American Visions

In this, his "love letter to America," transplanted Australian Robert Hughes, art critic for TIME magazine, and author of the blistering and insightful The Culture of Complaint, offers a witty, casually brilliant overview of 200 years of American art. In the opener, The Republic of Virtue, Hughes stands in the classic-cum-kitsch modern temple Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, and suggests that this is not what the founding fathers had in mind when Thomas Jefferson created--along with the Declaration of Independence--American architecture. What they did want was a clean slate (a very American desire, Hughes points out), so they took Greco-Roman ideas and transformed them in the volatile cauldron of nascent American independence. The program looks at the architecture in our nation's capitol, finds the seeds of American portraiture in the works of Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley (whose "Watson and the Shark," Hughes--straight-faced--dubs "Jaws the First"), and examines the founding of the American museum. Other titles in this excellent series include: The Wilderness of the West, The Guilded Age, The Empire of Signs, and The Age of Anxiety. Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)