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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?
02:08These are the questions that 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.
02:59It'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.
03:20And it reached a kind of peak of intensity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when floods of
03:26Europeans came 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.
04:15And yet she was never meant to be a 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, the seven rays of her crown indicating
04:52the seven continents.
04:57She is not a hospitable nymph, she is hefty and stern, and her gaze says, watch it, buster, not welcome
05:05stranger.
05:08She may not be a great work of art, but as an emblem, she's incomparable.
05:15Well, for my grandparents, my family, the Statue of Liberty was what they saw when they came over here and
05:20were realizing 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, like, 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.
05:45It wouldn't symbolize the same thing.
05:48I 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.
06:16And 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?
06:29Because, 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.
06:46And then, in the 1950s, it fell into ruin.
07:02This is the Immigration Hall of Ellis Island in New York Harbor.
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, 10 or 15 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 and suggest the direction in which good might be done.
10:05They worked in the same place where they lived, you see, and the kids of six or seven would pick
10:10the threads out of the garments, that sort of thing.
10:12It was part of their work, you see, and even though they stopped for prayer three times a day, there
10:17was not much joy in it.
10:19At around this time, there was such fear of this 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.
10:42He 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.
11:41His 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 horse shit and snow that froze on
12:40Broadway in 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, a portrait of a dancer whose long leg thrust out with strutting sexual arrogance and
13:07glinting through the overbrushed black veil, has far more oomph than the hundreds of virginal, genteel muses painted by American
13:15academics.
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 depicts 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.
14:37Prize fighting was illegal in New York, but that did nothing to stop it, and for Bellows, as for Hemingway
14:44and Norman Mailer later, it was a prime metaphor of manliness and survival, war in a smoky room.
14:53In Stag at Sharky's, the boxes form an arch, joined only at their heads.
14:59The faces are bloody speed-blurs, 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 was by being a pug.
15:31Bellows clearly reveled 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 phobism Ellis Island Art,
19:11his readers knew exactly what he meant, that 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
19:28and backed 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,
19:48and he fought for early American modernists too.
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.
20:20He photographed the new Flatiron building on Fifth Avenue, like he said,
20:25the bow of a monster ocean steamer, a 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.
20:53Here in the New York Armory in 1913, modern art became a public issue for the first time in America.
20:59The Armory show was put together by a committee of artists and others
21:02who wanted to create a sort of giant overview, a manifesto of new art, both in Europe and in America.
21:08It contained work by Cezanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, Brancusi, and scores of others.
21:18And most of the 70,000 New Yorkers who flocked to see it had never been exposed to anything resembling
21:24this kind of imagery.
21:25They, like the journalists and the critics who wrote about it, were both horrified and vastly amused by the spectacle.
21:31And the lesson that most of them took home from the Armory was that modern art was weird and foreign
21:37and deeply un-American.
21:41Cubists are making insanity pay. Kenyon Cox, member of the National Academy.
21:46Nobody who has been drinking should be let in to see this show. It is a disgrace to New York's...
21:52Mon Dieu, they have hang him, my masterpiece, upside down.
21:56Now, these figures are a useless pastiche. Younger American artists would be far better avoiding these daubs and childish marks.
22:05This painting became the star freak of the Armory show, its bearded lady or its two-headed chicken.
22:10People compared it to an explosion in a shingle factory or to an earthquake on the subway.
22:16And it is, of course, Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp.
22:20A brown painting and a cubist idiom, though, as a matter of record, the cubists themselves didn't like it very
22:26much.
22:27The fame it has today is the fossil of the enormous notoriety that was dumped on it in 1913 as
22:33a 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 Marais and the
22:58Englishman Edward Muybridge.
23:01It's no more advanced as such than any other cubo-futurist painting, but the media created its fame.
23:09But for me, it was a great break, of course, from Impressionism and Fauvism and all the movements before.
23:19And the painting was shown in New York then in 1913.
23:24And that was supposed to be a break in my life because it was a succès de scandale and I
23:31took advantage of it.
23:34Duchamp's effect on the American avant-garde was enormous.
23:38Partly it came from his ready-made, common objects, most notoriously this urinal,
23:43which he simply declared to 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,
23:58as with his most famous work, The Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors even.
