All language subtitles for S01E02 - Modern Dreams

This is the most famous statue
in the world.

The Statue Of Liberty

embodies the old American dream of
freedom, free opportunity for all.

But look beneath the surface

and she's also a great symbol of
modern America's economic and
technological power.

Liberty isn't quite what she seems
to be.

She's an American symbol, but she
was in fact, a gift from the French.

And while she might look like a
classical statue, she isn't made of
marble,

she is formed from a copper skin
stretched across an intricate
network of iron girders,

the very same cutting-edge
technology

that would soon transform the
skylines of America's great modern
cities.

She is, herself, a skyscraper.

From the moment that she was
installed here in 1886,

the Statue Of Liberty beckoned
immigrants to America,

they came in their millions.

At the beginning of the 19th
century, the population of the
United States

was less than four million.

By 1920, it was more than 100
million.

It was a transformation that
redefined the American identity

and which signalled the beginning of
the modern age.

SIRENS WAIL

To be a new arrival in New York at
the beginning of the 20th century

was a bewildering experience.

The constant influx of immigrants
made for an extraordinary mix of
nationalities.

And simply by their presence,
they made this the most dynamic
city,

in the most dynamic nation in the
world.

But it was also a place of slums,
gang wars,

exploitation and disease.

Yet to a small group of young
artists, it was precisely that
contrast

that seemed to encapsulate modern
America.

They abandoned their home city of
Philadelphia and came to New York,

not just to live, but to make the
city the subject of their art.

They wanted to depict the buzz and
grit of Manhattan,

the trashy sprawl of this ever
expanding, over populated city

and they became known as
"The Ashcan School".

The painters of The Ashcan School
were fascinated

by focal points, by meeting places

and there aren't many of their
places left in New York City today,

but McSorely's Old Ale House is one
of those places.

John Sloan, who was one of the
principal painters of the school,

came here many times.

I think what he was fascinated by in
this place was the way in which
ordinary life

would, so to speak, arrange itself
in a succession of different
compositions

before his artist's eye.

He borrowed the swift, sketchy
French Impressionist style of Manet
and Degas,

the pictorial equivalent of snatched
glimpses and glances,

and used it to capture the unique
energy of American life.

For all his passionate engagement
with the fabric of the city,

John Sloan tended towards
sentimentality in his slices of
life.

He turned a blind eye to the poverty

and the ruthlessly competitive
ethos of Manhattan.

He saw the people of New York as
a vast extended family.

And he depicted the city and its
multitudes

as if it was a non-stop street
party.

The art of Sloan's contemporary,
George Bellows, however, was
savagely critical.

To him, New York was a city where
people had literally to fight to
survive.

He made that his subject in a series
of pictures

that reflect the darker side of life
in this new world.

George Bellows was simultaneously
fascinated and repulsed

by what he saw as the maelstrom of
New York city.

The society where it really was dog
eat dog, those who got on, got on,

and those who didn't quickly fell
into the gutter.

And his great image of the
cruelty of New York as a society and
as a place

was the illegal boxing match.

These fights would take place in
gentlemen's clubs,

hence the grim irony of his title,
Both Members Of This Club.

These are desperate men fighting
for the entertainment of others.

Certainly far too poor to be members
of any club but,

in order to be able to fight, they
are briefly made members of the
establishment.

It's a horrible image of human
desperation.

The black man appears not just to be
punching his opponent, but kneeing
him in the groin

and he gives out this terrible yell.

That mouth is like a raw wound.

There is an extraordinary fleshiness
about the way in which

Bellows has painted the whole
picture.

Look at this sea of faces,
this is the audience.

A Goya-esque audience, but it also
seems to look forward to

Francis Bacon's depiction of man as
meat, man as a blur of flesh.

It's a really brutal image of what
Bellows saw as a brutal,
brutalised society.

The contrast between the bruising
images of George Bellows

and the softer visions
of John Sloan,

anticipates the great conflict that
American artists

would find themselves caught up in
during the first half of the 20th
century.

How do you respond to a new urban
reality?

The world changing at breathtaking
speed?

Do you idealise it, seek to see the
best in it,

or do you strip it bare?

Here, Bellows shows the city
itself being torn apart

in the construction of a new
railroad terminus for New York.

