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01:32I came here alone, and yet because of the freedom of the country, because of the laws that allows us
01:39together to be able to survive.
01:42As long as you know that you have the skills, you are law-abiding, you are given the chance to
01:49flourish.
01:50In a classroom in Brooklyn, the process of turning foreigners into Americans goes on.
01:56A class of eager applicants from many parts of the world get ready to become citizens.
02:03Yes or no? When you are asked why do you want to be an American citizen, these are the questions
02:09that they ask during the interview.
02:12Anyone who could share with us?
02:13To convince the immigration officials, they must show a passable grasp of English, and give signs of the patriotism expected
02:21of all good Americans.
02:29These include recognising some of the songs that make the collective American heart beat a little faster.
02:49America is the only country in the world where everybody is descended from immigrants.
02:53Anglo-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Spanish-Americans, African-Americans, it's a nation of hyphens.
03:01Even the Indians, the Native Americans, are actually immigrants too, since they migrated across the Bering Strait from Siberia into
03:09Alaska in prehistoric times.
03:11This sense of overlay and mixture and continuous superimposition is absolutely fundamental to the way that Americans imagine themselves, and
03:20it reached a kind of peak of intensity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when floods of Europeans
03:27came across the Atlantic and transformed American culture.
03:56This is the most famous statue of a human figure in America, or perhaps the world.
04:02To incalculable millions of people over the last hundred years, it has meant freedom.
04:07It has meant America.
04:10Most people interpret this giant Amazon as a promise to the immigrants, and yet she was never meant to be
04:16a monument to immigration.
04:18She was a gift from France to America, celebrating not immigration, but revolution.
04:24The American Revolution of 1776, as a forerunner of the French one, 13 years later.
04:33She was designed by a French sculptor called Bartholdi, and engineered by Gustave Eiffel, who built the tower in Paris.
04:44Her subject was not America welcoming the exile, but liberty enlightening the world.
04:50The seven rays of her crown indicating the seven continents.
04:57She is not a hospitable nymph.
05:00She is hefty and stern, and her gaze says, watch it, buster, not welcome stranger.
05:08She may not be a great work of art, but as an emblem she is incomparable.
05:15Well, for my grandparents, my family, the Statue of Liberty was what they saw when they came over here and
05:20were realising their dream of coming to a better place.
05:23From what I remember, my grandparents described, seeing the statue was a really emotional moment when they came over here.
05:29It represented the fruition of their dreams.
05:32They were finally here, and now their whole new life was going to start.
05:35And I think it held that for a lot of people.
05:42It would be a totally different thing if it was a statue of a man.
05:46It wouldn't symbolise the same thing.
05:47I think, usually, the woman is the mother figure, the one who welcomes people more, you know, the hostess, that
05:54kind of a thing, than the man.
06:00I wanted them to see it for themselves.
06:03Lauren and Erica are learning a lot about their country right now in school, and I think this kind of
06:09adds to their education, just seeing the Statue of Liberty and knowing that their freedom cannot be frustrated.
06:15And that's what the Statue of Liberty says to me, and I hope it says that to my daughters.
06:25Why did Ms. Liberty become associated with immigration?
06:30Because, in 1892, on an island nearby, a processing station opened to deal with the increasing flood of immigrants.
06:40Four out of every ten Americans now alive have an ancestor who came through it, and then, in the 1950s,
06:48it fell into ruin.
07:02This is the Immigration Hall of Ellis Island in New York Harbour.
07:07Here, the old world was sorted, inspected, classified, deloused, renamed, and then released into America.
07:15It's a museum now, and for all who value the plural and the various over the singular and the uniform,
07:21this is, and has to be, a sacred spot.
07:24There was no red carpet on the other side of the door.
07:28The millions of immigrants who streamed through here faced rebirth, but it was a rebirth into struggle.
07:34They found opportunity, sometimes vast.
07:37They also found poverty and misery and exploitation.
07:41There were no guarantees.
07:43And in the process, they created the cluster of ethnic villages known as modern New York.
07:50Nowhere in the world were there worse extremes of wealth and poverty than in 19th century New York.
07:56It was beyond Dickens, beyond Calcutta.
08:00In the 1880s, 334,000 people were crammed into a single square mile of the Lower East Side, making it
08:09the most densely populated place on Earth.
