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00:47When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they infuriated the entire populace of the United
00:53States of America.
00:54And I feel, excuse my language, the idea was kill those bastards.
01:00It had to happen as far as I was concerned, because when I was first told about it in
01:05September of 1944, my immediate thought was, if we are successful, we're going to bring
01:11this war to a hasty conclusion, because the Japanese will be convinced that they can't
01:15fight against that weapon.
01:18I knew what I was carrying, because at that time I was briefed in Los Alamos as to what
01:23the United States was doing about the development of such a weapon, and what my role in the
01:29use of that weapon would be.
01:31I'm sitting here looking out over the nose, and I said, I agree, that is Hiroshima.
01:36Tom said 30 seconds, 20 seconds.
01:41He said 10 seconds, 9, 8, 7, and took it down to 1.
01:46And when he said 1, the airplane jumped.
01:50The sky lit up.
01:52It lit up with a brilliant blue light.
01:55Everything in the cockpit turned blue.
01:58And I have to tell everybody, I tasted the weapon, and it tasted like lead.
02:05We saved more lives than we took.
02:29No nation in history had ever had such power of life and death over the human race.
02:35Having the bomb confirmed the old belief in American exceptionalism, that America had
02:41a special mission on Earth, which had been wired into American minds since the time of
02:45the Puritans.
02:54America went into the Second World War as one power among several.
02:57It came out of it in 1945 as one of two superpowers, the right-hand half of a Manichean universe,
03:04whose left half was the Soviet Union.
03:06And from then on, it accumulated the largest arsenal that the world had ever seen, an ever-expanding
03:12mass of military hardware whose growth was driven by the Cold War.
03:16Some of its relics are preserved here, in the high desert of Arizona, where nothing rusts.
03:21Thousands and thousands of aircraft, preserved like the mummified ibises that were buried with
03:27the pharaohs, as the Cold War itself has been buried 50 years later.
03:38This is one of the archaeological sites of a culture of self-confidence and almost unbelievable
03:43abundance, but also of self-doubt and considerable paranoia.
03:47A culture, moreover, that became imperial, in fact, if not in name.
03:52In the 1950s and 60s, Americans learned to believe in the supremacy of that culture, including
03:58its art.
03:59By the 1970s, it was simply taken for granted that the centre of world art was New York,
04:04as Paris had been the centre in the 19th century and Rome in the 17th.
04:10Today, we're not so sure about that, but we were then.
04:22The war that had devastated Europe and Japan made America rich.
04:26It hoiked it out of the slump of the 30s.
04:28From the other side of the Atlantic, it looked huge, naive, swollen with production and pleasure.
04:34A vulgar, innocent, triumphant paradise.
04:44Seldom had there been such a misalignment between what ordinary Americans rejoiced in,
04:49and what American artists felt.
04:53as I saw it, nobody could feel lonely than our ambitious artists in New York, the feeling
05:00of being isolated and overlooked.
05:02I don't want to dramatise it, I don't want to fancy it up, but man, did they feel lonely.
05:12The artists Greenberg was talking about, some of whom he was the first to support, would
05:17come to be known as the Abstract Expressionists, or the New York School.
05:22They would be seen as the world's leading abstract painters by the 1950s, and the idea of the
05:27supremacy of New York would ride on their work.
05:30Among them, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman.
05:47They had all grown up in Depression America, but the main influences that formed their work were
05:53not American, but European.
05:56Especially the Surrealists, some of whom had fled to New York to escape the Nazis.
06:01Max Ernst had said goodbye to the old world with this image of disaster, Europe after the rain.
06:09The presence of artists like Ernst and Andre Masson, with their belief in the power of
06:14the unconscious mind, inspired young Americans who needed to believe in the value of an artistic
06:20avant-garde with no reference to politics.
06:31But how to transcend the Surrealist model?
06:35The artist who really seemed to have done it by his death in 1956 was Jackson Pollock,
06:40and American culture never got over its surprise at producing it.
06:49Pollock was born in the West, in Wyoming, and the sense of large space, of epic landscape,
06:55had enormous meaning to his work as an adult.
06:58Pollock was born in the West, in the West, in the West, in the West, in the West, in the
07:04West,
07:09in the West.
07:12The National Anthem
07:12You can see the traces of Picasso and André Masson in this painting.
07:17It's abstract, but not so abstract, and the beginnings of his all-over style are showing up in its furious
07:24congestion
07:25of signs and scribbles.
