Episode 3 The Story of Women and Art

In this series I've travelled across the Continent and down the centuries,

from the Renaissance to the French Revolution,

to understand just why so little of the art on display is by women.

Time and time again ambitious female artists found their path blocked

tied to the home, starved of training.

Only a handful of tenacious

and resourceful women broke through to scorch a trail for posterity.

But finally, in the middle of the 19th century,

here in Britain it looked as if all that was set to change...

In 1842 the government opened its very first

Female School of Design, right next to the men's,

here in Somerset House.

What a breakthrough after centuries of disapproval.

Women finally painting

and learning alongside their male contemporaries.

Well, not quite.

Just six years after it opened the female school was moved...

to the other side of The Strand - an area then

infamous for pornographic book shops and unsavoury pubs.

As a journalist in 1851 Riley noted -

"If a paternal government had studied to select the worst possible place

"for such a school they could not have more completely succeeded."

The message was crystal clear.

Female artistry did not warrant the prestige of male.

Women were segregated.

Officially, second class.

But whatever the art establishment believed,

society was changing fast with women pressing on the door

of the universities, the professions and parliament.

In a galaxy of exploding potential,

women were flowering in even more adventurous ways.

As photographers, as sculptors, as architects.

I have chosen just six,

six women who, in unique ways, have transformed our vision of the world.

Among them a housewife in rural Sweden who would re-invent

our interiors and lead the vanguard of a lifestyle revolution.

An artist whose failing eyesight would refocus

the way we see our outdoor spaces.

And a pioneering modernist who escaped to the austere deserts

of New Mexico in search of a new language of painting,

creating an entirely original artistic landscape.

In the hundred years after 1850,

women would take art into unexpected territories - it was not enough

to reflect the world, female artists were bent on changing it.

STIRRING MUSIC

Over the centuries there was one genre of painting that had

remained the ultimate masculine stronghold - war art.

And rarely with more pomposity than in the age of empire.

But what would happen when a female artist decided to join the fray?

The battlefield reeked of testosterone.

Any artist who wanted to capture its visceral glory needed

an iron stomach and an imperviousness

that angelic Victorian women

were seen to lack.

And yet it was a pupil of the fledgling

Female School of Design

who would become the most celebrated war artist of her time.

Lady Butler was born, simply,

Elizabeth Thompson in 1846 to a wealthy family.

So pretty and delicate, there was no outward clue that she would

grow up to be anything more than a textbook Victorian angel in the house,

unless you looked inside her sketchbooks that is...

This one, done when she was only 14.

This is just the sort of thing you might imagine a teenage girl

of the mid-Victorian period to be producing.

There's two women in a drawing room,

it has a touch of Little Women about it, but as you go on

what this reveals to my utter amazement

is even as a young teenager

she was preoccupied with history, with battles, and with men.

Look, a bayonet charge. Firing a pistol.

Where on earth did this come from?

Lady Butler couldn't account for it herself.

She even reflected in her diary "how strange that

"I should be impregnated, if that's the right word,

"with the warrior spirit, given that there were no

"soldiers in either my mother or my father's family".

What I see even in these tiny sketches is

the unusual ambition of a young woman.

Even in something miniature she's reaching after the male,

and the epic.

Determined to further her ambitions, Butler,

aged 19, enrolled herself in the new Female School of Design.

Writing in her diary on the eve of her first day -

"Ah! They shall hear of me some day".

That day dawned sooner than she could have imagined,

when in 1874 Butler submitted one of her works to the Royal Academy.

It was here in this most male- dominated of arenas

that her art would provoke the most startling reaction.

When the exhibition was opened to the public she caused a sensation.

The painting was mobbed. The police had to be called.

She reflected it in her diary that night -

"I awoke this morning and found myself famous!"

So famous in fact that just a few weeks later the painting was

bought by Queen Victoria herself

and today it hangs in pride of place here in St James's Palace...

It's known as The Roll Call, or to give it its more precise title,

Calling The Roll After An Engagement In The Crimea.

This is not a celebration of noble heroism.

Instead it's a depiction of the costs of war

for the ordinary soldiers.

