ART HISTORY FOR SMARTIES
dumb it down in PBS's "American Visions." + + +
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BY CHARLES TAYLOR | you don't have to agree with everything Robert Hughes says to admire how damned hard he works to embody an almost old-fashioned idea of what a critic should be. Hughes' new eight-part history of American art, "American Visions" (PBS, Wednesdays beginning May 28), is almost old-fashioned. It's located squarely in the tradition of enlightening the public about culture, and it's unashamed in its belief in the enriching power of art. Before you head for the hills (or at least turn to reruns of "90210"), fleeing visions of Clifton Fadiman or those "Reader's Digest" record sets of "The World's Great Music" that sat unplayed in so many of our houses, I should say that you couldn't ask for a wittier or less stuffy tour guide than Hughes. In "American Visions" (and its hefty, 600-plus-page companion volume, published by Knopf), Hughes writes for a general audience without ever slighting his own storehouse of knowledge, blunting his responses or dumbing things down. That may sound like a conventional approach, and in some ways it is, but it's no longer a common one. I have rarely finished one of Hughes' pieces without learning something I didn't know, and the same was true for every episode of "American Visions." Sure, it drags in places (at eight hours, how could it not?) and your attention may wax or wane depending on your interest in the period under consideration. But there are precious few critics in any field who could take on this Moby of a topic without sacrificing either enthusiasm or common sense, and without bowing prostrate and flossy at the altar of Culture. Hughes relates the history of American art in big, broad themes that never seem simplistic, thanks to the flesh he puts on them and also to his sense of drama. Like many transplants to this country (an Australian, he has lived in New York since 1970, when he became the art critic for Time), he's taken with the expansive and heroic (sometimes foolishly so) characteristics of America and American art. He conceives of the tale he has to tell as one where the themes of nature vs. industry, tradition vs. innovation, inclusiveness vs. exclusiveness are replayed again and again. Hughes has an uncanny knack for finding echoes of style and theme. He remarks how Whistler's "Nocturnes on the Thames" looks forward to Monet and how Jackson Pollock's "Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)" harks back to him. The expansion of frontiers, traditionally associated with the idea of the American landscape as a promised land in a painting like Alfred Bierstadt's "Emigrants Crossing the Plains," can be seen in art that celebrates industry over nature, like Louis Sullivan's skyscrapers, a vertical expansion that came after Americans had pushed to the country's borders. And while Hughes spends much time detailing how architecture and painting was borrowed from Europe in an attempt to impart tradition and weight to a young country, he can see the ideals of the new country reflected in neo-classical style, most eloquently in Jean-Antoine Houdon's statue of George Washington. The statue depicts Washington as a gentleman farmer instead of a war hero, and he's missing a button from his coat, a touch Hughes refers to as "democracy in dress," just as the statue's life size might be called a democracy of scale. Wandering the country in his blue shirts and rumpled pleated chinos, Hughes is companionable and grouchy in equal measure. Whenever his bushy eyebrows start to arch, you can be sure that a quip is on the way. The best involves a series of minimalist canvasses by the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman -- vertical lines on whitewashed backgrounds that Newman claimed represented the passion of Christ. Hughes quotes Newman on the abstract expressionists' challenge to art. "I thought our quarrel was with Michelangelo," he said, to which Hughes replies, "Bad news, Barney. You lost." And Hughes displays an admirable poker face interviewing that epitome of everything he deflated in '80s art, Jeff Koons, who appears as a cross between the bond trader he was and a particularly untrustworthy undertaker. Koons is an easy target, but anyone foolish enough to go on opposite Hughes and claim that his gigantic sculpture of a kitten coming out of a sock is in the classical tradition of a crucifixion deserves what he gets. Hughes is unabashed about what he responds to, though, and sometimes he nails the essence of his subject with an evocative throwaway phrase. ("If you live in New York, you see Edward Hopper everywhere," he says to describe perhaps the most mournful of American painters.) What then is it that nags about "American Visions"? Why does the show seem a little unsatisfying around the edges? It may seem strange to speak of an intelligent, articulate critic able to hold the pieces of a large story in his head as being not right for the job, and it wouldn't be accurate, either. But I couldn't shake the feeling that there's an essential part of the American character that just doesn't mesh with Hughes. He has a marvelous sense of wit, but I don't know that he has much sense of play. That's why, for example, Marcel Duchamp gets treated as though he were a dilettante. All through "American Visions" Hughes clears space for all sorts of people to speak -- members of the last Shaker community, a woman finding her son's name at Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial and being delighted it's at a level she can kiss -- but he's a bit of a snob, forever on guard against any loosening of his high standards. He has no feeling whatsoever for genuine American kitsch (I don't mean the smug Jeff Koons variety), and without that, you're unable to grasp some essential part of the American soul. Las Vegas rates a few snide remarks while Hughes later accords serious -- though admittedly dubious and a tad appalled -- treatment to the Breakers, the Newport mansion of the Vanderbilts, though as a piece of kitsch the Breakers is stuffier, smugger and deader than any Grecian statues used to tart up Caesars Palace. Hughes' brief remarks on movies reveal that he buys into the
art/entertainment split, and while I realize that the visual arts are a thing apart, much of the best and most characteristic American art of this century -- literature, movies, music, theater -- has made hash of that distinction. "American Visions" is an undeniable achievement, and Hughes is an eloquent and appreciative chronicler of American art. I just wish he could summon up some affection for American artlessness.
American Visions Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon. GO TO THE PEOPLE'S CRITIC | HUGHES' VIEWS |