Notes on Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Colour and Black and White Outfits
Chances are that whatever you are doing professionally or whatever your hobbies are, you have come across Georgia O’Keeffe’s work (or a reference to them) at least once in your life. Best known for her paintings of flowers (I am not going to talk about how botanic they really are), skulls and deserts, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born on the 15th of November 1887, in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, USA. Born to second-generation Irish, Hungarian (aristocratic) and Dutch immigrants, she became one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and an icon of American Modernism.
O’Keeffe’s work was first exhibited in 1916 by Alfred Stieglitz (whom she would later marry) at 291, his Manhattan gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York City, number 291, originally called Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. The Photo-Secession group’s name was inspired by the Secession Movement in Vienna and the members’s view of photography. Contrary to the traditional approach at the time, Stieglitz and his acolytes (for lack of a better word) regarded it as a medium for artistic expression — a fine art rather than a documentation tool.
In 1916, a friend of O’Keeffe’s gave some of her charcoal drawings to Stieglitz, who exposed them at the gallery without asking for the artist’s approval.
What sparked this piece was an article I read a few months ago about how Georgia O’Keeffe, from an early age “used style to set herself apart.” Her black and white uniform-like outfits are almost as recognisable as her enlarged flowers. She once explained that her preference was rather practical than aesthetical, saying that if she started picking out colours for dresses, she would have no time for painting.
A Life and a Canadian Barn
In the preface of her extensive biography, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, commissioned by Harper & Row right after the artist’s death in 1986, Roxana Robinson, the author, talks about the difficulty and her own reluctance to write about O’Keeffe: the artist’s inaccessibility and the fact that she held the copyright to her paintings which could not be reproduced without her approval. Lastly, Robinson explains that until the 60s, O’Keeffe was snubbed by the critics; her work was simply too easy to like. The apparent accessibility of her paintings (the flowers smelling like sentimentalism) was inversely proportional to the inaccessibility of the painter, who was refusing interviews and was living in a remote New Mexico village. Robinson also tells the story of meeting O’Keeffe in the ’70s, when the former was working at Sotheby’s in New York in the American Paintings Department. The encounter took place over Canadian Barns, painted in the 1930s (a painting that I could not find online).
This is not a piece about how I discovered the depths of O’Keeffe’s work and how its beauty and apparent accessibility are misleading and misunderstood. Enough ink has been spilt on this, and I am far from anything resembling the expertise needed for this exercise. Quite on the contrary, my infatuation with O’Keeffe’s paintings feels almost atavistic: they are beautiful, and I love looking at them. Also, I find it difficult, and I rarely succeed in separating the art from the artist (it was nice while it lasted, Woody Allen! Say hi to Roman Polanski for me). In this case, I find Georgia O’Keeffe’s personality (volatile outbursts — one described in Robinson’s book, towards her sister, Catherine, when the latter started painting, and rivalry with her sisters included) fascinating, and I will never see O’Keeffe other than as a feminist icon (a conviction cemented by Roxana Robinson’s book).
A Life also captures in great detail O’Keeffe’s loving but troubled relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. The painter moved to New York in 1918 (from Texas, where she was teaching art) with Steiglitz (married at the time), with whom she started a relationship. The two married in 1924. In 1918, he created a solo show of her early work in charcoal drawings and watercolours (e.g., №3 — Special, 1915 and Light Coming on the Plains No. II, 1917) and started the series of portraits of her, counting five hundred photographs. Stieglitz was a great promoter of her work and instrumental in her success. He was also notoriously unfaithful, and the reason why she had multiple depressive episodes. Stieglitz had a long-term extra-marital affair with Dorothy Norman, who was 41 years younger than him and became his muse. This was a hard blow for O’Keeffe, who in 1932 was invited to create a mural for the Radio City Music Hall — Stieglitz expressly forbade it, but O’Keeffe accepted nonetheless. However, the work was never finished. Facing her husband’s betrayal and what she perceived to be a setback in her career, O’Keeffe was diagnosed with psychoneurosis and admitted to Doctors Hospital in NYC.
As Robinson explains, O’Keeffe had a long enough life to see herself resurrected as an artist (and turned into a pop culture icon). From her early charcoal drawing and watercolour paintings associated with the birth of American Modernism to the Precisionism of the 1920s -the simplified clear-lined industrial forms of the New York cityscapes to her abstract and New Mexico years, she was a very prolific artist who produced over two thousand works. In 1919, she started the first of the series of oil on canvas magnified flowers (Red Canna, 1919), often interpreted as expressions of female sexuality, which became synonymous with her name. O’Keeffe painted her surroundings and her natural environments — at Lake George, she painted the lake, barns, and East Coast falls; when she was in New Mexico, she painted crosses, bones, bleached skulls (I’m a sucker for those), and adobe churches; when she travelled to Hawaii, she painted Waterfall — №1 — ʻĪao Valley — Maui, 1939 (among other works) and her paintings of New York are inherently urban, all strong geometric lines, skyscrapers and industrial urban landscape, capturing the birth of the skyline we all know. The majority — starting with New York Street with Moon, 1925 — are set against a night sky. Some exceptions that come to mind are 1929’s Pink Dish and Green Leaves (where one might argue that the focus is not the city) and the two paintings of the Shelton Hotel made in 1926. “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt”, she once said. The elongated stylised architectonic elements and the visible attraction towards urban modernity make the painting instantly recognisable.
