(ethereal music) (light music) - It was about this group, this wonderful creative mad group.

- They had a job to do and that job was to get married, to have children, to keep a house, and they basically said, "I'm not doing that."

- They already started to have differences about his expectations and hers.

- She was a traditional woman.

She went wildly off-course, according to 1950s America.

- It was immediately influential on other artists of the time, some of whom were unwilling to credit a woman, fully, with the amazing technical innovation.

- And the painting that was on her easel is a bloated figure with a head wound and an evil eye up in the corner.

- They were literally fighting, fighting to find themselves.

- I wanted to see who'd been left out of the canon, who was not known in abstract expressionism, and, as it turned out, there were all these women.

- In 1951, an exhibition called "The Ninth Street Show" was presented in downtown New York.

It was one of the first to present the achievements of artists who were associated with this movement called abstract expressionism.

It included quite a few artists.

Nine women took part in the exhibition.

- Great painting, great art in general, is not about materials used or methods mastered, or even talent possessed.

It is a combination of all these factors and an individual driven by a force that seems outside of them toward an expression of an idea they often do not understand.

"Ninth Street Women" by Mary Gabriel.

(upbeat funk music) - The art history that was being written in the mid-20th century was pretty much a history written by white men.

And so perhaps not surprisingly, they were writing about white men.

The lack of attention to the art that these women were making, either during their lives or thereafter, did not go on the written record in the same way as the art critics and historians, mainly men, who really were building what came to be thought of as the Canon.

- I think in any situation like that, you have to work twice as hard, 10 times as hard to get the same recognition that a man would normally get without any effort at all.

- I think every woman has had the experience of having possibilities foreclosed, opportunities that the men received but they didn't, for doing the same work that men did and not being recognized or rewarded for the same work.

- All of those women faced the same problems as they still do, but to a much more severe extent, because, at that time, no one thought that was a problem, except the 52% of the world's population known as females, and they put up with it.

(jazz music) - So in 1990, I was working at an art magazine in DC and the editor asked me to go interview Grace because she was having kind of a resurgence.

She had a few shows in New York, a monograph had just been written and she had just turned 64.

We had a scheduled one-hour interview that lasted for four hours and she told me a story about her work and her time that was so much more interesting than anything I had ever read in the art history courses I'd taken or anything I had ever known, and it was about this group, this wonderful, creative, mad group that worked together and supported each other outside of society at a time when, not only were they unrecognized by art scholars and art critics in America, but they were unknown around the world.

and that women were part of this ferment.

I thought, "How tragic, then, "that the women who were part of this "not only have individually been removed, "but as a group they've been removed "as the story's come down to us through history."

(double bass thrumming) - There is this place for creativity, or the expression of our creativity, that is fundamental.

You know, it's as much part of life as eating and sleeping.

- There's a moment where New York becomes the big center of cultural life, of painting, of poetry, of lyrics, of music, and with that is a moment that's ripe, that's due for a truly genuine American movement that was the abstract expressionists.

- Without knowing the sort of social setting and the historical context within which they worked, you can't possibly understand that the reason they began painting seemingly nothing but marks on the canvas was because they had to start from scratch.

They couldn't borrow any of the language from the past.

They had to create their own language, and that's what they did, and that's what abstract expressionism is.

- And it's this moment after World War II, when Europe, which had been until then commonly assumed as the heart of avant garde culture, Paris particularly.

World War II had devastated Europe.

- I think it's hard for us to reconstruct and imagine what it was like to live through World War II, the extent and the depth of the degradation and violence that humans were capable of waging on each other was really, truly devastating for the artists.

For them, it was the loss of faith in other human beings and a loss of faith in politics as a solution.

(melancholy guitar music) - What a difficult time to create, you know, at a time of so much darkness and yet, because they were artists, because that's what they were, profoundly, to their core, They had no choice but to do that.

They went into themselves as deeply as they could to find their essence to express it on canvas.

They were literally fighting, fighting to find themselves.

It's the kind of thing that most people go to a therapist to do.

- This attitude, to look inside one's self rather than to look outside for subject matter for inspiration, became a very important aspect of how artists would create their subject matter.