08:13Less than 10 square yards of urban space per person, including the sidewalks and streets.
08:20They were packed into filthy, disease-ridden tenements, ten or fifteen to a room, and the well-off knew nothing
08:27about them and cared less.
08:42Into the purgatory of the tenements came a Danish immigrant with a camera.
08:47His name was Jacob Rees, and he changed the social conscience of New York.
08:55Before leaving for America, Rees spent his last $40 on a pistol to defend himself against the Indians and bisons
09:02he thought he'd find on Broadway.
09:05But he found something very different and shot it with a camera.
09:09He became America's first crusading photographer.
09:15Rees disclosed the teeming labyrinth of the city, the human cost on which the plutocracy of New York's Gilded Age
09:23relied.
09:42He was the first documentary photographer to use flash.
09:46He threw light, literally, into dark corners.
09:50I wanted to show, he said, as no mere description could, the misery and vice that I have noted in
09:56my ten years of experience,
09:58and suggest the direction in which good might be done.
10:05They worked in the same place where they lived, you see.
10:08And the kids of six or seven would pick the threads out of the garments, that sort of thing.
10:12It was part of their work, you see.
10:13And even though they stopped for prayer three times a day, there was not much joy in it.
10:20At around this time, there was such fear of his immigration.
10:23A lot of people started talking about giving intelligence tests and psychological tests of the incoming immigrants.
10:30It was the poverty, it was the foreigners that bothered them.
10:33But above all, I think it's fair to say, these people had no tradition which they could literally bring into
10:38the American picture.
10:40Rees shared some of those prejudices.
10:43He viewed his subjects as specimens who had to be displayed for the ultimate good of their own class.
10:49He didn't ask permission.
10:51He burst in, in the middle of the night, like a cop with a camera.
10:55The results are like images of befuddled animals in their dens.
11:18New York was a city in continuous convulsion, Baghdad on the subway, one writer called it.
11:24It was the urban frontier, more real to most Americans than the vanished frontier out west.
11:33The painter who led the depiction of this tough, exuberant city was a son of a riverboat gambler who'd killed
11:39a man in Nebraska and fled east.
11:42His name was Robert Henry.
11:46He'd learned about realism at the Philadelphia Academy and in Paris.
11:50He was a charismatic teacher and he'd acquired a circle of younger artists who were as committed as he was
11:56to painting the human clay, the streets and slums of New York.
12:02There is only one reason for art in America, he said, and that is that the people of America learn
12:08the means of expressing themselves in their own time and their own land.
12:15Because of their desire to tell some truths about the dirty city, Henry's group was nicknamed the Ashcan School.
12:23They spurned academic painting.
12:25They disliked impressionism as an art of mere surfaces.
12:30Henry wanted art to be akin to journalism.
12:34He wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horseshit and snow that froze on Broadway
12:40in the winter.
12:42As real a human product as sweat, carrying the unsuppressed smell of human life.
12:48Idealism he scoffed at.
12:58Take his Salome of 1909.
13:01A portrait of a dancer whose long leg, thrust out with strutting sexual arrogance and glinting through the overbrushed black
13:09veil, has far more oomph than the hundreds of virginal, genteel muses painted by American academics.
13:19He gave it urgency with slashing brush marks and strong tonal contrasts.
13:25He'd learned from Winslow Homer, from Manet, and from the vulgarity of Franz Hals.
13:34Another colloquial artist was George Bellows.
13:38His views of the excavation for Pennsylvania Station show a grand canyon in the city, with late snow still on
13:45the floor of the crater.
13:49Steam and smoke billow up from the engines below.
13:54This is a view of the city as precipitous, dizzying.
14:02Forty-two kids depict the pale, gawky, knobbly bodies of working-class boys horsing around by the Hudson River on
14:11what was called Splinter Beach, a broken-down wooden pier.
14:18But Bellows' fascination with low life and high testosterone found its main subject in the prize fights that were held
14:26in semi-clandestine New York clubs with the ferocity of gang warfare.
14:38Prize fighting was illegal in New York, but that did nothing to stop it.
14:42And for Bellows, as for Hemingway and Norman Mailer later, it was a prime metaphor of manliness and survival.
