TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television - Hardcover

Spigel, Lynn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226769682 ISBN 13: 9780226769684

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2009

Synopsis

While critics have long disparaged commercial television as a vast wasteland, TV has surprising links to the urbane world of modern art that stretch back to the 1950s and ’60s During that era, the rapid rise of commercial television coincided with dynamic new movements in the visual arts—a potent combination that precipitated a major shift in the way Americans experienced the world visually. TV by Design uncovers this captivating story of how modernism and network television converged and intertwined in their mutual ascent during the decades of the cold war.


Whereas most histories of television focus on the way older forms of entertainment were recycled for the new medium, Lynn Spigel shows how TV was instrumental in introducing the public to the latest trends in art and design. Abstract expressionism, pop art, art cinema, modern architecture, and cutting-edge graphic design were all mined for staging techniques, scenic designs, and an ever-growing number of commercials. As a result, TV helped fuel the public craze for trendy modern products, such as tailfin cars and boomerang coffee tables, that was vital to the burgeoning postwar economy. And along with influencing the look of television, many artists—including Eero Saarinen, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, William Golden, and Richard Avedon—also participated in its creation as the networks put them to work designing everything from their corporate headquarters to their company cufflinks.

 

Dizzy Gillespie, Ernie Kovacs, Duke Ellington, and Andy Warhol all stop by in this imaginative and winning account of the ways in which art, television, and commerce merged in the first decades of the TV age.

About this title

About the Author

Lynn Spigel is the Frances E. Willard Chair and Professor of Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. She is the author of Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs and Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

TV BY DESIGN

MODERN ART AND THE RISE OF NETWORK TELEVISIONBy LYNN SPIGEL

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2008 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-76968-4

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................ixIntroduction.................................................................................................11 Hail! Modern Art: Postwar "American" Painting and the Rise of Commercial TV................................192 An Eye for Design: Corporate Modernism at CBS..............................................................683 Setting the Stage at Television City: Modern Architecture, TV Studios, and Set Design......................1104 Live From New York-It's MoMA!: Television, The Housewife, and the Museum of Modern Art.....................1445 Silent TV: Ernie Kovacs and the Noise of Mass Culture......................................................1786 One-Minute Movies: Art Cinema, Youth Culture, and TV Commercials in the 1960s..............................2137 Warhol TV: From Media Scandals to Everyday Boredom.........................................................251Epilogue: Framing TV, Unframing Art..........................................................................284Notes........................................................................................................299Index........................................................................................................361

Chapter One

HAIL! MODERN ART

Postwar "American" Painting and the Rise of Commercial TV

On March 4, 1949, NBC presented an episode of the Admiral Broadway Revue, one of the first variety shows on television, and one of the first to engage the subject of modern art. Starring comics Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, the program opens with a production number about bohemian lifestyles that sets off a series of routines focused on such varied fads as coffeehouse folk music, psychoanalysis, and modern dance. Sandwiched in between the au currant lineup is the most elaborately designed "set piece" of all-a song-and-dance extravaganza about abstract painting, aptly titled "Hail! Modern Art."

The routine begins as the curtain opens onto a huge modern painting that serves as a backdrop for singers and dancers, some dressed as museum goers out for a day of art appreciation, others as artists complete with smocks and berets. Looking curiously at the painting, they break into song:

Modern Works of Art Take first place in our heart And this is the museum Where we all come to see 'em Chorus: Hail! Modern Art It's cubistic, surrealistic Non-objective and reflective There are some who think it's cracked But that's because it's abstract Chorus: Hail, Modern Art!

After several more stanzas with similar lyrics, a female contortionist (Hin Lowe) emerges from the frame of the huge painting. Dancing to Oriental themes and dressed in Chinese pajamas, she winds her legs several times around her head. The audience appreciatively applauds.

To be sure, "Hail! Modern Art" was not alone in its depiction of modern art as "cracked," exotic, distorted, and altogether foreign from American cultural norms. Such beliefs about modern art could also be found in films, pulp novels, newspapers, vaudeville, legitimate theater, and on radio, and they appeared well before the TV age. When modern European art (such as Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal) was first exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, newspaper critics mocked the wild, crazy, and decidedly foreign moderns. Hollywood movies took up these themes in films such as the B-thriller Crack Up (1946), which dramatizes the exploits of a mad museum curator, and Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), which features a dream sequence by Salvador Dali to depict the nightmares of a tortured soul. In these and numerous other examples, modern art took on a decidedly suspect nature, whether played for laughter or high dramatic suspense.

