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From 1941 to 1978, this husband-wife powerhouse brought unique talents to their partnership. He was an architect by training; she was a painter and sculptor. Together their work helped shape the second half of the 20th century and remains culturally vital and commercially popular today. Best known for their beautiful and functional, yet inexpensive furniture, most notably their signature molded plywood “Eames chair,” Charles and Ray’s influence on significant events and movements in post-World War II American life – from the development of modernism to the rise of the computer age – is less widely understood.

The Architect and the Painter crafts a fascinating, complex blueprint of two great American artists and provides a candid view of their emotional lives as they apply their genius to practical problems and innovation. The film draws extensively from a virgin cache of archival material, visually stunning films, love letters, photographs, and artifacts produced in mind-boggling volume during the hyper-creative epoch of the Eames Office. Critics may argue about how to delineate Charles and Ray’s respective roles in their prodigious design output, but American Masters reveals how they and the Eames Office designers actually dealt with questions of authorship and control. Interviews with Charles’s daughter Lucia, his grandson Eames Demetrios, Eames Office designers, director/screenwriter Paul Schrader, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, noted architect Kevin Roche, design historians, and others guide viewers on an intimate voyage through the “Eames Era,” shining a light on the genuine legacy of their design – that which elevated aesthetic refinement and functionality to a higher plane.

The Eameses applied the same process of inquiry to large-scale exhibitions and their quirky, beautiful films, which pushed the envelope for communicating complex ideas to mass audiences. The Architect and The Painter tours their landmark house in the Pacific Palisades and incorporates clips from their films (“Tops”) and exhibitions for clients like IBM (“Powers of Ten”), Westinghouse, Polaroid, and the U.S. government (“The World of Franklin and Jefferson”). The technique known as “information overload,” was one of the most lasting Eamesian innovations, as seen in 1959’s Cold War project “Glimpses of the USA,” featuring thousands of images of American life projected simultaneously on seven enormous screens.

“This is a particularly personal project for me,” says Susan Lacy, series creator and executive producer of American Masters, “because I had the great privilege of knowing Ray and Charles Eames. They introduced me to the concept of design through their magical, whimsical and beautiful work – their artistic vision affected everything they touched. I am thrilled to have these true masters as part of American Masters.” This year the series earned its eighth Emmy® Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series in 11 years.  American Masters is a production of THIRTEEN for WNET, the parent company of THIRTEEN and WLIW21, New York’s public television stations, and operator of NJTV. For nearly 50 years, WNET has been producing and broadcasting national and local documentaries and other programs to the New York community.

Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter is produced by Quest Productions and Bread and Butter Films. The film is co-directed by producers Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey. Don Bernier is editor. James Franco is narrator with narration written by Jason Cohn. Camille Servan-Schreiber is co-producer and Arwen Curry is associate producer and archivist. Michael Bacon composed the musical score. Shirley Kessler is executive producer. Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters. This program is made possible with major funding from The National Endowment for the Humanities and The IBM corporation. Additional funding for this program is provided by The National Endowment for the Arts, The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust, OXO, and the Beverly Willis Architectural Foundation.

American Masters is made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding for American Masters is provided by Rosalind P. Walter, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Rolf and Elizabeth Rosenthal, Cheryl and Philip Milstein Family, Jack Rudin, Jody and John Arnhold, Vital Projects Fund, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, Michael & Helen Schaffer Foundation, and public television viewers.

I.M. Pei has been called the most important living modern architect,  defining the landscapes of some of the world’s greatest cities.  A monumental figure in his field and a laureate of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, Pei is the senior statesman of modernism and last surviving link to such great early architects as Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe.   Entering into the twilight of his career and well into his eighties, Pei returns to his ancestral home of Suzhou, China to work on his most personal project to date.   He is commissioned to build a modern museum in the city’s oldest neighborhood which is populated by classical structures from the Ming and Qing dynasties.  For the architect who placed the pyramid at the Louvre, the test to integrate the new with the old is familiar but still difficult.  The enormous task is to help advance China architecturally without compromising its heritage.  In the end, what began as his greatest challenge and a labor of sentiment, says Pei, ultimately becomes “my biography.”

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Premiering nationally on Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS(check local listings), American Masters’s I.M. Pei: Building China Moder follows Pei on this historic journey to define China’s architectural vision as it comes into its own on the world stage.  Post-broadcast, the film will stream online for 3 months here on the American Masters Web site.