14:49War in a smoky room.
14:53In Stag at Sharky's, the boxers form an arch joined only at their heads.
14:59The faces are bloody speed-blurbs, the pigment fat and vivid, the bodies starkly gleaming.
15:08Along the ringside are the heads of the spectators that put you in mind of Daumier.
15:20The title of this painting, of a black and a white fighter, both members of this club, refers to the
15:26fact that the only way a black could get into a club
15:29was by being a pug.
15:31Bellows clearly revelled in creating its violently dark atmosphere.
15:36He puts the scene before you as a Darwinian fact of life, not a piece of social criticism.
15:42He wouldn't be interested in those gaping, leering, stupefied heads if they were more civilised.
15:48It's a journalistic opportunity, part of the carnal fabric of New York.
15:57The most lyrical and politically the most acerbic of the Ashcan artists was John Sloan, a spectator of life, as
16:04he called himself, looking at a less violent world than Bellows.
16:10In election night, he sets down a more benign crowd, a throbbing, chaotic bunch of New Yorkers making whoopee under
16:18the elevated railway.
16:24Sloan's work had an honest humaneness, a frank sympathy.
16:28He refused to flatten lower-class New Yorkers into stereotypes of misery.
16:35And his strong sense of the moment in which ordinary people are seen unawares or isolated, a hairdresser at the
16:42window, was to deeply affect a leading artist of the next generation, one of Henry's students, Edward Hopper.
16:59It is the poor who emigrate, and the poor don't bring titians with them.
17:04But in America, the immigrants created a new popular culture, the folk art of the urban crowd.
17:23Its great instrument was the silent movie, which crossed all the barriers of language and spoke to every level of
17:28the American Tower of Babel, precisely because it was silent.
17:33Its supreme exponent was Charlie Chaplin, an emigrant from the East End of London.
17:39Chaplin's tramp enacts the difficulties and humiliations of the immigrant underdog.
17:44The constant struggle at the bottom of the American heap.
17:48And yet he triumphs over adversity without ever rising to the top, thereby staying in touch with his audience.
17:57Chaplin's films were also deliciously subversive.
18:01The bumbling officials enable the immigrants to laugh at those they fear.
18:06But because silent cinema was entertainment and not art, people didn't resist it.
18:12It largely escaped controversy.
18:14It changed the perceptions of a whole society, but it was tolerated and welcomed.
18:36Painting and sculpture, high art, were a different matter.
18:43Not many Americans cared about changes in their language, but those who did care, saw modernism as a threat to
18:50civilization itself.
18:52In art, America really disliked the new, at first.
19:01Like cinema, modern art was an immigrant too, and it was treated accordingly.
19:05When a conservative critic in New York called cubism and fauvism Ellis Island Art, his readers knew exactly what he
19:12meant.
19:13That it was foreign, incomprehensible, Jewish.
19:16Now the taste for modernism developed quite slowly at first, and it was mainly fostered by one man.
19:22The son of a wealthy German Jew in New York, who ran a tiny gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue and
19:29backed the artists who he believed were radicals and risk takers.
19:33His name was Alfred Stieglitz.
19:37Stieglitz was, as a friend said, the John the Baptist in the desert of American art.
19:43His gallery was the first in New York to show Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse, and he fought for early American modernists
19:50too.
19:55He was an artist in his own right, a photographer.
19:59To see the moment, he said, was to liberate the moment.
20:04And his big subject was New York, its change, its energy, its technological power.
20:12Even static objects like buildings become imbued with the machine metaphor.
20:21He photographed the new flat iron building on Fifth Avenue, like he said, the bow of a monster ocean steamer,
20:28a picture of New America still in the making.
20:43Stieglitz's commitment to modernism laid the ground for the most influential art show ever put on in America.