07:30Pollock underwent Jungian analysis.
07:32He was obsessed with the idea of the primal, the primitive.
07:37He was also influenced by the art of Navajo Indian painters
07:41who made their designs by pouring coloured sand on the ground.
07:45It suggested a whole other relation to the canvas.
07:49You could get into it, be part of it.
07:56I don't work from drawings or colour sketches.
07:59My painting is direct. I usually paint on the floor.
08:05I enjoy working on a large canvas.
08:08I feel more at home, more at ease in a big area.
08:12Having the canvas on the floor, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting.
08:16This way I can walk around it, work from all four sides and be in the painting.
08:23I can control the flow of the paint.
08:25There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.
08:30Sometimes I lose a painting.
08:32But I have no fear of changes, of destroying the image.
08:37Because a painting has a life of its own, I try to let it live.
08:45Journalists derided Pollock as Jack the Dripper, a man out of control.
08:48But the mark of his greatest all-over canvases, like this one, was their amazing balance.
08:54Between, on one hand, the spider web of shallow space, so transparent to the eye, so nuanced in its energy.
09:01And on the other hand, the surface, with its crusts and puddles and blots of pigment.
09:10It's utterly abstract, and yet it makes you think of nature, and that too was part of Pollock's ambition.
09:16He said that he wanted to be nature, not just paint it.
09:40Anyone who thinks that American modernism doesn't have its religious aspect should come here, see the light, and be converted.
09:48This is the studio once used by Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in the village of Springs on Long Island.
09:55It has since been preserved as a shrine.
10:04None of Pollock's actual paintings are here, but instead you have the holy coffee cans, the miraculous brushes, and the
10:11sanctified shoes.
10:20I don't know whether young artists come here in search of transformation, poof, you're a genius, but nothing is impossible.
10:26In any case, this is the sanctum sanctorum, whose floor preserves the drips left by the master, the ones that
10:33went off the edges of the canvas.
10:47Pollock's originality didn't just lie in the fact that he dripped paint, although that was the means to the end.
10:52Those skeins of paint drawn in the air added up to an extraordinary grace, a continuous surface that did away
11:00with the relational grid of Cubism.
11:05No modern painter, American or not, had managed that before.
11:10At first, its newness was scandalous, but now it seems fundamental.
11:26In 1949, Life magazine splashed Pollock's work across several pages, echoing Greenberg's bold claim that he was the best living
11:35American artist.
11:37Never before had the American mass media latched onto an abstract painter.
11:42It made him a national celebrity.
11:45His widow, the painter Lee Krasner, recalled that it changed everything.
11:50Life magazine has as their headline, is he the greatest painter in America, question mark.
11:57And Life magazine was going to an audience other than the little in-group.
12:03In other words, it began breaking out of the little in-opinion on art.
12:09Curious it would be Life magazine, but that's the way it happened.
12:14It took on another scale then.
12:20Pollock's legend remains obstructive.
12:23The doomed, hard-drinking artist who died at age 44, driving with two girls in a big American car on
12:30Long Island.
12:31The puffy James Dean of American art.
12:52Artists, however, have looked to Pollock ever since as a kind of talisman.
12:56He was immensely influential.
12:58He broke the ice, said Willem de Kooning.
13:00He created a new scale for American painting.
13:04A fresh idea of surface and touch.
13:06A new kind of space.
13:14But if you ask where the deeper appeal of his work lies, part of the answer has to be its
13:20American romanticism.
13:21Its sense of the presence of an epic landscape.
13:24The memory of links between man and nature in the new world that had infused American art a hundred years
13:31before.
13:39Abstract expressionism had its theological side.
13:42A yearning for transcendent experience that would go beyond the things of this world.
13:49Mark Rothko was obsessed with the idea of an abstract art that would carry the full weight of religious meaning.
13:57In the forties, he had looked for what he called tragic and timeless subject matter.
14:05Now the subject was gone.
14:08And the format was that of landscape.
14:10Hovering oblongs of colour, moody blurs stacked vertically up the canvas.
14:24It's the silence and pervasive light of 19th century luminism on a much bigger scale.
14:41Hovering oblongs of colour, moody blurs
14:43Rothko had an exquisite sense of colour and of formal nuance, especially along the edges of his shapes.