The carnage of the Crimean War some 20 years before was still

raw in popular memory.

Undeterred, Butler had chosen to expose

the painful truth ground in mud and gore.

They are an absolute study

in weariness and exhaustion...

it's suffused

with human emotion.

The painting went on tour across the great northern cities

and was mobbed wherever it went.

Arguably, this is the painting

that touched the Victorians like no other.

It's an irony that a women who was so effective in depicting

the realities of war never actually saw a battlefield

for herself, but Butler explained in her autobiography that

a painter should be careful to keep a distance to stop the vile

details blinding them "to the noble things that rise beyond".

However, this distance has done nothing to diminish the impact

of her work upon those who HAVE experienced conflict first-hand.

Well, Butler wrote in her diary,

"I thank God that I only paint for the pathos and not the glory of war.

"If I had seen even a corner of one battlefield

"I would never paint another war painting."

But I think that makes her even more extraordinary...

You've got to bear in mind that Butler was probably the first artist

to actually bring the human- soldiering individual

face of conflict onto the canvas.

Butler didn't go to the Crimea.

But you've been to Helmand and Afghanistan.

Well... I have drawn enormous inspiration from her work

because, I think, she as a woman was really trying to do exactly

what I'm trying to do, which is...which is make the public

aware of the reality of soldiering and the individual.

And the human being.

Butler's sensitive depictions of the humble soldier saw her dubbed

the "Florence Nightingale of the Brush" but characteristically

she didn't want to be cast as merely a "sensitive female artist".

If her male contemporaries captured the drama

and violence of warfare then so would she.

A Royal Commission to paint the army's last stand

against the Zulu at Rorke's Drift would test her

ability to capture action to its limit.

As a woman with no experience of war could she rise to the challenge?

DRAMATIC MUSIC

I think it's something to do with her natural ability as an artist.

You FEEL this battle, you feel the moment.

So how did a female artist achieve something like this

because we know she never went to the front?

The way she did that was actually to go to Portsmouth where the

army were stationed and see people who were here at this event,

and they re-enacted it for her.

So, realistically they put on their uniforms and they acted it out.

So she was making sure every button, every colour was exactly right,

as well as the expressions on their faces.

I think that's the exciting thing about Lady Butler.

It's a bit, for me, like today a female director making

an action movie saying, "I'm not going to do a romantic comedy,

"I'm not going to play on those stereotypes."

And she gets to the heart of the matter, and she gives us this action piece.

This is what we think of as a history painting really...

I really like that you used that phrase, history...history painting. That's the thing.

That's what great artists were supposed to be creating - history paintings.

Female artists, well, they could do flower paintings,

they could do portraits or landscapes.

But to do this real

bare-knuckle history painting stuff, it wasn't thought to be

the stuff of ladies, and yet Lady Butler is able to do it.

Determined that her work would be as authentic as possible, she restaged

cavalry charges, bravely standing before thundering hooves.

She wrote - "I twice saw a charge of the Greys before painting

"Scotland Forever!

"and I stood in front to see them coming on."

Lady Butler's art begun to overturn centuries of prejudice.

She even forced the critic John Ruskin, who believed that

"No woman could paint" to eat his words and marvel -

"This is Amazon's work."

Butler had triumphed on her own terms in the genre

most esteemed by the art establishment.

But it was the art establishment itself that was to

come under threat now...

Just across the Channel rebellious young painters where throwing

out the rule book.

Detractors sneered at them as mere impressionists.

But they were revolutionaries, demanding that art be fast,

instinctive, spontaneous, requiring no formal training.

Surely, here at last, was a manifesto for women.

Of course it could never be that simple.

Here, at Christie's in London, there is a major auction of the

finest impressionist paintings about to take place.

Flicking through the sale catalogue,

the big guys of impressionism are here - Renoir, Monet, Degas.

But on sale there are also two paintings by a woman,

Berthe Morisot.

For this nude here, Lot 315, please start me at 180,000, please.

180, 190. Thank you.

190, 200,000...

at 220...a bid in Texas, welcome, Texas, online...

And 240 back in London.

Right at the back of the room at 280...

