How a Forgotten TV Show Forever Changed the Way We Look at Art

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.