Art Appreciation February 2015
AMERICAN ART - GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986) by Bob Wallace
Georgia O'Keeffe had a very long life – 98 years. A smattering of her pictures over time shows only a little of her changing subjects and styles. She was unmistakeable and original and takes some understanding to appreciate.
She was an influential painter of 20C American art
The 1932 offering shown above, "Jimson Weed, White Flower No. 1," depicts one of O'Keeffe's favourite subjects: a magnified flower.
It was sold by Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe California for $44.4 Million – record for women’s art.
To her, the delicate blooms stood as some of the most overlooked pieces of naturally occurring beauty, objects that the bustling contemporary world ignored. She made it her mission to highlight their complex structures, explaining: “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world."
O'Keeffe was born 1887, the 2nd of 7 children of successful farmer in Wisconsin where she developed her characteristic love of rural landscape and nature and dramatic weather.
She was independent and self-sufficient – she learnt to cook and sew. Her mother was keen to get the girls a good education. She became a fighter for women’s suffrage and developed a love of music, reading and art.
Early No 2 1915 Charcoal on paper 61 x 43 cm The Menil Collection, Houston
O'Keeffe developed a talent in art from her early years. The family moved to West Virginia and she attended art schools in Chicago, she was the first woman in a class of 29. She produced a number of abstract drawings in charcoal during this period. However, she had to earn her living as father’s business failed and became a commercial artist teacher and head of Art School in Texas. Her desire though, was to be a full time artist.
Light Coming on the Plains No III 1917 Oil on Canvas 30 x 23 cm, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Her first one-woman exhibition, and her career was launched. The works in it arose from the Texas landscape (where she was teaching at an art school) horizon, sun, clouds and a sense of sparseness and extreme luminosity. Light coming on the Plains arouses the now familiar sense of the American sublime within its solemn arch of green-blue sky, distinguished from the earth by the thinnest of unpainted horizon lines: it conveys the anticipation one feels before dawn, waiting for the sun’s rim, and suggests a space both infinite and womblike.
ROBERT HUGHES
Edward Steichen
Alfred Stieglitz at “291” Photograph 1915
Friend Sent some of her pictures to ALFRED STIEGLITZ the photographer and art dealer who did more than anyone to bring the works of the European avant-garde to American notice. His 291 gallery was the first in America to hold exhibitions of Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Douanier
Rousseau etc. He championed American artists and put Georgia O'Keeffe's work on show. They met in 1915 and were later married. Stieglitz took many photographs of Georgia.
Blue and Green Music 1919 Oil on canvas 58 x 48 cm Art Institute of Chicago
She began experimenting in oil and some of her paintings were inspired by her love of music and her intense feelings about nature. As the artist Charles Demuth put it, “Each colour regains the fun
it must have felt within itself on forming the first rainbow”
In paintings such as Blue and Green music 1919 with its ripples, blue black rays, and green-white flame shapes (which could also be highly abstracted plants bending in the wind, but are probably best imagined as synesthetic forms representing musical chords) one heard America singing – in O’Keeffe’s distinctive voice. ROBERT HUGHES
Lake George 1922 Oil on canvas 58 x 48 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
PRECISIONISTS
Charles Demuth (1883-1935)
Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) Sail in Two Movements 1919 Skyscrapers 1922
Tempera, Watercolour and pencil on board Oil on canvas
George Ault (1891-1948) Bright Light at Russell’s Corners 1946
Oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum Washington DC
Precisionism was an American art movement between 1915 – 1920s. Artists focussed on urban and industrial subjects. Precisionists used very smooth and precise techniques – clear, sharply defined, flattened images with dramatic shafts of light and unusual view points. The art
emphasised geometric lines and shapes and did not include people. It was not a formal group although they sometimes exhibited together, Georgia among them.
Georgia O'Keeffe moved to apartment at top of new building in New York and the view inspired her.
