All language subtitles for BBC.The.Story.of.Women.and.Art.3of3.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org

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.