20:52here in the new york armory in 1913 modern art became a public issue for the first time in
20:58america the armory show was put together by a committee of artists and others who wanted to
21:03create a sort of giant overview a manifesto of new art both in europe and in america it contained
21:09work by cezanne matisse gauguin van gogh picasso brancusi and scores of others and most of the
21:1970 000 new yorkers who flocked to see it had never been exposed to anything resembling this kind of
21:24imagery they like the journalists and the critics who wrote about it were both horrified and vastly
21:30amused by the spectacle and the lesson that most of them took home from the armory was that modern
21:35art was weird and foreign and deeply un-american cubists are making insanity pay kenyon cox member
21:45of the national academy nobody who has been drinking should be let in to see this show
21:50it is a disgrace to new york's mon dieu they have hang him my masterpiece upside down these figures
21:57are a useless pastiche younger american artists would be far better avoiding these daubs and childish
22:04arts this painting became the star freak of the armory show its bearded lady or its two-headed
22:10chicken people compared it to an explosion in a shingle factory or to an earthquake on the subway
22:15and it is of course nude descending a staircase by marcel duchon a brown painting and a cubist idiom
22:23though as a matter of record the cubists themselves didn't like it very much the fame it has today
22:28is the fossil of the enormous notoriety that was dumped on it in 1913 as a puzzle picture
22:35it's gone into the pantheon because it embodies the idea that the truly new work of art like a prophet
22:42has to be scorned and stoned by the ignorant mob before ascending into museum heaven
22:50the nude was based in part on the sequential photos studying movement done by the french photographer
22:57marais and the englishman edward mybridge it's no more advanced as such than any other cubo
23:04futurist painting but the media created its fame
23:09but for me it was a great break of course from impressionism and fauvism and other movements before
23:19and the painting was shown in new york then in 13 1913 and that was supposed to be a break
23:26in my life
23:27because it was a success scandal and i took advantage of it
23:34duchon's effect on the american avant-garde was enormous
23:38partly it came from his ready-made common objects most notoriously this urinal which he simply declared
23:44to be a work of art and entitled fountain flowing in reverse as it were
23:53he also wanted the work to include chance to enlist accident as a co-author as with his most famous
23:59work the large glass or the bride stripped bare by her bachelor's even yes they put the two pains
24:08on top of one another on a truck flat not knowing that what they were carrying and bouncing for 60
24:15miles
24:15in connecticut so that's what happened but the more i look at it the more i like the cracks because
24:21they're not like shattered glass they have a shape but the symmetry in the cracking there's more in
24:28almost an intention there already made intention in other words that i respect and love
24:34the large glass with its nebulous bride floating about in the upper half and sending her mating calls
24:40to the adoring bachelors below was an ironic parody of profane love but it remains a fairly hermetic work
24:50duchon's greater influence was through his ready-mades there was no context in 1913
24:55in which an american could imagine a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool as a work of art
25:03they were shocking in their time and they keep their refined wit despite 75 years of imitation by
25:10later artists and endless academic theses duchamp opened the work of art to the play of jokes puns
25:17irreverent gestures he was a great abattoir of sacred cows though he was wrong when he claimed
25:24that the only works of art america had given the world were her plumbing and her bridges
25:40still how could an artist not feel the current of modernist power that new york embodied
25:46how would stieglitz's american artists interpret the brutal ever-changing lyricism of the city
25:56john marin imagined the brooklyn bridge imbued with energy fragmented dancing
26:12but the painter who responded most strongly to america's machine and power culture
26:17was joseph stella an emigrant from naples for him too the brooklyn bridge was a key emblem
26:26he painted it several times calling it the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of
26:32america the eloquent meeting of all the forces rising in a superb assertion of their powers and apotheosis
26:42he imagined the gothic arches of the bridge as a cathedral of progress framing the clean high
26:49towers of the city beyond strung by cables linking earth and heaven engineering as myth
27:00earlier in 1909 stella had gone back to europe for three years and there he had seen the work of
27:06the
27:06italian futurists in some respects he outdid them on his return with this painting of new york's great
27:14working-class fun fair coney island he packed it with images of frenzied movement the blaze of lights
27:22the swooping of the big dipper the girders the rush of crowds the towers the chaotic noise
