're trekking is where the railroad was and as for those colors those burning yellows and fiery oranges those were stolen directly from turner this is moran's view of yellowstone painted after he got back from his first expedition to the west and this was actually acquired by the government for ten thousand dollars a huge amount of money in the days when the american government believed in art so persuasive was moran's dramatic yellowstone that this picture was the key reason why in 1872 yellowstone was turned into a national park the first in america and the first in the world [Music] the grand canyon painted on moran's second trip to the west and what you get from it immediately is how these huge western lands felt so biblical with these scary chasms and the towering deserts the scale of it the sense of descent reminded people of dante's inferno when the critic from the new york times saw this picture he described it as the most diabolical scene man has ever looked upon [Music] and here at the autry museum in los angeles made famous by the singing cowboy gene autry they have the third of moran's great picturings of the american west the mountain of the holy cross on a hill far away in the wilds of colorado there's a mountain on which the snow forms a miraculous white cross that never melts and which can be seen from far away this was the hardest place to get to but moran was determined to paint it because the miraculous white cross on the mountain was such a perfect symbol of america's divine destiny [Music] the waterfall and the raging torrents were invented by moran to heighten the symbolism and to give his picture an even bigger storyline the holy waters rushing down the mountain towards us baptizing america moran wanted to hang his three great paintings of the west the yellowstone the grand canyon and this all together like a giant altarpiece a triptych but congress wouldn't lend them so it never happened not in real life anyway but this isn't real life this is tv and on tv we can do what thomas moran wanted and we can do more than that we can also jump ahead in time and see how the rhythm and the dimensions and the sublime presence of the american landscape soaked into the national art these are by clifford still the loner of abstract expressionism and a man of the west [Music] feel his moods look where they come from and what about this from jackson pollock hero of the american west and this film's ultimate destination while the landscape painters of the american west were imagining the awesome landscapes of the promised land a second branch of early cowboy art was turning its attention to the inhabitants cowboys as we know them with their gunfights and their bucking broncos were largely the invention of a fellow called frederick sack rider remington he was america's most popular cowboy artist though you wouldn't know it from looking at him remington was born in new york state so he was another easterner with an overactive imagination his family wanted frederick to become something respectable but he had the artistic gene in him and it led him astray remington had been drawing pictures of cowboys since he was a schoolboy as many of us little boys do but the rest of us grow out of it and he never did [Applause] during the civil war his father had been a colonel in the army and he wanted little freddie to follow him but little freddy grew up to become big freddy and like me he was too fat to be a soldier so all his fighting was done on paper he worked as an illustrator for various books and magazines and he was immensely popular largely because he'd invented this dramatic persona for himself as the man who really knew the west who'd lived it and experienced it remington's paintings had a reputation for being strikingly authentic full of insider knowledge and accurate details to me they look like the covers of cowboy comics and where remington is much more impressive is in his sculptures [Music] this is his most ambitious horse sculpture it's called coming through the rye and if you know your scottish poetry you'll know that coming through the rye is a line from a poem by rabbi burns it's later turned into a famous song in a body meets a body coming through the eye again a buddy meet a buddy coming through the road again the poem is actually pretty steamy a man meets a woman in a field of rye and she's wearing a wet dress well you can imagine the rest that's why jd salinger referred to it as well in his celebrated novel about the awakening of teenage sexuality the catcher in the rye [Music] but all that steamy stuff went over remington's head and what he actually shows us here is some cowboys coming into town after a successful roundup and they're riding straight at us through the rye whooping it up in this brilliant blur of sculptural movement look down here can you see how only a few of the hooves are actually touching the ground and they're supporting the weight of the entire sculpture and this fellow around here his horse isn't touching the ground at all it's flying through the air at full speed it's a technical tour de force remington sculptures are as ambitious as any statues produced in the renaissance but where a renaissance bronze might show you the labors of hercules or the battles of the gods [Music] fat freddie remington gives us a bunch of whooping cowboys heading for the saloon there's just one more thing i'd like you to see before we leave cody wyoming and it's this the irma hotel built by