Civilisation in America: Public Broadcasting, Art Museums ...



A Civilisation for America: the art museum, public broadcasting and cultural segregation, 1968-1974

Jonathan Conlin (University of Southampton)

Abstract: As the first colour documentary series produced by the BBC, Kenneth Clark's thirteen-part history series Civilisation (1969) was a landmark in the history of British broadcasting. Yet its impact on public discourse was arguably greater in the United States, where the series was first screened at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington in late 1969, then in government offices and educational institutions across the country and finally on the new Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). At the NGA the screenings were part of director J. Carter Brown's attempt to engage socially excluded audiences in exploration of civic humanist ideals. This essay uses the phenomenal success of the series as a way into contemporary debates over the museum's role in society, and in particular its responsibility to address social inequalities, war and inter-racial strife. It considers the role of both the NGA and the Smithsonian in developing “neighbourhood museums” as well as new ways of displaying African art, two projects that coincided with Civilisation screenings. Are these to be understood as further examples of “museum outreach,” or did they in fact confirm rather than confront segregation? It concludes by considering Civilisation's use as a justification for public television's precarious existence under a hostile Nixon administration. A series that carefully avoided claims to comprehensiveness or smug visions of Whiggish progress was somehow prescribed as a means of improving American minds and soothing “hysterias” peddled by commercial television. In this fashion Americans made their own Civilisation. This appropriation necessitated critical thought about the museum and television as public resources, and in particular whether conflict over support for Vietnam, over the ills of the inner city and other crises had fatally shattered a unitary “American public.”

Forty years ago Civilisation arrived in America. This thirteen part television series presented by Sir Kenneth Clark had first been broadcast at 8:15pm on Sunday, 23 February 1969, on the BBC's relatively new second channel, BBC2. On 27 October episode one of this survey of European cultural history, entitled “The Skin of Our Teeth,” was screened in Washington, in the National Gallery of Art's 300-seater auditorium. At first one fifty-two minute episode was shown twice a day for a week, with a third screening on Saturdays. In keeping with the Gallery's overall policy, admission was free.

It became clear that something unusual was happening. The auditorium was packed. Lines were forming for every showing. In the second week the young, recently-appointed Director of the Gallery, J. Carter Brown, responded by showing episodes two and three back to back. Still they came. According to the National Observer those jostling for a seat included “government workers on their lunch breaks and peace marchers in town for the Nov[ember] 14 mobilization.”[1] The line stretched out the building and around the block. Something more was needed. As Brown later recalled in a letter to Clark:

Our first realization of the problem came that first Sunday night, when instead

of a normal attendance of four or five thousand people, we had over 20,000

people show up at the Gallery, and the corridors outside our auditorium were

close to panic level. We then went on Red Alert, and pushed our exhibition of

the films to the maximum available limit, showing each film all day, every day,

continuously.[2]

The screenings continued into early 1970. That summer special screenings were organized for younger visitors working as interns in congressional offices. Brown kicked this season off on 29 June with a rock concert in the Widener Room.[3] In November 1971 a new season of screenings began. As the Gallery's 1972 annual report noted, interest in the series seemed “indestructible.”[4] This despite the fact that by then the series had made the jump to American television, being screened on PBS affiliates from coast to coast on Sunday evenings at 9pm starting 7 October 1970.

Its appearance on the small screen drew rave reviews from across the media spectrum, from TV Guide to Vogue.[5] The accompanying book was top of the New York Times bestseller list. The National Gallery's Extension Service had started a programme of lending copies to town halls, libraries, schools, museums and government agencies. Just under ten million Americans watched the films. It was shown in the Senate, at the White House, CIA headquarters and the Pentagon. Senator Edward Kennedy and CIA director Richard Helms were among those to write and thank Brown for making the films available, and to note how well-attended their screenings had been.[6] Mariners aboard the US Navy's nuclear submarines on patrol under the Arctic ice cap weren't able to pick up television signals. They ran silent, keeping any communication to a minimum. But they had projectors on board, and they watched Civilisation too.[7]

Civilisation was a phenomenon. When Brown invited Clark back to Washington on 18 November 1970 to receive the NGA’s Medal for Distinguished Service in Education the series' presenter received a hero's welcome. As Clark and Brown walked from the East Sculpture Hall through the rotunda to the dais at the west end of the West Sculpture Hall - a distance of two city blocks - the attendant crowds “rose to their feet at his passing so that he was like a surfer borne forward on a rising surge of adulation.”[8] Overwhelmed, Clark would later lock himself into a toilet and break into tears. “I sobbed and howled for a quarter of an hour” he would later record in his autobiography. “I suppose politicians quite enjoy this kind of experience, and don’t get it often enough.” “The saints certainly enjoyed it,” he went on, “but saints are very tough eggs.”[9]

Civilisation clearly spoke to Americans, who found the series a source of hope at a difficult time in their nation’s history. But it was also seen as a challenge to the institutions which promoted it: to public broadcasting and to art museums such as the NGA. These institutions’ relationship with the American people was under unusual stress in the years 1968-74, and opinions were divided over what role they should play in society. Should they provide a haven from political controversy and the “vast wasteland” of American consumer culture, serving up comforting reminders of enduring and unimpeachable values? Or were they to form part of the public square, to encourage a broader debate of the values enshrined in art and hold to account their trustees and those who directed the nation’s political and economic fortunes? Were they to suffer the little ones to come unto them, or reach out to the dispossessed of the incinerated inner cities through decentralized “neighbourhood museums” and “black heritage” shows such as the Metropolitan Museum's Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America 1900-68, which had opened in January 1969?