These were the places where most
people in America would live,

in the belly of an immense machine,
the city.

That would provide enormous wealth
for some, but not for all.

And this new city machine had an
emblem

that symbolised the social chasm
that was coming to America.

And it first appeared in Chicago.

A terrible fire in the city in 1871
had cleared the way for architects

to begin experimenting with a new
form of construction,

that would allow them to make
buildings taller than ever before.

These lofty brownstone buildings are
some of the world's first
skyscrapers.

The main conceiver of the
skyscraper, architect Louis
Sullivan,

lived and worked in Chicago.

This is his Auditorium building,
completed in 1889.

Sullivan coined the phrase, "Form
follows function",

meaning that the new social and
economic structures of America
required a new architecture.

But his manifesto on the design of
tall buildings has endured as a
blueprint

for almost every skyscraper built in
the last 120 years.

"Let us state the conditions", wrote
Sullivan, in the plainest manner.

"First, a storey below ground
containing the plant for power,
heating, lighting.

"A ground floor devoted to stores,
banks or other establishments.

"A second storey, readily accessible
by stairways.

"Above this, an indefinite number of
storeys of offices, piled tier upon
tier.

"Last, at the top of this pile,
is placed a storey that is

"purely physiological in its nature.
Namely, the attic".

Sullivan described the skyscraper as
the perfect emblem

of the proud, upwardly aspiring
spirit of American man.

He might, more accurately, have said
businessman.

By 1920 there were over 300,000
corporations in the United States

serving 100 million consumers in a
vast, interconnected single market.

The mightiest economy the world had
ever seen.

This is what the land of opportunity
looks like.

The opportunity to make a fortune in
a free market.

Skyscrapers stood, above all, for
American corporate success.

They transformed the appearance of
American cities,

cities the like of which had never
been seen before.

Skylines became like graphs, the
tallest buildings representing

the greatest concentration of
commercial wealth and power.

Travel away from the gleaming,

bright, beautiful, skyscraping
downtown

of a city like Chicago in the early
20th century

and you would encounter another
city, a completely different place.

Far more horizontal, lower in look,
lower in spirit.

The experience was described in a
vivid, bleak, depressing passage
in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel,

The Jungle, where he talks of
journeying south out of Chicago

and travelling for 34 miles along
the same one road and seeing nothing
but ugliness.

The reason the sprawl of the slums
could continue for mile after mile
after mile

in a place like Chicago was simply
because the American landscape is
so enormous.

It could just eat it up.

Although the scenery's changed, I
think Sinclair was being
depressingly prescient.

What he was describing was the
formation of the modern American
cityscape.

While the details have changed,
the contrast between rich and poor,

between beauty and ugliness, are
still exactly the same.

Chicago epitomised a new reality.

The task ahead for American artists,
as it had been for The Ashcan
School,

was how to respond to this world of
extremes.

By 1913, as American artists began
to face up to that challenge,

a headline event in New York offered
them one possible solution.

I'm on Lexington Avenue, between
25th and 26th Street.

What's really a landmark in the
development of modern American
culture

because it was here in 1913

that they staged the first
international exhibition of modern
art.

A show that included some 1,250
paintings and sculptures

by around 300 American and European
artists.

Above all, this was the American
public's first opportunity

to experience the incendiary series
of revolutions that had swept
through European art,

from Phobism to the work of Picasso
and the Cubists.

And it was staged here at the
appropriately incendiary venue

of the Armory of the 69th Regiment
of the US Army.

The show certainly had an explosive
impact,

but not in the way its organisers
had hoped for.

The show got plenty of press
coverage and thousands of visitors

but, by and large, people came not
to look and be enlightened,

they came to gawp and to mock.

A painting like Nude In Motion
by the founder of The Ashcan School,
Robert Henri,

might have been deemed acceptable.

But Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending
A Staircase,

actually painted a year earlier, was
incomprehensible to most Americans.

Other modern European artists, such
as Matisse and Picasso, were also
pilloried.

But Duchamp's painting drew the most
criticism and became the butt of
most of the jokes.

In all, around 300,000 people
saw the Armory show in 1913

but, as an exercise in introducing
the American public

to European contemporary art, it
was a disaster.