buffalo bill cody who gave the town its name and that museum full of remingtons the irma hotel was named after buffalo bill's daughter irma and i've brought you here because somebody who's important for the story of american art worked in here as a dishwasher [Music] it was a fellow called leroy pollock now leroy was a bit of a waste stroll but he did leave american art one extraordinary gift because it was here in cody wyoming the leroy had a son and he called him paul pollock paul didn't like being called paul it wasn't western enough for him he preferred his middle name jackson [Music] and since we're going to be hearing a lot about jackson pollock in this film i thought you should see where he came from gunfighters and bronco busters were not of course the first inhabitants of these extraordinary lands [Music] long before fat freddie remington began imagining his cowboys there was art being made here that was mysterious and profound the native americans who had their lands stolen by the invading cowboys didn't have a written language they didn't need it they could communicate with something far better than words they could communicate with art all over the great outdoor museum of the american west you can find mysterious art carved onto the boulders and painted onto the rocks this rock here it's called the birthing rock has 8 000 years worth of ancient art incised into its stone by the various native cultures who passed through here [Music] why did they choose this particular rock perhaps because there's something thoroughly mysterious about the way it's just plonked down here as if it's dropped from the sky there's art all the way around it and these are called petroglyphs they're cut into the rock so you scratch the outer layer of the stone and reveal this brighter sandstone underneath it's called the birthing rock because of this scene here can you see it's a woman giving birth to a baby but it's a breach birth so the baby's feet are coming out first why is it here what does it mean we'll never know for sure but it must be something to do with fertility and survival because rock art is always about the big issues up the road from the birthing rock is another dramatic location for native american rock art the place they call sago canyon most of the huge figures here are painted onto the rocks rather than scratched so these are pictographs not petroglyphs all kinds of wacky proposals have been put forward to explain these a particularly popular one is that they show aliens who landed on earth in ancient times visitors from outer space come to see if america was for them in a way this mad aliens idea isn't that far away from the truth because rock art wherever it's made and you find it right across the globe is an attempt to communicate with another world the world behind the surface [Music] when we didn't know where water came from or where babies are made or what the sky is when everything was a mystery that's when art came to our rescue imagine waking up in the morning 8 000 years ago and remembering your dreams where have you seen the things you've just seen where have you been there must be another world out there another reality and artists were special because not only could they visit this other reality they could describe it too i don't like the word shamans it's loaded with so much spurious hocus pocus but sometimes it's the only word that will do the miraculous power of artists to enter the dream world and come back with images of it was a power like no other in the world of the ancients art wasn't there to decorate things it was there to change them and even if we can't understand what it's saying anymore we can still feel its power and that's why american rock art has been so influential wind the clock forwards to the age of abstract expressionism and you'll see its impact on modern american art the paintings of adolf gottlieb were a 20th century search for ancient mysteries [Music] and look at the fierce art of jean-michel basquiat if you came across this scrawled onto a rock you wouldn't be surprised would you [Music] after bumming around america searching for work in arizona california the pollock family from cody wyoming ended up like so many pilgrims before them in the city of angels paul pollock or jackson as he became went to this school here the manual arts high school from which he soon managed to get himself expelled for producing a leaflet attacking the school's sports department pollock wasn't alone in getting himself thrown out of manual arts a second delinquent was expelled with him he was known in those days as philip goldstein but he too changed his name and we know him better today as philip gustin the two of them had an art teacher called frederick schwankovsky now even by la standards schwankovsky was eccentric he had long hair down to here wore purple jackets and sandals and he believed in all sorts of strange eastern philosophies and he's the one who introduced guston and pollock to theosophy the occult doctrine of theosophy has been brutally redacted from the story of modern art even here in california it's an art historical embarrassment no one wants to believe that theosophy changed anything but it did actually theosophy changed everything without it abstract art would never have happened all the pioneers of abstraction all of them kandinsky mondrian malevich the italian futurists boccioni and balor all of them were fascinated by theosophy and jackson pollock was