- One by one, they started to develop their new, although certainly influenced by many precedents, their new development in American painting that would eventually make them superstars.

(bright jazz music) - During the course of the abstract expressionist movement, there were, at any given time, maybe 12, maybe up to 30 women who were really working in the scene.

But to do what I wanted to do, I had to narrow it down, but I chose these five because they represent a 20 year difference in age and they also were fundamental to the movement itself.

These women not only wanted to work outside the home, they didn't wanna have a home.

They didn't want to have children.

None of them could actually, during their formative years of being an artist, see how they could fit that dual role of being a mother and an artist, and be true to themselves.

(upbeat jazz music) Grace Hartigan, who went from being a New Jersey housewife and mother to being a cutting-edge artist in Manhattan in the space of about four years, hers is really the most essentially archetypally female story.

She was a traditional woman.

She went wildly off-course, according to 1950s America.

she gave up her only son because she knew she couldn't be a mother and a painter.

She lived on the Lower East Side in a studio without heat or electricity.

She had affairs with men, not because she loved them, but because she just liked sex.

This was at a time when women never did that, or if they did it, they certainly didn't talk about it.

Then the love of her life was a gay poet, Frank O'Hara.

Her story was kind of the most tragic because she rose to the very top in the '50s.

She was the heralded artist.

She had sell out shows, repeatedly, and she fell off the map in the '60s.

She still showed, but she wasn't Grace Hartigan the star.

And that's because she fell in love and moved to Baltimore, which didn't exist in the art world.

- Grace was always curatorially and commercially successful, particularly in the '50s.

We look back and we say, "Oh, it was so great she was included in these shows."

But I mean, again, it was like the token woman alongside all of her other male counterparts.

And those works were selling; she was selling things when she was making them, but they were at a fraction of the price as her peers within that community.

It's still the case that women artists are substantially undervalued compared to their male counterparts.

(lively jazz music) - She said, "Well, I really want to be judged by my work."

They said, "Okay, we could have you have a show, "but we have to call you George Hartigan "so that if any critics come, "they won't dismiss you before they even see your work."

And one of the big-time art critics came and was enthralled, as everyone else was, by this new guy on the block, George Hartigan.

Grace, smoking her pipe, being her wonderful charming self, finally, she said to the critic, "By the way, those are my paintings.

My name is Grace, as you know.

There is no George Hartigan.

Perhaps it was possible for women to not only mop the floors and take care of the messed-up men's lives and the messed-up world that they created, but also paint up a storm, and she helped to open up that door.

- Grace was an artist who was grappling with figuration, both at the beginning and at the end of her life.

(casual jazz music) - Figuration was almost a sin in New York in the 1950s, and a lot of artists paid dearly for it, for dabbling in it, or at least women artists did.

Strangely, Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning were ridiculed and discouraged from working in those quasi-figurative styles.

(lively jazz music) - By being both a portraitist and an action painter, she had the tools to segue into deconstructing the figure and becoming either figurative abstraction or pure abstraction in a way that very few other artists of that period could.

- One of the main mouth pieces for the abstract expressionist movement was the magazine "ARTnews", still in publication today, run by Thomas Hess, who was an important early champion.

He hired Elaine de Kooning as one of his frontline critics, who wrote some of the most important things about artists and their working processes that we still use today.

- Elaine became the voice of the movement.

She was a translator for her own work and for her fellow artists, at a time when people were looking at this stuff, when they just began looking at this stuff, and had no idea what it was.

Elaine put it in everyday language and through her writing in "ARTnews", she basically invited readers to go with her, to meet her friends.

- I think the word, domestic, is a word that almost all of these women hated.

And this generation certainly rejected the idea of domesticity and saw it as a trap.

Elaine de Kooning famously thought that she and Willem could both use a wife because she wasn't gonna cook him dinner and clean the house.

- Shortly after they were married, they already started to have differences about his expectations and hers.

His were "Susie Homemaker" and hers were staying the course to become a great artist.

Her search for creating and painting was never more fueled by his teachings, which allowed her to have breakthroughs in her creativity and in her style.

