Walker Mimms’s article on Feitelson on Art is a must-read, giving context to the importance of Feitelson’s show within early television and the wider culture of the 1950s and early-1960s. Additionally, Mimms contemplates the show’s influence on the contemporary moment in which we consume a vast number of images stating
Its host, Lorser Feitelson, would become the interlocutor between the avant-garde and the country’s first generation of television viewers. He was personable, pedigreed and principled. Now, 60 years since its final episode, Feitelson’s show feels prophetic of a fact of visual life today: Most people experience art as filtered through a screen, for example, of a computer or an iPhone.
And yet,
it’s worth remembering this early attempt to communicate art’s ability to enhance the lives of all kinds of people.
This Feitelson did by bringing art history, including cutting edge artworks and artists, into the viewer’s home.
In describing Feitelson’s direct impact on specific viewers, and also Feitelson’s “improvisatory and deeply felt manner” and design of the show, Mimms paints a picture of the reverberating effects Feitelson on Art had on its audience and the culture at large. He quotes laudatory fan letters sent to Feitelson and the Los Angeles NBC affiliate on which the show aired, KRCA-TV. The fan mail, contained within the Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg Papers held at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, are also a great read, harking back to a time when people were appreciative of the cultural learning that was possible to access through televisions that were entering more and more people’s homes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/18/t-magazine/lorser-feitelson-on-art-tv-show.html
Feitelson on Art episode on Vincent van Gogh. Image courtesy of the Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg papers, circa 1890s-2002, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.