Great art, and it has all the moves

I’M ON THE COUNCIL of the National Endowment for the Arts, which means I get a privileged overview of the American arts scene. But the most exciting news in American art right now (in my opinion, not the NEA’s) has to do with works that everyone can get a look at -- a series of black-and-white movies that are over 60 years old, the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films of the 1930s.

Astaire made nine movies with Rogers during the ‘30s. I’ve always considered them the crown jewels of American film, arguably of all American culture. The first batch are finally appearing this month in high-quality DVD versions, nearly eight years after the first DVD players were sold in the U.S. Obviously public demand for these movies hasn’t been overwhelming. Why do Americans pay so little attention to their own national treasures?

Partly it’s the art community’s fault. The memory is fading at last -- but during the 1980s and ‘90s, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art tried hard to convince us that true art is the ongoing struggle to express hatred for the U.S. mainstream and do it as offensively as possible. The Whitney’s influential biennials were dominated by hilariously hyperventilating denunciations of racist, sexist, homophobic, hypocritically “religious” America. And that was dead-typical at the time. Museums thrived on upper-middle-class business, but the nation at large saw “art” as an unpleasant form of toxic waste.

That wasn’t always true. And the Astaire-Rogers masterpieces (like Jackson Pollock’s widely admired drips, Willem de Kooning’s slashes and Mark Rothko’s glimmering hazes) made it clear that art doesn’t need a message. Great art is usually “escapist”: Check out the gorgeously colored late-medieval miniatures of the Limbourg brothers, or Titian’s blowzy nudes, Vermeer’s subtly erotic domestic scenes, Ingre’s romantic fantasies, Matisse’s luminous and ebullient cut-outs, Joseph Cornell’s mesmerizing micro-worlds in glass-fronted wood boxes. I could go on.

The Fred-and-Ginger escapist masterpieces reach from “Flying Down to Rio” (1933) to “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle” (1939) -- all black and white, all brilliant. Astaire and Rogers worked together once more, on “The Barkleys of Broadway” (1949) -- a gently amusing color film that comes nowhere near the quality of their earlier stuff.

Astaire may be the greatest of all American dancers; Astaire and Rogers are certainly the greatest dance team. He succeeds where Disney’s “Fantasia” tries and fails: He lets you see music. He was a peerlessly great dancer in part because he was a great musician: His piano solos in “Roberta” and “Follow the “Fleet” are highlights of the series. The Astaire-Rogers films of the ‘30s also include (hypnotically catchy) songs by Vincent Youmans and the Cole Porter mega-hit “Night and Day.” Irving Berlin wrote three of these scores, Jerome Kern two, George Gershwin one. How to explain all this talent in one short series of films? Easy. It was a miracle.

These are quintessentially American masterpieces: Astaire and Rogers are virtuoso artists, but they never seem unreachable or untouchable. He’s charming but funny-looking, she stops just short of beautiful. The films are sweet but never sentimental, romantic but rarely soppy, witty but never sarcastic or bitter or political. Gershwin’s hit “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” which debuted in “Shall We Dance?” -- is a lovely, sad and moving song, in a major key. American all over.

These films are great art, but they’re also tongue in cheek. Only the dance numbers take themselves seriously. The dialogue never bogs down; the champagne scripts are wry and dry. The super-glamorous sets are deliberately over the top, sometimes hilarious.

Rogers (so we’re told) once said, “I did everything Fred did, but backward and in heels.” The claim is so silly that I can’t believe she ever made it. Her technique is nowhere near Astaire’s. When the going gets tough, she steps aside and lets him do his stuff. She has only one dance solo in the series; he solos in every film.

Yet none of Astaire’s other dancing partners holds a candle to Ginger. Her seductive, wise-cracking cool and lyrically elegant way of moving make up for her technical limitations. She might be the most underrated great actress in American film. Katharine Hepburn is supposed to have said, “He gives her class, she gives him sex” -- and that story I believe, because the claim is true. The Fred-and-Ginger dances are controlled thermonuclear explosions of romantic passion. The censors would have banned them if they’d been sharp enough to see what was happening.

The greatest moment in the whole series comes in “Swing Time,” when Fred dances alone before a projected backdrop of three shadow-Astaires to a song that pays tribute to the black dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. At one point, Astaire stands with his back to the viewer, feet planted, hands swaying in an ocean of music. His barely moving figure sweeps you into another universe -- as great art always does. The subtext is moving too: a plain vanilla dancer plus a Jewish composer paying homage to a black hero.

The debut of these DVDs reminds us that we can’t possibly know America if we don’t know Astaire and Rogers -- and that without great art, we are only half alive.