fascinated by it too this shady grove in ohar is where frederick schwankovsky brought jackson pollock and philip guston to hear the teachings of krishna murti the californian guru of theosophy greta garbo charlie chaplin john lennon they all came out here to hear krishnamurti speak so what's theosophy about well frankly life's too short to go into it in detail to understand any of it you have to have read this the secret doctrine by madame blavatsky and that's not something i'd wish upon anybody especially not you nice sensible people watching this film so i've read it for you and tried my best to comprehend the most important thing that theosophy teaches is that the universe has an underlying order that the stuff on the surface is just stuff on the surface below it there's a deeper reality and that's what artists need to show so it wasn't that different from what the native americans believed that there was a universal reality beyond the visible reality and that only artists could see it [Music] and it wasn't just theosophy that schwankovsky introduced to pollock and guston he was also a fervent communist with a passion for mexico and its art in mexico in 1910 just across the border from hollywood so right under the nose of the movie industry a real live revolution had broken out pancho villa the notorious rebel leader was even said to have signed an exclusive contract with the mutual film company to film him in action [Music] pancho they say would delay his battles so that hollywood's cameraman could get there in time to film him thus mexico its revolution its politics its passion began to exert a powerful hold on american art [Music] mexico city where your pulse quickens as soon as the plane lands what an exhilarating city it is and what great art treasures it holds i love rome i love venice i love paris saint petersburg new york they're all great art cities but for sheer excitement for that raw artistic thing that makes your heart go boom buddy bum buddy boom the art of mexico city is in a league of its own this is the ministry of education painted in the years 1922-1928 the mural masterpiece of diego rivera [Music] this used to be a dominican convent but after the revolution it became the ministry of education and rivera was handed the entire space 15 000 square feet of it to fill with his revolutionary murals they call this the sistine chapel of the americas it's a display of ambition and invention the like of which the new world had never seen rivera had traveled extensively in italy and he'd seen how during the renaissance the monasteries of florence were filled with frescoes but this is more than a tribute to the renaissance this is an attempt to outdo it anything giotto could do in florence diego rivera could trump in mexico city all together there are 235 fresco panels in here and rivera single-handedly painted most of them here's the day of the dead when everyone in mexico gets annually happy and this is the burning of the judases when unpopular politicians are turned into puppets and set a light in the streets but rivera saves his best moments for up here on the next floor where the gringos and their filthy capitalism come in for a fearful bashing this is called the wall street supper the rich bankers of wall street the rockefellers the jp morgans are seated at a capitalist dinner tucking in to the gold ticker tape of the stock exchange and the culmination of it all is up here the overthrow of the capitalists in the mexican revolution here's the battle in the trenches in 1910 and then a few years later handing out guns to the soldiers there's someone you may recognize ah yes the proud and redoubtable frieda carlo rivera's wife heroine of the revolution handing out rifles to the rebels [Music] so yes it's agit prop but agit prop that thrills and delights when this was painted most mexicans had never been to school and was still illiterate murals became the chosen art of mexico because they spoke to all of the people all of the time [Music] and it wasn't just mexicans that painted them visiting americans were at it too this faded whopper in the small town of moralia three hours out of mexico city was painted by jackson pollock's buddy philip goldstein who became philip gustin it shows the forces of evil being bashed up by the forces of good and if we leap forwards 40 years to the nixon era here's philip gustin again expressing his respect for his president mexican style [Music] do you know when the star spangled banner became the national anthem of america you'd think it was the 19th century wouldn't you but no it was the 30s 1931. [Music] it was originally a drinking song written for a gentleman's club in london but new lyrics were added about the land of the brave and in 1931 it became the national anthem another resonant creation of the american imagination so we caught up with philip goldstein who became philip gustin but what about his buddy jackson pollock what was he up to [Music] jackson went through a cowboy phase in his art as well and had his high noon moment but he was a restless soul and his cowboy imagination was soon seeking other trails to follow [Music] his father leroy remember him had gotten the job as a surveyor and he'd take jackson with him on his long trips into the desert and remember how jackson had got interested in eastern mysticism with theosophy and all that well it was here in the desert that he first encountered the sand art of the native americans [Music] with sand art