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00:15Over the coming weeks, I want to write a sort of love letter to America, the country where I've
00:20lived and worked as an art critic for more than 25 years. It won't be uncritical, it won't be
00:25without its gripes, but it definitely will be an expression of gratitude for what its
00:29creative life has shown me. I want to show something of what we can tell about Americans
00:34from the things that they've made, and how these images act in the story of American experience.
00:40When we look at them through the lens of their art, what do we see?
01:23For more information, visit www.fema.org
01:49The New America was fascinated by the ancients.
01:52Classical Greece, Republican Rome.
01:55The values of these civilizations became American ideals too.
02:00Democracy, civic responsibility, public virtue.
02:04Their imagery saturated American culture right from the Republic's beginning in the 18th century
02:10and continues in weirdly mutated form sometimes down to the present day.
02:25What would the Founding Fathers have made of this modern site of American classicism, Las Vegas?
02:31To them it would have seemed eerily familiar and yet scarcely recognizable.
02:36They thought the classical column held up the Republican Temple of Virtue.
02:40We prefer it to support the popular palace of middle class sin.
02:49Today there aren't too many classicists in a place like Las Vegas,
02:52but the allure of Rome like old man Tiber just keeps on rolling along.
02:56Except that it's a different Rome, not the virtuous Republic of George Washington,
03:01but rather the late empire of Frank Sinatra and Bob Guccione.
03:05Caesars and senators, centurions and slave girls.
03:09The Rome of Hollywood of excess of authority, heavily overlaid with pasta, meatballs and pets of the month.
03:16There are places in Italy where you can still escape the classical past,
03:20but in America it's not so easy.
03:24This is Caesar's Mall, a moon colony for shoppers in the Nevada desert
03:28with a sky that cycles through from rosy dawn to purple dust
03:32every half hour with computer controlled lights.
03:35It is not what 18th century Americans had in mind
03:38when they called for a public architecture based upon the severe forms of ancient Rome.
04:09The New Republic was weak, only its ideals were strong.
04:14Classicism gave it a language of power and authority and of continuity with the past,
04:19even though it was so new.
04:23To choose a new capital is a radical act for any state.
04:27The founding fathers of the American Republic didn't want to take an existing city
04:31like New York or Philadelphia and just call it the capital of the United States of America.
04:36They wanted a clean slate, a very American desire.
04:40An empty site where the Republican vision would not be blurred by earlier royalist and colonial meanings.
04:50The place they chose in 1791 was empty alright because up to then nobody in his right mind would have
04:56wanted to live there.
04:57It was a tract of hot, humid marshland beside the Potomac River with a few tobacco farms and a large
05:03and rich variety of animal life, mostly mosquitoes.
05:06But this was to be the site of the new Rome and they called it Washington.
05:11A mere hypothesis at first, just a bunch of lines on a surveyor's map, but it was to grow into
05:16the most powerful city on earth.
05:34The ambitions of the revolutionary leaders, among them George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were large
05:40and they found expression in the plan for the capital of the new republic.
05:44It takes its form from the greatest metaphor of royal autocracy in France, the gardens of Versailles, designed by Le
05:52Notre for Louis XIV in the 17th century.
05:55Washington's designer was also French, an engineer named Pierre L'Enfant.
06:02Versailles imagery of great corridors of power radiating from the palace becomes L'Enfant's plan of grid and boulevards.
06:10A hugely ambitious design and it took more than a century to fill it in.
06:20And yet this ambition allowed the founding fathers to show how they rejected the Englishness that was all around them.
06:29This had become one of the more disliked buildings of the old regime, the English governor's palace in Williamsburg, capital
06:36of the colony of Virginia.
06:38Its architecture is English, not French, in origin.
06:40The balcony signifies government by proclamation, the governor issuing his orders from above to the king's subjects below.
06:53When you, the colonist, entered the hall and saw the 774 weapons that decorated it, you might have been reassured
07:01by the display of military power.
07:02And if you had any republican thoughts, you might have been intimidated.
07:07But this kind of building, and the town it anchored as an image of royal authority, had nothing like the
07:13symbolic charge that the American revolutionaries imagined for their architecture.
07:21A young man who studied law in Williamsburg wrote that its architecture was in the worst style I ever saw,
07:28and said of Virginia in general that the genius of architecture has cast its maledictions over this land.
07:41This was Thomas Jefferson, and he would become the third president of the United States, but he was an architect
07:47before the revolution.
07:48His father gave him a classical education, a political background, and thousands of acres of rural Virginia.
07:59By 1767, he was designing himself a house on a hill deep in the Virginian countryside near Charlottesville.
08:07He called it Monticello.
08:11He was to work on it, tinker with it, for the best part of 40 years.
08:29Monticello was pervaded with enormous aesthetic ambition.
08:32It was also this great amateur's spiritual centre, his hearth, and his refuge from the painful stress of political life.