In Washington the words and music of Civilisation mingled with the chants of anti-Vietnam protestors outside on the National Mall, with Nigerian music performed at an exhibition of African sculpture being held upstairs, and with Nixon's “silent majority.” The embattled President's speech appealing to “honest and patriotic Americans…the great - silent - majority of my fellow Americans” was broadcast the day after the Civilisation screenings began. It was followed ten days later, on 13 November by Vice President Spiro Agnew's speech accusing the big three television networks of prejudicing Americans' minds by giving airtime to hostile instapundits. Two days later came “the Mobe” (the New Mobilization March Against Death), a massive anti-Vietnam demonstration.[10] The story of the brutal killing of over 300 residents of the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai the previous year (16 March 1968) first appeared in newspapers on 13 November, and reached the television news 20 November.[11] Washington in November 1969 was an interesting place and time to be watching a show called Civilisation.

Each episode of Civilisation focussed on a sudden outburst of creativity in a particular place in a particular chronological context - sometimes a period of just half a century.[12] Rather than linking up to form an overarching narrative of Whiggish progress each episode ended on a note of decadence or collapse, as the pessimistic gravity of man's tragic fate cut short another brief yet exhilarating flight before the underlying principles or even the cause of this flight could be identified. The locations were highly significant, and not simply because it was then rare for a presenter to be seen outside a studio. Iona, Urbino and other landscapes and cities served as more than mere settings; they were places whose soil and stones were infused with power to broaden the human mind. Clark and the camera dwelt on and in these places. In contrast to near contemporaries such as John Berger or Robert Hughes, Clark was not in vision much, nor did he adopt a pedagogic tone. Much to the irritation of New Left critics in Britain such as Raymond Williams he preferred an easy-going “after dinner” tone that dispensed aphorisms liberally, without indicating any firm commitments to specific values.[13]

Indeed, spaces, sculpture and details of paintings and other artworks were often shown without any commentary or accompaniment other than music. These sequences, dubbed “commercials” by director Michael Gill, were remarkable for the degree of confidence they placed in the visuals' ability to hold the viewer's gaze. In one case (in “The Great Thaw”) the “span” of these sequences reaches more than three and a half minutes, something that would be unthinkable today. As for “civilization” itself, Clark began episode one with the teasing line that he was unable “to define it in abstract terms...yet.” The viewer never gets a definition, although the final episode did include a “credo” in which the presenter declared his preference for “forgiveness over vendetta” (among other platitudes). Clark found this sequence very hard to deliver. He lived long enough to find the anti-democratic hauteur of Bloomsbury manifestoes such as Clive Bell's 1928 book Civilisation embarrassing, and to discover in the dynamism of postwar commercial culture an invigorating tonic. But he found himself unable to negotiate a compromise between the two. Clark espoused a civic humanism modelled on his Renaissance hero Leon Battista Alberti, but this vision was pre-political; one might even say pre-representational. In another rare break with his uncommittal facade Clark gesticulates rhetorically towards the “monuments” of western civilization: “There they are. You can't dismiss them.”

It is the customary fate of all great works of art that they strike a course independent of their creator. Clark found the procession down the Gallery “very disturbing” because he “felt like a man who is supposed to be a doctor, walking through a crowd of earthquake victims who are appealing to him for medical supplies.”[14] Fans had seen him as the purveyor of a cure for their ills, something he knew he did not possess. As he tried to remind them, the series did not depict an unstoppable ascent of western man, and contained a good deal of pessimism. There was no intention to suggest that this - western European civilization from the Dark Ages to the present - was the only civilization.[15]

For the most part, however, art historians and critics then and since have unfairly viewed the series as a televisual equivalent of the “universal survey museum”. In their highly-influential 1980 essay of the same name Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach argued that the NGA, Louvre and similar museums were all examples of a single institutional species, one which “certifies the claim to civilization and universality”.[16] According to Duncan and Wallach the universal survey museum affirms “the power and social authority of a patron class” and fosters “the illusion of a classless society”, while in fact privileging a “middle class” view of history as “the history of great men” and “institutionaliz[ing] the bourgeois claim to speak for the interests of all mankind.”[17] As we shall see, in 1969 there were those who anticipated Duncan and Wallach in their suspicion of programmes inviting new audiences to contemplate a shared, unitary artistic heritage.

It could be difficult to determine whether the most outspoken (if not always articulate) critics of the museum were attempting to appeal to a unitary national conscience or seeking to hijack ostensibly “public” institutions for their own purposes. But there was no doubt that the stakes were high. Was there a common heritage, a civilization to which they could all appeal, or was each ethnic group seeking recognition of their own distinct “community” and its discrete civilization? To use the language of the time, was civilization integrated, or segregated?

Museum Freaks

The 1970 American Association of Museums (AAM) convention had hardly got started in the ballroom of New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on 1 June when it was hijacked by demonstrators drawn from the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) demanding that the scheduled speeches be replaced by a more open-ended discussion on their “official” theme of “War, Racism, Sexism and Repression.” Although conventions organized by other professional associations had experienced similar disruption, for museum curators this was novel.[18] The protestors clearly had sympathizers among the delegates. A room was duly set aside for break-out sessions attended at different points by between 30 and 70 AAM members, and some productive dialogue did ensue, despite the presence of “a group of the art strikers” intent on “confronting Governor [Nelson] Rockefeller and causing a disturbance.”[19] AAM members worked with the demonstrators to establish a set of seven “demands” whose language was carefully softened to give them a chance of passing a vote. There was only time to debate and vote on the first, although it did pass. It committed the delegates to organize a “national workshop conference” bringing together AAM members, artists and “community people...with the purpose of examining the responsibility of institutions with regard to racism, sexism, repression and war, and determining ways in which they can relate constructively to daily changes and growing stresses in our culture.”