14:53But the hope that this or any other abstract art could carry the tragic weight of King Lear,
14:59or the moral elevation of the Old Testament, was bound to fail.
15:03Though many people thought he had succeeded.
15:05An idea that got hoisted into myth by Rothko's suicide in 1970.
15:25The belief in sublime awe that inflated so much writing about abstract expressionism was part of a period style.
15:33The feeling that artists and the critics who backed them were locked in a high stakes struggle with the whole
15:39history of past art.
15:44Did everything the abstract expressionists painted live up to the rhetoric about it?
15:48Well, of course not. Nothing could.
15:51Big claims were made for these artists and one or two of them, like Clifford Still or Barnet Newman, made
15:56them for themselves.
15:57These are Barnet Newman's Stations of the Cross, which now have their own room in the National Gallery of Washington.
16:05As documents of early minimalism, they're not without interest.
16:08But as a narrative of the passion and suffering of Jesus Christ, they're utterly absurd.
16:14Newman once said, I thought our quarrel was with Michelangelo.
16:18Well, bad luck, Barney. You're lost.
16:26Just as Pollock renewed American painting, so David Smith in the 1950s reinvented American sculpture.
16:36True to his name, he worked mainly with welded iron.
16:40But like Pollock, his work played off landscape, whether as a background, as here, or as an image in the
16:47work.
16:54As stuff to make sculpture out of, iron didn't have a long history like marble or bronze.
16:59It was industrial. It spoke of the machine age.
17:02Its direct power, its structure, balance, mobility and variety.
17:06All of that was in Smith's work.
17:08Oh, David, said Bob Motherwell, his friend, grieving after Smith's death in 1965.
17:14You were as delicate as Vivaldi and as strong as a Mack truck.
17:18And so he was.
17:30The idea of welding steel into sculpture came from two Spaniards, Julio Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso.
17:38Smith loved the directness of welding, which rivalled the directness of painting.
17:44He was a user-up of discarded things, a collagist in three dimensions.
17:49His work was an inspired fusion of the formal elements of cubism with the imagery of surrealism.
18:00Even cast-off tools went into the work for their own sake as form and as a tribute to the
18:06act of making.
18:16Smith grew up with American industry.
18:19As a child, he had played around factories and railroad yards.
18:23Big American metal was nature to him.
18:30He wanted all his work to be at human scale.
18:33It's seldom bigger than a body and sometimes it looks like one.
18:37A personage.
18:38A totem.
18:58If Smith often evoked the body, Willem de Kooning couldn't leave it alone.
19:02It pervaded his work.
19:06A tangled, dirty cream image of what?
19:09Bodies, is the short answer, but not whole ones.
19:13Forms slipping and jostling against one another,
19:16the line creating memories of limbs, butts, elbows and every inch full of energy.
19:32This painting is arguably the best one of his career.
19:35There's even what appears to be a set of floating teeth,
19:39the dentures that his women would soon be sporting.
19:47I just wanted to make it easy for myself to put something right in the centre of the canvas.
19:53Like it had two eyes and nose and mouth and arms and feet.
19:57I had a lot of mouth cuts out of magazines.
20:01And I noticed that when I had something,
20:04a photographic image like this, the mouth,
20:06it gave me a point of reference.
20:09It was something to hold on to.
20:11I pasted it on and it was a shock.
20:14Then I knew where I had to go.
20:16And then of course a woman's mouth was very appealing.
20:21It is interesting though that I could only do it with a woman.
20:26I guess it's because I'm not a woman.
20:32De Kooning's work had a way of annoying the critics who wanted it to be more abstract than it was.
20:44The ghosts of Baroque figure painting kept jogging his elbow.
20:48He was, after all, a Dutchman.
20:50An illegal alien who jumped ship into America in 1926
20:53from the same country as Rubens and Frantz Howells,
20:57where he'd been thoroughly trained in figure drawing.
21:00Hence the women he continued to paint from the 1950s on.
21:10The eyes of Woman One glare at you like a pair of black headlamps.
21:15She has the worst overbite in all Western art.
21:18She's imposing and commonplace and full of a power which flows from the slashing brush strokes into her body.
21:46De Kooning called himself a slipping glimpser open to a constant stream of impressions,
21:52visual slang and high art, pin-up girls but Manet too.
21:57High and low everywhere.
22:22And how couldn't you love what highbrows called the low?
22:25The great symbol of America's new post-war life was that emblem of passion, freedom and innovation, the automobile.