08:45If I had to pick one person from all the dead Americans that I wish I could talk to,
08:49that man would be Thomas Jefferson, and the reason is the overwhelmingly attractive cast of his mind.
08:56He was one of those rare people who want to build everything up from first principles
09:00and do it without a trace of fanaticism or self-pity or cant.
09:05He was the living proof of William Blake's dictum that energy is eternal delight.
09:10He was revolutionary, statesman, diplomat, president, constitutionalist, educator, farmer, botanist,
09:21and the founder of American architecture.
09:23Reading him, you feel his enthusiasm and curiosity on your face like sunburn.
09:28He lived far beyond his means and was constantly in debt from the huge sums
09:33that he spent building and furnishing Monticello,
09:36and under the surface of the 18th century Whig reasonableness,
09:39there is something immoderate and crazy about Jefferson,
09:43and very important from my point of view,
09:45he was the patron saint of all do-it-yourselfers,
09:49a fact to which Monticello bears witness.
09:53He was always looking for details of convenience.
09:56The portholes in the wall up there above his bed
09:58are there to ventilate his winter wardrobe.
10:03He designed a machine to make copies of his letters,
10:06and he wrote about 18,000 of them over his lifetime.
10:13Monticello also enshrines the deepest of American dilemmas,
10:17because the man who wrote of liberty and equality lived in a house built and maintained by slaves.
10:23Jefferson felt deep qualms about slavery, but not deep enough to abandon the system.
10:28Slaveholders, he said, have a wolf by the ears.
10:32The descendants of his slaves have not forgotten such moral ambiguities.
10:38You looked at Monticello and the beautiful edifice there and all the gardens and the walkways.
10:45My people worked from sunup to sundown to provide that for him.
10:51When I looked and saw the remains of those small cabins, cramped quarters,
10:58knowing how others lived in that period makes you want to cry.
11:04And yet you look at the big mansion, splendor and luxury,
11:09which came about as a result of slave labor.
11:13It makes you angry.
11:17His attitudes reflected, I think, to some extent, the Enlightenment period.
11:23Mr. Jefferson was, in fact, a slaveholder, but he wrote the Declaration of Independence,
11:30and in it he wrote, all men were created equal.
11:35That's been one of the greatest strokes of the pen for African Americans that there ever has been.
11:45Jefferson's masterpiece is his University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
11:50He saw that education was the key to the life of the New Republic.
11:53He believed in what he called natural aristocracy, elites of talent and virtue,
11:59not of birth and privilege, which education could create from the ranks of ordinary Americans.
12:06It was dedicated, he said, to the illimitable freedom of the human mind.
12:11It would be a pure expression of the Enlightenment without any input from religion.
12:15For Jefferson was a secular humanist through and through.
12:19How today's religious right would have disliked him,
12:21and how very little he would have thought of them.
12:25The campus, which Jefferson called his Academical Village,
12:28is built around a lawn open at one end,
12:31so that, in a symbolic sense, knowledge and wisdom could radiate down and out into the American landscape.
12:39It is made of pavilions set on increasing spaces as they recede from the eye, like a Palladian stage set.
12:49Each pavilion has classrooms at ground level and professors' quarters above.
12:54Between them are the students' dawns.
12:59Each of the ten pavilions is built in a variant on the classical styles of architecture.
13:05Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and so on.
13:12The pavilions, said Jefferson, are cubic architecture.
13:16But the climax of the project, the Rotunda, begun in 1823, he called spherical.
13:22It was based on the Pantheon in Rome.
13:27Within is the library, the round cranium of the university, literally its brain.
13:34Light floods it from the round skylight above, representing the power of nature.
13:39The books radiate the power of reason.
13:42Originally, Jefferson wanted to take this metaphor further by painting the dome sky blue
13:47and having gilt planets and stars moved across it by a sky clock.
13:52Even without that, it's a pristine space, a precinct of intellectual light, clarity and harmony.
13:59To me, this is the most beautiful room in America.
14:03Once you've seen it, you understand why Jefferson wanted to be remembered,
14:07not as President of the United States, but as the author of the Declaration of Independence,
14:12the founder of religious liberty in Virginia, and the designer of this university.
14:22No wonder that dressing up in Greek drag and striking classical poses
14:26in homage to antiquity and Isadora Duncan became a ritual in some American colleges,
14:31as here at the University of Washington in the 1920s.
14:37Oddly, it still persists today.
14:43The young Athenians of Washington, D.C. honour Greece and Rome
14:47because they taught us democracy, the fundamentals of government-based inequality.
14:54We actually wear togas as an outward expression of our gratitude.
15:01They were intellectuals who were able to bring some sort of simplicity out of the chaos that is the natural
15:09world,
15:10and some sort of structure and form that created a kind of balance
15:14so that you could have a society that worked together.
15:18I want to keep an American vision alive that is based in Greek democratic ideals.
15:25I think that Americans could learn a lot from Greece and Rome.