Radiator Building – Night, New York 1927 Oil on canvas 130 x 76 cm Fisk University Galleries, Nashville,Tennessee
The starting point for many of her paintings at this time was view from the widow of high rise apartments from which she would watch seething lights of evening traffic -brilliantly lit windows, dazzling headlights, advertisements traffic lights and neon signs windows multiple shades of grey.
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New York. Night 1929 Oil on canvas 102 x 48 cm
University of Nebraska Art Galleries
Photographic perspectives and pictorial components became creative design elements which O'Keeffe used to convey her romantic feelings about New York. She used birds eye perspective and mixing with photographers she became familiar with perspective distortions produced by camera angles. The skyscrapers in her pictures were subject to same foreshortening as a camera pointed upwards. Buildings are monuments were symbols of power and the progress of
City Night 1926 Oil on canvas 122 x 76 cm MInneapoli s Institute of Arts
Over 8 years O'Keeffe painted almost 200 flower pictures Many were over a metre high. She painted common flowers such as poppies and rarer specimens such as red canna lilies. She shows plants close up, in sharp focus with cropped edges. She painted on canvas with a very fine weave and coated it with a special primer to make the surface extremely smooth.
Red Canna 1924 Oil on canvas mounted on masonite 91 x 76 cm University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson
She subtly blended on colour with the next making sure that the brush strokes were invisible. She simplified the forms of the flowers but carefully suggested their texture – waxy, velvety or soft The crisp lines of the petals in Red Canna and stronger tone along the edge of a petal helps to define the shape. It contrasts with a pale or different colour on the next petal.
Oriental Poppies 1928 Oil on canvas 76 x 102 cm Weissman Art Gallery University of Minnesota
White Iris 1926 Oil on canvas 61 x 51 cm New York Collection Emily Fisher Landau
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Jack-in-the-pulpit IV 1930 Oil on canvas mounted on masonite 101 x 76 cm Washington Alfred Sieglitz Collection
In the social climate of America in the twenties and of a New York enamoured of the latest
theories of Sigmund Freud, O’Keeffe’s outsize flowers and enlarged details of plant antatomy were attributed with erotic implications. O’Keeffe dismissed these interpretations out of hand “Well – I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flowers you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write and think about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t."
Black Iris III 1926 Oil on canvas 91 x 76 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Alfred Sieglitz Collection
Slightly Open Clam shell 1926 Pastel on white ground on pasteboard 18 ½ x 13 inches, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Harford Connecticut
Much ink has been spilled on the topic of whether O’Keeffe ever set out to use specific genital images; she herself indignantly denied it, and especially refused to countenance any sexual
interpretation of the large clos-ups of flowers she painted in the twenties – the blossoms seen as if from the eye line, and body size of a questing bee. This must have been an overreaction to what O’Keefe felt was prurient criticism of her work. To deny the sexuality of a painting such as Black Iris III 1926 is absurd; it amounts to not seeing the work. O’Keeffe was, after all, the collaborator in Stieglitz’s photographs of her, the most daring and complete hymn to the erotic ever created by a photographer O’Keefe’s denials can only have been a way of fending off the prurience of those philistines – which meant in guilt-crippled America, most Americans – who could make no distinction between the erotic and the pornographic. To Stieglitz and those closest to him, Eros was the breath of existence, the precondition of aesthetic insight: and O’Keeffe was closest to him of all. ROBERT HUGHES
The D H Lawrence Pine Tree Oil on canvas 79 x 99 cm 1929 Wadsworth Atheneum Harford Connecticut
In Summer 1929 she went to New Mexico to find new inspiration and was overwhelmed by the vast scale of the dry unspoiled landscape, the clear light and the extraordinary colours of the bare rounded mountains . She said “It makes me feel like flying.” She bought a house there and visited
it almost every summer for the next 20 years . One of the first pictures O’Keeffe painted was based on a pine tree in the courtyard of a house
owned by D H Lawrence under which he used to write. The unusual angle is because she painted the view lying underneath on a carpenter’s bench.
