Wave from Atlantic

Episode number 5 of Series “American visions”.
At the turn of the twentieth century, huge waves of immigration confirmed America’s multicultural character forever. The immigrants’ struggle was also fundamental in creating a new truly popular culture; the movies. A new social conscience began to emerge as the photography of Jacob Riis and the social realism of the Ashcan School replaced effete salon art and American impressionism. Its subjects were often gleaned from the slums and sweat shops of New York City’s Lower East Side. American modernism began with the paintings of Marsden Hartley, and it is also found in the slangy collages of Arthur Dove, who anticipated Pop Art. Futurism found its American counterpart in the Perfectionist paintings of Charles Sheeler, who immortalized the Machine Age in his paintings of Ford’s industrial Mecca at River Rouge. Finally, nature provided inspiration for modernism, too, in the revolutionary buildings of America’s greatest twentieth-century architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. If westward expansion had been the predominant story of the nineteenth century, it was now a question of building upwards, with skyscrapers symbolizing the mood of unparalleled self-confidence for America in the twenties. But as many of the skyscrapers were on the verge of completion, America was rocked by events on Wall Street. The crash of 1929 was to change America forever. Written and presented by Robert Hughes.