22:40They're all image packed with the symbolism of sex and power.
22:45They have the tails of rockets and chromium breasts like Jane Mansfield.
22:49And when you hit the brakes, the rear end lights up like a robot animal in heat.
22:56Ultramatic ride.
22:58Dynaflow penetration.
23:00Triumph.
23:00Lust.
23:01Aggression.
23:02And tons of room for the whole family.
23:04The siren song of Imperial America.
23:07The parade of new cars starts across the stage among the dancing motorettes.
23:12Car commercials of the 50s are fascinating because they're constantly showing a car on a pedestal as though it were
23:19a David Smith at an art exhibition.
23:21Only the difference would be that the camera would then rotate around the car so that you could see all
23:25these insanely wonderful angles.
23:28This is as spiky as any abstract expressionist composition. I'm sure that's what tail fins are all about.
23:35In the 1950s, Americans put 20% of their gross national product into cars, and they owned three out of
23:42every four cars in the world.
23:44These were the ideal.
23:46People who believed in good virtuous Bauhaus design and environmental responsibility hated these gorgeous gas-guzzling dream boats then, and
23:54they still do.
23:55They're a world away from the demure Beetle or the virtuous Volvo.
23:59Nothing like them is ever going to be built again.
24:01They're the rolling Baroque public sculpture of an America that's gone forever.
24:10And it wasn't just cars.
24:12The war was over, rationing was gone, and the cornucopia of American industry tooled up, tipped, and released a flood
24:19of styling.
24:19Gordy, lush, avocado-colored and hot pink, chrome everything, and big.
24:25Luxury for the masses.
24:27These were the signs of capitalist paradise, and they had a political message.
24:33To a trade fair in Moscow in 1959, America sent an ideal kitchen.
24:42Richard Nixon took the Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev through it, saying,
24:46Look, this is what the American housewife has.
24:49And Khrushchev lost his temper, shouting,
24:52These things are mere gadgets. They don't count.
24:55But they did count, even though most of the American intelligentsia would have agreed with Khrushchev.
25:10The Cold War had been running at full heat for ten years by then.
25:14It had brought national paranoia to both Russia and America, and in its grip of fear and self-assertion,
25:21all symbols of American identity got a new charge.
25:25Including, most obviously, the flag which Americans are so given to flying, parading, displaying, and saluting.
25:42No other nation treats its flag the way that Americans treat the stars and stripes.
25:47On the one hand, it's a peculiarly sacred object.
25:49You must handle it with care, you must salute it, you must never allow it to touch the ground,
25:53to burn or to face it as a supercharged political act,
25:57and right-wingers are always wanting a constitutional amendment to punish such indignities.
26:02But on the other hand, they make jeans and knickers out of it,
26:05and they use it to advertise everything from gas stations to hot dog stands.
26:12The American flag is an abstraction, the most recognized abstraction in the world.
26:18Americans still argue about what it means, but they all know what it is.
26:23Is a picture of an abstraction a representation?
26:26Is this a flag or a painting?
26:32It's sometimes scorn that I have the truth, which is that one night I dreamed I painted a large American
26:38flag,
26:39and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought materials to begin it.
26:43It's a very rotten painting because I began it in enamel paint, and it wouldn't dry quick enough,
26:48and then I had in my head this idea, something I had read, I heard, I don't know what, about
26:52wax, encaustic.
26:55And I changed in the middle of the painting to that because the encaustic just has to cool,
27:00and then it's hard and you don't blur it again.
27:04John's flags were first-class conundrums, brain teasers carrying the questions about art that had been posed earlier by the
27:12surrealist René Magritte and the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp,
27:15but never put quite so sharply in an American context before.
27:21My Aunt Gladys once wrote me a letter saying she was so proud of me because she had worked so
27:26hard to instill some respect for the American flag in her students,
27:30and she was so glad the mark had been left on me.
27:37Nobody has yet laid down his life for one of John's flags.
27:41Collectors, however, have laid down millions of dollars.
27:53In all the massive argument and interpretation that they raised, one thing wasn't in doubt, the beauty of John's surfaces.
28:02This is the ghost, the white fossil of a flag, its pattern almost bleached away and remaining as texture.
28:27John's paintings of targets seem just as banal and just as mysterious as the flags.
28:34A target is like a painting in one way, it's a thing you look at, focus your attention on.