27:31a vision of total over stimulation
27:38in the same spirit john marin rendered the streets and towers of manhattan as explosive toppling disassembled
27:46by the human energy they reflect
27:59the skyscrapers those emblems of thrust and high technology bristling up from the bedrock
28:04of manhattan island had made a cityscape like no other in the world
28:10georgia o'keefe in the early 20s painted them several times the dark cliffs with rivers of electricity
28:17between and colored light on their spires and finials
28:24and by day the shelton hotel its bulk half dissolved in steam and the halation patterns
28:30that o'keefe though she was never a photographer herself had copied from photographs
28:45for these new york modernists the homer of the machine age was walt whitman the poet who had brought
28:52technological america into consciousness he seemed as mighty a bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries
28:58as this one was between manhattan and the rest of america
29:04in 1920 two photographers charles sheila and paul strand made a six-minute film of the city
29:11and called it manhattan it was constructed around whitman's verses
29:19city of the world for all races are here city of tall facades of marble and iron
29:28one million footed manhattan unpent descends to its pavements
29:33high growths of iron slender strong splendidly uprising towards clear skies
29:48sheila turned this image from manhattan into a painting stressing the clean plains of the buildings
29:54and the pattern of the city in strong light his photographs bred his paintings they acted as ideas
30:01for further stages of abstraction after the armory show american modernists tended to define themselves
30:11in terms of the new city and the machine partly because in the eyes of europeans that was the unique
30:17side of american culture
30:38but sheila took this to an extreme for him the industrial sublime replaced the natural sublime
30:46and since any tendency in art worth its salt was expected to become an ism sheila called his precisionism
30:54precisionism indicated both style and subject in fact the subject was the style exact hard flat big
31:02industrial and full of references to photography photography fed into painting and vice versa anything
31:09live and organic like trees or people was kept out of it and there was no such thing as a
31:14precisionist
31:15pussycat the ideal precisionist site was something like this and yet it was a deeply romantic movement
31:21adoring the good machine the clean-cut primary forms of technological america
31:39the man who builds a factory builds a temple the man who works there worships there nothing symbolized this bizarre
31:47piety of american capitalism better than river rouge the capital of henry ford's automotive empire
31:55was now the biggest industrial plant in the world
32:00ford viewed industry as the new american religion he thought it would lead to the united states of the
32:06world with himself as an industrial messiah the complete anti-humanist men could be treated like
32:13machinery the defective human body could be fixed with new interchangeable parts machinery he wrote
32:20is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching propaganda or the written word
32:28the ford motor company hired sheila to spend six weeks in river rouge taking official photographs
32:35that reflect this fantasy of the machine as cult object tiny workers serve enormous clean machines like this stamping press
32:46there is no hint of the boring dehumanizing and sometimes dangerous nature of production line work
32:53the managerial elite had found its ideal artist in sheila his crisscrossing conveyor belts at river rouge
33:00match the buttresses of chartres cathedral which he photographed two years later
33:08in a panorama of river rouge called american landscape which he painted in 1930 the factory is all
33:18and man is a single lonely ant
33:23was he commenting on the crash of 29 in whose wake ford ruthlessly cut wages
33:29fired armies of workers and fixed machine guns at the gates
33:51other artists shared sheila's fascination with the industrial
33:56this painting by charles demuth is called my egypt it's a head-on view of a grain elevator in
34:02demuth's hometown of lancaster pennsylvania its title whimsically refers to the mania for all things egyptian
34:10that swept america in the early 20s when howard carter discovered the tomb of tutankarmen
34:17my egypt demuth is raising the old american worry about being a new culture without a long past
34:25the weight of those twin silo shafts does indeed suggest the thick pillars of the temple of karnak
34:41among the rain and lights i saw the figure five in gold on a red fire truck moving tense
34:48unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city
34:59demuth's most famous picture done in 1928 was a precursor of pop art a big glittering numeral
35:05a sign for its own sake called i saw the figure five in gold
35:12it was inspired by an imagist poem by his friend william carlos williams
35:19demuth puts in the street lights the red back of the truck
35:22and the engine company number five receding down the street
35:40but were the city and the machine the only themes of early american modernism
35:45not at all for america's greatest 20th century architect frank lloyd wright