“I.M. Pei is an architectural poet – a living legend,” says Susan Lacy, series creator and executive producer of American Masters, a seven-time winner of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series.   “He’s among the league of rare American masters whose artistic sensibilities have both provoked public debate and transformed our notions of what is possible, of how tradition can be honored in the 21st century.”

The film captures Pei as he forges an architectural language that brings together Western modernity and Eastern tradition into a current synthesis.  After decades of living in the U.S. and amassing unprecedented international acclaim for his projects, Pei returns as a “foreigner” to his birth country to give a new direction for Chinese architecture in which history can live in the midst of change.  In effect, Pei, who has contributed to America’s urban landscape during the height of its architectural and engineering power is now helping China do the same.  Few architects have played such a critical dual role.

With an agenda of change, Pei inevitably enters into a crucible of conflict in Suzhou.  For those concerned about the loss of traditional forms of architectural identity, he is too modern.  For those who would simply bulldoze China’s past, he is too tradition-minded.   Adding to the already complex assignment, he faces the controversy of displacing residents living at the museum site.  To meet the design challenges, Pei draws on ideas that stretch far back within his own life and work – including a 1946 thesis project at Harvard, where he was taught abstract modern architecture.  Throughout his education and career, Pei maintains his “impossible dream” to bring together modernity and traditional, regional influences (including nature) in his work.  Eight years in the making, American Masters’ I.M. Pei: Building China Modern traces Pei’s pursuit of that dream and explores the defining conflicts of our age – the lure of the modern versus the pull of history.  The result is a surprisingly revealing and intimate portrait of the man who set as his goal nothing less than the redefinition of architecture in modern China.

American Masters’ I.M. Pei: Building China Modern is a co-production of PACEM Distribution International, LLC and the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in association with South Carolina ETV (SCETV), the China Intercontinental Communication Center (CICC), and The New River Education Fund, Inc.  Eugene B. Shirley, Jr. is producer.  Anne Makepeace is director.  Eugene B. Shirley, Jr. and Anne Shirley are executive producers.   Caroline Courtauld and Tom Parry are co-executive producers.  Anne Makepeace and Brian Funck are writers.  Polly Kosko is executive-in-charge of production for SCETV.  Sally Jo Fifer is executive producer for ITVS.  Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters.

American Masters is made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  Additional funding for American Masters is provided by Rosalind P. Walter, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Jack Rudin, Elizabeth Rosenthal in memory of Rolf W. Rosenthal, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, Michael & Helen Schaffer Foundation, and public television viewers.

Major funding for American Masters’ I.M. Pei: Building China Modern is provided by Shumei and its flagship cultural institution, the Miho Museum.  Additional funding for the program is provided by Kimball Chen, Alice King, Goldman Sachs (Asia) LLC, Shirley Young, Paul B.J. & Phyllis S.Y. Chu Charitable Trust, Ambrose W.H. Lam, Elaine Forsgate Marden, Grace Wu Bruce, Sir David Tang, Adeline Yen Mah and Robert A. Mah.

Born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, Annie Leibovitz enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute intent on studying painting. It was not until she traveled to Japan with her mother the summer after her sophomore year that she discovered her interest in taking photographs. When she returned to San Francisco that fall, she began taking night classes in photography. Time spent on a kibbutz in Israel allowed her to hone her skills further.

In 1970 Leibovitz approached Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, which he’d recently launched and was operating out of San Francisco. Impressed with her portfolio, Wenner gave Leibovitz her first assignment: shoot John Lennon. Leibovitz’s black-and-white portrait of the shaggy-looking Beatle graced the cover of the January 21, 1971 issue. Two years later she was named Rolling Stone chief photographer.

When the magazine began printing in color in 1974, Leibovitz followed suit. “In school, I wasn’t taught anything about lighting, and I was only taught black-and-white,” she told ARTnews in 1992. “So I had to learn color myself.” Among her subjects from that period are Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Patti Smith. Leibovitz also served as the official photographer for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 world tour. While on the road with the band she produced her iconic black-and-white portraits of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, shirtless and gritty.

In 1980 Rolling Stone sent Leibovitz to photograph John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had recently released their album “Double Fantasy.” For the portrait Leibovitz imagined that the two would pose together nude. Lennon disrobed, but Ono refused to take off her pants. Leibovitz “was kinda disappointed,” according to Rolling Stone, and so she told Ono to leave her clothes on. “We took one Polaroid,” said Leibovitz, “and the three of us knew it was profound right away.” The resulting portrait shows Lennon nude and curled around a fully clothed Ono. Several hours later, Lennon was shot dead in front of his apartment. The photograph ran on the cover of the Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue. In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the best magazine cover from the past 40 years.

Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, the photographer’s first book, was published in 1983. The same year Leibovitz joined Vanity Fair and was made the magazine’s first contributing photographer. At Vanity Fair she became known for her wildly lit, staged, and provocative portraits of celebrities. Most famous among them are Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a bath of milk and Demi Moore naked and holding her pregnant belly. (The cover showing Moore — which then-editor Tina Brown initially balked at running — was named second best cover from the past 40 years.) Since then Leibovitz has photographed celebrities ranging from Brad Pitt to Mikhail Baryshnikov. She’s shot Ellen DeGeneres, the George W. Bush cabinet, Michael Moore, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Clinton. She’s shot Scarlett Johannson and Keira Knightley nude, with Tom Ford in a suit; Nicole Kidman in ball gown and spotlights; and, recently, the world’s long-awaited first glimpse of Suri Cruise, along with parents Tom and Katie. Her portraits have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, and in ad campaigns for American Express, the Gap, and the Milk Board.

Among other honors, Leibovitz has been made a Commandeur des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress. Her first museum show, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990, took place in 1991 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and toured internationally for six years. At the time she was only the second living portraitist — and the only woman — to be featured in an exhibition by the institution.

Leibovitz met Susan Sontag in 1989 while photographing the writer for her book AIDS and its Metaphors. “I remember going out to dinner with her and just sweating through my clothes because I thought I couldn’t talk to her,” Leibovitz said in an interview with The New York Times late last year. Sontag told her, “You’re good, but you could be better.” Though the two kept separate apartments, their relationship lasted until Sontag’s death in late 2004.

Sontag’s influence on Leibovitz was profound. In 1993 Leibovitz traveled to Sarajevo during the war in the Balkans, a trip that she admits she would not have taken without Sontag’s input. Among her work from that trip is Sarajevo, Fallen Bicycle of Teenage Boy Just Killed by a Sniper, a black-and-white photo of a bicycle collapsed on blood-smeared pavement. Sontag, who wrote the accompanying essay, also first conceived of Leibovitz’s book Women (1999). The book includes images of famous people along with those not well known. Celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Diane Sawyer share space with miners, soldiers in basic training, and Las Vegas showgirls in and out of costume.

Leibovitz’s most recent book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005, includes her trademark celebrity portraits. But it also features personal photographs from Leibovitz’s life: her parents, siblings, children, nieces and nephews, and Sontag. Leibovitz, who has called the collection “a memoir in photographs,” was spurred to assemble it by the deaths of Sontag and her father, only weeks apart. The book even includes photos of Leibovitz herself, like the one that shows her nude and eight months pregnant, à la Demi Moore. That picture was taken in 2001, shortly before Leibovitz gave birth to daughter Sarah. Daughters Susan and Samuelle, named in honor of Susan and Leibovitz’s father, were born to a surrogate in 2005.

Leibovitz composed these personal photographs with materials that she used when she was first starting out in the ’70s: a 35-millimeter camera, black-and-white Tri X film. “I don’t have two lives,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Still, she told the Times, this book is the “most intimate, it tells the best story, and I care about it.”

–Rachel Somerstein

Rachel Somerstein is a writer who lives in New York.

In the late 1950’s, Jasper Johns emerged as force in the American art scene. His richly worked paintings of maps, flags, and targets led the artistic community away from Abstract Expressionism toward a new emphasis on the concrete. Johns laid the groundwork for both Pop Art and Minimalism. Today, as his prints and paintings set record prices at auction, the meanings of his paintings, his imagery, and his changing style continue to be subjects of controversy.

Born and raised in Allendale, South Carolina, Jasper Johns grew up wanting to be an artist. “In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn’t know what that meant,” recounts Johns. “I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different from the one that I was in.” He studied briefly at the University of South Carolina before moving to New York in the early fifties.

In New York, Johns met a number of other artists including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. While working together creating window displays for Tiffany’s, Johns and Raushenberg explored the New York art scene. After a visit to Philadelphia to see Marcel Duchamp’s painting, The Large Glass (1915-23), Johns became very interested in his work. Duchamp had revolutionized the art world with his “readymades” — a series of found objects presented as finished works of art. This irreverence for the fixed attitudes toward what could be considered art was a substantial influence on Johns. Some time later, with Merce Cunningham, he created a performance based on the piece, entitled “Walkaround Time.”