Undebated articles included a demand for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from southeast Asia, decentralisation (i.e. museum annexes in the inner cities, an idea I will consider later) and an end to prosecution of the Black Panthers.[20] The AWC arguably got more out of their intervention at the AAM than they had from previous interventions at the city’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 1969 they had joined with the Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG) in demonstrations against MoMA trustees (who included CBS chairman William S. Paley, several Rockefellers and other plutocrats) for supposedly degrading art from a political force into a pleasant opiate. Paley intervened to stop MoMA distributing an AWC-designed poster featuring a photograph of a corpse-strewn road taken by Sgt. Ron Haeberle at My Lai. [21]

Surveying a tumultuous three days at the Waldorf-Astoria, Museum News concluded that the protestors had sped up “a process already underway.”[22] As a profession American curators were vacillating between a range of new visitor-focussed initiatives and more familiar object-focussed nostrums. Alma Wittlin’s magisterial 1970 survey of the museum’s role: Museums: In Search of A Usable Future nicely captures the mood of earnest befuddlement.[23] Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving was present at the 1970 AAM meeting, and was clearly well-disposed towards the protestors. “Although the protestors were using harsh language,” he noted, “the goals they sought were essentially the same as those being discussed at the conference - how to make museums more germane to the issues of our time.”[24] Hoving had returned to the Metropolitan as Director in January 1967, having previously worked for John Lindsay, first on his campaign and then, after Lindsay's successful mayoral bid, as Parks Commissioner. On taking office Lindsay had declared his intention to make New York “Fun City,” and quickly sought to address black New Yorkers' distrust of the city authorities by introducing a Civil Review Board to oversee the NYPD, even as working-class inhabitants of the outer boroughs accused him and his fellow “limousine liberals” of supposedly rewarding civil disobedience. Hoving claimed to see this conservative backlash forming, and had been happy to leave politics behind.[25]

At the 1968 AAM his “Branch out!” speech urged directors to join in “the serious fun,” or face the consequences “of being unceremoniously pushed in.” New Left accusations that the museum was failing “to supply them - the youth - with a usable past” could not simply be ignored.[26] Hoving went on to adopt a line that managed to advocate increased scholarly output, critical self-examination and dialogue with the disaffected without sacrificing the museum's claims to set standards of beauty and encourage contemplation. “Not only can we be the great batteries where people refresh themselves,” he promised, “but we can also be something outgoing - a crusading force to see that quality and excellence are more broadly known.”[27] Controversy was good, if not a central part of the museum's role in society.[28]

Other art museum directors disagreed, most notably James Johnson Sweeney of Cleveland Art Museum. To view museums as “instruments of popular education along mass media lines” was to pander to an “indolent approach to the visual arts” that was itself “a result of the hasty democratization of education of the past century.”[29] “Art should never be spoon-fed nor offered in capsule, digested form” he insisted. The sort of “indolence” that led directors to employ recorded lecture tours and films was to be expected from a commercial television station, but not from a museum with a public charge to keep. Sweeney was writing in 1961, around the time of FCC member Newton Minow's famous speech lambasting television as “a vast wasteland.”

It wasn't just the directors who were concerned that Hovingite initiatives might encourage museums to betray their institutional identity in ill-advised imitation of rivals for the public's attention. In a September 1970 article for Museum News the sociologist Margaret Mead implicitly condemned much of what Hoving and Brown had been doing.[30] Mead insisted that museums were “places to go” where one navigated one's own course through unique, authentic objects: “[Museums] can say as no other form can: this is it, itself... To the extent that this authenticity is sacrificed to showmanship and competition with world’s fairs and other forms of fabricated exhibits, museums lose.” Most museums were already too crowded; their success should be measured, not by visitor numbers, but by the length and " ‘quality’ " (intriguingly, Mead herself put the word in scare quotes). Echoing Sweeney, Mead argued against “programmed learning” and asserted the freedom to drift, “a kind of freedom basic to the individuality which young people are crying out for today.”[31] As far as young African Americans were concerned, museums should, she argued, be careful to display “residues of past cultural states” alongside “contemporary accomplishments” (images of the cities of contemporary Africa, she suggested). Otherwise these objects might “memorialize a past which today's people are proud of abandoning.”[32]

Mr. Ripley's Neighbourhood

But were African Americans “proud” of abandoning their past? Was it even appropriate to call such artefacts “residues,” given the status of “tribal art” as at once ethnological specimen, primitive art and modern art? In May 1969 Nelson Rockefeller announced his decision to transfer his collection of African art from the Museum of Primitive Art he had originally founded to the Metropolitan. Whereas the Met had previously chosen to loan its African artworks to other museums rather than put them on display, now it established a Department of Primitive Art.[33] As with Hoving and Allan Schoener's Harlem on My Mind, a measure intended to salute the creativity of the black community was perceived by leading black intellectuals as a form of subjugation-by-proxy. For poet and Sarah Lawrence Professor June Hordan speaking in November 1969 it was all a “hip cop-out for the regular museum establishment...it’s still possible for the Metropolitan Museum of Art...to run a show like Harlem on my Mind, that didn't have any black painting in it, any black sculpture in it, and only one black poem in it.” “And the only way you can get to see African art,” she added, “is through the courtesy of Rockefeller.”[34] She might have said the same of contemporary black theatre of the kind staged by the Free Southern Theatre, a key part of the Black Arts Movement that was then dependent on funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, despite its own best efforts to secure support from middle-class blacks.[35]

Hordan was speaking at a seminar on neighbourhood museums held at MUSE, a museum set up in 1968 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. The neighbourhood or branch museum concept had first emerged in Victorian London.[36] The idea had been developed much further, however, around the turn of the century by Newark Museum Director James Dwight Dana, only to fall out of fashion.[37] When Smithsonian director S. Dillon Ripley advocated neighbourhood museums in a speech to a meeting of museum directors in November 1966, therefore, the concept seemed a novel idea; timely, indeed, in view of the need to do something about America's inner cities, where outbreaks of rioting, looting and arson in black neighbourhoods seemed to be getting worse every summer.