35:50nature was the permanent inspiration this is one of his early buildings the roby house built in a chicago
35:58suburb in 1909
36:04he called this his prairie style it's horizontal today we're used to horizontal houses but 90 years ago
36:14americans felt their homes should look like greek temples or gothic boxes
36:18not groundhuggers like this one with its wide strong eaves every line expressing kinship
36:25with the flat flat earth of the midwest
36:48right objected to the idea of dividing the space of a house into separate cubicles and permanent rooms he loved
36:54classical japanese tea house and farmhouse architecture in which space is altogether more
36:59permeable and fluid not walled off but divided by sliding screens and out of this idea he developed the open
37:07plan which lies at the heart of so much modernist architecture and it's there very early in his work as
37:13here
37:16right's genius as a planner is the channel through which the lessons of japan flowed into the american
37:22mainstream the massive stone fireplace recalls the social anchorage of the japanese half
37:30the detailing is very sophisticated but it's not ornamental it fuses with the design idea that he
37:39summed up in the term organic architecture the belief that space material and furniture should
37:45compose an organic whole not just be a collection of things in a box
38:01my mother was a teacher and she wanted an architect for a son
38:06i happened to be the sun and of course naturally an architect i was conditioned by her the room into
38:13which i was born was hung with the wood engravings of the english cathedrals made by timothy cole
38:21so i was born into architecture right began as a draftsman in louis sullivan's office in chicago
38:30and inherited his mantle he had the longest career of any american architect and he still casts the
38:36longest shadow no designer was ever more aware of the interrelatedness of nature's systems or strove
38:43harder to embody them in his work he was also capable as geniuses sometimes are of astonishing arrogance
38:52nowhere is this clearer than in his design for the guggenheim museum in new york
38:59as a pure building as creation of space the guggenheim is one of the great inventions of the 20th century
39:05with that spiral ramp that draws you slowly up towards the light flooding from the shallow dome
39:12but its contents the paintings and sculpture have to fight the slope of the floor jammed into the
39:18angled bays its rights gesture of indifference to artsy thought were inferior to his own
39:34the house that fully shows the lyric relation between culture and nature that frank lloyd wright
39:39sought is in the woods of pennsylvania it doesn't announce itself suddenly all in one piece like a
39:45mansion in a park you catch glimpses of it through the trees like the partial views that you get of
39:51a japanese
39:51tea house in its garden your expectation rises and then bingo the whole thing with those magnificent
39:59cantilevered terraces jutting out above the rocks and a cascading stream it's called falling water and
40:06wright designed it in 1936 for a pittsburgh department store heir called edgar kauffman for
40:12me without exaggeration this is the most beautiful american house since jefferson's monticello and it
40:17becomes so by its play between nature and culture with those great forms seeming to hover above the
40:24elements of nature and yet rooted in them
40:29the noise of the water made it a trying house to live in but that needn't worry the visitor
40:35it's a wonderful set of variations on themes the liquid water surface and the hard skin of glass
40:42the cut fieldstone masonry and the raw rock ledges the sense that the bulk of the building is cradled
40:49in that rock while at the same time the balconies fly out into the air working against gravity
40:56all the opposites held in a poetic synthesis
41:20in the 19th century american artists had equated nature with
41:22spirits
41:22artists too believed that nature could underwrite their work even as it pushed towards abstraction
41:28if european pioneers of abstract art like kandinsky believed that why not americans
41:37in the 19th century american artists had equated nature with spirit with creation itself they saw
41:43it as the ground of american uniqueness an impulse like that doesn't just suddenly evaporate and so
41:49in the early 20th century the avant-garde was rich in images of land sea sky plants earth and moon
41:56as nature and abstraction converged
42:08one especially lyrical talent in the early american avant-garde part of stieglitz's circle was arthur
42:14dove who for some years lived on a boat in long island his early abstractions still reflect the world
42:21in this one from about 1912 sales you can see the triangular mainsails against the cloud and landscape shapes behind
42:32like some european avant-gardists dove wondered if shape and color could also convey an impression of
42:38sound if there could be a match between painting and music and in this gray seascape called foghorns
42:45the soft blooms of shape do suggest the echo of those horns in the mist
42:59for some american modernists long island wasn't far enough away
43:12some american modernists went west looking for primitive america in search of nature stripped bare