- "Bill was a teacher and a mentor for Elaine, "but Elaine reached out for a place "that Bill didn't even know existed; "a Mount Olympus.

"She saw what he was doing.

"The fact that she could easily imagine that, it was big.

"'I speak your language.

"'I show you what you're all about.'

"None of the other women "could bring that intellectual caliber "that Elaine never stopped delivering."

Clay Fried in "Ninth Street Women".

- Elaine never divorced Willem.

Even after he had told her early on in their marriage that he didn't want to have children.

He went ahead and had a child, an illegitimate child.

Elaine rose above that.

She stayed focused on her mission.

She was in love with Bill.

She was always in love with Bill.

He was recovering from alcoholism, but had Alzheimer's.

He invited her to come back.

Elaine lovingly went back, helped him restart his painting and helped him with his final series.

- In the portraits that she would do of all of her friends, especially friends and colleagues who were also artists, she paint Robert De Niro Sr., who was also a painter, and that is of course the actor's father.

He was so fidgety during the sit that she had placed a television.

She had him sitting, looking over his shoulder and watching TV so that he would sit still.

- She has this phenomenal opportunity.

She's invited by the White House to paint President Kennedy's portrait.

- She's the only female artist that has been able to paint the portrait of a sitting president.

And so she traveled with him for a little over a year, up until his assassination.

- That portrait would become the foundation of a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

(casual jazz music) - She was a master portrait artist.

She really had the ability to capture an image, a likeness of whomever it was.

- If you weren't going to museums, or you didn't have museums in your community that had this art, this new art on the wall, it came through magazines.

I'm thinking particularly of Helen Frankenthaler's spread in "Life Magazine".

Here was this beautiful woman who, for all intents and purposes for most of America, should have been a housewife, but she looked gorgeous, and there she was making these paintings.

(upbeat jazz music) - Helen was one of the most fascinating characters because she lived her life on the edge.

She had no sense of any limitations; personal, social, artistic.

"No" didn't exist in her vocabulary.

She entered the scene and jumped right into the middle of it.

She had just graduated from Bennington College and she became the girlfriend of Clem Greenberg, the most important critic on the scene.

She was once asked if she thought she made it as a painter because she was Clem's girl.

And she said, "No, I'm Helen's girl."

And that's how she lived her life.

She was born wealthy.

She was born beautiful.

She was born talented.

And she was always suspected of having it too easy.

Critics would ask her questions like, "Oh, did you notice that the color of your painting "matches the color of your clothes?"

- [Critic] Is it harder to be a woman or be a painter?

- [Helen] Oh, I think the first issue is being a painter.

- Frankenthaler struggled overtly with sexist reviews and reactions and descriptions of her work.

Frankenthaler's style courted the feminine.

It was transparent, pastel, it looked like watercolor in many ways, that there was something that was decorative in a positive sense about her work.

Helen Frankenthaler really developed a technical innovation, which was an enormous and original and identifiable way of working with paint, which was very, very thinned down, soaked and stained and poured onto raw canvas.

(soft jazz music) - Helen arrived in the spring of 1951 for her first visit to the Pollock household.

Whatever its genesis, by the end of of her stay, Helen would be transformed as an artist.

There was something fascinating about seeing his actual studio, the stillness in which such chaos was produced.

The cans of paint, rags, cigarette butts, and sand scattered around the room.

The smell of solvents and oil, which, to a painter, are as evocative as the scents in a chocolatier's shop are for a child.

With streams of sunlight filtering through its cracked wooden siding, that humble barn was the scene of a revolution.

Soaking it all in, Helen realized something she had not understood when merely viewing Jackson's work on a gallery wall.

Pollock didn't paint with his hands or his wrists, or even his arms.

He painted with his whole body.

Helen saw the potential for her own work in this method.

She too wanted to engage her entire person in her paintings, not merely the delicate extremities that held a brush.

She did not want to paint on canvas, she wanted to paint in it.

- It was immediately influential on other artists of the times, some of whom could recognize that and some of whom were unwilling to credit a woman, fully, with the amazing technical innovation.