So why did the Armory show meet
with such an overwhelmingly
hostile response?

Well, I think part of the answer
lies purely in all-American
patriotism,

large swathes of the press and the
public deeply resented the idea

that these newfangled Europeans with
their newfangled ideas represented

some kind of cutting edge with which
they were not familiar.

But it's also important to remember
that a lot of American artists

and their students had problems with
the work in the Armory show.

The truth is that even the most
forward looking American artists of
the early 20th century

still remained essentially wedded to
representational languages of
painting.

Even those who were drawn to the
experimental and the avant-garde

ultimately embraced a form of
realism.

This is Voice Of The City
Of New York Interpreted

painted by Joseph Stella in the
early 1920s.

Stella was an Italian immigrant
who was passionately excited

by the forms and shapes of the
teeming American metropolis.

In places, this picture must've seen
bewilderingly modern to the American
audience.

Especially in the almost abstract
passages meant to conjure up the
lights of Broadway.

Overall, he's framed his hectic
celebration of the city in a
sharp-lined, figurative style.

Even the overall form of his work is
traditional.

It's a five panelled altarpiece,
erected to the steel and glass gods
of the city.

The painter and photographer
Charles Sheeler saw the same subject
matter

and conveyed the same excitement

in the literal and representational
language of moving pictures,

themselves generated by a machine.

Sheeler made Manhatta in 1921
with filmmaker Paul Strand.

It's a powerful evocation of the
drama and intensity of America's
most dynamic city.

Sheeler was struck by the idea that
the new buildings and machines

formed by big business and heavy
industry

were the most distinctive feature of
American life.

And in his work as a painter he
chose an hauntingly cold, clinical,
figurative style.

In American Landscape, from 1930,
a huge factory dominates the scene.

There's an impersonal geometry,

an unreal, unsullied look to
everything.

Especially the factory chimney
and the wharfside train.

Sheeler's painting was inspired
by an earlier trip he'd made to
Detroit

which proved to be a turning point
in his career.

This steelworks was once part of the
Ford River Rouge plant.

Charles Sheeler arrived here in
1927 with a commission from Ford

to produce a series of photographs

and he was suitably impressed by
what he saw.

The subject matter, he said,

"Is incomparably the most thrilling
I have had to work with."

And these are his photographs.

At the time the River Rouge plant

was the largest most technologically
advanced industrial complex in the
world.

Raw materials like iron ore were
processed and assembled in a
continuous workflow

on one enormous site to produce
finished automobiles.

It was called vertical integration.

Sheeler photographed it all as if it
were the modern equivalent of a
Gothic cathedral.

Towering structures reaching to
the heavens.

But he also saw it as a distinctly
unwelcoming cathedral,

hard, unyielding.

That's why there is such an
unsettling quality to so
much of Sheeler's work.

I think it's very telling that the
one thing you almost never find

in Charles Sheeler's images of the
Ford River Rouge plant is any trace
of human presence.

It's as if he recognised that the
vast edifice of big business in
America,

despite its cathedral-like
magnificence,

rested on an essentially cold and
calculatedly impersonal view

of the individual human worker.

In America in the early 20th century
people were chasing money as never
before,

streamlining production to maximise
profits,

and Detroit was one of the capital
cities of this capitalist creed.

The factory production line was
a process that Henry Ford had
personally pioneered.

Human beings became
biological machines,

endlessly repeating the same
mechanical actions.

This endless vista of human labour
underpinned the soaring structures
of the factory,

its chimneys and its plant.

It's like the contrast between
skyscraper

and urban sprawl laid out at the
level of industry and labour
relations.

Today, workers are assisted by
computer-controlled machines.

The business philosophy
remains the same.

Henry Ford's perfection of the
production line process marks

the apotheosis of America's old
puritan work ethic.

This is work purged of every last
ounce of inefficiency,

work rendered totally, purely,

transparently, utterly productive.

I think it's also the triumph of a
certain type of utilitarian American
attitude

that's so profoundly embedded.

You find it in the language,

you find it in all kinds of
unexpected places in modern America.

You can go into a restaurant and,
if haven't finished your meal,

the waitress will say to you, "Hey,
are you still working on that?"