My very subjective list of favourite O’Keeffeian New Yorks is: City Night, 1926, Radiator Building — Night, New York, 1927 and New York, Night, 1928–1929 (not necessarily in that order).
Between the Moon (or New Mexico) and New York City
Did I just paraphrase the nice, fluffy, romantic song from Arthur for no apparent reason? Yes, I did. O’Keeffe loved nature, and after she first visited New Mexico in 1929, the vast skies above the even vaster desert became a recurring theme in her painting. Later, she described the feeling she had after that first visit to Santa Fe: “I was always on my way back.” From her correspondence, she seemed to find New York increasingly claustrophobic. One episode captured by Robinson’s book is when she went to Maine to escape the city, saying it had too much winter (probably just the same amount that Maine had), too many people and “not enough sky”. When reading that passage, my mind didn’t go to her famous Sky Above Clouds series but to enormous desert night skies (not really present in her paintings).
My favourite sky paintings by O’Keeffe are Ladder to the Moon, 1958 — a wooden ladder hanging between a pearly half-moon and the Pedernal Mountains against a bright turquoise night sky reminding of Magritte’s paintings — and the very famous From the Faraway, Nearby, 1937.
The Feminist Rampage
In preparation for this article, I watched Georgia O’Keeffe, the 2009 biopic directed by Bob Balaban and featuring Joan Allen as O’Keeffe and Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz. Rather than a biopic, the movie felt like an account of her marriage. Little did I learn about O’Keeffe, the artist, and even less about O’Keeffe, the woman. The film seems constructed around Stieglitz’s multi-faceted personality (oh, the amount of self-control I am exercising not to write this in mocking SpongeBob!) and Georgia’s adoration for him. While it is certainly true that they loved each other and that Alfred Stieglitz was a giant in his own right and an incontestably strong force and catalyst in her life and career, the film portrays O’Keeffe almost exclusively through her marriage. Even her very famous quote: “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life — and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do”, is somehow disjointedly introduced into a scene that feels more about him than her. It is as if the film is purposely trying to contradict a scene that it features: during a fight, O’Keeffe tells Stieglitz that she was something before she met him and she will continue to be something long after. This was double-disappointing as the film is one of the few Georgia O’Keeffe biopics.
Alfred Stieglitz died in 1946, and in 1949, Georgia O’Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico — Abiquiu, where she spent her winters and springs, and Ghost Ranch, where she stayed during summers and falls.
In 1977, she received the Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford. In 1973, she met Juan Hamilton, 58 years younger than her, who became her assistant. The two started a close personal and professional relationship that would last until the artist’s death. According to Hamilton, the painter once said, “All the men artists can have young women, but people think it’s shocking that I might have a young man in my life.”
Geogia O’Keeffe died on the 6th of March 1986. She is celebrated as a pioneer of American Modernism and one of the most significant Modernist painters.
To read:
This article about Georgia O’Keeffe epistle-mentoring Yayoi Kusama and the mentor-mentee relationships in the world of women artists.
It also features Joni Mitchell (as a musician, mentoring Brandi Carlile), the woman about whose paintings I know nearly nothing (mental note for the next rabbit hole) but who will forever inspire my hairstyle and who wrote one of my favourite Christmas songs — it is already November, people, come on!
A portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe by Calvin Tomkins, published in 1974 in The New Yorker.
This article about the MoMA exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time by the art critic Jackson Arn, who believes that O’Keeffe “devoted the better part of her ninety-eight years to grand, sometimes grandiose oil paintings, despite the ample evidence that she was spectacular with charcoal and watercolor. A world-class sprinter chose to run marathons.” More on the same exhibition here.
This interview with Georgia O’Keeffe, published in 2014, part of a series bringing back some of Warhol’s conversations from the Interview archives.
This collaborative article in which five artists share their reflections on O’Keeffe.
The essay Georgia O’Keeffe by Joan Didion, originally published in The New York Review of Books and later included in her essay collection The White Album (1979).
To see:
The beautiful but bizarrely unsettling painting titled Star Gazing in Texas that O’Keeffe’s sister, Ida, painted in 1938.
The online collection of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
