Sense and Sexibility

Visual culture documentaries are few and far between so it seems churlish to complain, unless of course, Waldemar Januszczak is involved. Sex and Sensibility: The Allure of Art Nouveau (BBC4) had its moments (which we shall return to) and was never less than beautifully photographed but the presentation, while avoiding the routine excesses of BBC presenters (foaming at the mouth über-enthusiasm, shouting and staring madly over the shoulders while marching away from the viewer) did little to inform and interpret.

Presenter Stephen Smith was rarely out of shot and tried a little too hard to impress with a poker-faced air of nonchalant flippancy. It would be ungenerous to imply that his commentary was devoid of all interest but the suspicion remained that the over-riding concern was self-promotion, polishing up the brand. Jonathan Meades remains the undisputed master of this territory over which he presides with an armoury of aphoristic excess that Mr Smith could never aspire to.

The idea put forward that Art Nouveau exploded into existence out of a clear blue sky is seriously misleading. Notwithstanding the need for a simple narrative where television is concerned, the links with Seurat and Signac, with Jules Cheret and Toulouse-Lautrec, with Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier, with La Revue Blanche deserve acknowledgement. What makes Art Nouveau so fascinating is the speed with which it travelled from city to city via the media of print and photogravure, becoming a trans-national style more rapidly than anything that preceded it. Even as it peaked, below the radar Braque and Picasso were developing Cubism and when its brief time was up, it crashed and burned with equal velocity. And in that sense it seems to be the first art movement of the Twentieth Century, and the rise of the ephemeral rather than, as claimed, the last art movement of the Nineteenth Century.

So – the good bits. Émile Gallée and his struggle to reconcile his socialism with his reliance upon a wealthy clientele for his exquisite ornamental glass made an interesting case-study. There’s a parallel with William Morris although Morris would never share Gallée’s enthusiasm for mass production. The tale of Mary Watts and her extraordinary architectural tribute (the Watts Chapel) to her lugubrious and less talented spouse, the original Man Who Came to Dinner, G F Watts, was a useful corrective. In a similar way Margaret MacDonald was given her due as an equal partner of her husband, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. But the real highlights resulted in the ability of television cameras to explore architectural forms and amplify the hidden detail, especially Olbrich’s Vienna Secession Building. Even better was the cherry-picker aerial examination of the forbidden Palais Stoclet, inside which the co-owners remain insolubly locked in dispute with one another and the Belgian authorities for whom it is the most enormous conservation headache.

America on a Plate

Mercifully this TV documentary on BBC4 was not a programme about gastronomy. On the menu instead was a cultural study of the all-American Diner, an institution that came into being at around the same time as the motor car and developed a unique significance in the American collective consciousness. Offering massive portions of high-calorie food from roadside premises to the working man and the weary traveller alike, diners became a theatre where all levels of American society could rub shoulders, where Hank Williams might have found himself next to Raymond Chandler. The solitary itinerant could preserve his anonymity while the sociable could share each other’s company in garrulous badinage each according to their particular behavioural code.

Attention became focused on the diner as the rapid expansion of fast-food chains in the 60s and 70s forced many of them out of business. As an endangered species they suddenly ceased to be taken for granted and, in the early 70s acquired an official historian (Richard C Guttman) and a court painter (John Baeder). Both took part in this programme in contrasting fashion. Guttman displayed the spritely enthusiasm of the born conservator while Baeder, who has a wider interest in all aspects of the American roadside, presented himself as a man on a mission to record the vanishing glories and architectural eccentricities before they are swept away by the triumphal advance of corporate monotony. Baeder’s participation was a special treat. Enveloped in his studio by a dazzling assortment of model vehicles, ephemera and memorabilia, he sat at his easel dispassionately applying minute and precise brushstrokes to his photorealist paintings.

Later, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks came under discussion. Over the last three decades Hopper’s painting has rapidly expanded in the American popular imagination as a defining emblem of the deep existential isolation to be found in the shadow of the American Dream. It’s a fine painting but when it’s suggested that it might be the greatest American painting of the last century it seems like too much weight for it to carry. Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker and author of an excellent book on Wayne Thiebaud, was on hand to offer a roadmap of America’s “melancholic underside”. Later still, photographer Stephen Shore joined the party, commenting on his images of a personal pilgrimage along the American highway in search of the overlooked and ignored aspects of daily life. For me, Shore’s most brilliant photographs were taken out on the street, usually at intersections, at the very instant when the banal and quotidian is suddenly and momentarily transformed into a tableau of heroic magnificence. The programme presenter, Stephen Smith, tested the legendary tolerance and good humour of New Yorkers almost to destruction by interrogating passers-by on the location of Hopper’s Nighthawks but this was the only moment of tedium in what was otherwise an absorbing sixty minutes of television. Finally I would have liked to accompany this with a selection of postcard images of the finest in diners but, lacking the income of a Russian oligarch makes them unaffordable. So we must make do with some lesser American eating places and some examples of exquisite interior decoration.