43:19they found it 2 000 miles away in new mexico around santa fe albuquerque and especially taos
43:29taos had been an art colony for years before any modernists got there since 1900 minor academic
43:36artists like ernest blumenshine had gone there to paint the pueblo indians the adobe churches and the
43:42landscape by 1915 organized tourism had turned the place into a sort of internal american tahiti with its
43:51own art marketing organization
43:59but the artist who came to dominate our idea of new mexico imagery was a woman georgia o'keefe
44:10some of her earliest abstractions from the 19 teens
44:14and very beautiful their response to landscape is luminous almost pantheistic
44:21once in new mexico she reacted intensely to the images of its culture
44:25like the crosses erected by the penitentes stark against the big sky
44:38her close-ups of flowers were very popular both for their lushness and for their sexual overtones
44:44whose presence o'keefe indignantly denied
44:51her paintings of skulls and pelvises in the landscape mostly verge on kitsch surrealism
45:02she made memorable paintings of the landscape itself
45:04bare and complicated in its rock formations drawn with a tenderness that sometimes edges over
45:10into a certain weakness of structure they're the result of long intense looking o'keefe didn't like
45:18generalization
45:22georgia o'keefe died in 1986 just two years short of her 100th birthday and this was her house and
45:28studio in abicure new mexico was she one of the greatest american artists well there's certainly many
45:34people who think so i'm not so sure but this is confused by the fact that for the last 50
45:39years of
45:39her life she was unquestionably the most famous woman artist that america has ever produced
45:45she was a diva of independence an icon of feminism and god help anybody who had the temerity to suggest
45:52that they might have been let's say some unevenness in her work
45:57i can imagine myself being a much better painter and nobody paying any attention to me at all but it
46:03happens that the thing that i have done the things that i've been doing have been in touch with my
46:10time so that people have liked it
46:16georgia had to be moved emotionally by something in nature in order to
46:22paint it but she let that first feeling rest inside of her for a year and then we'd go back
46:30to the same
46:30place and she might just sit and look at it a while and then we'd go back six months later
46:35and she'd go to
46:36work on it she could not stay in new york six months there was all she could take and then
46:42she would come
46:42out here and go to work and work eight eleven eleven hours a day was not unusual then there was
46:49the hiatus
46:50of taking a a walk which was sort of a rebuilding of this thing of the spirit
46:57she wanted to work that was the whole point of georgia she wanted to work
47:09o'keefe had shown her work at stieglitz's gallery since 1916. they became lovers and later married
47:16and stieglitz photographed her incessantly both clothed and nude
47:27their relationship was a scandal at first then it became a legend and finally a middlebrow
47:33soap opera like the loves of bloomsbury
47:37we have talked over everything stieglitz wrote into one week we've compressed years i don't think
47:43there is anything to equal it
47:49stieglitz disliked going west of the hudson but o'keefe moved to new mexico in 1929
48:08marcel duchamp once said that the fame of an artist depends on the multiplication of small
48:13anecdotes and o'keefe certainly had her fair share of those her immense aura today has more to do with
48:21legend and gender politics than with her actual achievement as an artist which doesn't quite
48:26measure up to that of dove or marsden hartley but she was still a very considerable painter an american
48:33original
48:40o'keefe first went to new mexico as a guest of mabel dodge a rich hostess with a radical artistic
48:47political
48:47salon in new york who had moved to taos and married a pueblo indian named tony luhan
48:56they built a house in the pueblo style on the outskirts of the town
49:05she wanted she said to throw a bridge between two different kinds of consciousness
49:09the ancient collective blood knowledge as she called it of the indians
49:13and the inventive mindset of western modernism put these together and taos would become a city on
49:19the hill the center of a new kind of american civilization
49:25mabel dodge luhan was a mr gog and an egotist and in many ways a very trying woman but there
49:32was
49:32something undeniably impressive about her and she did great things for the cause of indian rights in the
49:37south west
49:40in her role of talent collector she made sure that no visiting artist could escape her relentless
49:46hospitality
49:50when dh lawrence and his wife frida came to taos it was in this place that they stayed
49:56and the prudish author of lady chatterley's lover was so alarmed by the sight of mabel luhan
50:01cavorting naked in her bathroom that he covered its windows with totemic designs
50:10value of the ground plane here the way you've painted it is the same as the vertical
50:16today as one of the registered tourist sites of old-style frontier modernism in the south west
50:22the house is a mecca for sunday painters