On 15 September 1967 the Anacostia Neighbourhood Museum opened in a former movie theatre on Nichols Avenue (now Martin Luther King Blvd.) Anacostia had been a black neighbourhood since the federal government gave out plots of land in the area to freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War. Separated by the Anacostia River from central Washington, in 1967 it was a world away. Many children in local schools had never crossed the bridge. The Museum was a partnership between a local civic group and the Smithsonian, which provided curatorial expertise and $104,000 annual running costs and lent objects suitable for hands-on exhibits. As Faith Davis Ruffins has noted in her survey of African American Museums, the Anacostia Neighbourhood Museum was one of a group of museums established after 1965 which differed from similar museums established in the 1950s and early 1960s. Whereas the latter had been founded by activists who saw themselves as forming “an elite revolutionary vanguard”, institutions such as Anacostia and Detroit’s Museum of Afro-American History (1965) saw themselves as “standing inside the community and helping to give voice to community desires.”[38]

Anacostia Neighbourhood Museum flourished and now operates from a purpose-built building on a different site. It owed its success to its first director, John A. Kinard: minister, former social worker and Youth Corps leader with close ties to the neighbourhood. The museum was open until 8 or 9pm six days a week, and over 40,000 visited in the first six months. Temporary exhibitions were themed to reflect local residents' demands for “our African heritage.” This Is Africa, for example, consisted of just over two hundred pieces of “traditional African sculpture, crafts and artifacts,” most of which could be handled by visitors. Performances of Ghanaian dancing, an “African Food Fair” and evening art workshops were organized for children and adults alike.[39]

Anacostia Museum was held up as a model example of community outreach, both within the American museum world and abroad.[40] From the Smithsonian’s perspective it reflected Dillon Ripley’s inclusive spirit as Secretary (from 1964-1984). When the Poor People’s Campaign set up a shanty town (“Resurrection City”) on the National Mall in June 1968 as part of their push for an “economic bill of rights”, Ripley insisted that his museums remain open, where other institutions battened down the hatches.[41] Black leaders of other neighbourhood museums were suspicious, however, of collaborating with long-established museums of European art, fearing a conspiracy to patch deep wounds with a token dose of “culture,” in lieu of taking more costly steps to address inner-city problems. As Edward Spriggs of Toledo Museum noted, “community outreach” skirted a number of important questions: “What do we mean by ‘communities’? Is that word being used as a euphemism for black or Puerto Rican or cultural disadvantaged? And what is meant by culturally disadvantaged? Whose culture? Whose disadvantage?”[42]

These were questions that could have been asked inside the National Gallery, which at that moment was hosting both Civilisation and Masterpieces of African Sculpture. Curated by the British Museum's William Fagg, Masterpieces had opened in late January 1970 and ran until March, when it travelled to the Brooklyn Art Museum. It was the first time the NGA had displayed works of art that did not hail from the United States or western Europe, and the first exhibition to include temporary ceilings, walls, and vitrines. There was some nervousness at the sums required, and the NGA considered backing out of its commitment to the designers it had brought in from MoMA and cancelling the show. Internal memos of the time weigh up reasons to go forward: that the Times critic John Canaday already knew of their plans and that Nixon might come were two of them. While the $18,000 installation cost represented “an extraordinarily large amount of money,” the Gallery's curator of sculpture C. Douglas Lewis added a third justification to Brown in the form of a fascinating hypothetical: “What lesser amount could be contemplated if it were a (roughly equivalent) question of asking Kenneth Clark or someone to install Michelangelo’s David and 200 other masterworks of European sculpture, in Nigeria?” Brown added three exclamation marks in the margin.[43] But the show went ahead.

If the NGA hoped that their ground-breaking show would garner plaudits from Canaday, they were wrong. His review compared Washington's “cramped and jumbled installation” unfavourably with that of the same show at the Brooklyn Art Museum, concluding that overall Masterpieces had been “a letdown.” And looking at the installation views one has to agree. The show lurched from “Ethnographic” galleries featuring potted palms, large wall labels, films of tribal dancers and statues on daises rising out of beds of gravel to “White Cube” or “Modernist” galleries with bare walls and artefacts marooned in “floating” vitrines. Statues were pin-pointed in the gloom by spotlights like so many convicts from the “dark continent.”

In May 1969 Brown had written to the founding director of the Museum of African Art in Washington, the former foreign service officer Warren Robbins, in order to run his proposed title, African Heritage, past him and check if “it has any overtones I don't know about.”[44] The Museum of African Art was a small one, established in 1964 in a historic townhouse that formerly belonged to Frederick Douglass. It would become part of the Smithsonian in 1979 and eventually be renamed the National Museum of African Art in 1981. While Robbins noted in his reply to Brown that they had used African Heritage themselves, he argued that it was less appropriate in the case of a show intended for the larger institution:

But whereas the programme of our small and specialized Museum is intended

to call attention to social implications, I wonder if it wouldn’t be more appropriate for the National Gallery to play it straight, entitling the exhibit something like ‘The Sculpture of Traditional Africa’ –the idea being that the art is shown strictly in terms of its own greatness, not because of the current emphasis on ‘black heritage.’ I think the National Gallery would be saying more by saying less....Six months or a year ago I wouldn’t have thought this way but today with the exaggerated and sometimes arrogant claims being made regarding ‘heritage’ it may be enough simply that the show is being held at the National Gallery.[45]

Brown abandoned Heritage as a title, and went back to the drawing board.[46]