Any advance?

Selling to the gentleman standing in the distance...all done...280,000.

-Sold! Thank you, sir, well done at 280.

-Business is brisk today,

but at the first impressionist auction over a century ago,

interest in Morisot, the only woman in the show, was feverish.

Back in 1875 she was the one who bore the brunt of the attention.

At a sale that the impressionists organised in Paris, it was

Morisot's work which gained the highest bids.

She was a phenomenon.

Her talent, coupled with a smouldering beauty

brought her much attention not least

from the father of impressionism himself, Edouard Manet.

He would go on to paint Morisot 11 times.

There she is all in black,

rather sleepily extending a pink-slippered foot.

Not very proper at all.

And that lack of propriety was noticed by critics in one painting

in particular, Le Repos, in which Manet

has the beautiful dark-haired Morisot

reclining on a plush pink sofa,

presenting herself almost

as if she's going to sink onto that sofa, full of dreamy sensuality.

I think all these portraits hint

that underneath the beautiful clothes

there's a woman chafing against the

conventional restraints of femininity.

Which is surprising,

as Morisot was groomed to follow convention not defy it.

Born in 1841 to wealth

and privilege she grew up in the exclusive Parisian suburb of Passy.

This was a world where women might be tutored in art, to make them

marriage material, but not to make them professional artists.

So, the exceptional talent betrayed by Morisot

and her sister Edma began to raise serious concerns.

One of their tutors, Joseph Guichard, recognised the girls'

unusual potential so he warned their mother

"With characters like your daughters

"my teaching will make them painters, not minor amateur talents.

"And do you really understand what that means?

"In the grand society of the haute bourgeoisie in which you move,

"it would be a revolution.

"I would say, even a catastrophe."

Yet the Morisot sisters were not to be put off...

following the established path for any male artist -

becoming copyists in the Louvre.

However, Edma's career was short-lived,

she succumbed to family obligation.

Marrying a naval officer in 1869,

she felt obliged to retire her paints.

And her wistful regret ever after for the life of the studio

made Morisot all the more determined not to give it up.

Morisot's friendship with Edouard Manet drew

her into the circle of his younger acolytes.

Men who were striving to capture modern life on canvas.

She was inspired.

The impressionists, as they became known, were breaking with

the conventions of the art establishment, but they still

had charmingly old-fashioned ideas about the roles of women and men.

They claimed the freedom of the streets -

moving freely about the city, luxuriating in anonymity,

idling and observing high life and low.

This was the life of the flaneur, or urban wanderer.

But a female wanderer?! A flaneuse? Impossible!

The cafes of bohemian Montmartre have long since disappeared,

but there's one bar remaining, La Bonne Franquette,

which boasts of its link to impressionism.

Here it's announcing the great artists -

who used to gather here to drink.

Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne - Berthe Morisot's name is not there.

She knew them all but, of course, the streets at night, the bars

and cafes of bohemian Paris were no place for a lady.

But Morisot was too determined to be defeated.

She took the principles of impressionism and applied them in

her own context, unconventional art in the most conventional setting.

And this is the modern life that Morisot painted.

She couldn't go to the bars, the cafes

and the theatres to capture Paris of the 1870s, but she painted the world

that she knew.

Drawing rooms, nurseries, bedrooms and gardens.

In 1874, aged 33, Morisot married Edouard Manet's brother Eugene.

She longed to be a mother and had one precious daughter,

Julie, 4 years later.

Morisot was one of the very few women who managed to blend

domesticity and an artistic career.

That blend was captured on her canvases,

creating a fresh version of modern family life.

What she's saying here is that modern life

and its fleeting moments are just as vivid in the private world

of women and children as they are on the streets.

And so, she's immortalised for all time these wonderful,

transient, fugitive moments of what it is to be alive.

But this shimmering originality did not establish Morisot's reputation

alongside her fellow male impressionists...

her wealth and privilege meant she was never driven by the same

need to sell her works.

So, upon her premature death of pneumonia

in 1895, aged just 54,

she had failed to secure a lasting legacy...

..as her grave bears stark testament.

