PROGRAM GUIDE

The television incarnation of Robert Hughes’ American Visions is a vivid, exuberant tour of 400 years of American visual culture, in the same vein as Hughes’ 1981 series on modern art, The Shock of the New. The new series, a co-production of the BBC and Time Inc., in conjunction with New York City’s Thirteen/WNET, is being aired in two-hour segments on four successive Wednesdays from May 28 to June 18 (check local listings for times). Herewith a summary of the episodes:

EPISODE 1, MAY 28 THE REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE

Hughes begins his series by examining how the brand-new United States sought a national visual style that would express its values. It found a model in the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. Classicism, says Hughes, gave the country “a language of power and authority and continuity to the past, even though it was so new.” The man who adapted classical architecture to the American Arcadia was Thomas Jefferson, whose home, Monticello, Hughes visits. Standing amid the emblems of Jefferson’s artistic and scientific achievements, Hughes cites him as the “one person from all the dead Americans that I wish I could talk to” because of “the overwhelmingly attractive cast of his mind.”

The show traces how, from Jefferson’s time to our own, classical models have shaped our buildings and sculpture, providing symbols for everything from the dollar bill to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The city of Washington was planned and built according to such models, and structures like the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial have helped transform the capital into a “historic theme park” laid out to teach Americans the virtues of civilization. In a poignant segment, Hughes stands alongside the black granite walls of the Vietnam Memorial and learns from mourners and visitors what the site means to them.

Only 50 years after the nation’s founding, the concept of Arcadia was passing. “The fear of decline started to nag at the edges of the American consciousness,” Hughes notes. The show ends by focusing on one of the artists who memorably reflected that fear, Thomas Cole. He created a five-painting cycle called The Course of Empire, which stood as a warning that America–so new, so strong and shiny–could nevertheless be swept away in one cataclysmic moment.

EPISODE 2, MAY 28 THE PROMISED LAND

Ranging from a remote mesa in New Mexico to a graveyard in Massachusetts, Hughes in this episode explores how religion has shaped American culture. He starts with 16th century Spanish missions, the sites of the first big cultural collision between Europeans and natives. It resulted in both the mass slaughter of the Indians and the beginning of an artistic melding of European and Indian art forms in the haunting, death-themed statuary known as the santos.

The Puritans meanwhile created a severe culture of practicality and moral rigor as they set out to build a virtuous Utopia in the wilds of the Northeast. What they wrought, Hughes says, has proved basic to how Americans view themselves even today. He visits the “Old Ship” meetinghouse in Hingham, Massachusetts, a stripped-down, foursquare building that embodies the seriousness and urgency of Puritan life. Puritans were also fixated on death, and in a simple wooded cemetery Hughes discusses why gravestones were their only acceptable art form.

The show looks at the works of other religious sects who emigrated to the U.S.–the grandly abstract quilts of the Amish, for example, and the chastely simple yet elegant furniture of the Shakers. Furniture, in fact, was the first American art form that lifted into originality, notably in Townsend and Goddard’s almost architectural bureaus and sideboards. In these, and in John Singleton Copley’s portraits of a confident generation of colonial men and women, Hughes detects the beginnings of a distinctly American culture.

EPISODE 3, JUNE 4 THE WILDERNESS AND THE WEST

As he gazes over the rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Hughes notes that to 19th century Americans, the country had no architectural ruins or monuments. Yet it had natural wonders that “proved that God had written the immensity of his design right here in America.” And if Americans couldn’t experience what James Fenimore Cooper called “the holy calm of nature,” they wanted works of art that reminded them of it.

The show presents a panorama of the paintings that brought it to them: the works of Thomas Cole, the first to depict the American landscape as a holy ground; of the generation of artists known as the Hudson River School; of Frederick Church, who painted vast, almost encyclopedic views of both the Northeast and South America (and whose The Heart of the Andes became “America’s first one-man, one-picture blockbuster”). Hughes profiles John James Audubon, who captured another kind of nature with his Birds of America. After the Civil War, as railroads opened up the continent, painters like Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt glorified its scenery to entice settlers and tourists–and thus, Hughes notes, the myth of the West was born.

The settling of the country and the wresting of the land from the Indians tormented the art of American whites, and still does. Hughes drives to the top of a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota to assess the quest of the late sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski–now carried on by his family–to blast and carve out of the mountain a colossal homage to the Indian leader Crazy Horse.

EPISODE 4, JUNE 4 THE GILDED AGE

The Civil War was the first great modern war, and Mathew Brady’s views of Union and Confederate bodies strewn on its fields radically changed people’s perceptions of combat. Standing amid rows of gravestones, Hughes says the war “was America’s Iliad. It was America’s Holocaust, and it changed the country forever.” How it did so is the subject of this episode.

The war created a nostalgia for lost heroes, as in the still lifes of John Frederick Peto, and for vanished innocence, evoked as a remembered collective childhood by Winslow Homer. With the mechanization of the war came the industrialization of the society–and the explosion of wealth that gave the postwar era its name. Realism reigned. The greatest Realist painter, Thomas Eakins, “wanted to be objective, as declarative as a camera,” says Hughes. Advances in iron framing transformed the American city, as seen in the early skyscrapers of architect Louis Sullivan. But the icon of “the technological sublime” was the Brooklyn Bridge. It, the historian David McCullough tells Hughes in an interview, represented “the beginning of the vertical city.”

Yet while this technological age created the belief that America could do anything, its artists still looked longingly to Europe for inspiration. So did the new American plutocracy, created by the boom in steel, railroads and shipping. The superrich lived in mock-European palaces–especially in Newport, Rhode Island, which Hughes tours bemusedly–and flocked to the Continent, returning with trunks full of art treasures. Some, like Bostonian Isabella Stewart Gardner, established museums with their acquisitions to help expose the masses to the fine arts.