you make pictures by dropping or dribbling coloured sand onto the ground so it's a physical way of making art with your whole body an action art so you can see straight away what influence that might have had on jack the dripper but not just yet first he needed to go through another of his phases what we might call his regionalist phase when he fell under the influence of a powerful and significant american artist called thomas hart benton who specialized in depictions of rural america rural america was a hot topic in the 1930s a subject that stirred deep emotions and thomas hart benton was the chief stirrer [Music] this was painted specially for the country music hall of fame the marvellous museum here in nashville and it shows the origins of country music it's like a jamie oliver recipe of all the ingredients that went into country a bit of gospel a bit of banjo lots of fiddle and guitar and a big smoking train bringing its chug chug chug to the sound of country [Music] and benton knew what he was talking about hear that harmonica blaring out and drowning out my words that's benton himself playing on one of his records the mural was mexico's great gift to american culture a way of telling stories that everyone could understand and benton didn't half pump them out this one here was painted for the state capital in jefferson city missouri benton's home state and it tells the story of missouri the industry the cornfields the fun that was had here and the horror [Music] i love the way he stood up for the oppressed and poked fun at the establishment and the brain work involved in planning all this is so impressive the way it unfolds around you with these interlocking scenes it's like a 3d comic book we know exactly how he did it because there's a film of him making his murals and the process is fascinating he first experiments with rhythmic designs or dynamic patterns he'd start with a flow chart of the murals abstract movement no figures just the rhythm he wanted the abstract underpinning once he'd got the overall rhythm he'd start sketching in the figures still keeping the abstract design but filling it with recognizable shapes the pencil drawing is given third dimension in a clay model next he'd make a sculpture in clay of the entire scene position all the figures to see how the light falls on them [Music] and when that was done and only then he began painting putting in the colors the final layer the icing on the cake so all these great mural cycles of his have an abstract framework to them lurking under the bottom of the image you can't always see it but it's there and they were all painted with egg tempera and when he painted this his masterpiece in the metropolitan museum in new york it's called america today the rumor is that he was paid with eggs not money eggs painting with egg tempera is a wispy delicate and busy process the brush flicks and slides dances and twitches and there's a sense of perpetual motion to it all now all these lessons about starting with an abstract rhythm painting in layers painting quickly and ristily these were all things that benton was teaching his students and his students repaid him by modeling for his murals like this fellow here who's whipped off his shirt and who twists heroically like a michelangelo's slave that is benton's most loyal and celebrated pupil that is jackson pollock [Music] pollock arrived in new york in 1930 he was 19. a hick from the west who wore cowboy boots and a stetson and who strutted about manhattan like wyatt's ear as soon as he got here he enrolled as a student at the art students league an independent art school for painters who wanted to get better benton was a teacher here and he had his work cut out because according to the people who knew pollock in his first days in new york when it came to art he wasn't a natural [Music] this is his first and only self-portraits it's scarily intense black bleak and clumsy [Music] benton to his credit saw through the clumsiness and spotted something real in there he took pollock under his wing nursed him educated him and as we saw used him as a model [Music] there's jackson again playing the harmonica in another benton mural which lists all the fun you could have in america they were so close that pollock moved into the same house as benton here in 8th street number 46 and that's where he developed a fierce crush on benton's wife rita who played with him flirtatiously and helped to derail him [Music] pollock had been a drinker since he was fifteen but it was in new york that it became a problem [Music] there was something harsh inside him something brutal and primitive it came out when he drank and it came out when he painted [Music] the drinking got so bad he was forced to see a shrink and for four years he was in psychotherapy and it all came spilling out [Music] pollock's union therapist encouraged him to get in touch with his unconscious self and boy did he do that with pollock now and later there's a feeling that he's hanging on for dear life while all this stuff comes bursting out of him his breakthrough picture the one that made him famous was painted in 1942 for his new dealer peggy guggenheim and according to legend the whole thing was painted in a single night the day before he was due to deliver it it's called mural and it's the size and shape of a thomas benton mural it originally showed a stampede of wild west mustangs and they're still in there somewhere but where benton started with abstraction