I'm depressed to discover that even in death she's, quite literally,

overshadowed by the celebrity of her more famous brother-in-law.

Edouard Manet up there.

Down here, her husband, and then Berthe Morisot,

"Veuve D' Eugene Manet".

So, "widow". That is her only attribution.

As her fellow impressionist Camille Pissarro lamented on hearing

news of her death - "Poor Madam Morisot.

"The public hardly knows of her."

And yet, some 120 years later

the art-buying community certainly knows her name today.

Morisot's delicate female nude,

fetched an impressive £280,000 but there's no escaping the fact

her fellow male impressionists raise far greater sums.

Well, I think there is a sense in the art market that the

blue-chip artists that one immediately thinks of-of Monet and

Renoir, but also Picasso and Chagall and Matisse and so forth.

Has there ever been a blue-chip female?

Er, there are starting to be.

I mean most of the big prices for female artists have been

made in the last five to ten years,

so for Morisot the world-record auction price was

made in February of this year when Christie's sold a...

a wonderful early masterpiece by her for nearly £7 million.

And that's a world record for any female artist.

-To put that in context, Renoirs can go for 20 million...

-Hm.

..and Monets for 40 million.

Are you and the buyers saying "she is not as good"?

I don't think so...

I think she is very ground-breaking, you know,

we still see a painting like this and think that it's...

that it's quite revolutionary, um, you know particularly in

figure painting as opposed to landscape painting

but I think, you know,

she was, er, certainly, in my view she was

la impressionist par-excellence,

and I think her reputation, um, certainly should be larger today.

For all its picture-postcard prettiness

impressionism cast off the dead hand of tradition

and grasped anew, the immediacy of existence.

But there is more to art than two dimensions...

Open your eyes wider and broaden your definition and new

worlds of creativity are revealed far beyond the walls of galleries.

Here, nestled in bucolic Surrey, a female artist would take inspiration

from the impressionists and take her art into an entirely new territory.

She would work on a far bigger canvas.

Gertrude Jekyll is one of the most celebrated

garden designers in history.

But to see her as a mere horticulturalist is to miss

the flavour of her genius.

She was first and last an artist.

She saw the garden as a canvas on which the gardener paints or

embroiders his picture more or less formed in his mind,

using, for his pigments, the plants that best suit his purpose.

Gertrude Jekyll was born in 1843, just two years after Berthe Morisot.

In a career that spanned 60 years, she would design over 400 gardens,

publish 14 books and write over 1,000 articles.

She was determined to make the public to see the potential

lying just outside the window.

But long before she picked up the spade she held a paintbrush.

Jekyll was, in fact,

a student of the Female School of Design just like her

contemporary Lady Butler.

She was intent on becoming a professional artist -

but her career was to be threatened before it had even begun.

Like all professional artists,

Gertrude Jekyll partly trained by copying the paintings of others,

and here's her version of Turner's Ancient Rome.

I think you can see her personal fascination with Turner's

sublime use of subtle colour contrasts, and light.

But she faced a terrible handicap -

short sight of the severest kind, inadequate and painful.

She admitted "my natural focus is just two inches".

What a handicap in a woman who had the ambition to

paint on this scale.

Jekyll was forced to find a different way

to channel her creativity.

Embroidery, embossing, photography,

glass making, collage.

These crafts where dignified as never before by the

Arts and Crafts movement of the later 19th century.

Arts and Crafts rejected mass-produced industrial design

as soulless, and proposed the recovery of handicraft skills

and the protection of rural traditions.

So, Jekyll's blend of art and rural craft led the zeitgeist.

And she saw that one arena was ripe for reinvention -

the garden.

She broke, absolutely, with the formal conventions of the Victorian flowerbed...

the kind of thing you can still see today in corporation parks

or at the seaside.

Here, she seems to have dabbled the white on with a painterly eye

in these flowing free drifts of white and pastel pink.

I can really see now why she claimed to be inspired

by the impressionists.

Jekyll approached a garden like a painting, as she wrote,

"plants were like having a box of paints from the best colourman"

and she used them to sparkling effect.

It's only when you see one of her gardens in all its glory that

you appreciate what she was trying to do...