15:35Even after a century of glass and steel, when we think of public buildings,
15:39we still think of columns and porticos.
15:42The very first temple-formed political building in America, or indeed the modern world,
15:47was the new State House in Richmond, Virginia, designed by Jefferson in 1785.
15:54Jefferson was totally enraptured by an ancient Roman temple he visited in Nîmes,
15:59the Maison Carrée, or square house.
16:02Here I am, Madame, he wrote to a friend in Paris, gazing whole hours at the Maison Carrée like a
16:08lover at his mistress.
16:10He had a stucco model made of it and shipped it back to Richmond,
16:14and he bullied the legislature into accepting it as the basis of the new design.
16:20At the core of the State House, where the statue of the God would have gone in a real Roman
16:25temple,
16:25there is a figure of George Washington.
16:27It was commissioned in 1788 from the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdin,
16:32and he gave America its first really good public sculpture,
16:36a superb display of neoclassical style and intelligence.
16:40Insofar as a single figure can, this expresses an idea about democracy.
16:46It shows the statesman as citizen.
16:48Not a king, not a god, but first among equals.
16:58Jefferson specified that the size should be precisely that of a man.
17:03Anything bigger would be pretentious.
17:06So we don't see Washington as victorious general.
17:09He's a new Cincinnatus, the Roman hero,
17:12who was called from civilian life to lead the army and return to his farm after victory.
17:19He leans on a bundle of rods, the Roman fascis,
17:23each rod a state, their union connoting strength.
17:26His sword is sheathed.
17:29And then there's the plough, the symbol of agrarian virtue
17:32and the planting of a new political order.
17:36Houdin's final touch, a marvellous one I think,
17:39is Washington's missing button.
17:41It lets you know that he's not a stickler for protocol.
17:44Democracy in dress.
17:59In reality, the Founding Fathers were more of a secular elite than Americans commonly imagine.
18:05Jefferson and Washington were both Freemasons.
18:08This is the largest Masonic temple in America, built in Alexandria, Virginia.
18:13It's modelled supposedly on Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem
18:17and dedicated to George Washington, whose flame is kept alight by the keepers of the shrine.
18:23But now inflation has set in.
18:25Washington is not the size of a man.
18:27He is a bronze colossus, four times life-size.
18:39George Washington, of course, was the most prominent Freemason.
18:44Harry Truman was a devoted Freemason.
18:46He dedicated the statue of George Washington in 1950.
18:51Over 50% of those who signed our Constitution were Freemasons.
18:56Over 50% who signed the Declaration of Independence were also Freemasons.
19:02And we have had 14 presidents documented as being Freemasons.
19:08And their conduct in office pretty well indicates to most of us that they have had good moral training,
19:15which probably was a result of the obligations that they assumed when they became Masons.
19:26Masonic imagery was so important in the politics of the American Enlightenment
19:30that it even found its way onto the dollar bill,
19:32the eye of universal knowledge above the pyramid with the motto,
19:37A New Order of the Ages.
19:40In the 20th century, it would be lampooned by the American Dadaist Man Ray
19:44with his satirical sculpture made from a metronome called Object to be Destroyed.
19:59But the biggest Masonic image of all was the monument to George Washington in the city that bears his name.
20:07555 feet high, the biggest obelisk ever made beyond the wildest dreams of the pharaohs.
20:13The Washington Monument is so much a part of America's mental landscape by now that it's hard to imagine anyone
20:20ever objected to it.
20:21But they did, vehemently.
20:24They did, vehemently.
20:28Earlier rejected designs for it included this pyramid tomb in 1800,
20:33a Gothic spire in 1836, a colonnaded tower,
20:39and an obelisk surrounded by a sort of pantheon.
20:42There wasn't the money for the pantheon, but the obelisk took off.
20:49The political fuss and bother over the designs was so great that this one wasn't actually approved until 1848,
20:55nor was it finished until 1885.
20:57And in the meantime, every imaginable faction got in on the act.
21:01Some politicians thought the simpler designs didn't pay enough respect to the great Washington,
21:05and other people thought the more elaborate designs made him out to be a Caesar or a king, but not
21:10a Democrat.
21:10At one point it was even proposed that all the surviving veterans of the Revolutionary War of 1776
21:17should somehow or other be brought to Washington where they would each fling several shovelfuls of earth on this site,
21:24thereby creating a large mound over the memory of the great man, a kind of national anthill.
21:32But in the end, an army engineer came up with a perfect and abstract form with a steam elevator inside
21:38to get people to the top,
21:39the tallest stone structure in the world.
21:42Its critics compared it to a stalk of asparagus, and Mark Twain thought it looked like a factory chimney with
21:48the tip broken off.
21:49But it is also a colossus whose figure is absent, sublimated.
21:54Its impersonal beauty takes your breath away.
21:57It's the midpoint between the first heroic style of America, neoclassicism, and the last one, minimal art.