Everything in America, at a certain
level, is work.

But what happens when there is no
work to be done?

What happens when the apparently
virtuous circle of mass production
and mass consumption,

the engine of American progress,
is suddenly broken?

The stock market crash of 1929 set
the world economy on a downward
spiral.

Factories began to close and
unemployment soared.

Against the backdrop of what became
the Great Depression,

Americans began to look back to the
values

and familiar certainties of earlier
times.

And that's what you see in this
celebrated painting by Grant
Wood, American Gothic.

Grant Wood submitted American Gothic
to the juried annual

Open Art Exhibition Of The Art
Institute of Chicago in 1930

and he won the Norman Wait Harris
Bronze Medal and $300 for it.

Yet the picture has become, since
that time,

one of the most famous images in all
of American art history.

Wood painted it, I think, out of a
deep sense of nostalgia.

He was harking back to his
own childhood in Iowa

where he grew up among frontiersmen
and women just like this.

When the picture was reproduced in a
local newspaper

back in 1930, with the caption
Iowa Farmer And His Wife,

a real Iowa farmer's wife
wrote in to the newspaper and said,

"That's disgraceful, you're going
to give people like us a bad name.

"The picture should be hung in a
cheese factory, that woman's face
would positively sour milk."

But I think the essence of it,
for me,

is it's got a kind of specimen-like
quality to it.

It's as if these are, if you like,
the last representatives of old
Victorian values in America

and they represent, in a sense
they are the homesteader equivalent
of the last of the Mohicans.

One feels that these people are on
the way out,

they are being squeezed out by the
new urbanisation of America

that is gradually depopulating the
countryside

and they are also being squeezed
by the economic conditions of the
Great Depression,

which they can't control in anyway.

Grant Wood's painting is a lament
for the passing of a 19th-century
ideal,

decent people, living in small
communities.

But the dream of such a life
continued to exert a powerful
hold on the American imagination,

and especially so in the darkest
days of the depression

when many Americans clung on to it,
like a fantasy of escape from
hardship.

It's the dream of a wonderful life
in a perfect world,

a world not unlike this one,
a small town somewhere in America.

This is Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

It might seem almost too perfect

but it represents an idealised
America, based not on chasing the
dollar

but on goodness, decency, shared
troubles and human dignity.

And, it had its own painter, a man
called Norman Rockwell.

For more than 40 years, Rockwell's
pictures were almost a weekly
feature

of life in the United States.

Delivered to the doorsteps of the
millions of families

who read magazines like the
Saturday Evening Post.

It's a benevolent, comforting myth
of America as a place where people
always help each other,

where the sick are cared for and
there's always someone looking out
for you.

It's a tonic for the white
middle-class,

the vision of a world where family
always gets together at Thanksgiving

and there's always a 20 lb turkey on
the table.

The Rockwell Museum draws huge
numbers of patriotic American
visitors.

People who are nostalgic for that
old dream of their nation

and find it reflected back at them
in these meticulously painted single
frame stories.

Stephanie Plunkett is the museum's
curator.

Stockbridge doesn't seem to have
changed a great deal.

Stockbridge is very much the same,
that's really part of its charm.

I think of Rockwell, in a sense, as
an artist who paints a kind of ideal
America.

I think he once said,

"My subject is America as I would
like it to be rather than as it is."

What do you think the values that
he tried to capture,

what are those values?

I think Rockwell saw the best in us.

His art is absolutely aspirational
and he was really showing an America

that I think represented the best
possible human qualities.

Ideas about kindness and care
and community.

It didn't have to be a big event to
be important, it could be a small
moment in life

and in fact he said, "I was painting
the America I knew and observed

"for others who might not have
noticed."

I have the sense that there are
certain groups

that are not included in the
Rockwell idyll.

They simply don't figure.

I imagine that Thanksgiving dinner,
that table could go on forever this
way.

Yes. But would a black face ever
appear at that table?

Isn't that something slightly
troubling

about the exclusiveness of
Rockwell's small town paradise?

Rockwell felt very strongly about
human rights,

human dignity for all and equality.

He would've loved to introduce those
figures

and, in fact, the publications of
the era really did not allow that.

The Post generally had an unwritten
rule that said that if people of
colour were portrayed

they would be portrayed in service
positions.