The modern art community was searching for new ideas to succeed the pure emotionality of the Abstract Expressionists. Johns’ paintings of targets, maps, invited both the wrath and praise of critics. Johns’ early work combined a serious concern for the craft of painting with an everyday, almost absurd, subject matter. The meaning of the painting could be found in the painting process itself. It was a new experience for gallery goers to find paintings solely of such things as flags and numbers. The simplicity and familiarity of the subject matter piqued viewer interest in both Johns’ motivation and his process. Johns explains, “There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.” One of the great influences on Johns was the writings of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein’s work Johns recognized both a concern for logic, and a desire to investigate the times when logic breaks down. It was through painting that Johns found his own process for trying to understand logic.

In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli visited Rauschenberg’s studio and saw Johns’ work for the first time. Castelli was so impressed with the 28-year-old painter’s ability and inventiveness that he offered him a show on the spot. At that first exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art purchased three pieces, making it clear that at Johns was to become a major force in the art world. Thirty years later, his paintings sold for more than any living artist in history.

Johns’ concern for process led him to printmaking. Often he would make counterpart prints to his paintings. He explains, “My experience of life is that it’s very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences.” For Johns, printmaking was a medium that encouraged experimentation through the ease with which it allowed for repeat endeavors. His innovations in screen printing, lithography, and etching have revolutionized the field.

In the 60s, while continuing his work with flags, numbers, targets, and maps, Johns began to introduce some of his early sculptural ideas into painting. While some of his early sculpture had used everyday objects such as paint brushes, beer cans, and light bulbs, these later works would incorporate them in collage. Collaboration was an important part in advancing Johns’ own art, and he worked regularly with a number of artists including Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Naumann. In 1967, he met the poet Frank O’Hara and illustrated his book, In Memory of My Feelings.

In the seventies Johns met the writer Samuel Beckett and created a set of prints to accompany his text, Fizzles. These prints responded to the overwhelming and dense language of Beckett with a series of obscured and overlapping words. This work represented the beginnings of the more monotone work that Johns would do through out the seventies. By the 80s, Johns’ work had changed again. Having once claimed to be unconcerned with emotions, Johns’ later work shows a strong interest in painting autobiographically. For many, this more sentimental work seemed a betrayal of his earlier direction.

Over the past fifty years Johns has created a body of rich and complex work. His rigorous attention to the themes of popular imagery and abstraction has set the standards for American art. Constantly challenging the technical possibilities of printmaking, painting and sculpture, Johns laid the groundwork for a wide range of experimental artists. Today, he remains at the forefront of American art, with work represented in nearly every major museum collection.

El arte es el conocimiento al servicio de la emoción.
-José Clemente Orozco

La vida del muralista mexicano José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), una vida llena de emoción, adversidad y triunfo, es una de las gran historias de la época moderna. A pesar de la pobreza, una fiebre reumático en la infancia que le hizo daño al corazón y una explosión en su juventud que le costó la mano izquierda, Orozco se empeñó en su anhelo a hacerse artista. Experimentó la carnicería y traición de la Revolución mexicana, el apuro después de la Crisis de 1929 de la Bolsa de Nueva York y el ascenso del fascismo durante su única viaje a Europa en 1932, y salio con una visión estética y moral sin paralelo en la pintura del siglo XX.

Una individualista taciturno, muy sensible y completamente inútil en la autopromoción, Orozco tuvo una lengua afilada y un sentido de humor mordaz. Descrito por un contemporáneo como “el único poeta trágico que América ha producido”, Orozco fue antes que nada un artista público, y sus logros más magníficos fueron los murales creados no solo para mecenas particulares, sino para la sociedad entera. Sin embargo, al lado de su colega y competidor Diego Rivera, es solo recientemente que el nombre de este artista publica preeminente se le ha dado por conocer al público. Se ignoró la obra de Orozco, considerada compleja y llena de controversia, mientras que se le consideró a Orozco el hombre una especie de enigma. ¿Quién era este figuro solitario que pasó años a solas en el andamio creando obras que desafían tanto a las normas sociales como el establecimiento del mundo del arte?