22:09The profusion of monuments in Washington make this city into a sort of theme park representing the tides of history.
22:16Each monument is partly a shrine and partly a ride.
22:21Abraham Lincoln described the aura of the American monument when he spoke of the mystic chords of memory
22:27uniting Americans with one another through their past.
22:33The Lincoln Memorial, designed 50 years after the President's death by Henry Bacon, is deservedly the most famous.
22:42Its colossal figure of Lincoln by the sculptor Daniel Chester French sits enthroned in a temple like Zeus,
22:49gazing down the main axis of the city towards the capital.
22:55When you move into that great memorial, and you look up and you see the statue of Abraham Lincoln, it's
23:02impressive.
23:03But let me say that when you turn and look at the words inscribed on the marble, and read the
23:10words of that second inaugural,
23:12I think it is the most beautiful piece of literature written in English language.
23:18I can hardly read it without tears because of what he was saying to the people.
23:28Remember in Britain, you have the pageantry, you have the monarchy, you have all of this that is a glue
23:33to society.
23:34It brings people together, it creates community.
23:37And we're trying to do that with our architecture, at the same time maintain our democratic concepts and ideals.
23:47I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up.
23:55Monuments live by use and die by neglect.
23:59The world is studded with dead monuments.
24:01The Lincoln Memorial was revived by civil rights rallies 30 years ago
24:06when Martin Luther King and hundreds of thousands of African Americans transformed and refreshed its meaning.
24:12This was doubly ensured by television, which for so many Americans is the main organ of social memory.
24:20That one day on the red hills of George,
24:25the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slavers will be able to...
24:31But the cadences of King's speech fit the classic form of the memorial in a way that reminds you what
24:36has been lost in our age of sound bites.
24:39The speed and pseudo intimacy of TV have killed the classic ideal of the heroic monument just as they destroyed
24:46great rhetoric.
24:51Years ago I was interviewing Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, and I asked him whether the vast monumental designs of Nazism
24:58would have been any different if there had been television in the Third Reich.
25:01Well, of course they would have been, said Speer.
25:04We could have put the Fuhrer in every living room. We could have done for him what the Americans did
25:09for Kennedy.
25:10It's absurd to imagine today that anybody would get a political edge from having a statue of himself.
25:16Politicians buy television time instead.
25:18Ronald Reagan, who was television incarnate, knew this in his bones.
25:23Once we know our politicians on television, there's no way of imagining them back into bronze or marble.
25:30Can you imagine anybody giving a hoot what a statue of Reagan or Bush or Bill Clinton would look like?
25:36But media images, that's another story.
25:39This memorial, a highly inventive reworking of classical motifs, can still move its visitors deeply.
25:46But not everyone, especially not the cantankerous genius of early modern American architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, who clearly felt that
25:55he could have done better himself and should have been given the chance to.
26:00The Lincoln Memorial is related to the Toga and the civilization that wore it.
26:08And I think it would be absurd to try and maintain the weaknesses and follows of the old lack of
26:17culture.
26:19Now the Lincoln Memorial is not an indication of culture.
26:22It's an indication of the lack of it.
26:42The last completely successful American memorial commemorates the American dead of the Vietnam War.
26:50Almighty God, as we stand here, this Veterans Day in the shadow of the Vietnam Memorial,
27:00and strive with the names of those who gave their lives in the Vietnam War,
27:06we particularly pray for those veterans of Vietnam and the families of those whose names are upon this black granite
27:15wall.
27:17May this memorial continue to be a wall of healing for all those who come with wounded hearts.
27:25O God, we pray for the men who gave you our hearts.
27:29When we come back, we retreated very badly by the American public.
27:33And this is our monument.
27:34We paid for it.
27:35We bought it.
27:35We built it.
27:36It means something to us.
27:37And anybody that desecrates it or does something against it isn't in front of ours.
27:44It brings back things I've tried to hide in my mind a long time.
27:47I try to forget.
27:48You can't forget.
27:49And this just brings it out and helps bring it out.
27:51It helps heal.
27:52And it means a lot to all of us.
27:58My twins were in Vietnam, Terry and Jerry.
28:02And Jerry got wounded and Terry was killed on the same day, February 21, 1967.
28:09Jerry can't come down here.
28:10Jerry's moved into a world of his own.
28:12So we come down here to see Terry, me and his family.
28:16And look, he's right here where my lips can reach him.
28:22He isn't up high where I can't reach him or down low where I can't bend anymore.
28:27He's right here in front of me.
28:38It was designed by a young, unknown woman, an architecture student called Maya Lin.
28:43And before its dedication in 1982, it ran into a barrage of criticism as fierce as the objections to the
28:50Washington Monument a century before.
28:52Right-wing critics attacked it as a slur on the memory of the dead.
28:57It was furiously denounced as a black gash of shame.
29:01Those polished granite walls, the low grade, bearing no effigies or mottos, but only the names of the 58,000
29:09American dead.