24:04Yes, they put the two panes on top of one another, on a truck, flat, not knowing what they were
24:12carrying,
24:13and bouncing for 60 miles in Connecticut.
24:16So that's what happened.
24:17But the more I look at it, the more I like the cracks because they're not like shattered glass.
24:23They have a shape, but the symmetry in the cracking, there's more, almost an intention there,
24:29a ready-made intention, in other words, that I respect and love.
24:34The large glass with its nebulous bride floating about in the upper half
24:39and sending her mating calls to the adoring bachelors below,
24:42was an ironic parody of profane love, but it remains a fairly hermetic work.
24:50Duchamp's greater influence was through his ready-mades.
24:53There was no context in 1913 in which an American could imagine a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool as
25:00a work of art.
25:03They were shocking in their time, and they keep their refined wit,
25:07despite 75 years of imitation by later artists and endless academic theses.
25:14Duchamp opened the work of art to the play of jokes, puns, irreverent gestures.
25:19He 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 was Joseph Stella, an emigrant from Naples.
26:21For him, too, the Brooklyn Bridge was a key emblem.
26:25He painted it several times, calling it the Shrine, containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America,
26:33the eloquent meeting of all the forces rising in a superb assertion of their powers, an apotheosis.
26:42He imagined the Gothic archers of the bridge as a cathedral of progress, framing the clean, high towers of the
26:49city beyond,
26:51strung 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 Italian futurists.
27:09In some respects, he outdid them on his return with this painting of New York's great working-class funfair, Coney
27:16Island.
27:18He packed it with images of frenzied movement, the blaze of lights, the swooping of the Big Dipper, the girders,
27:25the rush of crowds, the towers, the chaotic noise.
27:31A vision of total overstimulation.
27:38In the same spirit, John Marin rendered the streets and towers of Manhattan as explosive, toppling, disassembled by the human
27:46energy they reflect.
27:59The skyscrapers, those emblems of thrust and high technology bristling up from the bedrock of Manhattan Island, had made a
28:06cityscape like no other in the world.
28:10Georgia O'Keeffe, in the early 20s, painted them several times, the dark cliffs with rivers of electricity between and
28:18coloured light on their spires and finials.
28:24And by day, the Shelton Hotel, its bulk half dissolved in steam and the halation patterns that O'Keeffe, though
28:32she 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 technological
28:52America into consciousness.
28:54He seemed as mighty a bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries as this one was between Manhattan and the
29:01rest of America.
29:04In 1920, two photographers, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, made a six-minute film of the city and called it
29:12Manhattan.
29:13It was constructed around Whitman's verses.
29:19City of the world, for all races are here.
29:23City of tall facades of marble and iron.
29:27One million-footed Manhattan, unpent, descends to its pavements.
29:34High growths of iron, slender, strong, splendidly uprising towards clear skies.
29:48Shiela turned this image from Manhattan into a painting, stressing the clean plains of the buildings and the pattern of
29:55the city in strong light.
29:57His photographs bred his paintings.
30:00They acted as ideas for further stages of abstraction.
30:06After the Armory show, American modernists tended to define themselves in terms of the new city and the machine, partly
30:14because, in the eyes of Europeans, that was the unique side of American culture.
30:38But Shiela took this to an extreme.
30:41For him, the industrial sublime replaced the natural sublime.
30:46And since any tendency in art worth its salt was expected to become an ism, Shiela called his precisionism.
30:54Precisionism indicated both style and subject.
30:57In fact, the subject was the style.
30:59Exact, hard, flat, big, industrial and full of references to photography.
31:05Photography fed into painting and vice versa.
31:08Anything live and organic, like trees or people, was kept out of it.
31:12And there was no such thing as a precisionist pussycat.
31:15The ideal precisionist site was something like this.
31:19And yet, it was a deeply romantic movement, adoring the good machine, the clean-cut primary forms of technological America.
31:39The man who builds a factory, builds a temple.
31:42The man who works there, worships there.
31:44Nothing symbolized this bizarre piety of American capitalism better than River Rouge.
31:52The capital of Henry Ford's automotive empire was now the biggest industrial plant in the world.
31:59Ford viewed industry as the new American religion.
32:03He thought it would lead to a United States of the world, with himself as an industrial messiah, the complete
32:10anti-humanist.
32:11Men could be treated like machinery.