- The so-called Color Field artists, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, would not have careers without Helen Frankenthaler.

(slow jazz music) - "No artistic advance is ever without precedent.

"Even the most rebellious among New York's avant-garde "acknowledged they were indebted "to the artists who proceeded them.

"But faced with an innovation "that alters the direction of art, "a lively, sometimes acrimonious debate can erupt "over whether the person who made it "was really the first to have been so bold.

"The debate over who dripped first "lasted decades after Pollock's death.

"In Helen's case, "the question debated among painters themselves "and then by generations of scholars "was an equally silly one: "Who made the first stain?"

"Ninth Street Women" by Mary Gabriel.

(casual jazz music) (melancholy piano music) - She had a very privileged childhood, but a very abusive childhood.

(gentle piano music) And she was so conflicted.

And yet her paintings were absolutely luminous.

Her mother was a poet.

And as a young girl, Joan had to choose between becoming a painter to please her father and becoming a poet like her mother.

And she chose painting to please this man she could never please.

But when she became an adult, her paintings were poems, so she merged both of those sides of her.

- Joan Mitchell, unlike some of the other women artists, and many, many black artists, Latino artists, Asian American artists, unlike many of these other marginalized artists, she actually not only was recognized by her fellow artists from early on, but had a career almost from the very beginning and was showing in galleries and her work was being acquired by museums.

- Joan was critically important because she was the first woman painter to really be taken seriously from the start, from the moment she started painting, as a force to be reckoned with.

- Mitchell's painting is rooted in landscape, but it reaches far beyond that.

She used the phrase, "the feeling of a landscape" to describe what she was after.

(upbeat jazz music) Like many painters educated in the early decades of the 20th century, part of one's education, in a way, was you were expected to go to France if you were thinking about modern art, modern painting.

She had this foot on both sides of the Atlantic for about four years, until she finally committed to living in France full time.

There are letters that she wrote to friends where she says, "It's an easier life as a painter, "a more dignified life as a painter here "than it is in New York."

And I think it was also less heated competition, in a way.

She could focus.

She could follow her own ideas without worrying so much about what everyone else was going to think or what the critics were going to say.

It gave her a freedom.

(upbeat jazz music) And what she produced was a miracle on canvas.

(double bass music) - One of my most favorite paintings, which is currently in the Jewish Museum, is Lee Krasner's self portrait of her painting herself, her looking directly at the viewer, but her canvas is, you can see it on the right side of the composition.

You don't know exactly what she's painting, but it's such an arresting portrait.

- Lee was a foundational force well before Pollock ever came on the scene, as a leader, as an artist, as one of the best eyes in the country for painting.

As an organizer, in the '30s when artists were political activists as well, Lee was actually a leader of those demonstrations.

- She quite knowingly and willingly sacrificed her career in order to further her husband's health and his career as well.

She was a very outspoken advocate for Pollock's work throughout his entire life, but especially early on.

- There was a moment when Lee took Pollock, this raw Pollock, and started molding him and guiding him, in a way.

His friends noticed the change in him and they said they were shocked that he listened to Lee the way he did, that he let her into his studio, talk to him about his paintings in a way that no one else had.

- I think the most important aspect of her relationship with Pollock was her strong belief in him, that she had a certain instinct about his genius, and that she was the person who was going to be able to encourage and cultivate it, that her role as his wife was really as a colleague, almost, more than just as a lover and a caretaker.

- They were married for 11 years.

And during that time, Lee held his hand, basically, through extremely difficult moments due to his drinking and self destructive tendencies and just his paranoia and his mania.

He was a very disturbed individual.

Lee held on; she said it was like holding a comet by the tail.

She held on to try to preserve this artist Jackson Pollock, not as she would because she was a 1950s wife and that was her role, to take care of the man while he worked.

It's because she thought her job was to protect this artist, Jackson Pollock, who she felt was the most important artist the United States had ever produced.

- But that doesn't in any way, minimize the importance of her own work, especially in the late 1940s.

Those so-called "Little Image" paintings are as important as anything any American artist made in the late 1940s, but somehow she, probably based on her biography of being devoted to her husband, has been left out of a lot of those early histories.