She painted a series of dramatic landscape views using strong flat contrasts of light and dark. At first she painted these bare grey hills from a distance away and included ground and sky. Later
she quite precisely depicted the folds and clefts of the rugged hillside .
Grey Hills Oil on canvas 76 x 91 cm 1942 Indianapolis Institute of Art, Indiana
She used the car as a makeshift studio, sitting in the back and swivelling the front seat so it could support a canvas. The car also sheltered her from the fierce sun, dusty wind and unexpected bursts of rain.
After her first few trips to New Mexico she shipped back to New York a barrel of sun bleached bones from the desert. She collected skulls of horses, cow, elks and rams as well as thigh bones and ribs. For O’Keeffe these hard dry bones were a powerful symbol of the harsh barren but beautiful desert, She used the bones as a motif in her pictures for many years and decorated her homes with them.
Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock – Hills 1935 Oil on canvas 76 x 91 cm Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York
Here the huge ram’s head takes pride of place in the centre, hovering in mid-air. The horns reach almost to the top corners of the canvas, stretching across the hills of the Rio Grande Valley where the ram might once have grazed tips of its long twisting pictures the shapes are mainly
geometrical leaving very little detail texture. "Many of her bone paintings….look as sentimental as
kitsch realism" ROBERT HUGHES
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Stieglitz died in 1946 and in 1949 she moved house. "I bought this place because it had a door in the patio – I had no peace until I bought the house".
The house was red and pink and called Abiquiu (AH-bi-kyoo).
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Patio with Clouds 1956 Oil on canvas 91 x 76 cm Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin
In 1953 when she was 60 years old she made her first journey by plane. For the next 30 years she travelled all over the world – to Europe, Latin America, the Far east North Africa and the
It was Green and Blue 1960 Oil on canvas 76 x 102 cm Whitney Museum of Art, New York However O’Keeffe painted scarcely any pictures of the particular places she visited. Instead she awe fascinated seeing how different the world looked from the great height of an aeroplane – he simplified patterns and shapes, the contrasting colours of rivers, roads and fields. .
Ladder to the Moon 1958 Oil on canvas Whitney Museum of Art, New York
The painting shows a handmade wooden ladder suspended in the turquoise sky. In the background are the pitch black Pedernal Mountains and a pearl coloured half-moon. Some
interpret the painting as a religious work. In Pueblo culture the ladder is used to symbolize the link between the Pueblos and cosmic forces. The fact that the ladder is pointed up in the sky may represent the link between nature and the cosmos. In her biography of O'Keeffe, Roxanna Robinson describes this work as somewhat of a self-portrait of the artist in her later years, highlighting the transitory nature of the stage of life she was at when she painted it. She writes, "The images are all of transition: the ladder itself implies passage from one level to another; the moon is cut neatly in half by the bold slicing light, halfway between full and new; and the evening sky is in flux, still pale along the line of the horizon, shading into deep azure night at the top of the canvas. ”
Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987 )
Georgia O'Keeffe and Juan Hamilton 1970s Polaroid
A young potter appeared at the ranch house in 1973 looking for work. She hired him for a few odd jobs and soon employed him full-time He became her closest confident, companion and business manager until her death. Hamilton taught O’Keefe to work in clay and with assistance she
produced clay pots and a series of watercolour, wrote a book about her art and allowed a film to be made about her in 1977.
Dam Brudnik Georgia O’Keeffe at the Ghost Ranch with Pots by Jun Hamilton 1975
Silver print Aged 85 she suffered from Macular degeneration which led to the loss of central vision leaving only peripheral vision She stopped oil painting without assistance but continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984 (aged 97). She became increasingly frail in her 90s and died in 1986 aged 98. She left all her estate to Hamilton but it was contested. Her Asserts ended up at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum established in santé Fe in 1997 to perpetuate her artistic legacy. Her home and studio in Abiquiu designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998.