29:10The living see themselves reflected in those walls, visually united with the dead.
29:15They take rubbings of the names.
29:18They leave flowers.
29:20It has become a tremendously charged focus of memory, transcending the bitterness over the most divisive war that America had
29:28fought since the Civil War itself.
29:30It is the best public sculpture, the most loved, the most consulted, made in America in 50 years.
29:37A monument without figures, only names.
29:41Completely the reverse of traditional depictions of heroism in war.
30:04And yet it was also an American who changed the way heroic action was painted two centuries ago.
30:12He was Benjamin West, the first American painter to influence English art.
30:19He did it with this picture, The Death of Wolfe, painted in 1770 and commemorating General James Wolfe, killed by
30:27the French eleven years before in the act of capturing the city of Quebec in Canada.
30:33Wolfe must not die like a common soldier under a bush, West had said, and indeed he doesn't.
30:39He is expiring with eyes turned to heaven in the posture of the dying hero, with his grieving officers forming
30:46an arch above him.
30:48It culminates in a billowing flag whose thrust indicates the direction that Wolfe's soul will take to heaven.
30:58It also alludes to the empty cross in a deposition, linking Wolfe's body to the image of Christ.
31:09On the left is his second in command, and with him are an American ranger scout in the green coat,
31:15pointing towards the defeated French,
31:17French, and a thoughtful Indian sitting on the ground.
31:22There were no Indians with the English forces at the Battle of Quebec, but West brings this Mohawk warrior in
31:28to signify natural nobility, contemplating the heroic sacrifice of another tribe.
31:41The death of Wolfe made Benjamin West's reputation.
31:45Crowds flocked to see it, it became George III's favourite picture, and it generated a healthy amount of controversy.
31:52Why? Because West had chosen to paint a modern incident in modern dress.
31:58Thereby, he flattered all the conventions of history painting.
32:01Under those conventions, the figure of Wolfe would have been a naked hero off a Roman bar relief, and his
32:06staff officers could have been wearing antique armour and togas,
32:10and they might even have been a genius of victory, swanning around up there in the sky with a scroll.
32:15But West American pragmatism wouldn't put up with that.
32:18And by refusing to paint the immediate past in terms of remote antiquity, he gave a new lease of life
32:26to English history painting.
32:28Not that this turned into an exercise in realism, very far from it.
32:39Benjamin West had been thought a prodigy ever since he arrived in London in 1763.
32:45After Sir Joshua Reynolds, he became the second president of the Royal Academy.
32:49Not bad for a self-taught Quaker's son from Pennsylvania.
32:55No American artist, at least until the 1980s, had ever been more immovably convinced of his own genius.
33:01In his Academy self-portrait, you see a man who, at the age of 12, had announced that,
33:07My talent will make me the companion of kings and emperors.
33:11And as a matter of fact, it did.
33:13He became George III's favourite painter.
33:21But West always found time to help other American artists who were trying to make their way in London.
33:27His studio was open to them.
33:29And here it was painted by one of them, Matthew Pratt, under the title, The American School.
33:36The best painter who came under West's aegis in London was the Boston portraitist, John Singleton Copley.
33:48Copley was Boston Irish and born poor.
33:51His mother ran a tobacco shop and he had to pull himself up by the bootstraps in what was, from
33:56the viewpoint of painting, a desert.
34:00Boston had no professional painters of any standing, and they were seen as craftsmen, like tailors or cobblers, which, Copley
34:07admitted, is more than a little mortifying to me.
34:13But he stuck to his easel and carved himself out a career as portraitist to the solid, expanding merchant class
34:19of Massachusetts, Tories mostly, including figures like Jeremiah Lee, whom he painted in full fig at full length and girth
34:27with his wife for their mansion north of Boston.
34:42Copley's career really begins with this little portrait of his half-brother called Boy with a Squirrel.
34:47He was 27 years old when he painted it, and he knew that his best hope of breaking into a
34:52wider professional sphere lay in London, and specifically with Sir Joshua Reynolds.
34:57Without the support of such people, he would always be a provincial.
35:02But with their support, he could go anywhere.
35:04So he put all his acquired tricks into it.
35:08The sheen and reflections on that mahogany table, the minute rendition of the hairs of the little glider squirrel, the
35:15glitter of the gold chain, and the rosy flesh of his half-brother's face.
35:20He sent the canvas off to Reynolds in London, and after an agonising wait of several months, word came back
35:26that the great man approved.
35:27Something really new, it seemed, had come out of the American wilderness.
35:43But Copley was a timid man, and he didn't get to London for another nine years.
35:49Business in Boston was too good.
35:53He married into a rich Tory family, but his subjects weren't all Tories.
36:00Some of them were figures in the coming revolution, like Paul Revere, the silversmith who was one of the leading
36:07dissenters in Boston.
36:09Copley's portrait of Revere is a manifesto of democratic American pride in skilled work, the radical as craftsman.