So this is really, in a sense,

his own sensibilities slightly being
forced into that box?

Yes, as beautiful as his paintings
are, they were created for mass
publication

and the publications each had their
own structures

that guided what they would show.

So there's more going on under the
surface of these images than
you might at first imagined.

Look closely and you really can
glimpse

some of the cracks in the American
dream.

Even though Rockwell does his best
to conceal them.

But in the paintings of Rockwell's
contemporary, Edward Hopper,

those unsettling undercurrents
are brought to the surface.

What's wrong with America, was what
his art was all about.

Hopper's scenes are like glimpses,
almost voyeuristic moments,

that seem to capture the inner
turmoil of lonely individuals.

The angst in the soul
of modern America.

Hopper's world is not dynamic
or dangerous.

In its way it's as soulless as a
Sheeler factory.

Only this time we really can see
the people and share their feelings,

or at least think we do.

If there's a contemporary equivalent
to the art of Hopper,

it must be the work of another New
York artist, Philip-Lorca Dicorcia,

whose photographs are shot through

with that same sense of ambiguity
and introspection.

So, Philip-Lorca, what is it that
draws your eye to Hopper,

what do you value in his work?

I value the contradictions, really.

I think complexity often results
from contradiction and

he does create a lot of tension
between what is there and what is
not there.

I find the images
that I like the most

do kind of have a narrative to them,

a tension between
reality and fiction.

Can you give me an example of that?

Well, I think the one that's
strangely the most casual,

though it's the most elaborate,
is the movie theatre, The Usherette.

You're looking at a movie,
an audience watching the movie

and then, in a place in the image
where the usherette cannot see the
audience

and the audience cannot see her,
she's in her own bubble.

I think that's a very complicated
picture, in terms of its psychology,

because you can kind of empathise
with her on a level that is very
difficult to do, I think,

because with narrative pictures

you see the conclusion, always, to
things

and he never concludes anything.

He is a master of what I call the
elliptical narrative.

There's an element always missing.

When I think about your own work in
relation to Hopper,

I always think of that wonderful
series you did called Heads

which seems to me in there sort of
catching of people

in their own lonely bubble in the
city.

Almost like a photographic
re-enactment of a kind of Hopper
voyeurism.

Well, I think that people in groups
can be seemingly isolated.

It really remains a mystery what
they're thinking about.

When people don't look directly
at the camera,

or at the nominal viewer in a
painting, it's always seen as
inward.

It is a bit of a cliche, I guess,

but it's also one of the reasons why
his work

and my work is described as
cinematic at times.

Hopper's most cinematic painting,
and his most famous,

is Nighthawks painted in 1942.

It's an apparently simple scene,

four figures in a New York
diner at night.

But, as a viewer, you are instantly
gripped by the possibilities of
what might be going on here

and that, as always with Hopper, is
far from straightforward.

Hopper's pictures evoke aftermaths
or preludes,

moments when things have just
happened or are just about to happen

in lives that he deliberately
leaves inscrutable.

What I think is most distinctive
about his vision of America

is this pervasive feeling of
emptiness, of transitoriness of
rootlessness.

I think what Hopper absolutely nails
about a certain aspect

of the modern American experience
is

that sense of a place where people

who are perhaps travelling from
different places in this vast
continent,

perhaps travelling salesman,
hookers,

someone from out of town, they
suddenly come together in a diner.

I love the way that Hopper's painted
this diner almost as if it were an
aquarium.

I think that's exactly what
he captures,

he captures this oceanic emptiness
of modern American existence.

And Hopper said that he was the
great figurative artist holding
abstraction,

holding modernism in all its forms
at bay.

I actually think his own language
of expressing modern alienation,

if you like, is full of touches of
abstraction and modernism.

Look at the way in which he's
melted the walls

behind the seated figures into this
bruised, blue, empty void.

Look at the way he's painted that
stripe of a window frame

and isolated it against that
yellow expanse.

The picture is full of little
touches of abstraction.

Little plays of light and shade
that, to me, suggest

that Hopper isn't nearly as far away

from the first great generation of
American abstract painters as he
claimed to be.

So who would at last defy the
deep-seated American preference for
realism and representation in art?