In his letter soliciting loans Brown had promised that the show “would help show to all Americans the impressive roots of African culture.” [47] But were these roots connected to a living plant? Most of the leading American and European collectors of African art as well as museum directors such as Sweeney saw artefacts produced after European contact as impure specimens.[48] As Christopher Steiner has noted, this aesthetic caesura made it possible for collectors to confess indifference towards the creators of their treasures, their ritual significance and subsequent artistic developments in Africa. In so far as it was often their donations that led art museums to take an interest in African art, such attitudes influenced modes of display in public collections.[49] Although Fagg criticized the “uninformed nègrerie” of such collectors he clearly saw the Masterpieces show as a tribute to a dying or dead tradition.[50] He suggested the title “The African Past: A Valediction to Tribal Art.” He agreed with Robbins that “African heritage” had become a “meaningless cliché.”[51] It is indeed striking that, for all the Africanist rhetoric of Black Power and the Black Panther Party (BPP), so little attention should have been paid by activists such as Amiri Baraka and Emory Douglas (BPP Minister for Culture) to African art or, indeed, the visual arts in general.[52] “We have to realize our Black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress”, BPP founder Huey Newton stated, “But as far as returning to the old African culture, it’s unnecessary and it’s not advantageous in many respects.”[53] This neglect contrasts with the position taken in the 1920s by the New Negro Movement’s Alain Locke, who encouraged black artists to look to African art for inspiration.[54]

119,000 visitors would see Masterpieces of African Sculpture in Washington, an impressive figure given that it ran for just over a month. In part this was due to the Gallery's efforts to match a new subject with a new audience. It was widely noted across the museum sector that blacks were heavily underrepresented in art museums, whether as visitors or staff (except for the guards). The NGA had posters printed for distribution to community groups in the “Inner City.”[55] These brought results: the Gallery’s curator in charge of education noted that the 131 school parties who visited included “a number of District schools which, as far as we know, had never requested tours at the Gallery [before]”[56] These may have included the group shown in one of the Gallery's installation photographs [Fig].

This class is entirely black. A large majority of the “conservative backlash” that swept Nixon to power had been incited by scare-mongering over Title IV and the use of busing to make the desegregation of schools signed into law by Johnson's Civil Rights Acts a reality on the ground. Nixon's “silent majority” included many suburbanites who had sought to escape the violence they associated with the inner cities and especially its black residents. These included unionized workers, relatively young immigrant communities and other groups that Democrats considered firm supporters of Johnson's “Great Society.” They did not want to be part of a community that included blacks, or participate in the integrationist “fun” of Hoving and Lindsay.

In showing Masterpieces of African Sculpture in a museum that was neither a modern art nor an anthropological or natural history museum the NGA had attempted something new - certainly compared to, say, the way in which the nearby Smithsonian displayed Congolese artefacts.[57] What with its lavish installation Masterpieces was, it could be argued, the NGA's first blockbuster: a genre normally seen as originating in the 1976 Tutankhamun show. Though the critical reception was mixed, Masterpieces was a statement of confidence in the ability of the Gallery and its canon to recognize and integrate (if temporarily) a kindred tradition. As for the difficulty over the title, one only has to glance at the much more recently installed Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to realise that such institutions are still wrestling with such questions, still struggling to find a way to display African artefacts that offers something other than exquisite spot-lit modernism or peep-show ethnography.[58]

In 1969, however, suspicions ran deep. Brown's inclusiveness could be interpreted by black curators such as Colin Carew as cynical gesture politics, as a new “hustle” to control or direct black access to and interpretation of something that was exclusively “theirs” (as in belonging to the African American community in isolation).[59] One of the questions Anacostia residents had asked of the Smithsonian staff in the runup to the launch of their museum had been pointed: “Is the neighbourhood museum idea a further attempt to segregate black people?”[60] Many of the most outspoken black activists in the art world did not see integration or even communication between races as possible. Although it would take until 2003 for African Americans to lobby successfully for a national museum of “their own,” the idea of a National Museum of African American History and Culture (due to open on Washington’s National Mall in 2015) originated in such debates. It was and remains a curiously segregated form of integration.[61]

Masterpiece Theatre

In his November 1969 speech Spiro Agnew had lambasted television news editors and pundits for belonging to a self-regarding liberal East Coast clique that rarely strayed from its own ghettos.[62] Though the Public Broadcasting System had only just been established in 1969, the attempt to improve the quality and profile of public television by pooling resources and setting up a national programme stream was soon rewarded with similar accusations of elite parochialism.[63] These led to strong government opposition to any attempt to make PBS into a “fourth network” alongside CBS, NBC and ABC.

For advocates of a more centralized “fourth network” approach Civilisation and Sesame Street (1969-present) were proof that television did not have to be “a vast wasteland.” Like the museum, television could educate and heal social divisions, helping to integrate the inner city child and assist working-class autodidacts denied other opportunities to improve their minds. Although public television, like the National Endowment for the Arts, formed part of Johnson’s raft of “Great Society” legislation, on taking power in 1968 Nixon was initially fairly supportive of PBS. By 1970 he was hostile, antagonized by what he perceived as hostile coverage of current affairs. He stayed away from the White House screening of Civilisation, although Pat Nixon and Henry Kissinger attended. In 1971 he sent the head of the White House of Office of Television Media to tell PBS executives to “put their house in order” and give up “fourth network” pretensions. The carrot he offered was an act that would provide the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with funding stretching over several years, rather than the usual lurch from budget round to budget round, which inevitably politicized it.[64] The dispute went unresolved, and culminated in Nixon’s veto of a PBS funding bill.