then added the figures pollock reverses the process he started with the mustangs but ended up with their rhythm with peggy guggenheim supporting him he finally had some money and in 1945 he moved to a house on long island and began making his celebrated drip paintings they were done on the floor he'd put a canvas on the ground and inspired by the sand paintings of the navajo he'd prowl around it and drip paint onto it [Music] he began with some figurative shapes heads bodies faces whatever jumped into his mind indicated quickly with a runny black paint that responded immediately to his twitches and thrusts and there was always music playing not country music like benton but jazz that's the music that suited his rhythm he'd put jazz on the record player and play it night and day over and over again everything he was interested in was pulling him in the same direction the theosophy the union therapy the sand art of the navajo benton's murals with their hidden abstraction and what they all had in common was the belief that the visible world was just a surface and that underneath this surface lay something bigger and more important and the artist was the conduit through which this bigger reality could be reached all he had to do his trust [Music] his instincts this one is called lavender mist it's in the national gallery of art in washington and it's one of his greatest paintings now because of the way he made these the dripping the the prowling around the canvas pollock was called an action painter but to get the most out of his art you need to be an action visitor there's no point standing in one place to look at jackson pollock you too needs to dart about in and out left and right backwards and forwards the art never stops moving so neither should you sometimes it's like looking through a microscope at tiny details other times it's like staring up at the cosmos it wasn't the stetson or the cowboy boots that made jackson pollock a wild west artist it was the bigness of his vision the cosmic scale that taste for infinity [Music] so this is abstract expressionism the first truly american art movement when all the dumb and encode stuff inside came bursting out in an unstoppable [Music] torrent while jackson pollock in new york was reimagining the west as a bit of abstraction in the west itself the landscape was impacting on american art in more tangible ways land art is the only american art form that couldn't have happened anywhere else it had to happen here you need this landscape these dimensions and this sense of place this is double negative by michael heitzer he made it in 1969 heitzer brought some bulldozers up to this impressive mesa in nevada and carved two huge artificial canyons in the rock two great trenches stretching all together 1 500 feet [Music] to create his artificial canyons heitzer had to dig out 240 000 tons of rock these days the sides have crumbled and obscured the clarity of the double negative but heitzer didn't mind it was part of his plan he always knew that nature was bigger than him and these here are the sun tunnels created by nancy halt in 1976 in the great basin desert of utah all these concrete tunnels are aligned to the sun and at different times of day the sun and the shadows do different things but the daddy of all examples of american land art the greatest land art moment in the west is the spiral jetty when i was an art history student this was on the cover of every book about modern art that i had and the reason it was so famous is because it wasn't there anymore when smithson created the spiral jetty in 1970 the waters of the great salt lake were at a historic low but soon after he finished they rose again and for 30 years the spiral jetty disappeared from sight it popped up again in 2002 just in time for the new millennium and i've been to see it a couple of times since then and every time it's different [Music] the first time i saw it it was gleaming white the salt crystals in the water had caked the rocks and given the jetty a christmas look so i hopped across it like a kid in the snow but that's not how it looks today today the changing climate has turned the great salt lake into a desert and smithson's stones stick out of the sand like bones and see how the water around the stones is this spooky red that's this tiny shrimp that survives in these salt waters millions and millions of them looking like blood that's soaked into the great salt lake smithson never intended this to be a happy artwork he was a sci-fi fan and he chose this location he said because it had a sense of decay about it an atmosphere of entropy and that's the thing about the wild west it was largely a work of fiction everyone who's looked at it has imagined things that may or may not be there what you see is what you want to see in the next film we're heading for that other quintessentially american territory the city where some look up and others look down that's the story of the american metropolis the next stop on this artistic road trip

Channel: Perspective

Views: 83,114

Rating: 4.8654771 out of 5

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, wild west, wild west history, the wild wild west, waldemar januszczak, waldemar januszczak documentary, american art, jackson pollock, jackson pollock documentary, jackson pollock painting, art history documentary, art history, art documentary

Id: t7YorPoPlfM

Length: 58min 54sec (3534 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020