EPISODE 5, JUNE 11 THE WAVE FROM THE ATLANTIC

At the start of this episode, Hughes takes the viewer through the Immigration Hall at Ellis Island–the conduit for massive immigration in the early decades of the 20th century. As footage rolls by of the teeming streets of New York’s Lower East Side–where many of the immigrants settled–Hughes comments that this wave of arrivals prompted artists to develop a new, popular style akin to journalism. Painters and photographers searched out subjects on the streets and in the slums of New York. The works of America’s first crusading photographer, Jacob Riis, are shown, as are the paintings of the Ashcan School–John Sloan, Robert Henri, George Bellows.

Yet nature continued to prove an artistic inspiration for some. Frank Lloyd Wright strove for what he called organic architecture, in which space, material and furniture would create a unified whole. Hughes visits such Wright masterpieces as the Robie House in Chicago and Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, which he describes as “the most beautiful American house since Jefferson’s Monticello.” Georgia O’Keeffe, who went west and found inspiration in the bone-littered hills around her adobe home in New Mexico, draws one of the most barbed tributes of the series. “She was,” says Hughes, “a diva of independence, an icon of feminism, and God help anybody who had the temerity to suggest that there might have been, let’s say, some unevenness in her work.”

EPISODE 6, JUNE 11 STREAMLINES AND BREADLINES

In the midst of the jazz age, New York went skyscraper crazy, producing some of the most original and exuberant buildings of the 20th century. As a helicopter camera circles dizzyingly around William van Alen’s polished, gargoyle-and-starburst-festooned Chrysler Building, Hughes and architecture critic Paul Goldberger analyze why architects embraced the sleek, ultramodern Art Deco style. “Art Deco wrapped it all into one package,” says Goldberger. “Suddenly New York had a building type that could absolutely summarize all the things it cared about most: drama, theater, power, money.”

Although such towers loomed large, the footage shows crowds huddling in soup lines. The New Deal put unemployed artists to work painting murals and taking pictures of the Dust Bowl. During this period, Edward Hopper depicted lonely people adrift in an indifferent world. Hughes dwells on Hopper’s paintings–their sense of light and nuance–as he explores the painter’s success in portraying “all the sweltering, tawdry life of the American small town, the sad desolation of our suburban landscape.” Other artists, notably the Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, evoked idyllic scenes of rural life. Virtually ignored, though, was the black migration from rural South to urban North, except by Jacob Lawrence, who chronicled it in his 60-painting visual ballad Migration Series.

As the Depression dragged on, designers projected the hope and promise of the future in streamlined machines, epitomized by the 1936 Cord 810, a car in which Hughes takes a spin. He concludes by showing how futuristic design culminated in the New York World’s Fair of 1939.

EPISODE 7, JUNE 18 THE EMPIRE OF SIGNS

After World War II, New York eclipsed Paris as the world’s art center. America, a land of Coca-Cola, supermarkets and drive-ins, was a “vulgar, innocent, triumphant paradise,” says Hughes. Abstract Expressionism and Pop ruled the day, and in this episode Hughes considers how these movements fit into a nation gripped by the cold war and awash in staggering abundance. In fact, postwar artists, especially such Abstract Expressionists as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, felt only alienation. Footage shows the greatest of the AbExes, Jackson Pollock, at work on a painting, smoking cigarettes as he splashes gobs of color on a canvas–“so transparent to the eye, so nuanced in its energy,” as Hughes puts it. Hughes makes a pilgrimage to Pollock’s Long Island studio–“the sanctum sanctorum”–to see the coffee cans containing Pollock’s used brushes, the paint-encrusted shoes and the color-stained floor.

John Kennedy’s death in 1963 was a watershed in the fragmentation of America. In its wake, Pop artists like sculptor Claes Oldenburg started exploring the weirdness of American life. Andy Warhol, seen making a movie in his Factory, meanwhile exploited the cult of celebrity, churning out images of the famous (Marilyn Monroe) and of the morbid (his electric-chair series).

EPISODE 8, JUNE 18 THE AGE OF ANXIETY

This final episode recounts how the world of promise of the 1950s unraveled during the Vietnam War. Some artists responded with political works–Philip Guston with his blood-stained Klansmen, Edward and Nancy Kienholz with their mock-monumental “tableaux.” (A bizarre segment shows Edward Kienholz’s final work: his own burial on a mountaintop in Idaho. His embalmed body is seated in a 1940 Packard coupe, driven into a large hole and covered up.) The last great ism of American art, Minimalism, rose during this era. It rejected images and avoided nature. In Marfa, Texas, Hughes takes the viewer through rooms full of gleaming aluminum boxes, what he calls “a temple of ascetic fanaticism,” constructed by the doyen of the Minimalist movement, sculptor Donald Judd.

In the ’80s, Hughes argues, Ronald Reagan’s economic policies created an overinflated art market with spiraling prices and egos–a “low, dishonest time for much American art.” In an interview, he goads one of the main players of the period, Jeff Koons, to explain what is spiritual about his large sculpture of a crucified cat, Kitten in a Sock. Hughes also searches out serious artists still at work, such as Susan Rothenberg, painter of highly stylized horses. He ends his series at an extinct volcano in Arizona, where the artist James Turrell has altered the crater’s rim so that it traces the shape of the horizon, and plans to burrow tunnels and chambers into the earth to enable visitors to experience the light, the sun, the moon and the stars. Hughes lies down on the ground to see the art, the sky and the horizon–a panorama he refers to as a true American Vision on an epic scale.

–By DANIEL S. LEVY