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...