Journey Through an Unknown Land

By Gerald Clarke

The Shock of the New, PBS, beginning Jan. 11,8 p.m., E.S.T.

Even today, many decades after they were unveiled before an uncomprehending world, the early works of the modernists retain the power to startle. Picasso's cubist women stare out from the canvas with the faces of monsters in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye belongs more to tomorrow than today, as it has for the past half-century. Jackson Pollock is still a puzzle to many people, who appreciate only the fancy prices his paintings now fetch. That lack of understanding is what makes this eight-part BBC series on 20th century art so valuable: it does not tell us where we are going, but it does tell us where we have been.

The series begins and ends in Paris. The Eiffel Tower (1889), that "static totem of the cult of dynamism," as Host Robert Hughes calls it, is a symbol of the ebullient optimism that ushered in the new age of machine worship. The Beaubourg Center (1977), which looks like a trite and showy illustration from a science fiction magazine, becomes a symbol of the decline of that exhausted era. In between is a terra incognita that we may think we know--the art of the 20th century.

Hughes, who also was the writer of the series, is as good a guide through that rough country as Kenneth Clark was through earlier centuries in Civilisation, after which The Shock of the New is patterned. But whereas Clark reflected an older, more urbane sensibility, Hughes, 42, is as brash and electric as his subject. He is sometimes seen in shirtsleeves; his blond hair is always unruly. Instead of Clark's patrician, High Church accent, Hughes speaks in a matey, sometimes too hearty Australian that lapses easily--and quite appropriately--into slang. Talking about Chicago's pioneering building developers, for instance, he says that their policy was to "grab the block, screw the neighbors."

What makes the program interesting, however, is not Hughes' manner but his arresting ideas. He brings a fresh eye to familiar scenes. Placing two cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque side by side, for example, he shows that they are almost indistinguishable. At that point in their careers, the two men were so alike that "they could have been Siamese twins." The medium of television allows him to juxtapose paintings and the real-life images from which they were so clearly derived -- automobiles, planes, locomotives, almost anything that meant speed and modernity. Old films and current interviews also add fascinating insights, giving Hughes' series one advantage over Clark's. Botticelli could not be filmed in his studio; indeed, no one even knows what he looked like.

Hughes, who is TIME'S art critic, makes a confident, opinionated guide. Some of his greatest scorn is directed at modern architecture. Though he praises Le Corbusier as an inventor of shapes, he showers contempt upon his most famous projects: Chandigarh, the Indian city built at the foot of the Himalayas, and the Unite d'Habitation, the huge apartment house outside Marseille. Hughes visits the Marseille building and stops in the shopping mall that Corbu put inside. It is empty. The French like the bustle of a real marketplace. Corbusier, says Hughes, thought of everything but the people who had to live in his creations.

There is also a visit to a Berlin museum so that Hughes can sit -- or attempt to sit-- in Gerrit Rietveld's beautiful, Mondrian-inspired chair. Like Corbusier, Rietveld designed for himself alone, however. The bottom that was supposed to settle in that lovely wooden chair, com plains Hughes, "is one of those platonic solids existing somewhere out in the ether in a world of ideal form never made flesh."

Throughout his sweeping survey of the century, Hughes is affectionate but ironic, intolerant of the hokum he sees behind so many famous names. In collaboration with Producer Lorna Pegram, he has created a small work of art himself, giving PBS, which is presenting the series, a fine start to the new year. --By Gerald Clarke

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