Who would tease abstraction out of
the back ground of American painting

and put it centre stage?

The answer is a man called Arshile
Gorky.

Two of his most influential
paintings hang here

in the slightly unlikely milieu of
the Newark Museum's cafe and
restaurant.

The paintings were only rediscovered
in the 1970s

after spending more than 30 years
under layers of whitewash.

Arshile Gorky was an Armenian
immigrant

with a passion for modern
European art

and he just couldn't understand why
America, this exciting, new, modern
country,

had failed to embrace the true
language, as he saw it, of
modern art.

So he, in this picture, one of the
two long forgotten

murals that he painted for the
Newark Airport Authorities,

he is almost singlehandedly
trying to introduce Americans,

everyday Americans, to the exciting
language of European avant-garde
art.

The picture's like a kaleidoscope
in which Gorky has whirled round

the different aspects of avant-garde
European style.

There are traces of surrealism,
of Cubism's flattened space,

of Fernand Leger's machine
age aesthetic.

This is a painting in one sense
that takes you inside the
cockpit of the American aeroplane.

So, he's given us the deceptive
forms of aeronautical instruments.

On the other hand, if you look at
those instruments, they also
actually form

the upside down body of a female
traveller by plane.

There she is, there's her head, with
a rather fashionable boater hat on,

and there's her high heeled shoe.

There were originally ten of these
grand murals painted for
Newark airport

but only two have survived.

The other one's just over there
and it shows a kind of diagrammatic
map of America

as a continent crisscrossed with
flight paths.

I think a kind of emblem of Gorky's
sense of America as an exciting
place,

or a place where you could literally
take wing.

What Gorky was saying to Americans
with these pictures,

he was asking them a piercing
question, he was saying,

well, you live in this land of
opportunity, this land of
excitement,

this land of technology,

this land where so much seems to be
flying off into the future,

how come your art, up until now,

has remained so mired in the past?

Tied to the old languages of
representational, figurative art.

Why are all your artists, people
like Hopper or Rockwell,

why not explore the languages of the
avant-garde, of Picasso, of the
modern?

Why not take that language and make
it your own?

In fact, Gorky would spend the rest
of his career saying that message to
Americans,

to American artists,
saying it again and again and again

until it got through.

Gorky was a considerable artist in
his own right,

though perhaps not a genius, but he
was the catalyst for a seismic shift
in American art

and his followers would create
one of the most exciting movements
in all of 20th-century painting.

Now meet the Abstract
Expressionists.

These were the people who responded
to Gorky's challenge

and set out to create a genuinely
new and modern art for a new modern
society.

The one point of difference
between them and Gorky,

who loved modern America, was that
they hated it.

Barnett Newman was one of the high
priests of the movement.

His signature the flickering zip
of paint, penetrating a void

which he saw as a vibrant assertion
of human free will against the dead
machine.

"If my work were properly
understood,"

he proclaimed, "it would mean
the end of state capitalism."

Franz Kline said,

"I paint not the things I see
but the feelings they arouse in me."

And Clyfford Still said that, "A
limited mass of paint on a canvas

"is nobler than an acre of
decorations in a rich man's
mansion."

Their art was, in effect, a
resounding no to America's
materialism,

consumerism, obsession with money
and things.

That's why they turned away from
things altogether,

from the figurative to the abstract.

And no-one pulverised the world of
physical appearances

more thoroughly than Jackson
Pollock,

the first American abstract painter
to achieve international fame.

This unique footage of Jackson
Pollock making one of his drip
paintings

was shot by Hans Namuth in 1951

when Pollock was at the peak of his
success.

The technique which Pollock made
his own

was an attempt to express the true
nature of existence

by turning art into a record of the
artist's gestures.

It also fixed Pollock in the public
imagination as Jack The Dripper.

'When I am painting I have a general
notion as to what I am about.

'I can control the flow of the
paint,

'there is no accident, just as there
is no beginning and no end.

'Sometimes I lose the painting

'but I have no fear of changes,

'of destroying the image because
a painting has a life of its own

'I try to let it live.'

Remarkably enough, you can still
visit the studio where Pollock

broke through to his signature style
of hectic drips, splashes and
spatter.

It is kind of extraordinary.

