ART HISTORY IS TV-BOUND IN PBS SERIES

Work has begun at public television station WNET here on a nine-hour, $6-million series about the history of Western art.

“We think it’s about time that we remind public television audiences that the visual arts can have as much impact as the performing arts,” WNET president John Jay Iselin said in an interview.

The series, a joint venture with a British production company, TV-South, is due to start shooting next fall at locations “all over the Western world,” station officials said. It is scheduled for broadcast during the Public Broadcasting Service’s 1988-89 season.

According to WNET officials, the series has been assured by an initial grant of $2.5 million from the Annenberg/Corporation for Public Broadcasting Project, a fund established to develop public television and radio programming that can be used in college-level telecourses, and by “about $2-million worth” of production resources from TV-South.

They said that WNET is now seeking the remaining $1.5 million, in addition to “about $500,000 for educational research,” from corporate underwriters.

The project will be overseen by executive producer Perry Miller Adato, whose public television credits include profiles of Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe and Carl Sandburg.

Of the massive undertaking, Adato said, “Nobody has been mad enough to take on such a large-scale history of art (for television) before, and certainly there has never been the money.”

He said that the series will attempt to cover painting, sculpture and architecture, from ancient Greece until the present, and will incorporate film footage, works of art, voice-overs and some dramatization, “in order to show the art in the context of the culture out of which it grew.”