Nevertheless, over the course of the 1930s and through the 1950s, modern art had become something of a popular craze. Beginning in 1934, Associated American Artists (AAA) began marketing affordable prints of famous artworks (especially the then modern art of regionalist painters) to middleclass consumers who could order them through direct mail or buy them in department stores across the country. After the war, middleclass department stores like Macy's and Gimbles sold paintings (via credit financing) to the public. Museum-going became a popular trend. The number of art galleries in New York grew from 40 at the beginning of the war to 150 by 1946, and both public and private gallery sales skyrocketed during the war. By 1962, the Stanford Research Institute estimated that "120 million people attend art-oriented events" and that "attendance at art galleries and museums almost doubled during the 1950s." According to the Stanford report, the new "cultured American" was in part the result of technology that made possible "first class reproductions" at a "cost many can afford." Twentieth-century European modernism was particularly in vogue. In 1958, the New York Times reported that there was a growing demand for reproductions of "modern masterworks" among young couples that were buying good quality reproductions of European artists such as Braque, Picasso, Feinger, Roualt, and Mondrian. For those who'd rather "do it themselves," paint-by-number kits became a national mania in the 1953 Christmas season. One of the first in the Craft Master paint-by-number series was a still life rendered in a faux Matisse style and titled (presumably after Jackson Pollock) Abstract No. One.

What role did television play in this context? Although broadcast historians have explored television's reliance on theater, vaudeville, radio, circus, and cinema, television's relationship to the postwar enthusiasm for modern painting remains virtually unexplored. Yet, as in my opening example, television often appealed to its first audiences with "free" shows of modern art. Moreover, as the "Hail! Modern Art" routine suggests, television did not just rekindle popular skepticisms about modernism; it also welcomed modern art and developed its own means for looking at it within the context of commercial entertainment. Remarking on the situation in 1957, James Thrall Soby (art critic and curator at MoMA) said:

One of the many indications of art's enormous popularity in this country is the frequency with which it is mentioned on TV or furnishes the central theme of TV programs.... It's getting so a fantastic number of TV performers mention art in one connection or another, and unlikely people turn out to be aspiring painters or dedicated connoisseurs. A short time ago on Edward R. Murrow's Person to Person, for example, Xavier Cugat confessed that he wanted 'most of all to paint' ... The next thing we know Jack Benny will abandon his violin for an easel.

More generally, a wide variety of television genres-from cultural-affairs programs to melodramas to variety shows to sitcoms to quiz shows-showcased modern art on a regular basis. Even TV Guide, the major national magazine for television, used modern art to woo subscribers. Mixing modern art with traditions of variety entertainment, the front cover of a 1957 issue shows popular variety host Ed Sullivan and star Judy Taylor while the back cover offers a lesson on non-objective art (which then dovetails into a promotional ad for the magazine).

To be sure, when presenting modern art, television did not exactly follow the orthodoxies of the art world's definitions of the postwar American avant-garde. Rather than simply mimicking art-world canons for cutting-edge artists of the day (e.g., the Pollocks, Willem de Koonings, Robert Motherwells, or Mark Rothkos), television presented modern art as a grab bag of historical styles. On television everything from surrealism to cubism to abstract expressionism (and, by the 1960s, pop and op) was part of the "shock of the new." So, too, given its performative nature, television's version of postwar modernism was embroiled in acts of self-presentation. On television (as in other venues of popular culture), the very act of engaging in artistic interests was itself a way to display one's progressive, au currant, tastes. In this sense, no matter in what style they were actually painting, celebrities of the Xaviar Cugat kind exhibited their status as postwar "moderns" by presenting their love of art as a distinctly contemporary lifestyle.

Moreover, the new medium was the perfect vehicle for rendering modern art as an everyday lifestyle for progressive publics. As a living room fixture, television offered audiences a way to feel "at home" with modernism and to experience art as a form of home entertainment. Watching television from their domestic interiors, viewers experienced modern art and design in the context of an assortment of art and period styles with which they decorated their homes (everything from American scene paintings to "moderne" chairs to the then popular rage for Colonial furniture). In other words, what I have called "everyday modernism" was a hybrid of historical styles that viewers could "poach" and recombine in ways that would surely have offended the tastes of orthodox modernists. Meanwhile, the stories that television told about art and the forms through which TV displayed it created a new visual environment-a virtual gallery-for painting in the postwar period.

This chapter explores how television showcased the visual arts-primarily painting-in the 1950s through the early 1960s, during the height of the cold war. The taste for modern art on the new medium was a constant source of debate, and as such was bound up with larger cultural struggles over the meaning and value of culture, and American painting in particular, in the new U.S. postwar society. Television's depictions of and discourses on the visual arts took place at a time when art was not only a subject of popular interest but also of grave political concern to the nation. Television's rise as a new medium dovetailed with cold war efforts to disabuse the world of the widespread perception that, while an economic and political superpower, the U.S. was still a cultural colony of Europe. America might have been famous for Hollywood movies, big bands, and comic books, but when it came to culture with a capital "C," Europe (and especially Paris) was still considered the arbiter of taste. In this context the elevation of American culture, and the distinctive character of American art, became central topics of concern among art critics, museum curators, market researchers, educators, advertisers, and popular critics alike.