Along with Sesame Street, Civilisation therefore played a crucial role in justifying PBS’ existence at a critical phase in its troubled history. Educational and social outreach characterized the network's approach to both programmes and the advice it gave viewers on how to watch. Volunteers toured the deprived urban areas urging mothers to expose their children to Sesame Street, either in their own homes (on televisions their menfolk had previously looted in one of the urban riots, it was suggested), or in special “viewing centres.”[65] A raft of companions, study guides, discussion groups and formal higher education courses formed around Civilisation. Some of this was issued by the NGA itself, including the curator Richard McLanathan's short $1 Guide to Civilisation. An autodidact's primer, it included a short biography of Clark, episode summaries, a glossary of terms and suggestions for further reading.

Other material was produced by PBS affiliates such as WMVS Milwaukee, suggesting among other things that the viewer start their own study group by asking their local librarian to locate like-minded individuals who might watch Civilisation with them.[66] Watching was to clearly supposed to be followed by improving discussion. WNET-13 President James Day got the ball rolling by tacking five-minute fillers on to the end of each episode in which he discussed its content with intellectuals, critics and artists.[67] In 1975 Miami Dade University College and the University of California joined forces to produce a college course based on the BBC series Ascent of Man (1973, aired in US 1975), and then moved on to tackle Civilisation. By 1979 10% of American institutions of higher education were offering it as a college level course.[68] Surviving evidence of such courses is scanty, but Clark's fan mail does suggest that Civilisation's open-ended refusal to adopt categorical positions on “civilization” or “values” allowed it to cater for a striking range of educational philosophies, from Catholic city academies to “rural neural homestead schools” in Colorado.[69]

Public television wasn't only intended to counteract the mind-numbing banality of commercial television, it was also supposed to offer an alternative to its supposed pessimism.[70] The citation for Clark's Peabody Award hailed Civilisation a refreshing change from television “devoted to hawking men’s failures.” [71]At CBS Paley had indeed shifted programming towards edgier shows reflecting “new concepts of realism and relevance.” Rolled out from 1970 onwards, this shift was a preemptive strike, given that the tried and trusted shows remained extremely popular. Paley felt that a forward-looking network needed to appeal to a younger audience. “It was a time of youth's uprisings in the ghettos and on college campuses,” he would later write, “the action was in the streets of our major cities, not in bygone rural settings.”[72] The results included All in the Family (CBS, 1971-9). It would be hard to imagine its hero, Archie Bunker, watching PBS, but his long-suffering wife Edith might have, if she was ever allowed near the television.

Although Clark only kept a fragment of the fan mail he received, it included letters from housewives. Doris Altier of Miami wrote that “to someone like me, in the middle age of life, a child of working-class parents, your program Civilization was a thrilling experience and an awakening of interests I never dreamed I had.”[73] The individuals and couples who watched Civilisation at home felt a close bond with Clark. They noted his personal mannerisms and found watching comforting. “We had the first atomic bomb go off at the threshhold of our adulthood” wrote Anna Lee and Bob Colp of Yonkers (NY), “and via the mixed blessing of TV - we have been inflicted with the myriad of hysterias accompanying contemporary life.” Chased out of the rest of their house by the loud music of their teenage children, they had a weekly “ ‘date’ “ with Clark “in the quiet of our own room.”[74] It was this sense of intimacy and gratitude for reassurance at a dark moment in American history that underlay the distressing (for Clark) scenes at the NGA ceremony.

In Washington in 1969 and later on PBS Civilisation was juxtaposed with barbarity: Vietnam and the My Lai massacre; the squalid, opulent “wasteland” of commercial television and the squalid, impoverished wasteland of the inner cities. One might also include the objects included in Masterpieces of Western Sculpture, which were then associated (by collectors, at least) with the “primitive.” It was possible to celebrate these “barbarities” as more legible, accessible and even more meaningful works of art than Rembrandts and Donatellos. As we have seen, collectors and curators of African art borrowed those minimalist display techniques common in contemporary art museums precisely because they felt that African masks could speak directly to our deepest selves, short-circuiting the values and traditions of civilization.[75]

Meanwhile Pop Art celebrated the cheesecake of commercial television as well as the machinery of the “military industrial complex” in works such as James Rosenquist's F-111 (1965, which Hoving controversially displayed in the Met in 1969), works whose saccharine palette and craftlessness “spoke” to the “silent majority” inhabiting a wasteland that didn't seem so empty after all.[76] Though they sought the means to remedy the vermin, unemployment and failing schools that scarred the inner cities, few black leaders sought integration. With the rise of Black Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s the ghetto became something to fortify and celebrate, a community model of similar cultural significance to the Jewish shtetl. Even today, directors of museums such as the Detroit Institute of Art meet “deep suspicion” from groups such as the NAACP when seeking to collaborate to address underrepresentation of blacks among both museum audiences and staff.[77]

This was not the approach taken by the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, or Hoving's Metropolitan. In mounting an exhibition like Masterpieces, in opting to welcome protestors where other directors opted to close, and in smaller gestures like having a rock band front for Clark's Civilisation Carter Brown was taking up Hoving's invitation to “branch out.” There will always be critics who choose to interpret such an inclusive approach to civilization as a subtly hegemonic plot by a wealthy, white western elite intent on pacifying or indoctrinating subaltern groups.[78] In its enthusiasm for Foucauldian approaches museum studies today exhibits a suspicion of “inclusion” as a Trojan horse, a suspicion redolent of that displayed by black curators such as Colin Carew (quoted above) in 1970.[79] What Brown and Hoving’s initiatives really represented was a choice of integration over segregation; a choice that needs to be made, over and over again.

-----------------------

This paper originated as a lecture delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, as part of the NGA’s celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of Civilisation. I am grateful to Faya Causey for the invitation to speak, to Jean Henry of the NGA Archive, and to my Southampton colleague Kendrick Oliver for his helpful comments.

[1] National Observer, 22 Dec. 1969.

[2] Carter Brown to Clark, 18 Sep. 1970. Tate Britain Archive, London. Hereafter abbreviated to TBA. 8812.1.4.92.