28:43But there the resemblance ends, you shoot at targets, you use them as a game or in training for war.
28:54Maybe in looking at these targets, one should remember the times they were made in, the era of the Cold
29:00War with America's fear of atomic apocalypse and its suspicion of the enemy within, the commie spy, the homosexual.
29:09Are you a member of the communist party?
29:11Are you a member of the communist party? Or have you ever been a member of the communist party?
29:14It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee.
29:17Stand away from the stand.
29:18Stand away from the stand.
29:22Stand away from the stand.
29:25Stand away from the stand.
29:28You may be in your schoolyard playing when the signal comes.
29:33That signal means to stop whatever you are doing and get to the nearest safe place fast.
29:40Always remember, a flash of an atomic bomb can come at any time.
29:51A paranoid image, suggesting threat to the defenceless or evasive subject,
29:57the eye of power hunting out what is concealed.
30:11But some artists lived entirely in a world of reverie, untouched by public images.
30:18Poet of the city, heir to surrealism and master of scale, Joseph Cornell.
30:24He lived a reclusive life in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, and he went to
30:30scavenging for relics of the past in New York junk shops and flea markets.
30:38In his fixation on a dream Europe that he could never actually bring himself to visit, Cornell
30:43was deeply American.
30:45He sorted his finds into their eccentric categories and stored them with his mementos, like love
30:51letters to movie stars that he'd never met.
31:02And from them he made boxes, each a world in miniature, where an enormous moon peers in
31:09through the window at its relative, a cork ball.
31:18A world of very fragile things, like glasses and old clay pipes.
31:35Of melancholy nostalgia for places he'd never been, Victorian travellers hotels.
31:43A fugitive beauty whose emblem was the caged bird.
31:52And all contained in the strict, tiny architecture that excludes sentimentality.
32:07The End
32:25Another scavenger of genius who took off from Cornell on the big scavenger of the
32:28scale was Robert Rauschenberg.
32:30He did more than anyone else to break down the barriers between painting, sculpture, performance,
32:36dance.
32:42Rauschenberg treated the canvas as flypaper for the world's images, and at first for the
32:47things themselves.
32:5140 years later, this bed still carries quite a charge.
32:55An early American quilt that seems to have been the site of an axe murder.
32:59The paint slathered and crusty and fierce.
33:02A manifesto of impurity.
33:11He's an inconsistent artist, restless even, but with spurts of dazzling invention.
33:18Neatly.
33:19Neatly.
33:20I can't tell when I spill something.
33:25Boo.
33:34Wandering around strange places, looking in every corner, I don't know, keeps you refreshed.
33:43Yeah, I guess it must, because you can bring back all sorts of solidified memories from
33:48the places you go to, and then they surprise you when they come out of the...
33:51Well, it's all very different.
33:52Once it gets to be a photograph, and then it gets blown up, and then it's a silk screen,
33:58and then colour follows, and then there's a juxtaposition of imagery that is hopefully non-logical.
34:06When you called that early piece Rebus, which means a kind of puzzle, I think, were you really
34:12stressing the idea of a work of art being a puzzle, whose solution the viewer has to work towards?
34:17I just collected a bunch of old posters or signs and tried to make them as diverse as possible,
34:28and the colours supposedly was the key about how they were to be read,
34:35but the whole thing was fantasy, so...
34:37So you do establish these kinds of...
34:40You do.
34:41Those are your experiences.
34:43No, no, you're drawing the pictures, Doctor.
34:46Yes, but you're the one who has all the references because of your experience.
34:54And so you're happy to let people make them up as they go along, you know?
34:57I insist on it.
34:59Hmm.
35:00I remember in the early 50s when you were going through the trash on the New York streets
35:05and finding this and finding that.
35:06I established myself a limitation.
35:09If I couldn't find enough to do one or two works in one block, I'd walk two blocks.
35:17Yeah.
35:18And it was different every day because I was very neat.
35:22Where did you find the goat?
35:24That was in a used office supply store near 23rd Street.
35:30Near 23rd?
35:31And the guy had bought that and almost wouldn't sell it to me.
35:36I didn't have enough money for it anyway.
35:38He wanted $37 for it and I only had 15.
35:42I gave him 15, told him I'd be back in half an hour or so.
35:46With the rest of the money, I never went back.
35:50The goat was stolen and so was the pleasure it stands for.
35:54It became the hero of one of the few really witty images of the sexual act in American art up
36:00till then,
36:00the satyr in the orifice.
