Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian Art Museum

Whether you're interested in ponying up $75 for this brief video (backed by excellent supplementary materials) depends, at least in part, on how you feel about subsidizing the Smithsonian American Art Museum's traveling collection "Scenes of American Life," which we're told, in terms strongly reminiscent of a commercial, is making the rounds of 70 cities. Taken individually, the dozen or so works spotlighted here, ranging from the personal alienation and longing of the woman staring out the window in Edward Hopper's Cape Cod Morning to the kinetic energy of several African-American patrons intently hunched over their books in Jacob Lawrence's The Library, are hardly representative of either the best American artists (Homer, Wyeth, Wood, Benton, among others, are absent here) or even the best works of the individual artists (Hopper's Nighthawks, for instance, is a stronger portrait of isolation). Still, what makes Scenes of American Life interesting is the underlying themes of rural life, the Great Depression, industry, leisure, post-war alienation, and urban life that are depicted here with admittedly broad strokes, but covered in more detail in the 50-page study guide. An optional purchase. Aud: J, H. (R. Pitman)