While many of Jekyll's gardens have long since vanished

one, in particular, here at Upton Grey in Surrey,

has been restored by following her instructions to the letter.

She argued that creating a beautiful garden was harder than

creating a beautiful painting.

Her gardens were designed to be seen from many different vistas.

They changed over the course of the day.

This white would really scintillate and sparkle in the evening.

They changed over the seasons,

and she battled and responded to the elements.

This is art wrested from living nature, art in 3D.

Jekyll defied convention and liberated an entire nation

of amateur gardeners to experiment with plants and

colour harmonies in their own back yard,

a legacy that is still with us today.

No other garden designer has had such a lasting impact

on our landscape.

Her obituary in The Times acclaimed her as a pioneering gardener,

but also as a true artist with an exquisite sense of colour.

Just as it inspired Gertrude Jekyll to reveal the artistic

potential of the English country garden, the Arts and Crafts movement

was to light the touch paper for a revolution INSIDE our homes.

Four hours north of Stockholm deep in the Swedish pine forest

an artist was to turn interior decoration

and lifestyle into a family-friendly art form.

Karin Larsson was not a revolutionary

in the conventional sense at all.

She embraced the traditional roles of wife, mother, and homemaker.

Yet it was in the very role of homemaker,

and in the lifestyle that she crafted in this house,

that she did so much to influence the way we see our own.

Karin was blessed with affluent parents who supported her education.

She studied as a painter at the Swedish Academy of Art.

Karin might have become a professional artist herself

had she not met and fallen in love with another Swedish painter -

the impoverished, insecure but ambitious Carl Larsson.

They married in 1883 and Karin stopped her own painting -

and started a family.

Looking at this self portrait of Carl he's clearly the artist of

the family. You'd be forgiven for not seeing Karin at all and yet,

if you look a little closer you can see that she is,

in fact, busily sewing.

Her creativity had not ceased.

Karin was crafting a family home and Carl's paintings offer

an intimate window into that private world.

The Larssons moved to this house in 1901 and Karin

set about transforming it from a dark old farm

into a warm family home.

What a cheerful, vibrant family dining room,

this is not a palace, clearly Karin Larsson's interior decoration

is on a domestic scale

and everything is decorated with her own hand.

Karin was rejecting outright the pervasive weight

and gloom of 19th century interior decoration.

With a joyful combination of bright colours, mismatched furniture,

abstract patterns... and loose bunches of flowers.

We are so familiar with this informal look,

it's easy to forget that it was once shockingly new.

This was cutting edge as design and as a way of life.

The house here at Sundborn is certainly remote,

but, as this study reveals, she was anything but cut off.

I see it especially

in the periodicals that Karin kept up with -

Art and Decoration from France, The Studio, an Arts and Crafts

magazine from England

and Culture and Decoration, a German periodical.

Karin Larson was engaged with international aesthetic debate.

This is not some artless recreation of peasant life,

this is intellectually informed, exciting and new.

This is the counterpart of the Arts and Crafts movement

in England you will find here what we call

the National Romantic, romanticism the National Romantic movement,

when, not only artists, you have authors, poets, composers, everyone

taking an interest in that genuine Swedishness and the countryside.

So it seems to be everything from the way

she arranged her flowers to the simple clothes

she dressed her children in to the beauty of the entire environment?

Yeah. And it has become really an iconic...

it has got an iconic status amongst Swedes and in the national identity.

I mean, look in a magazine for interior design

in Sweden for instance you'll find milieus that

look like, you know, Karin could have made them.

You have that same mixture,

you have the light, the flowers in the window and all that...

Interior decoration sounds kind of frilly,

but, in fact, she has helped define national identity?

Definitely so, yeah.

Looking at this rustic family home with fresh eyes,

you can appreciate the modernity of Karin's vision.

A heady combination of bold experimentation

and artistic freedom.

There is nothing of grandma about her weaving

with its weird and wild motifs.

I think here we have something really rather disturbing...

it's like a cartoon image out of manga.

There is a stylised animal here gripping on with nasty teeth.

What an earth is this creature?