I was half joking about this being a
shrine to St Jackson Pollock

but it really is and it's even got,
it's even got a reliquary case on
the end.

These are the sacred pots of paint

and the sacred brushes once
wielded by Jackson Pollock.

I think what's immediately most
striking,

I don't think I've ever quite seen a
studio that is as revealing

of an artist's unique idiosyncratic
practices as this one

because Pollock's great invention,
or his great thing, was to paint on
the floor.

Other artists had done it but not
quite with the abandon that he did
it.

He could work here on a scale like
he could never work before.

This is where he painted his
greatest pictures,

this is where he made his
breakthrough to his monumental
canvases

and what we see here are the
aftermaths of his creation,

these are the spatters of paint that
missed the canvas and ended up on
the floor.

Harold Rosenberg, the critic,
wrote that the action painter,

and he had Pollock in mind, is
like a gladiator entering the arena
of his studio

and if ever a studio felt like an
arena, this is it.

What came out of these battles
were enormous, imposing canvases

like this one, Autumn Rhythm,
painted in 1950.

I think what this picture represents
is an extraordinary X marks
the spot moment.

This is the moment of America's
appropriation of the modern language
of art.

Pollock, in one fell swoop, has
taken this whole revolution

that begins with Cezanne and Cubism
and pushes on through to surrealism

and he's taken, he's taken the
language of modernism,

he's taken that language and
breaking with conventional
representation.

He's brought it into a whole new
field of calculated incoherence.

Somebody asked Pollock, "Why don't
you paint appearances,

"why don't you paint objects?"

He said, "Well, we've got machines
to represent objects.

"I want to get at a more modern
essence of the nature of experience,
the nature of reality.

"I want to depict what's inside a
person."

So, when you look at this picture
I suppose, in a sense,

Pollock wants you to think of the
picture as the experience

of almost watching him pour himself
out onto the canvas.

What he's trying to do throughout
is actually eliminate

any suggestion of representational
form.

So whenever his hand accidentally
might almost make something that
would look like a face,

or a hill, or a river,
he would sabotage that

and make sure that nothing in the
image looks like an image.

The question you have ask yourself
is, what does it say, what does it
mean?

After all it's painted on the
scale of an altarpiece.

The scale of the picture suggests
that you're going to be told
something

very important, very powerful, very
meaningful.

Yet when I look at it, when I try to
distil it down to what it actually
says about life,

it presents an image of man,

Pollock himself, as this inchoate,
incoherent assembly of impulses

and energies and it depicts the
universe in the same sense.

This is very much the universe as
the blind watchmaker,

with no logic, no purpose, just
sheer being, sheer existence

but without any logic to it, without
any meaning to it.

It seems to me it's a pretty dark
statement, it's a pretty nihilistic
statement.

I don't really see where Pollock
could have taken this.

Pollock himself had his doubts.

In fact he'd only paint in his most
extreme drip style for a few short
years

and those doubts were only enhanced
by his growing fame.

When Life magazine showcased him and
his work,

the experience of seeing his
pictures reproduced in the glossiest
shop window

for America's new consumer culture,
alongside adverts for instant frozen
dinners

and Ford's latest motor cars, made
Pollock feel profoundly uneasy.

He'd sought to stand against the new
market-driven world

but feared he was a sell-out.

The fear of selling out also played
on the mind of Pollock's friend and
contemporary Mark Rothko.

In 1958 he was offered a lucrative
commission in Manhattan's most
talked about new skyscraper,

Mies van der Rohe's Seagram
Building.

Specifically, The Four Seasons
restaurant.

Over the course of a year, Rothko's
initial excitement for the project

gradually gave way to growing
scepticism.

The turning point is said to have
come when he actually turned up here
to eat a meal,

he came for lunch. And he looked
around at his fellow diners

and saw that everyone in here was
a banker, a businessman,

everyone in here represented lots
and lots and lots of money.

And he's said to have remarked,
"Do I really want my work to be

"the amusement of people who pay $50
a plate?"

That wasn't, in the end, what Rothko
decided his work was all about.

He was determined to keep his art
pure.

These are some of his pictures and
pure seems the right word for them.

They are made of pure colour, laid
in translucent layers and fields.

