AS FAR AS song-and-dance TV shows go, American Bandstand and Soul Train could hardly have been more different. Bandstand, which originally aired in 1952, showcased poodle skirt–wearing teenagers singing along to Top 40 radio hits, while Soul Train, which debuted two decades later, had a funkier repertoire of R&B, jazz, soul, and gospel acts. But the shows did have one surprising thing in common: set designs heavily influenced by modern art. The abstracted platforms, stepped risers, and colored spotlights were lifted straight from the world of minimalist art, according to Abbott Miller, a Pentagram partner and one of the designers of a new exhibition up in New York titled Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television.
The advent of premium cable channels may have ushered in a golden age of TV, but the experimentalism of TV's early days shouldn't be underestimated. Today we praise shows that meticulously and authentically re-create a look or moment, like the 1960s-era New York we watch on Mad Men, or the meth labs and Albuquerque homes of Breaking Bad. But when TV was just getting started, executives and creatives saw it differently, as a place where the art world and mass media could intersect. “The pioneers of early television understood the medium’s innate power, and they mined the aesthetic, stylistic, and conceptual possibilities of a new and powerful technology,” writes curator Maurice Berger. Television executives of the time, Berger says, were fascinated by avant-garde artists and saw television as not just a way to entertain the masses but as a vehicle for ideas about modern art.
Ernie Kovacs, seen here, was an early experimental TV comedian.
COURTESY OF THE JEWISH MUSEUM
If you ever thought TV pre-HBO was the fast food of entertainment, Revolution of the Eye, now open at the Jewish Museum in New York City, has more than 250 artifacts to prove otherwise. The exhibit is all about the early days of network programming—from the 1940s to the 1970s—and spotlights the ways networks were influenced by the aesthetics of high art and clever design in a way they haven't been since.
Andy Warhol's cover design for TV Guide in 1966.**
COURTESY OF THE JEWISH MUSEUM
Design—specifically graphic design—helped executives pull that off. “Design was a critical kind of negotiator in terms of providing a new look at what this new medium was about,” says Miller, who worked with Berger to design the exhibit space and a book on the topic. “You see things like the [credits for] The Twilight Show, or this show calledLaugh-In, and you have this immediate awareness that graphics and CBS were really pivotal in defining a new look of what [TV] about and capable of.” Take the titles from Laugh-In, for example: “It was trafficking in this Pop, almost psychedelic, language that is pretty concurrent with the psychedelic poster explosion on the West Coast, but they were using it to signify that this was a different kind of media,” Miller says. Consider also that this was being broadcast to everyone, not just hippies in California. Likewise, Miller says, “The Twilight Zone used surrealism and the graphics of op-art in the same way, but to signify not something silly, but something scary and sinister.”
CBS: A Business, a School, a Museum
Television networks even behaved like incubators for design talent, especially CBS. The network had a full-fledged design campaign, and its talent roster included credits-master Saul Bass and Andy Warhol (“before he was fully Andy Warhol.”) CBS’s attention to design stemmed from its creative director, William Golden, who came up with the CBS “eye,” the company’s famous corporate logo, which, incidentally, was based on a Shaker religious symbol. The symbol made a strong impression on audiences that weren't yet attuned to corporate branding, and the company realized the impact that effective graphic design could have on viewers. “They created a stage for design to contribute more than it had before,” Miller says. “I don’t want to say they were the HBO of the time, but it was inventive, with a lot of cultural caché. People realized a network was capable of cultivating a sophisticated persona.”
The CBS logo, from an ad that ran in Fortune.
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By pulling famous designers—like Bass—from the print worlds of movie posters and advertising, CBS helped push the medium along. For a while, TV design often looked like newspaper or magazine design supplanted on a screen. On-air graphics let designers experiment, and the cross-pollination of ideas followed. For instance, Miller suggest that the design and editing Bass did on a Johnson's baby commercial may have inspired the famously suspenseful shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
It’s easy to see how CBS, Bass, and the other networks of the time created the seeds for the kind of TV we watch today. Yes, we had to suffer through Bonanza and Family Matters, and we’re still suffering through Real Housewives. But we’re also in the middle of a Cambrian-esque explosion of clever storytelling that creates new opportunities for designers. It might feel novel, but as Revolution of the Eyeand Miller point out, those artistic dynamics have been simmering under the surface for decades: “There was this idea that a network was sort of like a business and school and a museum all rolled into one," Miller says. "They felt they had an obligation to do things in the right way, that they had a mission bigger than just sort of selling ad space.”
Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television will be open until September 27, 2015.