But also there is something charming

and hidden here.

Here in the corner...

..is a lovely little pear

and family tradition has it that her little daughter Brita

came in eating a pear while he mother was at the loom and said

"Please, put my pear... in your weaving."

Karin Larsson is absolutely

turning her back on the bourgeois conventions of Victorian art and

at the same time putting children

at the centre of her production.

Larsson's vision of a home was informal,

imaginative and playful but it amazes me to reflect that without

Carl Larsson's paintings we might never have realised HER originality.

The fresh, unpretentious, easy-going, family-centred

interior design of Karin Larsson - Lifestyle as art, for every woman.

Even today.

She had created the perfect model of the modern home but it would

take more than half a century for the rest of us to catch up.

Finally in the 1950s and '60s her vision for our domestic interiors

would take hold and one Swedish firm has seen it circle the globe.

The way she did her home taught us to break convention, dare to

break conventions and furnish your home according to your own needs.

The philosophy is such, I'm daring to use colour much more.

It doesn't have to be perfect.

If there is one word. I think it's freedom,

freedom of body, freedom of mind and-and family...

-is... was quite revolutionary.

-Hm.

It's ironic that a woman who gave up a professional career

as a painter and pursued no personal recognition

has nevertheless left an artistic legacy more palpable, tangible

and relevant to modern commerce and the way we live now than any

painting hanging in any museum in the world.

The female artists I have chosen were all trailblazers...

finding new ways for their art to shape our lives.

In the early years of the 20th century,

women were fighting for legal freedoms

and political rights.

Meanwhile, in Paris, a handful of designers

were determined to emancipate women in a most practical way.

How could women ever be free when they were physically bound?

Unable even to dress themselves?

Here at a fashion retrospective, at the Hotel de Ville, there is

one designer that stands out from all the others.

Known as the "Sculptor of Fashion",

she would offer women a whole new design aesthetic.

Now, perhaps the name of Vionnet is not

so familiar to you as the others in this exhibition -

Dior, Givenchy, Chanel,

but in fact it's Vionnet who's the true revolutionary.

You look at this dress and you think,

"Looks pretty simple to me."

But, in fact, it's deceptively simple.

Vionnet threw away the corset, stiffenings, the buttons,

the petticoats.

She cut the fabric in such a way that it sensuously clung to

every curve of a woman's body.

Vionnet had mastered the art of both

celebrating and liberating femininity.

The daughter of a tax collector Madeleine Vionnet was born in 1876.

She began as a seamstress at the age of 11,

but by 18 she was struggling to reconcile

the demands of a husband and young baby with her ambitions.

The tragic death of her child at only nine months seemed to make

the decision for her. Divorcing her husband she threw herself

into her career...

..working her way up through the couture houses of Paris.

But she grew frustrated. In her eyes, there was nothing more

old-fashioned than fashion itself.

She had a bold NEW vision.

Her approach is really similar to sculpture and architecture,

and goes towards the idea that the most important

thing in fashion creation is the cut, the structure.

Madeleine Vionnet is very famous about the invention of the bias cut.

For example, if you take a piece of cloth, like this

in the tradition before Vionnet, you were using the textile like this,

you know, following the straight line... and you were cutting

the dress following this thread.

With Vionnet you take the piece of material like this.

-On the diagonal.

-Yes, absolutely.

You cut across?

Yes, and you drape on the body like this

and you see the effect.

You know, it floats around the body, it's fluid as water...

-and that is light as a cloud.

-Yes.

It is very sensual

it is the discovery of sensuality.

Her clothes were artful in their simplicity.

With a sculptor's appreciation of form, she worked with the female

body, not against it.

Vionnet's approach wasn't just audacious, it was scandalous.

She had not just ditched the need for a corset,

even undergarments were unnecessary.

She gave the new generation of women freedom of movement

and sensuality...

as she later reflected, her success was like an explosion.

By the 1920s, the House of Vionnet

was the grandest fashion atelier in Paris.

All that remains now is the grand facade,

but THEN this hid the factory out the back where there was

a toiling hive of 1,200 workers, mainly women.