32:14The defective human body could be fixed with new interchangeable parts.
32:19Machinery, he wrote, is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching propaganda or the written
32:25word.
32:27The Ford Motor Company hired Sheila to spend six weeks in River Rouge taking official photographs that reflect this fantasy
32:36of the machine as cult object.
32:39Tiny workers serve enormous clean machines like this stamping press.
32:45There is no hint of the boring, dehumanizing and sometimes dangerous nature of production line work.
32:52The managerial elite had found its ideal artist in Sheila.
32:57His criss-crossing conveyor belts at River Rouge matched the buttresses of Chartres Cathedral, which he photographed two years later.
33:09In a panorama of River Rouge called American Landscape, which he painted in 1930, the factory is all.
33:17And man is a single, lonely ant.
33:23Was he commenting on the crash of 29, in whose wake Ford ruthlessly cut wages, fired armies of workers and
33:31fixed machine guns at the gates?
33:51Other artists shared Sheila's fascination with the industrial.
33:55This painting by Charles de Muth is called My Egypt.
33:59It's a head-on view of a grain elevator in de Muth's hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
34:06Its title whimsically refers to the mania for all things Egyptian that swept America in the early 20s when Howard
34:13Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.
34:17My Egypt, de Muth 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, unheeded,
34:49to gong clangs, siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
34:58De Muth's most famous picture, done in 1928, was a precursor of pop art, a big glittering numeral, a sign
35:06for 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.
35:18De Muth puts in the street lights, the red back of the truck and the engine company number five receding
35:25down the street.
35:40But were the city and the machine the only themes of early American modernism? Not at all.
35:46For America's greatest 20th century architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, nature was the permanent inspiration.
35:53This is one of his early buildings, the Robey House, built in a Chicago suburb in 1909.
36:04He called this his prairie style.
36:08It's horizontal. Today we're used to horizontal houses.
36:12But 90 years ago, Americans felt their homes should look like Greek temples or Gothic boxes, not groundhuggers like this
36:20one, with its wide, strong eaves, every line expressing kinship with 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.
36:54He loved classical Japanese tea house and farmhouse architecture, in which space is altogether more permeable and fluid, not walled
37:02off but divided by sliding screens.
37:04And out of this idea he developed the open plan, which lies at the heart of so much modernist architecture.
37:10And it's there very early in his work, as here.
37:17Wright's genius as a planner is the channel through which the lessons of Japan flowed into the American mainstream.
37:24The massive stone fireplace recalls the social anchorage of the Japanese hearth.
37:30The detailing is very sophisticated, but it's not ornamental.
37:36It fuses with the design idea that he summed up in the term organic architecture,
37:41the belief that space, material and furniture should compose an organic whole, not just be a collection of things in
37:48a box.
38:01It's very important.
38:01My mother was a teacher and she wanted an architect for a son.
38:06I happened to be the son, and of course, naturally an architect.
38:11I was conditioned by her.
38:13The room into which I was born was hung with the wood engravings of the English cathedrals made by Timothy
38:20Cole.
38:21So I was born into architecture.
38:26Wright began as a draftsman in Louis Sullivan's office in Chicago and inherited his mantle.
38:31He had the longest career of any American architect and he still casts the longest shadow.
38:37No designer was ever more aware of the interrelatedness of nature's systems or strove harder to embody them in his
38:45work.
38:46He 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 angled bays,
39:19its Wright's gesture of indifference to arts he thought were inferior to his own.
39:34The house that fully shows the lyric relation between culture and nature that Frank Lloyd Wright sought is in the
39:40woods of Pennsylvania.
39:42It doesn't announce itself suddenly, all in one piece, like a mansion in a park.
39:46You catch glimpses of it through the trees, like the partial views that you get of a Japanese tea house
39:52in its garden.
39:52Your expectation rises, and then bingo, the whole thing, with those magnificent cantilevered terraces jutting out above the rocks and
40:02a cascading stream.
40:04It's called Falling Water, and Wright designed it in 1936 for a Pittsburgh department store heir called Edgar Kaufman.
40:11For me, without exaggeration, this is the most beautiful American house since Jefferson's Monticello.
40:16And it becomes 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, the cut
40:42fieldstone masonry and the raw rock ledges.
