‘Icons’ takes a quick look at last century’s American art

Man cannot live by bread alone, or even by festive holiday cookies with purple icing and sprinkles. And so here on the verge of a new year, at the close of a trying old one, in this week of retrospection and indigestion, I recommend a nourishing, restorative two hours with “Imagining America: Icons of 20th Century American Art,” airing tonight on KCET.

Co-written by art historian Jonathan Fineberg and John Carlin, who (among other things) co-curated the “Masters of American Comics” show running at the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, it’s not a comprehensive or definitive or deep review (nor could it be in so short a time). It alights on only a handful of artists for more than a moment, which is, after all, the only practical way to cover a story this long and large and factional. They have chosen their subjects to fit their three main themes: artists engaging nature (and by extension what replaces nature); artists engaging (or repressing) the self; and artists dealing with commercial culture.

It doesn’t quite knit into a convincing whole, or communicate any single powerful truth about what it means to be an artist in America, or what America means to its artists, but its pieces are consistently engaging and frequently exciting, and they’ve been assembled artfully -- the interviews fit the images so well they might have been scripted. (Director Hart Perry, more often associated with music projects -- he made the VH1 series “And You Don’t Stop: 30 Years in the History of Hip Hop” -- also holds a degree in art history.)

It flows well, and conveys the way in which one thing leads to another, and how every artist is a product of his or her time, and how, being more than usually receptive to the tenor of that time, they help define for those of us less quick on the uptake.

If the critical commentators (including Fineberg) occasionally lapse into language designed to rationalize or dignify enthusiasms, the artists are refreshingly matter of fact or casually metaphorical about what they and their colleagues do. (Ed Ruscha: “You’re stepping into smoke when you say I’m going to make a work of art.”) Just so, the show works best not as a theoretical seminar but as a picture show, bringing to life the art, the art world and the world containing the art world.

There are archival interviews with Georgia O’Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, along with new comments from Ruscha, Grace Hartigan (enlightening on the existential spirit of Abstract Expressionism -- “You looked at the blank canvas and you made a mark on it as though you were the only person in the world, with no references, with no one else to help you”), Elizabeth Murray, John Baldessari and Mike Kelly.

There is footage of Pollock laying down paint; De Kooning in his studio; Robert Smithson (I assume it’s him) running along his “Spiral Jetty”; Duchamp visiting his “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.” (“So here you are, Marcel, looking at your Big Glass.” “Yes, and the more I look at it the more I like it”); and Warhol and Sonny Liston in an ad for Braniff International Airways. “There is an inherent beauty in soup cans,” Andy tells seatmate Sonny, “that Michelangelo could not have imagined existed.”

Obviously “Imagining America” leaves out much more than it includes -- whole movements disappear -- and as in any such survey, there is room for disagreement on what the film proposes as important. (The late Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarowicz, who stand for art at the end of the century, seem anticlimactic choices to me. But I have no counterproposal to make.)

For the most part, though, the inclusions seem apt, even inevitable, and give a good picture of the breadth of concerns, styles and trains of thought abroad in the 1900s.

The film ends with a montage of the featured artists viewed over the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” It’s an almost sentimental gesture, like the last moments of the final episode of a long-running sitcom, but here, as there, it works: So long, it says, and thanks for the all the art.

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‘Imagining America: Icons of 20th Century American Art’

Where: KCET

When: 9 to 11 tonight

Executive producers: Charles Benton, John Carlin, Karl Katz. Director: Hart Perry. Writers and content designers: John Carlin and Jonathan Fineberg.