That is really a disgrace in terms of the importance of that first generation figure.

- By 1956, their marriage was crumbling and Lee couldn't handle it anymore.

She went to Europe where she spent some time with Helen and hung around with some of her old friends from the early days in New York.

She was gone for only one month.

Pollock didn't even last the month.

By the end of it, he was dead.

- One of the most disturbing paintings she ever did is now known as "Prophecy".

It's the painting that was on her easel in the upstairs bedroom studio when Pollock was killed.

She and he had planned to go to Europe, but Jackson began to have an affair with a much younger woman and Lee decided to take the trip on her own.

And after she left, Jackson moved the girlfriend into the house to live with him.

And the painting that was on her easel is a bloated figure with a head wound and an evil eye up in the corner.

She came back from Europe and had to face this painting of what many people have interpreted as the foreshadowing of Pollock's death.

Because he had been drinking heavily, he was very bloated, he'd gained a lot of weight and he was killed by smashing his head against a tree.

So this was clearly a signal moment in her development as an artist and also as now the widow and administrator of Pollock's estate.

The year after his death, when Lee was his executor and the manager of his estate, the most that had ever been paid for one of his paintings was $8,000.

The Metropolitan Museum paid $30,000 for "Autumn Rhythm".

It had been offered for $8,000 to the Modern and they had turned it down.

There was a kind of shock in the art world.

"My God, they paid $30,000 for this thing," and it was attributed to Lee's acumen and her bargaining power that she could have said, "You need to have it, and there will be no more like this."

After Jackson died, Lee moved into this barn studio.

It's 21 feet square, roughly, and much larger than the upstairs room that she was working in so she was able to really spread out.

What I find fascinating about the aftermath of Pollock's death is that there was a kind of freedom now.

As grieving as she was, as devastated as she was by Pollock's death, she was liberated, in a sense, and I think that's what came out.

Then her mother died and that's when the grief poured out into her canvases.

"The Eye is the First Circle" is one of the largest paintings she ever painted and it shows the exuberant gestures that she was able to create, and there's a kind of darkness to the emotional undertones of the work as well.

But it was an expression of the grief at her mother's death and then I think the residual grief at Jackson's death.

For me, that is the definition of abstract expressionism.

(upbeat jazz music) (double bass music) - By the late '60s, a critic by the name of Irving Sandler was already at work on what would become the major volume, "The Triumph of American Painting".

And what you start to notice is the women artists are entirely absent.

How does that work for a woman artist or a gender-nonconforming artist or someone who doesn't match that, again, rather strict and rather narrow definition of what abstract expressionism was?

The idea that a act of putting paint down on canvas, it was a heroic act in many respects, believing that painting a itself was a heroic practice.

- In about the mid-'50s, a discussion began among critics.

One school was the Clement Greenberg school.

He became the kind of the voice of this theoretical tract that removed people and history and everything but the marks on a canvas from the conversation.

The other school was the Harold Rosenberg school.

He said in 1958, "Unless people know, and unless they're made aware "of where these paintings arose from, historically, "and who these artists were who made it, "it's not gonna have any meaning for them."

And so, Clem's school won, until now.

We're starting to reevaluate what history means for art, the world in which artists work and how that impacts them.

(drum-heavy music) - I was in New York and I happened upon an exhibition at the Jewish Museum called "Action Abstraction".

And it was a fantastic show, was centered around the critics Rosenberg and Greenberg.

But there was one section where I saw a bunch of artists I'd never heard of.

Mostly, they were either women or men of color.

So on the plane ride home, I kept thinking about this show and realizing how many women that were in this exhibition that I didn't know.

Of course, we always know the four or five that are well known.

So on the plane ride home, I kept thinking about putting on an exhibition of women of abstract expressionism.

And of course I kept thinking, "Someone must have done this," but as it turned out, no one had done it, so that was the impetus for this exhibition.

- Sometimes the stars just align and having the "Women of Abstract Expressionism" show at the Denver Art Museum, followed so closely by Mary Gabriel's wonderful book, just brought the female artists into focus in a way that they had not been before.