36:07By 1962, Rauschenberg was pulling the images of things into his paintings by means of silkscreen.
36:13News photos mainly, records of current events, the flux of the media.
36:23He wanted to create a new sort of history painting on the old panoramic scale.
36:48I've been to probably no fewer than a dozen of the Apollos and the shuttle shots.
36:58And it's always excited me and there's hope in that tremendous surge of energy
37:08and the sound the liftoff makes that it's not of this world.
37:23There's a very strong feeling that America is presenting you suddenly with this flow of images,
37:28which are really, really strong and in some way unprecedented.
37:31The space program, Kennedy, all this.
37:33Did you feel that you were living in really exceptional times when you were doing this?
37:38Well, I had to be aware of that.
37:41I mean, I certainly couldn't have done that work under Nixon or nearly anybody else.
37:50It's not the dramatic drive and the imagination that's ever reoccurred since that period.
38:07I had just invested in six foot silk screens of Kennedy with the hand.
38:15With the pointing finger?
38:16Yes.
38:17And in that context, he was like authority, the president.
38:22And now he was not authority.
38:25He was not president.
38:26He was a dead tragedy.
38:35Kennedy's death wasn't only a colossal blow to American self-confidence.
38:39It was one of the watersheds from which the present fragmentation of American society flowed.
38:46I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history
38:54as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
39:01We shall overcome.
39:06We shall overcome.
39:15The 1960s brought one of the greatest moral struggles in American history, the Civil Rights Movement.
39:20Some black writers in the process rose from national to international fame,
39:25among them James Baldwin and Richard Wright, the novelists.
39:28And yet the visual art seems strangely silent on the subject of black identity and experience.
39:33Why? Because white artists, critics, collectors, the whole art world in fact,
39:38good liberals to the last man, tended to regard blacks as a kind of social abstraction.
39:50Romare Bearden's collages of life in the South and in Harlem set out to change this.
39:56They are among the greatest expressions of African-American culture.
40:00They belong with the work of Duke Ellington and Earl Hines in music or Alvin Ailey in dance.
40:08As an artist, Bearden was not a cultural separatist.
40:11And he never bought the line that art had to be abstract to matter.
40:15It could report on its place, its time, its people.
40:25He drew on Picasso, on Matisse, even on Dutch genre painting, whatever was useful.
40:33And on African art as well, cycling the forms of masks and statues
40:37back into the living Harlem that was all around him.
40:46He was in Harlem after all the 1920s, saw the birth of jazz.
40:51And that aesthetic was very much a part of the way that he saw.
40:55And he found a way, I think unlike any other African-American artist before him,
41:01of representing that aesthetic visually.
41:03He found a visual language for an aesthetic which we had experienced mostly in verbal and musical forms,
41:11through great attainments in African-American music.
41:14Well, Bearden found a way to encapsulate that aesthetic visually.
41:18And his collage technique is the closest visual analog to jazz rhythms and improvisation that I at least have encountered.
41:26On the left, it's the closest visual language.
41:29On the left.
42:12To be an American was to have too much most of the time.
42:16It was to live in a permanent inflation of desire.
42:22The English invented the sandwich, and then they did nothing with it for 200 years.
42:28A miserable flap of bread with a little smear of mustard on a transparent piece of ham.
42:33Pathetic. Not here.
42:35Turkey, corned beef, Swiss cheese, roast beef, American cheese, pastrami.
42:40The only problem being, as the conquistador said on the edge of the Grand Canyon,
42:44how do you get down into it? Sandwich as metaphor.
42:51American artists had rejoiced in the mythic bigness of their country.
42:55It was one of the great themes of the 19th century.
42:58And then, in the late 50s and 60s, they began to get into the bigness of ordinary life.
43:04The artist who latched onto this aspect of America, so weird to the foreigner, was Klaus Oldenburg.
43:13He was the best of the pop artists in the 1960s, and pop art, as Andy Warhol said, was about
43:20liking things.
43:23I think there are many types of American food, but the sort of food that I was using here was
43:28the simpler forms that have a kind of architecture.
43:31And they're found in very simplified, fast food.
43:35The hamburger is a perfectly structural piece of food, and I think I'd almost rather look at it than eat
43:41it, you know.
43:41But it is fun. It's got three circles, and if you put an onion on it, you have even more
43:46variation,
43:47and then a pickle is even more variation, and so on.
