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TV BY DESIGN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

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

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...