Intelluptuously Speaking

Riots, wars, strikes, Picasso, floods, mass murders. . .

Picasso? As any viewer would easily detect, the painter seems as out of place in TV's barrage of hard news as a hippie at a hoedown. And that is a pity, for TV too often slights its coverage of the arts. Aware of that, NBC has countered with a one-woman cultural explosion named Aline Saarinen, a 53-year-old grandmother who is TV's best specialist on the subject.

Last week, acting as producer, director, researcher, writer and narrator, Saarinen took her NBC camera team to Concord, Mass., to make a Today-show film on the town's 19th century authors. After poring over encyclopaedias, biographies and the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott, she spent one afternoon tramping around the countryside, across the graveyards and through the centuries-old houses. Then she retreated to her hotel room to write her script and fill the margins with meticulous directions for the cameraman.

On camera the next day, looking comely in a bright red Dior suit, she toured the town with all the aplomb of a grand lady at her leisure. Daniel Chester French's famous Minuteman statue, she mused, "is rather splendid, though full of youthful literalism." Thoreau, she observed, is "a hero of the hippies, a dedicated dropout who was turned on by nature." Deftly summing up Hawthorne's stories as "tales of the dire results of invading the privacy of someone's secret heart," she added tartly that Hawthorne once confessed that he found Thoreau " 'tedious, tiresome and intolerable'--which he probably was."

Female Fellini. Aline Saarinen, nee Bernstein, keeps her work bright, light and informative, without ever making the highbrow seem high-blown. A Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar, whose girlhood goal was to be "intelluptuous," she got a job on Art News "because I could spell Pollaiuolo,"* rose to managing editor in 1944, a year later joined the New York Times as an art critic. While on an assignment in 1952, she interviewed and later married Finnish-born Architect Eero Saarinen (it was her second marriage). After his death eight years later, she appeared on a 1962 CBS special on Lincoln Center. An NBC producer, impressed with her knack for explaining the abstracts of architecture in understandable terms, stole her away for the Today program.

Now, stopwatch ready, calling for "trucking shots" and "dissolves" like some female Fellini, she directs each film with painstaking care. With a variety of shots, she forces the viewer to follow the camera as it roams with the eye of a connoisseur across a canvas or a Greek fac,ade. To dramatize the relationship of life to art, she has juxtaposed film clips of an Olympic sprinter with photographs of a runner molded in bronze, contrasted bullfight scenes with paintings by Goya and Picasso.

Six Worsts. She is just as uncompromising in her condemnations. Three years ago, while assistant curators winced in the background, she tore apart Architect Edward Durell Stone's Gallery of Modern Art stone by stone. She has panned designs for postage stamps and highway signs, and for good measure, aired her nominations for the "six worst man-made objects"--it was not such a daring list at that: Manhattan's Pan Am Building, Dali's Last Supper, the suburban builder's typical tacky house, some glass sculpture at Lincoln Center, a lamp with a violin as its base, and the faces on Mount Rushmore.

Mrs. Saarinen succeeds not only because she is an expert on art, but also because she is a versatile reporter. In addition to covering the cultural scene, she has turned her critical eye on medical care in Viet Nam, hippies, even space shots. Perhaps her most attractive gift is her ability to handle any story without appearing to be obtrusively feminine. As Aline puts it, intelluptuously: "I'm a woman but not a chick."

*A 15th century Florentine painter.

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