43:50So it's very often a structure which is covered with a very textured surface.
43:57In 1961, Oldenburg moved into a store on the Lower East Side, and began to fill it with things.
44:05The store was a parody of an art gallery, nothing but a shop with art in it.
44:10Out of cheap sleazy materials, plaster, rags, shiny paint and junk,
44:15he made shoes, shirts, stockings, knickers, all unwearable, all absurd.
44:27And then there was his highly loaded image of a child's toy, a ray gun.
44:33The essence of a ray gun is that it shoots but doesn't kill.
44:36It's more of a vision. It's more about seeing.
44:39I played with the notion of violence by making ray guns,
44:43and the gun is such an omnipresent thing in American society, and such a fascination.
44:48The ray gun also referred to the American fascination with pistols and rifles and guns.
44:55It was a kind of a phallic form, where the identification of the phallus and the gun was very clearly
45:01marked.
45:04Almost all of the works can be related to the body in some way,
45:08because they are objects handled by a human being,
45:11so they relate to the feeling of a human being.
45:14And then they also are imagined, they stimulate the imagination of human beings,
45:19so they all refer, all the objects refer to human experiences.
45:28Huh!
45:35Huh!
45:37What is this?
45:38Huh!
45:48Huh!
45:49Huh!
45:50Huh!
45:50Huh!
45:54Americans were the first people to completely adapt to mass advertising.
45:58It bombarded them with thousands of messages a day, it shaped their dreams, it interrupted
46:04their landscapes, and it helped form their cities.
46:07Its monumental form was the billboard, and one artist got his training by painting them
46:13high above Times Square.
46:16I was working as a sign painter in the union in Times Square, and I'd paint a huge 60-foot
46:22long glass of beer, beautifully, with bubbles and the right yellow and everything, and the
46:29salesman would come in and says, James, that beer doesn't have enough hops in it.
46:34He says, you've got to change it.
46:35I said, what do you mean?
46:36What do I know from hops?
46:37He says, well, make it a little lighter.
46:40I made it one-thousandth degree lighter, the whole damn thing.
46:42That's good, it passes.
46:45Next day, paint an Aero shirt 20 feet high.
46:50James, the collar looks dirty, you've got to change the collar.
46:54You've got a dirty shirt, they're not going to pass it.
46:57So I had all this color.
46:59I had Ford Seafoam Green.
47:01I had dirty beer color that were wrong hops.
47:06I had dirty Aero shirt collar.
47:09I took that paint home and made abstract paintings, and only I knew that this was the wrong color.
47:15Then it dawned on me, why don't I try to make a mysterious painting by doing enlarged fragments,
47:22and the largest fragment would be hardest to see and therefore be mysterious.
47:28So Lawrence Alloway came along, and he called it pop art because the artists loved their images so much.
47:37In I Love You With My Ford, a woman's dreaming face rises from a sea of orange spaghetti, a pollock
47:44in pasta, to kiss the grill of a Detroit car.
47:59Generally, there's no politics in Rosenquist's fantasies of desire, but in 1965, he produced an exception to that,
48:06an enormous panorama about Vietnam called the F-111, the name of a strategic bomber.
48:19It was panels covered with aluminum.
48:23Over the surface of that, I used Italian wallpaper rollers to give an idea of nuclear fallout and so forth.
48:29Then there was a runner's hurdle, so one was hurtling oneself into a blind spot.
48:39Then an angel foods cake that was a metaphor for a missile silo.
48:48Above that is a firestone snow tire that had this tough-looking design of industry.
48:59And I thought of this plane going through all this flack of household items, light bulbs, nuclear imagery, things during
49:09peacetime.
49:22There was a little girl with blonde hair under a hairdryer as the pilot of this bomber, like an aviatrix.
49:33And then on to the rendering of a hydrogen bomb in a red grisaille with an umbrella over it, with
49:40snow in an umbrella,
49:41like a view from a resort onto a nuclear bomb.
49:56Then a underwater swimmer with a gulp of air going to the surface, which was like the air missing in
50:03Dresden during the bombing.
50:08Then a field of Franco-American spaghetti.
50:16The F-111 summed up Rosenquist's vision of America as an Eden compromised by its own violence.
50:43The 60s were also a time of the face and the flashbulb, the great American fixation on celebrity, disposable renown,
50:51that gripped the culture as never before.