Orozco nació en Zapotlán el Grande, México en una familia de clase media que sufrió apuros financieros, y se influenció al comienzo de su carrera por los diez años de guerra civil que agarraron a México entre 1910 y 1920. Tenia veinte y siete anos cuando la Revolución se estalló, treinta y cuatro cuando se fue de México para los Estados Unidos por la primera vez en 1917. En su autobiografía, se transmite algo de la escala de la brutalidad al que fue testigo durante estos anos:

Se acostumbra la gente a la matanza, al egoísmo mas despiadado, al hartazgo de los sentidos, a la animalidad pura y sin tapujos…En lo político, otra guerra sin cuartel, otra lucha por el poder y la riqueza … Subdivisión al infinito de las facciones, deseos incontenibles de venganza. Intrigas subterráneas entre los amigos de hoy, enemigos mañana, dispuestos a exterminarse mutuamente llegada la hora.

Perseguido por el salvajismo y la traición de este periodo, el idealismo de Orozco se quedó resolutamente en forma apolítico. El vio conceptos de la raza y de la nacionalidad y dogmas de la salvación política y religiosa como ídolos que corrompen el entendimiento y impiden la emancipación del espíritu humano. Solo al deshacerse de los grillos de los credos y preconceptos que esclavizaron al ser humano a propósitos autoritarios, podrá realizarse la armonía verdadera de la expresión individual con el propósito social.

Subestimado como artista en su país natal de México hasta tarde en su carrera, Orozco pasó un conjunto de diez años en los Estados Unidos. Creó cuatro murales de importancia aquí (en Pomona College, the New School for Social Research, Dartmouth College, y el Museum of Modern Art), junto con cientos de pinturas de caballete y obras graficás que desafiaron los estereotipas norteamericanos del arte mexicana. A pesar de instancias de censura y periodos de privación financiera, Orozco se volvió un pionero del movimiento del arte público de los años 30 y 40. Entre los artistas norteamericanos influenciados por su estilo expresionista figuran Isamu Noguchi, Ben Shahn, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston y Jacob Lawrence. En los años 60 y 70, la obra de Orozco ayudó a inspirar a una nueva generación de muralistas chicanos y afroamericanos a reinventar el arte publico dentro de sus comunidades. Hoy su legado sigue vivo entre los artistas contemporáneas en ambos lados de la frontera.

Orozco creó frescos importantes en México después de volver en 1934, incluyendo el ciclo magnifico con que cubrió las paredes interiores del Hospicio Cabañas en Guadalajara en 1939. La nave inmensa, abarcando una serie de paneles arqueadas y bóvedas del techo en forma de semicírculo, proporcionó un espacio dramático para Orozco a explorar el juego entre las fuerzas indígenas y europeas en México moderno. En el centro de la nave, a una altura de sesenta metros del piso, su magnifico Hombre del Fuego asciende a la cúpula de lo que ha vuelto a conocerse como la “Capilla Sistina de las Américas”.

Orozco volvió a EEUU por la ultima vez en 1945. En plena crisis de la mediana edad a la edad relativamente tarde de 62, contó a un amigo, “Necesito renovarme”. Pero la renovación creativa tan esperada no llegó, y después de meses de lucha y autoanálisis profundo, Orozco volvió a casa. En sus últimos años, continuo a montar el andamio, aunque su corazón lesionado le obligo a pararse y recobrar la respiración cada par de pesos. Terminó su ultimo fresco menos de un mes de su muerte debido a insuficiencia cardiaca, a la edad de 65.

Un clave para entender la obra de Orozco es un conocimiento de la relación entre el idealismo apasionado y su pesimismo. El cineasta mas importante de España, el fallecido Luis Buñuel, declaró que “el hombre jamás es libre, sin embargo lucha por lo que nunca será, y eso es trágico”. El sentido de la condición humana de Orozco se basó en una convicción similar de paradoja trágica. “Tener una visión trágica de las Américas es sumamente difícil”, dice el escritor mexicano Carlos Fuentes, “porque nos fundamos como el Valiente Mundo Nuevo de la felicidad, la gran utopía. Por lo tanto cuando un escritor como Faulkner hace una ruptura en el optimismo de los Estados Unidos, o un pintor como Orozco hace una ruptura en la promesa de México del Nuevo Mundo, es un evento muy chocante”. A través de su arte, Orozco compartió su trauma y su rabia, lo cual el insistió una y otra vez, en muchas formas, es nuestro trauma y debería ser nuestra rabia. “La pintura”, creyó Orozco, “asalta la conciencia. Persuade al corazón.”

-Jacquelynn Baas