36:17No finery here, he sits in his shirt sleeves, thinking, confronting you.
36:22The stolid dome of his head rhymes with the teapot that he's holding.
36:27A plain image with virtuoso passages.
36:31The reflections of Revere's fingers and the glaring window in the polished silver, and the sculptural folds of his white
36:39shirt.
36:41This is Copley's liney style, as he called it.
36:44Everything weighed and measured with hard profiles.
36:48Nothing fancy.
36:50Sober, workmanlike, materialist, obstinate.
36:53Those are the adjectives for Copley, and nowhere more than in this portrait of Washington's aide and future governor of
37:00Pennsylvania, Thomas Mifflin, with his wife, Sarah.
37:03Very plain.
37:05The only note of bright colour being a little flower on Sarah Mifflin's bodice.
37:10This is marriage seen as enlightened equality.
37:14Conventional 18th century portraiture had the wife looking admiringly at her husband.
37:18Here, it's reversed.
37:20Sarah Mifflin fixes us with a slightly questioning gaze, while her husband looks at her with manifest pride.
37:30An ideal republic of two.
37:33Copley never got better than this, and American portraiture seldom did.
37:56In 1778, Copley poured the lessons of Rome and London into a history painting in the Grand Manor.
38:02Except it was an odd kind of history painting, because it wasn't about an important public event.
38:06It was commissioned by an English trader called Brooke Watson to commemorate something awful that befell him when he was
38:13a young man in the slave and sugar trade in Cuba.
38:16He'd fallen over from a boat in Havana harbour, and a giant shark chomped his leg off.
38:21In some ways, Watson and the shark reminds me of those pious ex-votos that one used to see in
38:26rural chapels in Spain, where a picture is commissioned to celebrate your miraculous delivery from a landslide or a lightning
38:35storm or a shipwreck.
38:36Except, of course, that it's a very sophisticated painting, and it is full of art historical allusions.
38:44A Roman statue called the Borghese gladiator, rotated through 90 degrees, gave Copley the body of Watson.
38:52The figures in the boat owe a lot to Raphael, especially the Raphael of the tapestry cartoon known as the
38:58miraculous draught of fishers.
39:01Despite its classical quotes, it's a melodramatic painting, and that shark charging out of the milky green sea can still
39:08give you a nasty turn.
39:10It was meant to be scary, to signify the uncontrollable, remorseless power of nature, Jaws I.
39:17Probably he'd never actually seen a shark, though.
39:20This one has no gills, and it has lips like a toothpaste ad.
39:26Most startling to a modern eye is Copley's treatment of the black crewman.
39:31Blacks up to now had only figured in American art as servants, slaves.
39:35But this man is given the full dignity of an individual.
39:38He anchors the composition, he holds the line that is to be thrown to Watson,
39:43and in his calm and apparent concern, he acts as a sort of Greek chorus to the horrific event, on
39:49equal terms with the whites.
40:02Copley took no part in the revolution. He stayed in England.
40:06But the revolution made the career of another American artist, an embezzler's son named Charles Wilson Peale.
40:13Peale became the Young Republic's first resident history painter.
40:17An ardent patriot, a populist on the extreme left of the struggle, who idolized its leaders and fought at Valley
40:24Forge.
40:25When he depicted Washington and Lafayette on the beach after the American victory at Yorktown,
40:31he left no doubt that he was a witness.
40:33A more generalizing artist might not have put in the carcasses of the horses at the tide line or the
40:39masts of sunken ships.
40:45His big iconic subject was Washington himself, whom we see here, after the Battle of Princeton,
40:51leaning on a cannon like a farmer on a fence, big-boned, small-headed and very American.
41:02But Peale wasn't just a painter. He was, in a sense, America's first cultural entrepreneur, a showman.
41:09Here he is, at age 81, lifting the curtain on his world of wonders.
41:35Peale invented the American Museum to bring into being, as he put it, a world in miniature, showing the natural
41:42marbles of America.
41:47What would it do? It would improve the Republic.
41:50As ours is an age of discovery, he wrote,
41:53every experiment helps to expand the mind and make men better, more virtuous and liberal.
42:00One such discovery would help change American ideas about America's own prehistory.
42:08Not all Americans liked the newness of the new world.
42:11They would have preferred to be able to point to something, at least, and say,
42:14this is truly, certifiably old.
42:17And after 1801, they could, because in that year, some people digging in a glacial bog in New York
42:23found the remains of a gigantic prehistoric animal, a mastodon.
42:28Now, today, every kid knows about fossils, but 200 years ago, the very idea of an extinct species didn't exist.
42:35Yet there, it incontrovertibly was, older than any human artifact and certainly different to any living animal.
42:42It implied a new conception of geologic time.
42:46And this so excited Peel that he rushed to the site and took over, digging the thing up.
42:54In this picture, the exhumation of the mastodon, Peel depicts the critical moment
42:59when a violent thunderstorm threatened to flood the pit in which the skeleton lies.