50:59It would get its artist laureate in Andy Warhol, who fastened his own identity to the identicality of American glut.
51:32Andy Warhol did most of his best work over a span of six years, finishing in 1970.
51:36In 1968, when he was shot.
51:38And most of it was connected to one central insight, which was that in a culture of raw data,
51:43where most people experience most things through a stream of media stereotypes, the affectless artist has a place.
51:51You didn't need to be hot and earnest anymore.
51:54You could be super cool, like a slightly frosted mirror.
51:58Andy Warhol didn't sit down and work that out.
52:01He knew it in his bones. He understood it instinctively.
52:04He was a conduit for a kind of collective American state of mind whose idea of sacredness is celebrity.
52:12And his themes were death and fame.
52:18On the one hand, you had the icons of publicity.
52:22The film stars.
52:24Liz.
52:26Marilyn.
52:30Elvis.
52:32The face of Jackie Kennedy, who doubled and quadrupled and multiply like images of the saints at the hands of
52:39a Polish Catholic boy,
52:41who was utterly fascinated by their aura and remoteness and pervasiveness.
52:46The production of fame was an American industry and everything to do with it mesmerized him.
52:53This is so glamorous.
52:56You don't have to do anything.
52:59Just what you're doing.
53:00Knowing that America makes all its children want to be famous, no matter how dull they may actually be,
53:07he produced endless hours of unwatchable film about the doings of his circle of friends and hangers-on in his
53:13studio known as The Factory.
53:16Later, he expanded this into a silkscreen portrait service for genuine and wannabe celebrities,
53:22a cosmetic operation that stripped the idea of social portraiture down to its bare chassis.
53:53His silence, his dead-panned lack of affect, became a Rorschach blot,
53:58onto which a hot culture could project its curiosity about artists.
54:02Here he is with his dealer, Ivan Karp, and an interviewer who was getting nowhere.
54:07Well, this is something that people wouldn't see every day,
54:10that something that is so familiar, it's become invisible to them.
54:14So why did you decide to paint the electric chair?
54:18Um, I don't know.
54:33But he did know, of course, and so does anyone who sees these bare, mute, grainy images.
54:39The dark side of Warhol was the most interesting one, maybe the only interesting one.
54:49He was truly mesmerized by death, American death, whether inflicted by the state or simply by random accidents.
55:01Over and over again, he silkscreened photos of it,
55:04as suicide's body crashed on the roof of a car in baroque swirls of black and white.
55:16A car burning in suburbia, with its driver hanging from a telegraph pole.
55:27Goya he wasn't, not by a million miles, but in these paintings he was true to his experience,
55:33and to his voyeuristic nature, and that gave them a grip that his more frivolous and routine stuff,
55:38now that he too is dead, no longer has.
55:46And that is true of his gold Marilyn as well.
55:50Suicide, drag queen, Madonna, all rolled into one.
55:57Not only was Marilyn Monroe dead when Warhol painted it, but the whole world she stood for was dead.
56:02That kind of peroxide, sex bomb, movie glamour has more to do with the gleaming chrome on a 1957 Cadillac
56:10than it does with the Volkswagen of 1959 or the squared off Lincoln Continental that Kennedy was shot in,
56:17which was a black box in 1963.
56:19It's a past style, and it therefore has the kind of stink of death on it.
56:23And that there is not just the fact that Marilyn is dead,
56:26but also the sense that a lot of the consumer culture they represented had the sense of something passing on
56:33it.
56:33There was something elegiac about what they did with consumer culture.
57:00The end of the 60s looks like archaeology today,
57:03and who believes anymore in the binding power of national fetishes of prestige like the space program?
57:09Not even the amazing feat of putting Americans on the moon
57:12could altogether convince other Americans that all was well on Earth.
57:16John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, all dead, assassinated.
57:22The war in Vietnam stalled and perhaps unwinnable.
57:26Huge splits of race and gender, class and belief were opening in the American polity,
57:30and the clamp of the Cold War could no longer hold them together.
57:34Perhaps it never had been as easy to be an American as many Americans thought.
57:57The final part of American Visions is at 10.30 next Monday.
58:02Concluding tomorrow at 10, Ken Burns' compelling series on the American Revolution.
58:07Next on BBC4, a meeting of minds and music with Jacob Collier.
58:32The Review of Jews
58:35of the Champions for Redmayor's Flight
58:36of the Carousel