(upbeat jazz music) - For me, in a way, the Denver show was the women's Ninth Street show.

I think of it as the Big Bang for women abstract expressionists, and also actually just for women artists to kind of reorient the art world and the greater society to the idea that there were women working, that their work was significant, and that they were significant.

- I researched with my team over 50 artists to figure out who really belonged in the show and then, of course, who should wind up in the catalog.

It was very difficult to bring this exhibition down to 12 artists.

(woman scatting) - The fun part of this show was to show artists that are more well known like Joan Mitchell or Helen Frankenthaler, and, at the same time, to explore some artists and to put them into the role that they deserve in the mid century's, second half of the 20th century.

It's a shame that they were overlooked so far and that it's really long due to get to know them.

(woman scatting) - People talk about the New York school.

I try not to use that term, because in fact, there was a whole group of artists also working on the West Coast during the 1950s, and these, of course, are the Bay Area artists that are included in our exhibition.

- I would say that as far as the San Francisco artists, they were almost, I mean, not almost, I mean, very few of them were known, are described in the major literature.

So they've been left out of the literature, and that includes Deborah Remington and Sonia Gechtoff.

Jay DeFeo has become a sort of national icon now.

The artists in San Francisco did have advantages, if the advantage is of obscurity for the lack of an art market.

One thing that they also had was they had tremendous institutional support, and that was different from the situation in New York.

- In addition to the California School of Fine Arts, this museum, which was known as the San Francisco Museum of Art, at the time, was led by a powerhouse woman named Grace McCann Morley.

She provided both kind of an educational base for the museum visitors in the Bay Area, but also a really strong sense of support and connections for the artists who were working here in the Bay Area.

- There's an absolutely marvelous picture of Deborah Remington and she's facing off against a row of men, the other co-founders of The 6.

I don't think you would ever see that photograph come out of the New York school.

You know, obviously she's in charge, she's a strong, very strong personality.

And in fact, supposedly she coined the name of the gallery, and even conceived of it.

- I'm happy that this exhibition got so much recognition.

And in my mind, someday, the women and the men will be shown equally, side by side, without any distinction.

- It was undeniable.

Here was this group of women who had been written out of the abstract expressionist story, largely because it became the story of men.

And yet here they were; their work was magnificent, it was bold, it was large, and they were a force to be reckoned with.

And so that was the first time, I think, art audiences really got a look of them.

(casual jazz music) - Denver Art Museum was a really important exhibition because it was the first time where it wasn't just, "Okay, here's a female painter "next to her male counterpart."

It was a show that was just dedicated and focused on this group of women.

And I only wish it had traveled to every city in the United States and the world.

(lively jazz music) - Since the Denver show, there have been a series of exhibitions and really important kind of recalibrating of these women's stories.

- We are here in our exhibition space in Southampton, in front of a mini retrospective of paintings by Grace Hartigan.

Part of the reason why we're doing this exhibition is to remind people about how important Grace Hartigan was to American art.

- At the Museum of Modern Art, today, we're actually very fortunate to have a collection that was built mainly, at the time, of works by most of these women, that are pretty outstanding with a 21st century attitude that has shed many of the old prejudices about who and what are more or less important.

And so we have the opportunity to put on view works by figures such as Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, that were waiting in our storage to get their moment in the light again; and many more women whose names aren't even as well known.

- The Met has made huge strides in altering what it offers to visitors, changing the way that curators interpret works of art on the wall and moving towards a much greater diversification in what we collect, what we show.

Alice Neel exhibition was astonishingly popular.

It was popular through word of mouth, and I think that the fact that a woman artist, who had been pretty much neglected for most of her life, had become this kind of crucible of relevance at a time when everyone needed this.

- We have a small but mighty collection of Mitchell paintings here at SF MoMA.

One of our aspirations for the Joan Mitchell exhibition was not just to kind of fit her into an existing story, but to give a full and nuanced complex account of her work, what she did, how she fit in and moved in the social circles, both in New York and in Paris, and in so doing to really expand how we think about painting entirely, that it's not the narrative we've been told.

