This foreword was written hours after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building. Those surreal events prompted commentators to write despairing elegies for their country. America is in terminal decline, they all said. We've lost our innocence.
Without doubt, many of these observers were inwardly contrasting USA 2021 with the Eisenhauer USA of the fifties. America was a young country then: prosperous, unified, and dreaming big. Anything seemed possible.
Of course, the joyful optimism of post-war America didn't just capture Americans all those years ago. Many Europeans gazed admiringly across the Atlantic too. One was a young Frenchman named Alain Bertrand. Growing up in Normandy near to the Evreux-Fauville US army base just after the war, young Alain watched the GIs come and go. He had a first-hand view of America's emerging cultural markers: the cars, the songs, the cokes.
Alain had a natural flair for drawing, and later made a career as a draughtsman after a short spell in the the French army. He designed campaigns for Pirelli, Peugeot, Nestlé and others. But in 1976, after a trip to the USA, Alain decided to become a full-time artist. He would specialise in artworks that were love letters to the America he had fantasised about as a child.
If you are a Catto regular, you will know this already. Alain has exhibited with us many times. He has gathered a legion of collectors along the way. And now there is a new show. As ever, it's a showcase of the artist's irresistible visual style - one that fuses the language of illustration, advertising and photo-realistic painting. And the collection features many of the themes he has explored before: New York streets overflowing with big yellow taxis; nighttime diners lit up by neon; desert highways dwarfed by huge cobalt skies.
But there are other works that reveal new ideas. Take Zion National Park. Yes, it features a car and freeway, but Alain seems much more interested in the rocky terrain that looms broodingly over the scene. This truly is frontier country. There's a vague sense of foreboding in this image. You could say the same about Palm Spring At Night. Again, it depicts familiar tropes: gleaming automobile, palm trees. But a darkening sky hangs overhead. And why is that car door open? Packard In The Field is similarly disquieting. This car is going nowhere, languishing unloved in the corner of a vast cornfield. Is this the flipside of the dream? Are we being reminded here that nothing lasts forever?
The people in Alain's paintings would never believe it, but the age of petrol is now coming to end. As is all the culture that goes with it. Filling stations for example. Alain frequently depicts scenes at these iconic locations. Indeed, there's one in the new collection - Discussion With The Gas Attendant. But these activities are disappearing. They're being replaced by Uber and the mains socket. Great for the planet, but lacking a certain glamour.
Perhaps this is why the Saudi Arabian culture ministry decided to create the Black Gold museum. As its name implies, the museum (twinned with the Louvre in Abu Dhabi) will be a memorial to the now-receding oil economy. It is scheduled to open in Riyadh in 2022, and will contain more than 200 contemporary works of art. Among them will be two of Alain's paintings, each a fitting tribute to a vanishing world.

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