A humble seamstress from Abbeville has scaled the

very heights of the French fashion industry.

Now a woman was not just the lead designer, she owned the business!

And she used her power to improve the lives of her staff.

An industry that had been notoriously exploitive

of its seamstresses was to find in Vionnet

a very different style of boss.

Vionnet took extraordinarily special care of her, predominantly,

female workforce.

There was a free onsite doctor, dentist,

and podiatrist open to all her workers and their parents.

There was an onsite creche and a fund

so that every baby born to the workshop, be they legitimate

or illegitimate, would receive a 500-franc note in the cradle.

The world that Vionnet made was as women-friendly as her clothes.

But how can such a creative visionary

and social pioneer not be seared on our cultural consciousness?

While Coco Chanel's ubiquitous suit lives on through endless imitations,

Vionnet absolutely resisted the notion of mass production.

She refused to give up her creative control.

Her entire production was photographed.

A clear record of every single design that came out of her house.

Someone like Gabrielle Chanel who always said to be copied is

a great flattery, Madeleine Vionnet was against copying and these

copyright albums are very important in showing how ferociously

she guarded her designs.

She did consider that she invented something

and this invention not only should be paid for but,

more importantly, respected.

This even can be found in her label, her label is her own signature

so it is a very personal signature

but she will push that to the limit in including her thumb print.

That is extraordinary, that hadn't occurred to me, that she

-is signing it just like a painter signs his work.

-Yes.

I can see that it is structural to the fabric but nevertheless it's not

quite as simple as I'd expected from reading about her.

It is not a question of simple, it is a question of pure.

Because when a woman wore this type of dress

-she could actually just slip it on.

-I see.

Up until then she needed a helper to button up, to put it in the

right direction, this actually was the most modern of dresses

because you could dress yourself.

If you feel comfortable in your dress you can say

"Thank you, Madeleine." It's really her that took the shackles out

of the female wardrobe and also made it quite luxurious and beautiful.

In just 80 years women had opened up entirely new territories of art

and grasped social, political and economic freedoms.

But as my journey comes to a close I want to return to painting

and celebrate a woman who demonstrates, above all others,

how far we have come.

America - the fastest-growing economy of the early 20th century,

looking for an artistic identity to match its global power

and cultural dynamism.

That challenge would be met by a woman

who blazed her own trail and became the first great American artist.

To say that Georgia O'Keeffe was single-minded is putting it mildly.

Born in 1887 to dairy farmers in Wisconsin, by the

age of 14 she had already proclaimed that SHE would be an artist!

But by her early twenties, after stints at art school

she survived by taking teaching jobs across the Midwest.

It was only when a friend showed several of her early sketches

to Alfred Stieglitz at his New York Gallery, 291,

that her career was to take off.

He was electrified...

he wrote to O'Keeffe,

"They're the purist, finest, sincerest things that have

"entered 291 in a long while."

O'Keeffe responded - "I make them just to express myself,

"things I want and feel but don't have words for..."

So, at last, O'Keeffe felt that someone else understood...

thereby forging a creative partnership between an impresario

and an artist that would change the future of American art.

Stieglitz became obsessed by the young artist.

Despite being 23 years her senior, he realised he had met

his intellectual

and physical match. His passionate desire to possess her is documented

in the hundred of photographs he took of every little bit of her.

He sought to capture her strong handsomeness,

her steely self possession,

her smouldering sensuality...

..but also the beauty of her languorous body.

She had no prudish fear of nudity which is pretty staggering

for a young woman in 1918.

O'Keeffe's sensual self-confidence

would be reflected even more

arrestingly in her work, especially in one subject to which

she would return to time after time - the flower.

But she would give it new meaning and power.

Look at that whirlpool of purity sucking you in...

..but what's new about it?

For centuries women had painted flowers,

botanical art was seen as decorative, feminine, miniature

and unthreatening but there is nothing tame about this bloom.

Inspired by the telephoto lens Georgia O'Keeffe has magnified

her flower into a monument.

She wrote - "I decided that if I could

"magnify a flower on to a huge scale you could not ignore its beauty".

Gorgeous is too weak a word, I think,

to describe its dreamy seductiveness.

