The arts in America
Introduced by Humphrey Burton

Ralph Fasanella
'I try to paint what really is. It's not my hobby, looking into windows and seeing what you're doing at night. I know what you're doing because I've lived this life.'
The son of Italian immigrants, Fasanella grew up amongst the gangsters of Lower Manhattan. From reform school he went to a series of jobs in light industry and became passionately involved in the Labour movement. At 30 he began painting. Now in his 60s he's a celebrity, recording in fantastic detail the landscape he knows -the working man's New York, Little Italy, the parades, the factories, the mythologies of baseball and Watergate.

Robert Motherwell
' Man is his own invention; every artist's problem is to invent himself. He does not reflect the world but invents it.'
In total contrast Motherwell is an abstract artist and one of the founding fathers of the hugely influential New York school of painters.
Ralph Fasanella director Michael Macintyre
Robert Motherwell director Barrie Gavin