[3] J. Carter Brown, Director's Report, National Gallery of Art Annual Report (1970), 21.

[4] J. Carter Brown, Director's Report, National Gallery of Art Annual Report (1972), 13.

[5] For press comment see the clippings preserved in the relevant files at the National Public Broadcasting Archives, University of Maryland, College Park (hereafter abbreviated to NPBA).

[6] Richard Helms to J. Carter Brown, 3 Sep. 1970. “Civilisation Film Series. CIA” and Edward Kennedy to J. Carter Brown, 14 Oct. 1970. “Civilisation Film Series. Senate and State Department.” Both National Gallery of Art Archives, Washington (hereafter abbreviated to NGA), 2C1 Box 21.

[7] Penelope L. Richardson, “Television adult education: materials and their implications,” unpublished paper, KCET-28 Los Angeles Visual Arts Conference, Palm Springs, 9-12 April 1979, p. 4. My thanks to Ann Turner for making her copy of the conference pack available to me.

[8] Michael Gill, “From Civilisation to America” (unpublished memoir, 1988-1990), 24.

[9] Kenneth Clark, The Other Half (London: John Murray, 1977), 225.

[10] Fearing for their licenses, none of the television networks covered the Mobe live. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland. The rise of a president and the fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 441.

[11] Kendrick Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 45-8.

[12] For detailed studies of the the series and its impact in Britain see John Wyver, Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (London:Wallflower, 2007); Jonathan Conlin, Civilisation (London: BFI Palgrave, 2009). See also the chapter in John Walker, Arts TV: a history of arts television in Britain (London: John Libbey, 1993) and John Wyver's various blogposts at .

[13] Conlin, Civilisation, 91-2.

[14] Clark to J. Carter Brown, 22 Oct. 1970. “Kenneth Clark - Award Ceremony.” NGA, 2C1 Box 21.

[15] Conlin, 6, 15-16.

[16] Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, Art History 3.4 (December 1980), 448-69 (467).

[17] Ibid., 457, 456.

[18] David Katzine, “Up against the Waldorf-Astoria,” Museum News, 49.1 (September 1970), 12-17 (12).

[19] Ibid., 14.

[20] For the full text, see Ibid., 14, 17.

[21] Francis Frascina, “Meyer Shapiro's choice: My Lai, Guernica, MOMA and the Art Left, 1969-70,” Journal of Contemporary History, 30.3 (July 1995), 481-511 and 705-728. Lucy R. Lippard, A Different War (Seattle: Whatcom Museum of History and Art/The Real Comet Press, 1990), 20-6 (26).

[22] Ibid., 16.

[23] Alma S. Wittlin, Museums: In Search of A Usable Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1970). Of Austrian origin, Wittlin had spent several years in Britain. Although she noted that she was a relatively recent arrival in the US, her book was strongly influenced by her close study of American museums.

[24] Lippard, 15.

[25] Thomas P. Hoving, Making the Mummies Dance: inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 29.

[26] Thomas P. F. Hoving, “Branch out!,” Museum News, 47.1 (Sep. 1968), 15-20 (15).

[27] Ibid., 16.

[28] Ibid., 18.

[29] James Johnson Sweeney, “The Artist and the Museum in Mass Society” in Norman Jacobs, ed., Culture for the Millions? Mass media in a modern society (Princeton: D. van Nostrand, 1961), 92- 95 (94).

[30] Mead, “Museums in a media-saturated world,” Museum News, 49.1 (Sep. 1970), 23-5 (24).

[31] Ibid., 24.

[32] Ibid., 25.

[33] Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: the story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 359.

[34] Cited in Emily Dennis Harvey and Bernard Friedberg, eds., A Museum for the People: a report of proceedings on the Seminar on Neighbourhood Museums (New York: Arno, 1971), 39.

[35] Joe Street, The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007), 140.

[36] Sheilagh Wilson, “ ‘The highest art for the lowest people’: the Whitechapel and other philanthropic art galleries, 1877-1901” in Colin Trodd and Paul Barlow, eds., Governing cultures (London, 2000), 172-86.

[37] Andrew McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 30-1.

[38] Faith Davis Ruffins, “Myths, Memory and History: African American Preservation Efforts, 1820-1990” in Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities: the Politics of Public Culture (Washington: Smithsonian, 1992), 506-611 (565).

[39] Caryl Marsh, “A neighbourhood museum that works,” Museum News, 47.2 (Oct. 1968), 11-16. For the museum see Smithsonian Institution Anacostia Neighbourhood Museum, Smithsonian Institution, September 15, 1972 (Washington: Smithsonian, 1972); Smithsonian Institution, The Anacostia Neighbourhood Museum, 1967/1977 (Washington: Smithsonian, 1977); Faith Davis Ruffins, “Myths, Memory and History: African American Preservation Efforts, 1820-1990” in Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities: the Politics of Public Culture (Washington: Smithsonian, 1992), 506-611 (580-582).

[40] John A. Kinard, “To meet the needs of today's audience,” Museum News, 51.2 (May 1972), 15-16. This article consists of a paper Kinard presented at the 9th General Conference of ICOM in September 1971. National Educational Television also made the museum the subject of a documentary. See also Wittlin, Museums, 180.

[41] Ruffins, “Myths, Memory and History”, 574-5.

[42] Cited in Ibid., p. 6.

[43] C. Douglas Lewis, memo, 12 Dec. 1969. “Masterpieces of African Sculpture - May 1961-March 1970.” NGA, 17A3 Box 10.

[44] J. Carter Brown to Warren Robbins, 9 May 1969. “Masterpieces of African Sculpture.” NGA, 2B1 Box 6.

[45] Warren Robbins to J. Carter Brown, 14 May 1969. Ibid.