Ever the provocative publicist,

Stieglitz mounted a series of exhibitions of O'Keeffe's flowers

in the 1920s, associating them

with his own frank photographs of her.

The combination was combustible.

Giddy on Freud, one critic said -

"Here is a long, loud blast of sex."

In this context, her flower abstractions

were seen as unambiguous celebrations of female genitalia.

Another critic, Paul Rosenfeld,

trumpeted in 1921, "Her art is gloriously female.

"Her painful and ecstatic climaxes give us to understand

"something man has always wanted to know.

"The organs that differentiate the sex, speak."

O'Keeffe was furious to have her art reduced to gynaecology.

O'Keeffe insisted that the critics were talking rubbish -

projecting their own views, not her intentions.

While such controversy did not stop her being a commercial success

O'Keeffe felt her art was compromised.

By late 1929 O'Keeffe found her professional life increasingly

unfulfilling and faced crisis in her personal life.

Stieglitz had

taken up with a younger woman - she felt close to breakdown.

In an all-American move, she headed west to escape, to the

barren, desert landscape of New Mexico.

"The country seems to call one in a way that one has to answer it"

she wrote.

"This is my world and it fits me exactly."

O'Keeffe spent five months here that first summer

but she would return almost every year for the rest of her life.

She just drank in the landscape, the people, the culture, feathers,

birds, all these things that were new to her.

She created 23 paintings during that five-month period

and it's astonishing to me that she had the power to rise to that.

And instead if it being crushing it became the

second great opening in her career.

Do you think she is an icon for women today because of that

steely self-reliance?

I think so. One of the things that I didn't imagine coming to work here

as the curator is how people respond to her.

I thought it would be about the artwork, I actually think

the iconicity of O'Keeffe is that she lived the life she wanted to live.

And I think there are very few men or women who can say that...

In any era?

Yes, at any time, right now, for instance.

It was here that O'Keeffe fostered the image that would become

so iconic - alone, strong, independent.

Seemingly as harsh as the rocky desert around her.

For her this was such a beautiful, lonely-feeling place,

such a fine part of what I call the "faraway".

It spoke to her deeply about what she thought was her mission in life.

"I must show the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it."

The move to New Mexico was a tectonic shift for O'Keeffe's art

and therefore the history of American modernism.

American abstraction would now draw

on the grandeur of America itself

not on European Civilisation,

and nowhere is that clearer than in her colours.

Look at these singing tones.

Her desert palette - the light is different here.

O'Keeffe's work in the desert was prolific

and hugely significant.

The woman who was famed for her flower abstractions

now found inspiration in the landscape,

architecture and Native American culture of the west.

Georgia is not looking to other examples -

she is a radical individual. She is painting these at a moment

when almost every artist in America is anxious about how to make

American Art - in part because so many of them have trained in

Europe and they feel,

they know they are doing things that are derivative.

-Yeah.

-She isn't. She is creating something that is unique and

original and hers...and that becomes part of the modernist vision.

She opens America's eyes to a new way of painting

and a new way of understanding what art can do to help us

think beyond what is merely in front of our face.

Georgia O'Keeffe wasn't a "female" artist, she was an artist,

full stop.

And the greatest American artist of her era.

We've come from the Renaissance where women barely left

the home, to a lone woman refusing to follow in anyone's footsteps

and taking inspiration from the widest skies on earth.

When asked what it took to become a female artist

O'Keeffe answered bluntly -

"Nerve"!

And it's nerve that fuelled

so many of the women I've encountered down the centuries.

The nerve of Artemisia Gentileschi to cast off the victimhood

of sexual abuse, to forge an international career.

The Nerve of Maria Sybilla Merian to leave husband

and home voyaging to the remotest rainforest to capture

the tropics in monstrous Technicolor.

The nerve of Rose Bertin to claw her way up from a humble shopkeeper

to define the glamour of the Ancien Regime.

And it was Georgia O'Keeffe's nerve that brought her here

to paint a new language for America.

It is courage that inspires me most across the centuries and the women

who remade the world in their image

had that in dazzling abundance.