43:04We see the men on the treadmill that drives the bucket pump lent to Peel by his friend Jefferson.
43:11In the pit, there's a buzz of wet activity.
43:14A half-naked worker triumphantly holds up a mastodon bone.
43:23On hand, a Peel and his own children with an enormous drawing.
43:27They're there to witness the great moment and will themselves carry on the saga of American self-discovery.
43:39They were quite a clan. Peel didn't just want to make a museum, he wanted to make artists to fill
43:44it.
43:45His wife bore ten children, eight of whom, male and female, became painters, an all-time American record.
43:52They were named after old masters, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian and so on.
44:01The staircase group shows Raphael turning to look at you from a stairway
44:05with his younger brother Titian peering from a corner above.
44:10Peel originally enclosed the canvas in a door frame
44:13and nailed on a step at the bottom to fool your eye.
44:16It is said to have fooled George Washington's
44:19who greeted the boys before he realised that he was looking at a painting.
44:30Such tricks of illusion became Raphael Peel's own stock in trade.
44:34He was the first American to devote himself to still life painting,
44:38recording every pore and highlight on the skins of fruit with a fine brush and almost enamelled paint.
44:46These are the actual objects that he used as models.
44:50With Raphael begins an ultra illusionistic vein in American art
44:53that would later become enormously popular in the 19th century
44:56because the public liked to think of the artist as a sort of trickster, a con man.
45:10Rembrandt Peel was the most talented of the clan.
45:13This is his portrait of his brother Rubens with a geranium.
45:18Rubens, despite his name, was half blind
45:20and here he sits for his brother looking mild, sweet and myopic,
45:24affectionately holding a plant which, in America then, was a botanical rarity.
45:46The Peel children grew up in an ever more confident nation.
45:50The English attacked America again in the 1812 war and once more were beaten.
45:55This prompted a wave of nationalistic fervour and with it a desire for ever grander state architecture.
46:13There is no more grandiose building in America than the capital in Washington, the seat of American government.
46:20Its dome was to be a replica of the Pantheon.
46:23Later, it was enlarged to the size of the dome of St. Peter's, ribbed with thousands of tons of iron.
46:33Our capital building is the affirmation of our community.
46:37The whole building really represents sort of America in progress, America a new nation, America an evolving nation.
46:47If you want to really understand the United States of America, I think that knowing the history of this building
46:53gives you that marvelous recitation of our history.
47:01As you look up and see the paintings of the dome and you see the magnificence of that structure.
47:10Well, I have a sense of awe.
47:13It's the third largest dome building in the world, St. Peter's of Rome, St. Paul of London and our capital
47:21building.
47:23Its designer was a Bostonian, Charles Bullfinch, America's first native born professional architect.
47:38In the rotunda, Bullfinch left room for eight huge murals of scenes from American history.
47:43Now, at this point, America didn't have a great deal of history, but its leaders felt that historical paintings in
47:49the grand manor would have an improving effect upon future generations.
47:52And only one man seemed right for the job.
47:56Bullfinch's friend, a pompous, irritable, deeply patriotic and moderately gifted artist called John Trumbull.
48:05Congress commissioned him to paint four moments from the American Revolution, and he finished the job in 1826.
48:14They are large, and what inspiration they have is spread fairly thin.
48:19Competent and worthy are the words that spring to mind, I guess.
48:26Two were military, not battle pieces, but scenes of peacemaking after the fight.
48:31The surrenders of two British armies at Yorktown and at Saratoga.
48:41Two were political, George Washington resigning his military commission, and most famous of all, the signing of the Declaration of
48:48Independence,
48:49which a sceptical congressman irked, no doubt, by Trumbull's huge fee of $32,000,
48:55and objecting, as congressmen still do, to the spending of government money on the arts,
49:01called the Great Shin Piece because of its forest of 18th-century calves.
49:21Not all Americans in the 1830s felt so secure about the future.
49:26Arcadian America was passing, but what was coming?
49:29The fear of decline began to nag at the edges of American consciousness,
49:33and one of the men who gave it memorable form was a transplanted Englishman, Thomas Cole,
49:39who produced a cycle of five paintings as a warning about the rise and fall of civilization.
49:45He called it the course of empire.
49:54The first phase he called the savage state, primitive hunter-gatherer culture in the wild.
50:10The next phase is Virgilian, the birth of religion and the arts.
50:16The stonehenge-like temple with smoke rising from its altar,
50:20the grazing of flocks, an equivalent, may be, to Jefferson's ideal of a nation of yeoman farmers, an agrarian republic.
50:29This is the social balance, the Eden, that Cole feared was threatened by impending political events.
50:36For in 1829, America's seventh president was sworn in on the steps of Bullfincher's capital.
50:44His name was Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory, a rabble-rousing populist democrat from the Indian killing frontiers.