40:46The sense that the bulk of the building is cradled in that rock, while at the same time the balconies
40:52fly out into the air, working against gravity.
40:55All the opposites held in a poetic synthesis.
40:59All the opposites.
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.
41:43They saw it as the ground of American uniqueness.
41:46An impulse like that doesn't just suddenly evaporate.
41:48And so, in the early 20th century, the avant-garde was rich in images of land, sea, sky, plants, earth
41:55and 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 Dove,
42:15who for some years lived on a boat in Long Island.
42:18His early abstractions still reflect the world.
42:21In this one, from about 1912, Sails, you can see the triangular mainsails against the cloud and landscape shapes behind.
42:32Like some European avant-gardists, Dove wondered if shape and colour could also convey an impression of sound.
42:39If there could be a match between painting and music.
42:42And in this grey seascape called Foghorns, the soft blooms of shape do suggest the echo of those horns in
42:49the 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.
43:33Since 1900, minor academic artists like Ernest Blumenshine had gone there to paint the Pueblo Indians,
43:40the adobe churches and the landscape.
43:44By 1915, organised tourism had turned the place into a sort of internal American Tahiti,
43:50with its own art marketing organisation.
43:59But the artist who came to dominate our idea of New Mexico imagery was a woman, Georgia O'Keeffe.
44:10Some of her earliest abstractions from the 19-teens are very beautiful.
44:15Their response to landscape is luminous, almost pantheistic.
44:21Once in New Mexico, she reacted intensely to the images of its culture,
44:26like 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'Keeffe indignantly denied.
44:51Her paintings of skulls and pelvises in the landscape mostly verge on kitsch surrealism.
45:01She made memorable paintings of the landscape itself, bare and complicated in its rock formations,
45:08drawn with a tenderness that sometimes edges over into a certain weakness of structure.
45:14They're the result of long, intense looking. O'Keeffe didn't like generalisation.
45:22Georgia O'Keeffe died in 1986, just two years short of her 100th birthday.
45:27And this was her house and studio in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
45:31Was she one of the greatest American artists?
45:33Well, there's certainly many people who think so.
45:36I'm not so sure, but this is confused by the fact that for the last 50 years of her life,
45:40she was unquestionably the most famous woman artist that America has ever produced.
45:45She was a diva of independence, an icon of feminism,
45:49and God help anybody who had the temerity to suggest that there might have been,
45:53let'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,
46:03but it happens that the thing that I have done, the things that I've been doing,
46:08have been in touch with my time so that people have liked it.
46:16Georgia had to be moved emotionally by something in nature in order to paint it.
46:23But she let that first feeling rest inside of her for a year,
46:28and then we'd go back to the same place, and she might just sit and look at it a while,
46:33and then we'd go back six months later and she'd go to work on it.
46:37She could not stay in New York. Six months there was all she could take.
46:41And then she would come out here and go to work,
46:44and work eight, eleven hours a day was not unusual.
46:48Then there was the hiatus of taking a walk,
46:51which 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'Keeffe had shown her work at Stieglitz's gallery since 1916.
47:13They 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,
47:31and finally a middle-brow soap opera, like the Loves of Bloomsbury.
47:37We have talked over everything, Stieglitz wrote.
47:40Into one week we have compressed years.
47:43I don't think there is anything to equal it.
47:49Stieglitz disliked going west of the Hudson,
47:51but O'Keeffe moved to New Mexico in 1929.
48:08Marcel Duchamp once said that the fame of an artist depends on the multiplication of small anecdotes,
48:14and O'Keeffe certainly had her fair share of those.
48:18Her immense aura today has more to do with legend and gender politics than with her actual achievement as an
48:24artist,
48:24which doesn't quite measure up to that of Dove or Marsden Hartley.
48:29But she was still a very considerable painter, an American original.
48:40O'Keeffe first went to New Mexico as a guest of Mabel Dodge,
48:44a rich hostess with a radical artistic political salon in New York,
48:48who had moved to Taos and married a Pueblo Indian named Tony Lujan.
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,
49:10the ancient collective blood knowledge, as she called it, of the Indians,
49:13and the inventive mindset of Western modernism.
49:16Put these together and Taos would become a city on the hill,
49:20the centre of a new kind of American civilisation.
