NBC's documentary "The American Image" - TV Guide, jan 28

What are America's modern painters and sculptors trying to express?

It's that question that the final segment of NBC's documentary "The American Image," scheduled for showing this spring, will try to answer.

It's also the question that sent the show's producer-director, Frank DeFelitta, and his crew scurrying off to New York's new Whitney Museum of American Art.

There, amid a special collection of avant-garde art, host E. G. Marshall, some dozen production people and a few museum employees worked from sunset to dawn. While continued the camera carefully probed the Whitney, three three key "American Image" participants probed their own answers to the big question.

"This art expresses the attitudes of America. It's wonderful, human, greedy, crazy," said Marshall.

"These artists are expressing the confusion of our time. . . . They're saying that things are gauche, strident, sick," said Frank DeFelitta. "You don't know what these art-are expressing," said writer John Lord. "But they must be serious. It's inconceivable that all the people who think this art worth- while are wrong."

'Tis a BIG question.