50:53And he put the fear of God into the establishment, including Cole's patrons, who viewed him as a potential dictator.
51:02The lessons of what can go wrong with the state unfold in the third painting, which Cole called the consummation
51:08of empire.
51:09No more the agrarian virtues of Jefferson's republic.
51:12Instead, populism has created mob rule, and the mob has thrown up a dictator who gives them a culture of
51:19spectacle and excess.
51:20And, in triumph across the bridge, here comes Caesar, followed by his train of subservient intellectuals and bought senators.
51:30Cole didn't actually give him Andrew Jackson's face, but he didn't feel he needed to because he thought the moral
51:36would be clear enough.
51:39There is something rather prissy about Cole's version of the awful delights of imperial Rome.
51:44No orgies, but he clearly had a great time doing the architecture of this marzipan city column by column.
51:50In its nutty grandiosity and bathroom-like newness, it looks forward to Cecil B. DeMille, and he hints at what
51:56is coming.
51:57Those little children have learnt about aggression.
52:00They're staging a naval battle in the marble pool, and a boat is sinking.
52:07So when they grow up, these bellicose little beasts bring down stage four, destruction.
52:14The empire is corrupt. It has fallen to the barbarians amid scenes of rape and pillage and mayhem under a
52:21stormy sky.
52:24Cole's viewers at the time would have thought of Edward Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire,
52:29and perhaps of the English burning Washington.
52:38And now history cycles back to its beginning, a wilderness with ruins.
52:42To me, this is the best painting of the five, and in it, Cole is trying to convey the scepticism
52:47of Edward Gibbon through the language of Claude Lorraine.
52:50But the anxiety that he expresses is very American, too.
52:55It's going to turn up at intervals all the way through American history and especially much later in the Cold
53:01War.
53:02It's the fear that this culture, so new, so strong and shiny, can nevertheless be swept away in one catastrophic
53:10eye blink.
53:11Except, of course, that for Cole, the threat wasn't nuclear, it was moral.
53:17This is not the primal landscape of the first America, full of possibility, an innocent slate upon which anything can
53:24be written.
53:24But its exhaustion may be the prelude to rebirth, another cycle, we don't know, and Cole doesn't tell us.
53:32But that image of the ruined column, seen from where we are now, becomes a haunting prelude to the end
53:39of America's own mounting moral crises in the 19th century,
53:42which would explode in the Civil War between the industrial North and the slave-owning South.
54:04This is Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, and it reminds you of how the most extreme uses of architecture as
54:11a fantasy about classical civilization were being created here in the Deep South.
54:17Everyone who's seen Gone with the Wind knows the idiom, white pillars, avenues of ancient trees.
54:26Now, ancient Athenians didn't live on this scale, but industries like King Cotton created tremendous wealth.
54:33And since these planters believed their true model was the slave-owning elite of ancient Athens,
54:39they built as they felt the Greeks would have done if they'd had the luck to be born Americans.
54:59Despite its belief in preserving an aristocratic way of life, the slave South between 1800 and the Civil War produced
55:06nothing in the way of painting or sculpture that could compare with the achievements of the North.
55:11It was the songs of the slaves that would create a new American music by laying the deep roots of
55:17the blues and of jazz.
55:19But in the visual fabric of the master's life, there was no ferment.
55:23It was provincial and gracious, but not inventive.
55:34Stagnancy was built into Southern culture in all areas except architecture.
55:39There, the longing for a classical past still functions as a powerful image of nostalgia.
55:52Understandably, I guess, most Americans visiting the great antebellum houses prefer not to think too much about the atrocious system
56:00that put them there.
56:01The black bodies under the white columns don't show up in the restorations.
56:10Yet Charles Dahlgren, who built Dunleath House in Natchez in Mississippi as his town residence in the 1850s, didn't feel
56:18that he had anything to hide.
56:20Like all his fellow planters on the eve of the Civil War, he was completely convinced of the immutable rightness
56:25of slavery and of what it brought them.
56:27This place isn't a mask for anything.
56:30In places like this, I think of William Yates' lines on the great country houses of Ireland, which run,
56:36Some vile and bitter man, some powerful man, brought architects and artists in that they, bitter and violent men, might
56:44raise in stone the sweetness all had longed for night and day, the gentleness that none had ever known.
56:59This was once a colossal plantation house near Jackson, Mississippi, burnt to the ground in the Civil War in 1864.
57:07An American pastry worthy of Piranesi, or perhaps of Thomas Cole.
57:13The end of empire, and also maybe the end of the Jeffersonian belief in classical architecture as the sign of
57:21democracy.
57:27Americans would go on to build millions of classical columns, North and South, but none would have quite the purity
57:34of meaning they had once possessed when the Republic was new.
57:54More American visions with Robert Hughes on BBC4 next Monday at 10.
57:59While on iPlayer, tensions and turning points in the nation's breakup with Britain, Lucy Worsley investigates the American Revolution.
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