- I think something else that's really, really exciting is that people are beginning to expand beyond this little group of New York painters in the '50s and to bring in people like Alma Thomas, who was working in Washington DC and shares a lot of interest with Joan Mitchell.

She's another master of color, another master of oil paint, another person who connects empathetically and sensitively to nature, but because she wasn't part of the social milieu of downtown New York, I think her work has not been considered, both on its own merits and in relationship to other kinds of abstract painting.

It's important that we reconstruct the diversity of downtown New York in the '50s and add the women, add the artists of color and see the other artists who are working in a related way, including around the world.

(upbeat music) - With this new way of dealing with art history, I noticed that there were so much women artists that were not visible in this history and that they were bringing something specific, a sort of expanded version of abstraction that goes beyond painting, but it includes the relationship to the body through dance.

So I tried to rewrite the history of abstraction and to show how much women were co-creators of this history.

(cymbals hissing) - At 9.5 million, at 10 million.

- Bid.

- $9 million now, against all of you here.

550,000, Barrett, coming in?

- Suddenly, the women artists who were so much a part of this scene, so crucial, so instrumental to the landscape of American art, are starting to achieve higher prices.

People started to pay attention and people started to question if a Pollock can be worth $100 million, why is Lee Krasner worth not even $1 million?

None of this made any sense, and the market started to pay attention.

- It is for you, Max.

(bidders shouting over each other) 10,500,000.

(gavel bangs) - Sold, 550.

- By positioning female artists within our biggest sales to our top collectors, both at auction and privately, we are telling the market, "This is a genre that you have to pay attention to.

"This is an artist that matters and is important "and is going to be in the books forever."

(auctioneers speaking over each other) - 480, 500, sold!

- 6 million.

- For the past decade, as I've been telling people to pay attention to the work of female artists, to buy Lee Krasner, and Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell, it's funny now see them, 10 years later, kicking themselves, as those prices have really skyrocketed, and also as the scarcity of real quality works continues to diminish.

I mean, what's gonna happen is the best examples are going to be picked up by collectors, they're going to be put into museums, and they're not going to be available anymore.

We're already seeing it start to happen.

So I don't wanna say, "I told you so", but, I told you so.

- Sold by 50.

- You have to have time to feel sorry for yourself if you're going to be a good abstract expressionist.

I think I always considered that a waste.

- Like all movements, there's always a young artist nipping at your heels and certainly, by the mid-'50s, people like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, in New York and elsewhere, were starting to find abstract expressionism to be something of a cliche.

The idea that so much was put into the importance of a single mark.

So it was these younger artists who started to chip away at that, and, of course, invented their own new way of thinking.

And so the movement's glory years were probably roughly 1945 to about 1960, even though many artists' careers, Joan Mitchell, Clyfford Still, Willem De Kooning, extends into the 1990s and beyond.

(upbeat contemporary jazz music) - I think we're were living through a great moment of historical reconsideration, again, not just for women, but for African American, Asian American, Latino artists.

There's so much work to be done, so many histories that haven't been recognized.

- The history of art as it is being told right now, and looking backwards, too, in our reassessment of how art history has been created, it is a much broader, much more exciting, much more nuanced collection of stories that can actually reveal to us, not just the great breadth and scope of what humanity is able to do, but also from which we truly learn.

- We're all startlingly the same, and that's a terrific thing.

And the independent, individual, human way of thinking and feeling and being was something that a lot of these great women that this book was written about were doing at a time when I was considered to be almost sacrilegious and antisocial, not to be at check, but to be more than that.

And the terrific thing about them was that they were doing that for no reason other than somehow all of them felt worthy and they knew their value.

- And as I was writing my book, I really came to the conclusion that art functions in society the way religion does, that both are necessary to nourish the collective soul.

And that both exist, both require an individual to go deep inside of themselves to find answers to profound questions, and also to look well beyond themselves for answers.

We do it today in this kind of mad fast-paced world where nothing makes sense, there is no truth.

Where do you look for answers?

You have to go where they went, where religion goes, which is deep inside and well beyond us.

(gentle music) (upbeat music)