Television programs of the 1950s often presented the arts as a national, even patriotic concern. On television the display of art was typically tied to the more widespread search among art critics, museum curators, business leaders, and even government officials for a uniquely "American" form of modern art, an American vernacular distinct from European art and capable of representing the U.S. as the leading center of the free world. However, given television's foundations in sponsorship, network and advertising executives sought out a commercially viable means of communicating ideas about art and culture in ways that might appeal to broad national audiences. Television offered a quotidian form of postwar modernism, showing the public how to enjoy new trends in the visual arts as an everyday national pastime. In the process, television contributed to a redefinition of the American vernacular that was ultimately based on the idea that American modern art was commercial art, with no apologies and no excuses. In fact, the TV commercial turned out to be one of the primary vehicles for the creation of this truly homegrown form of modern art.

PAINTING IN COLD WAR CULTURE

The popular embrace of art was connected to larger national agendas. In the 1930s, the federally sponsored Works Progress Administration (WPA) helped create a national audience for art by funding 103 community art centers in various regions of the country. Government-sponsored campaigns such as "Buy American Art Week" (1940) established connections between consumerism, aesthetic contemplation, and good citizenship. During the war, the U.S. government promoted art appreciation as a form of patriotism linked to the defense of American civilization against Nazi barbarism. In the early 1940s, museums such as MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art gained respect by linking their institutions to the war effort. MoMA's "Road to Victory" show (1942), which featured photographs by Edward Steichen (then a lieutenant in the navy), won critical acclaim as "a declaration of power and our will to win the war." In the 1950s Winston Churchill and President Eisenhower both served as role model "weekend painters" for the American public, endorsing amateur painting not just as pleasant relaxation but also as an ideal pastime for progressive citizens.

Not only was art a national trend, by mid-decade the national taste for art was connected to the perceived triumphs of the American avant-garde over European masters. Summarizing the historical trend, Erika Doss observes:

If European strains of modern art, especially those of French avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Matisse, had previously commanded the attention of collectors and curators, the post-World War II era saw a surge of interest in an American avant-garde, and American culture in general. By mid-century, New York had clearly replaced Paris as the world capital of modern art-the culmination of aesthetic, social, and economic trends decades in the making-and modern art had become widely understood as 'American' art.

In this geographical, economic, and ideological context, modern art also came to be a central component of cold war strategy. As Serge Guilbaut has argued, debates about the relationship between European modernism (especially its roots in Paris) and a uniquely American form of modern art engaged intellectuals during the Depression, and increasingly during and after World War II "every section of the political world in the United States agreed that art would have an important role to play in the new America." Since the establishment of the Department of Cultural Affairs in the late 1930s, the federal government had officially recognized the importance of culture in securing international good will. Despite many humanist intentions, the major strategic focus of these cultural exchanges was the government's desire to counteract the prevailing image of Americans as militaristic vulgar brutes (or what one book later called "the ugly American"), an image that dominated the European and Latin American imaginations. A major mission of the Department of Cultural Affairs-and later, during World War II, the Office of War Information-was to counteract this notion of the ugly American and spread a more genteel, peace-loving image of Americans abroad.

After the war, these forays into cultural imperialism were enacted under the Marshall Plan as American media industries and government offices applied policies of "containment" and searched for new markets for the free world around the globe. Guilbaut argues that the attempts to construct an American art scene, distinct from Paris and situated instead in New York, coincided ideologically with the new ethos of corporate liberalism that saw Communism as a threat and sought to contain it globally. Modern art and the American avant-garde were nourished, he claims, by a climate of thought that divorced art from the politics of the thirties and favored the freedom of individual expression that abstract expressionism, with its sense of eccentric psychology, especially provided. Moreover, as Eva Cockcroft argues, the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in conjunction with MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, promoted American art in the name of freedom, using abstract expressionism in particular as a "weapon of the cold war." Organizing shows and international exchanges, these institutions used the new American painting to spread the image of a cultured America abroad.

Although the CIA, museum world, and the more general climate of corporate liberalism often nourished the new American painters, more conservative government leaders thought abstract expressionism was inconsistent withAmericanvaluesandevensubversive,andtheytriedtostopitsexhibition overseas. In 1946, when the State Department put together an international exhibit called "Advancing American Art," the contemporary paintings chosen for exhibition became the site of public and Congressional controversy as various government officials attacked the work of painters who had been connected to the Communist party in the 1930s (before this was considered a "cardinal sin"). Among the most outspoken, Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan regularly denounced abstract art as "communist" calling it the work of "brainwashed artists in the uniform of the Red art brigade." A devout anti-modernist, President Harry S. Truman mocked the "modern day daubers and frustrated ham and eggs men" whose art paled in comparison to the great masters. In his diaries he observed that comparing the likes of Rembrandt to the "lazy nutty moderns" was like "comparing Christ with Lenin." Because abstract art emptied itself of recognizable content, people assumed it could easily contain covert meanings completely eccentric to the proverbial "vital center" of U.S. consensus politics. At its paranoid extreme, rumors circulated that American abstract artists were working as foreign agents by inserting military maps into their paintings.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from TV BY DESIGNby LYNN SPIGEL Copyright © 2008 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226769682
• ISBN 13: 9780226769684
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 392