50:24other than the sky itself because it's receiving the light of the sky and the sun most directly
50:32the towers of today isn't much like the towers of the 1920s
50:37it's become a high sierra theme park full of faith healers wannabe witches dealers in multicultural kitsch
50:43all flashing their silver and turquoise concho belts at one another
50:51yet this character was already beginning to emerge 75 years ago
50:57one of the artists mabel luhan invited there hated its art colony as self-conscious self-absorbed
51:03and called taos the stupidest place i ever fell into he was a bristling and unhappy man
51:10lately returned from the wider sphere of europe and he was america's finest early modernist painter
51:16marsden hartley he loved the new mexican landscape as much as he disliked its white inhabitants
51:31i am an american discovering america he said any one of these beautiful canyons is a living example
51:38of the splendor of the ages and i am bewitched by their magnificence and austerity
51:44it is the only place in america where true color exists it is not a country of light on things
51:51it is a country of things in light
52:18he had learned from cezanne and kandinsky but the great american influence
52:23of hartley was albert pinkham rider the visionary 19th century artist whose mysticism spoke directly
52:30to hartley's own
52:34he remembered seeing his first canvas by rider just some sea some clouds and a sailboat on the
52:41tossing waters he wrote
52:44i felt as if i had read a page of the bible
52:48all my essential yankee qualities were brought forth out of this picture it had the stupendous solemnity
52:55of a blake
53:01hartley's real maturity as an artist had begun with his visit to berlin in 1913 on the eve of world
53:08war one
53:10of america hartley was homosexual and the strong gay subculture of pre-war berlin
53:15enraptured him it was tied to military pomp and pageantry the cult of the warrior
53:22hartley's berlin paintings were full of army regalia badges helmets they were the most complete
53:28assimilation of cubism by any american painter up to then
53:34they were also coded love tokens to his german boyfriend a young cavalry officer named kurt von freyberg
53:46in berlin painted in 1914 hartley idealizes his lover as siegfried the embodiment of chivalric purity the white knight
53:57it was of course the age of iron of blood and iron hartley wrote bursting with organized energy
54:03and the tension is terrific and somehow most voluptuous in the feeling of power a sexual immensity
54:12von freyberg was killed in the first months of the war and the grief-stricken hartley evoked his memory
54:19in his plumed helmet his regimental numbers the iron cross and his initials kvf
54:30hartley's paintings mourning the lover taken from him by the state
54:34use the emblems of state power to reconstitute his memory
54:40after he returned to america in 1915 hartley couldn't even show his german elegies there
54:47the anti-german fever ran so high that even performances of mozart and beethoven were barred
54:53and patriots were kicking dachshunds to death on the street
55:03the victory of 1918 sealed the confidence of new york the writer f scott fitzgerald wrote
55:10of the returning troops marching down fifth avenue this the greatest nation on earth
55:15a wild gala in the air the festivities would last right through the twenties until prohibition drove
55:25them partially underground and made the gala wilder still because illicit it was indeed the jazz age with
55:34it's parties at the mansions of new york gatsby's
55:45this was the kind of reward an immigrant could reach for when and if he really connected to the american
55:51dream
55:53a medician palace in the 16th century florentine manor built above the hudson river for a sicilian
56:00named anthony campania who came penniless off the boat around 1900 and became a property tycoon
56:11dilapidated now but then with its colonnades and frescoes that campania could never have had if he'd
56:17stayed in sicily a declaration of a rival that nobody could contradict
56:24do
56:34do
56:52The Wall Street crash devastated the economy and had its effects on culture too.
57:01It wasn't that artists suddenly started making different kinds of art, though some did,
57:06but the general environment changed. They found themselves in a field of uncertainty and doubt.
57:14New York's great collective work of art had been itself. Between 1900 and 1930 it had turned
57:21itself into the exemplary modernist city, the capital of change, infused with a giddy sense
57:28of possibility and freedom, a belief in cultural and political progress that was open to the world.
57:38Now all that hope would falter in the face of the breadlines and the shanty towns, the ideological
57:44fights and the bitterness of depression America. It would be a long time before it won back anything
57:51like the sense of optimism and promise that was open to its citizens in the age of immigration.
58:13more american visions on bbc4 same time next monday tomorrow at 10 from the american revolution to
58:20independence and the birth of a new nation ken burns compelling new series continues the history of the
58:26history of vienna next tonight a story of empire dynasty and dream
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