[46] J. Carter Brown, “Discuss with Mrs. Pope,” memo. Ibid.

[47] J. Carter Brown to J. W. Gillon, 31 Oct. 1969. “Exhibitions: African Sculpture [January 28-March 1 1970].” NGA, 2C1 Box 54.

[48] See Sweeney’s introduction to the catalogue for MoMA’s 1935 African Negro Art catalogue, reproduced in Jack Flam, ed., Primitivism and Twentieth-century Art: a Documentary History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2003), 242-5 (245).

[49] Christopher B. Steiner, “The taste of angels in the art of darkness: fashioning the canon of African art,” in Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Art History and Its Institutions: foundations of a discipline (New York: Routledge, 2002), 132-145.

[50] William Fagg, “The Study of African Art,” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin, 13.1 (Fall 1955), 44-61 (44). Although it seems that his peers in American anthropology departments considered his approach to his subject moribund in itself. Jehanne Teilheit of UC San Diego had studied with Fagg and respected him, but felt it necessary to inform Brown that “There has been some criticism that he is out-of-date.” Fagg was “an ethnologist, which gives him a point of view that is not always accepted by the anthropologists.” Teilheit cited in J. Carter Brown memo, 19 June 1969. “Masterpieces of African Sculpture - January 28 - March 1 1970.” NGA, 2B1 Box 6.

[51] Cited in Edward P. Lawson to J. Carter Brown, 19 Aug. 1969. See also William Fagg to J. Carter Brown, 9 April 1969. Both Ibid.

[52] See Street, The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement, esp. 125ff. Visual arts are not mentioned at all in Kalamu ya Salaam’s article on the Black Arts Movement in William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster and Trudier Harris, eds, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (OUP, 1997), 70-4.

[53] T. V. Reed, The Art of Protest: culture and activism from the Civil Rights movement to the streets of Seattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 59.

[54] Flam, ed., Primitivism, 15; Ruffins, “Myths, Memory and History”, 531-4.

[55] J. Carter Brown, Director's Report, National Gallery of Art Annual Report (1970), 18.

[56] Margaret Bouton, memo, 25 March 1970. “Masterpieces of African Sculpture – General – January 1970 – January 1971.” NGA, 17A3 Box 10.

[57] Mary Jo Arnoldi, “A Distorted Mirror: the exhibition of the Herbert Ward Collection of Africana” in Karp, Mullen and Lavine, eds, Museums and Communities, 428-457; Mary Jo Arnoldi, “Where art and ethnology met: the Ward African Collection at the Smithsonian,” in Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim, eds., The Scramble for Art in Central Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193-216.

[58] There is a large museological literature on the question of exhibiting “exotic” cultures. See for example James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988) and the essays collected as Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds, Exhibiting Cultures: the poetics and politics of museum display (Washington: Smithsonian, 1991).

[59] Carew was then Director of the New Thing Art Center in Washington in Harvey and Friedberg, eds., A Museum for the People, 33. See also Leo F. Twiggs, “The museum and the black community,” Museum News, 51.2 (May 1972), 7-8.

[60] Marsh, “A neighbourhood museum that works,” 13.

[61] Ruffins, “Myths, Memory and History”, 559; James Oliver Horton and Spencer R. Crew, “Afro American Museums: towards a policy of inclusion” in Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds, History Museums in the US: a critical assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Faith Davis Ruffins, “Culture wars won and lost, part II: the National African-American Museum project,” Radical History Review, 70 (1998), 78-101. See also .

[62] Perlstein, Nixonland, 439.

[63] There is still no satisfactory history of public television or PBS in print, although Laurence Jarvik, PBS: Behind the screen (Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1997), Laurie Ouellette, Viewers Like You?: how public tv failed the people (New York: Columbia, 2002) and David Stewart, The PBS Companion: a history of public television (New York: TV Books, 1999) are useful.

[64] “Public TV Bill rejected by Nixon,” New York Times, 6 Oct. 1974, 6.

[65] Ouellette, 180.

[66] WMVS, “You and Civilisation,” copy at TBA, 8812.1.4.88. Similar material can also be found in the programme files at the NPBA.

[67] Conlin, Civilisation, 114.

[68] Richardson, “Television adult education,” 6-7.

[69] See Clark to Professor M. Barbara Akin, 2 April 1973. TBA, 8812.1.4.88; T. D. Lingo to Clark, 14 March 1973. TBA, 8812.1.4.315.

[70] WMVS, “You and Civilisation.”

[71] For the text of the interview (Radio Times, 8 Dec. 1970) and the citation see TBA, 8812.1.4.88.

[72] William S. Paley, As It Happened: a memoir (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), 264-5.

[73] Doris Altier to Clark, 11 Nov. 1971. TBA, 8812.1.4.97c.

[74] Anna Lee and Bob Culp to Clark, 8 Dec. 1970. TBA, 8812.1.4.94a.

[75] Steiner, “The taste of angels,” 136.

[76] See James Aulich, “Vietnam, Fine Art and the Culture Industry,” in James Aulich and Jeffrey Walsh, eds., Vietnam Images: War and Representation (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1989), 69-85 (72) and Hoving, Making the Mummies Dance, 143.

[77] DIA director Graham Beal, quoted in Martha Lufkin, ‘America is changing – but are its art museums?’, Art Newspaper, 204 (July-August 2009), 29.

[78] Ouellette, Viewers Like You?, 97-101.

[79] A typical example is Tony Bennett’s oft-cited essay on “The Exhibitionary Complex”, originally published in New Formations 4 (Spring 1988) and developed in his subsequent book The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995). For rare challenges to this view see Jonathan Conlin, The Nation’s Mantelpiece: a history of the National Gallery (London: Pallas Athene, 2006), ch. 4; Stephen Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 12; McClellan, The Art Museum, 6-7.

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