Oil paint with the shimmering
fugitive qualities of watercolour.

But I think they are also full of
that old American love

for the continent's vast sublime
nature.

When I look at these paintings
I see sunsets over a dark horizon,

I see seas and sky.

Once you've got Rothko on your mind
you can find his spirit, or at

least find yourself seeing with his
abstracting eyes, everywhere you go.

Even on an airport travelater,

in a departure lounge or looking
through an aeroplane window.

Gazing at the heavens from 20,000
feet you might almost be travelling

through some vast three-dimensional
version of a Rothko painting.

In fact, I'm on my way to the most
ambitious of his works.

An entire secular chapel in Houston,
Texas.

It was the culmination of his
lifelong desire to see his pictures
exhibited

in a series under controlled light
conditions.

And this is the result, the Rothko
Chapel.

The building's name suggests that
what you're going to find when you
come in here

is some kind of religious space,

but what kind of religious
space, it's hard to say.

He's clearly got the form of the
altarpiece in his mind.

There's one, two, three triptychs in
here.

And there's this question of
where should you look

because in a regular church or
chapel there's a principal point of
orientation,

you know, you'd look there at
the main altarpiece and yes, 0K,
here

that is the biggest picture but
there's...

You do not have the sense that that
is where you look for your
enlightenment,

for your clarity, all the answers
are going to be over there, no.

Here you've got this sense that
maybe I should look there, or there,

there's another triptych there,
there's one here.

So, where do you look? It's almost
like a hall of mirrors.

And, 0K, the pictures don't reflect
you back

but, in a sense, they do because
they're quite resistant to the gaze,

they are not as misty,

they don't take you in as much as
some of Rothko's earlier work.

They seem to

come back at you

with their materiality.

And Rothko said something, or
hinted,

I think to a friend, that

when he was thinking about creating
these pictures he was thinking about
creating pictures that,

when you look at them,

what you're actually looking at
is yourself.

So, what do you see when you
look at these paintings,

you look into that glimmering void,

was that God, or just a trick of the
light?

Are these pictures windows

through which we can glimpse some
sense of transcendence,

some sense that there is something
beyond

or are they walls that bear down
on you, are they symbols of the fact
this life is all we've got

and that there's no way out?

I think the beauty of it is that
Rothko leaves it perfectly
completely ambiguous.

There are no answers in here,
only questions.

Almost all of the artists I've
looked at in this film

were responding to the behemoth
of the modern American city.

Some loved it, some hated it and the
Abstract Expressionists

claim to have risen above it
completely.

But I'm not so sure.

If you believe the rhetoric of the
Abstract Expressionists

their's was an almost priestly art
movement

entirely dedicated to transcending
the banalities of daily life
here in the city of New York.

There was Clyfford Still writing
about the act of painting as a form
of ecstasy.

In The Creation Of A Canvas
Still wrote,

"It's as if I achieve a form of
resurrection,

"I rise above the mundanities that
oppress me in ordinary life."

One critic even wrote of Barnett
Newman's principal signature device,

that strip dividing his canvases,

one critic compared that to God's
primordial act of separating light
from darkness

in the book of Genesis.

To me, when I am in a taxi
travelling round New York,

everywhere I look I see evidence
of the physical residue

this city left on the canvases
of the Abstract Expressionists.

Think of Franz Kline's girder-like
shapes,

like the shapes of a skyscraper
under construction,

think of Rothko's great bruised
walls of canvases

and I think of the bruised walls of
New York's tenements.

Even Clyfford Still himself, you
know, you can see those shapes of
colour

as examples of patently excellency
but you can equally well see them

as comparable to the visual
experience of looking up in New York

and trying to see the sky past
these slivers of skyscrapers,

these slabs of form that seem to be
obscuring the light.

Even Pollock, I think of Pollock,
yes,

I can think of him as an artist
who evokes nature.

I can also think of an artist who
evokes

the spatter of oil on asphalt

left by some car's shattered sump.

In one sense they wanted to rise
above consumer culture,

capitalist culture, the culture of
the city

and everything that that stood for
in New York historically,
economically, politically

but, on the other hand, their's
was an art completely of the city.

Idealism and materialism

inextricably intertwined.

That's America.

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