As the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe and as Joseph McCarthy, a senior Republican senator from Wisconsin, was railing against the U.S. State Department being “infested with communists,” an intimidating group of abstract painters were occupying America’s galleries. In August 1949, the same month Life magazine called Jackson Pollock “the greatest living painter in the United States,” the Michigan Representative George Dondero outlined on the House floor all the ways art history posed a threat to democracy: “Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder,” he cried. “Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms. Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason.” Modern art became a screen onto which Americans could project their fears.
Those themes — suspicion and painting — permeate “Feitelson on Art,” the first television program devoted to art history. First broadcast live from Los Angeles in October 1956, it was initially watched mostly in the vicinity of Southern California, and later syndicated nationwide. Its host, Lorser Feitelson, would become the interlocutor between the avant-garde and the country’s first generation of television viewers. He was personable, pedigreed and principled. Now, 60 years since its final episode, Feitelson’s show feels prophetic of a fact of visual life today: Most people experience art as filtered through a screen, for example, of a computer or an iPhone. . As contemporary art continues to provoke a backlash among political elites — and as our screens increasingly seem to divide rather than unite us — it’s worth remembering this early attempt to communicate art’s ability to enhance the lives of all kinds of people.
Feitelson was raised in New York by Ukrainian Jewish refugees and as a teenager saw the famous 1913 Armory Show that introduced New York to Marcel Duchamp. Like many interwar American artists, Feitelson practiced his craft in Paris. A combative and gregarious Surrealist painter, he reached Los Angeles in 1927, where until his death in 1978 he worked as a noted and occasionally visionary interpreter of American abstraction. Some critics have claimed that hard-edge painting, characterized by geometric shapes and careful planning, and made famous by Ellsworth Kelly, originated with Feitelson. In L.A., he led the mural division of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal Art Project, which filled America with public art during the Depression. As a teacher at various art colleges in the region over the course of 50 years, he tutored emerging West Coast painters including Philip Guston and Helen Lundberg, who would become Feitelson’s second wife.
One of his private pupils, Tom McCary, became an executive at KRCA-TV, the West Coast flagship of NBC, and in 1956 McCary suggested his old teacher try a program in art history. Feitelson was square but liberal, anti-Red but also anti-censorship at a time when the memory of McCarthy’s blacklist was still fresh. In other words, he was a perfect bridge between the accepted and the strange.
But he had doubts about television. The network had achieved its most comparable success with “Learn to Draw,” John Gnagy’s series of 15-minute sales pitches for branded art supplies disguised as soothing and fun lessons in drawing (which they were). “The Price Is Right” would soon debut. With this landscape in mind, Feitelson recalled in an oral history telling McCary, “I don’t believe I could possibly reach the general public, because all my experiences are among people who are in art. Do you realize we talk in a private language?”
He solved this by using no script. “You cannot rehearse enthusiasm,” he discovered. Episodes went like this: As Strauss’s “Don Juan” fades, a stocky man in a wide-shouldered suit and pencil mustache steps into the frame. Smoke trails from the cigarette in his hand as he greets us haltingly. “Hello. Today we will look at …” Soon enough, Feitelson gets going; his smile and cigarette die; and for the next 30 minutes he walks among strategically arranged canvases and sculptures, delivering, in poetic and booming Brooklynese, his thoughts on art since the “turn of the century,” which he pronounces charmingly as “tain of the century.” On the English sculptor Henry Moore: “We find in his work a concern with a dynamic form that is organic, just like vegetation. It grows, changes. It can also be compared to mitosis — the division or the act of division or nuclear division — where one cell is developing, say, another cell before the completion takes place. It’s in a state of becoming. A state of being born. A tension between two forms coming out of a single form.” Thanks to his improvisatory and deeply felt manner, the show survived for six years.
Although the episodes are mostly lost — with only a handful surviving in media archives — fan mail sent to the station is held in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and helps explain just how radical it was for Americans to find art beamed into their homes. Most of the letters are from women. “You seem to state so clearly what we have been working so hard to learn,” a viewer named Lilian Chopman wrote to the station. “We are still unconvinced as to ‘modern’ art, but Feitelson does a good job so we hope you’ll continue indefinitely,” Mrs. Timothy G. Turner said.
When in 1958 Feitelson introduced viewers to the neon-colored riffs on Hebrew scripture by Peter Krasnow, another Ukrainian Jewish painter living in Los Angeles, Betty in Pasadena was watching with her children. “It made us realize more fully the meanings of contemporary art,” she wrote. When the program’s existence was briefly threatened to end in 1960, Fay Karpf fumed that “so much trash and screaming advertising occupy radio and TV that it hardly seems worthwhile any longer.” It was the week of the first televised presidential debate.
Feitelson had his agendas. He promoted his own work and that of his wife and friends. Tony Rosenthal, now known to New Yorkers as the sculptor of “Alamo,” 1967, the black cube on Astor Place, came on as a guest, and Feitelson defended his abstract steel weldings via 30 slides of Gothic architecture and Anglo-Saxon letterforms. He talked trash: Henry Moore’s imitators were of the “Pretzel School.” He got territorial: Privately mournful of his remove from New York, where the art world action was thought to be, he hyped the fledgling local museums that the national art magazines overlooked and borrowed works from them for his show. When NBC adopted color in 1957, the network used Feitelson as a poster child for the new technology. His first program in the format was on the Californian elder statesman of color abstraction, Stanton MacDonald-Wright. When NBC started syndicating the show, Robert Gross, the president of Lockheed Aircraft, stood paralyzed at his morning shave, listening to Feitelson’s every word, Gross’s wife later recalled to Feitelson. Gross’s daughter, another private pupil of Feitelson’s, became an early benefactor of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The show concluded in 1963, but by then its aims were well in motion. L.A. was beginning to be taken seriously as an art town — thanks in part to Feitelson, as well as to an enterprising young curator named Walter Hopps, who brought Duchamp and Andy Warhol to California for big retrospectives. Fashions had changed, and the C.I.A., with the help of institutions like MoMA in New York, deployed modern art as Cold War-era agitprop by financing exhibitions of artists like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko that traveled extensively abroad and promoted their subjects as icons of American individualism. Even stranger events took hold. As confirmed by the work of Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik and a rising generation of video artists using cathode-ray televisions, the screen was now a canvas. It became a gallery, too, as art critics like Kenneth Clark and John Berger got their own shows. In this way Feitelson was a real democratizer — or an adulterator: Today artworks are admired, rejected, reviewed, acquired and curated according to their appearance online. Samsung sells a framed television designed to broadcast paintings into your living room.
You can hear this world taking shape in the letters from Feitelson’s viewers, who delighted in the possibility of fine art onscreen. “I am grateful for the interest you have awakened in my son,” one mother wrote Feitelson in 1956. “We are making a list for color slides for our own projector.” In 1964 a dealer of works by Claude Monet, marveling at the fidelity of technology, wrote in to confirm that the artist’s “greens and yellows seemed to reproduce best” during a Feitelson program on Impressionism. In 1956 a budding painter called the show “an education to many, many amateur artists, like myself, who are continually striving to do the masterpiece.” From the perspective of artists, that legacy is clearest today on Instagram, the world’s largest gallery. The way a picture might stand out from that infinite grid of backlit thumbnails increasingly influences the colors and figurative modes a painter will choose at the easel. Painters no longer shock as they once did, but the glowing portal that Feitelson entered 60 years ago to help introduce visual expression to an unsuspecting audience has yet to go black.
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