49:25Mabel Dodge Lujan was a mistagog and an egotist,
49:29and in many ways a very trying woman.
49:31But there was something undeniably impressive about her,
49:34and she did great things for the cause of Indian rights in the South West.
49:40In her role of talent collector,
49:42she made sure that no visiting artist could escape her relentless hospitality.
49:50When D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda came to Taos,
49:53it 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 Lujan
50:01cavorting naked in her bathroom that he covered its windows with totemic designs.
50:10The value of the ground plane here, the way you've painted it, is the same as the vertical...
50:17Today, 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.
50:25...other than the sky itself, because it's receiving the light of the sky and the sun most directly.
50:32The Taos of today isn't much like the Taos of the 1920s.
50:36It's become a high Sierra theme park, full of faith healers, wannabe witches,
50:42dealers in multicultural kitsch, all 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 Lujan invited there hated its art colony as self-conscious, self-absorbed,
51:03and called Taos the stupidest place I ever fell into.
51:08He was a bristling and unhappy man, lately returned from the wider sphere of Europe,
51:13and he was America's finest early modernist painter, Marsden Hartley.
51:20He loved the new Mexican landscape as much as he disliked its white inhabitants.
51:31I am an American discovering America, he said.
51:35Any one of these beautiful canyons is a living example of the splendor of the ages,
51:40and I am bewitched by their magnificence and austerity.
51:44It is the only place in America where true color exists.
51:48It is not a country of light on things, it is a country of things in light.
52:19He had learned from Cezanne and Kandinsky, but the great American influence on Hartley
52:24was Albert Pinkham Rider, the visionary 19th century artist
52:28whose mysticism spoke directly to Hartley's own.
52:34He remembered seeing his first canvas by Rider.
52:37Just some sea, some clouds, and a sailboat on the tossing 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.
52:53It had the stupendous solemnity of a Blake.
53:01Hartley's real maturity as an artist had begun with his visit to Berlin in 1913
53:06on the eve of World War I.
53:11Hartley was homosexual, and the strong gay subculture of pre-war Berlin enraptured him.
53:17It was tied to military pomp and pageantry, the cult of the warrior.
53:22Hartley's Berlin paintings were full of army regalia, badges, helmets.
53:27They were the most complete assimilation 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 Freiburg.
53:45In Berlin, painted in 1914, Hartley idealises his lover as Siegfried,
53:52the embodiment of chivalric purity, the white knight.
53:57It was, of course, the age of iron, of blood and iron, Hartley wrote, bursting with organised energy,
54:04and the tension is terrific and somehow most voluptuous in the feeling of power, a sexual immensity.
54:12Von Freiburg was killed in the first months of the war, and the grief-stricken Hartley evoked his memory in
54:19his plumed helmet,
54:20his 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.
54:47Anti-German fever ran so high that even performances of Mozart and Beethoven were barred,
54:54and patriots were kicking dachshunds to death on the street.
55:03The victory of 1918 sealed the confidence of New York.
55:08The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the returning troops marching down Fifth Avenue,
55:13this the greatest nation on earth, a wild gala in the air.
55:21The festivities would last right through the twenties until Prohibition drove them partially underground,
55:27and made the gala wilder still because illicit.
55:32It was indeed the jazz age, with its 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,
55:59for a Sicilian named Antony Campagna, who came penniless off the boat around 1900,
56:05and became a property tycoon.
56:11Dilapidated now, but then, with its colonnades and frescoes that Campagna could never have had if he'd stayed in Sicily,
56:18a declaration of arrival that nobody could contradict.
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.
57:09They found themselves in a field of uncertainty and doubt.
57:14New York's great collective work of art had been itself.
57:19Between 1900 and 1930, it had turned itself into the exemplary modernist city,
57:24the capital of change, infused with a giddy sense of possibility and freedom,
57:30a 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,
57:43the ideological fights and the bitterness of depression in America.
57:48It would be a long time before it won back anything like the sense of optimism and promise
57:53that was open to its citizens in the age of immigration.
58:13More American Visions on BBC Four, same time next Monday.
58:17Tomorrow at 10, from the American Revolution to independence and the birth of a new nation,
58:23Ken Burns' compelling new series continues.
58:25The history of Vienna next to light a story of empire, dynasty and dream.
58:44The c info and picture to the C
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