GEORGIA O'KEEFFE AT THE TATE MODERN
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE at the TATE MODERN
The new major retrospective of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) at the Tate Modern follows a conventional re-telling of the narrative of the artist’s life. The early work, development and maturity, fame, the final years and the visionary final statements. The chronological narrative begins with the artist working in black and white, charcoal and pencil, in order to develop an abstract style and a truly American form of Modernism.
Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, a northerner and daughter of Irish and Dutch-Hungarian parents. O’Keeffe turned to the landscape to create a specifically American form of Modernism distinct from the European form and used traditional American icons such as the apple, the prairie and flowers, symbols of the American wilderness and its fecundity. She did not turn to abstraction before encountering and documenting the natural world. O’Keeffe loved to walk in the countryside and collected old dried bones but also flowers and leaves to use as subjects for her art.
This exhibition at the Tate Modern begins with O’Keeffe’s first abstract work then her early development in works such as Red and Orange Streak (1919) and Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow (1923). In these works, O’Keeffe seems to want to be an abstract artist before she has really begun discovering the American wilderness but they are legitimate attempts to break away from representational art. O’Keeffe began her art career as an art teacher in Virginia and Texas but then moved to New York in 1918 in order to further her career. Her work becomes increasingly abstract at this point and she changes medium, from watercolours to oil. At this point she also met the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) who hung her first works at his gallery ‘291’ in New York in 1916. She was later to become Stieglitz’s subject and eventually married him.
The critical response to these works emphasized the essentially feminine qualities of her work and possible erotic content which Stieglitz promoted by introducing psychoanalytic interpretations of her paintings. O’Keeffe rejected her critics and decried attempts to depict her as a feminist artist or at least sought to distance herself from these.
The artists and intellectuals who gathered around O’Keeffe and Stieglitz celebrated the ‘Progressive Era’ of optimistic cultural nationalism that followed WW1. In summary this was the era when artists and writers felt that they were beginning to break away from the old society that existed before the war. Stieglitz’s photographs which include nude and clothed portraits of Georgia, as well as the generic photographs of clouds for which is better known. Stieglitz photographed their entire circle and there are tributes to the couples from authors as diverse as D.H.Lawrence and Lewis Mumford.
At this time O’Keeffe began painting the New York cityscape in works such as New York Street with Moon (1925). Her passion for abstraction perhaps reaches the limits of her energies and abilities because society and culture was about to change direction in a new, radical direction. Her enthusiasm for the city faded after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression. She made her first painting of New York in 1925 but by 1929 she had left the city for New Mexico.
The exhibition disrupts the chronological and biographical timeline to consider O’Keeffe’s work at Lake George, coastal Maine and Canada contrasting with her work in New York and, later, in the Southwest, and her paintings of flowers and still lives. Her Lake George paintings introduce a warmer, softer palette of greens, reds and purples and new subject matter like apples and autumn leaves. Images of fruition and decay are beginning to form part of O’Keeffe’s work.
O’Keeffe’s flowers and still lives form the central focus of her life’s work. They were completed from the 1920s to the 1950s onwards. These works emphasize realism over abstraction, a move prompted by O’Keeffe’s cool responses to feminist interpretations of her paintings as sexual or bodily representations, for example her work Oriental Poppies (1937). O’Keeffe is tending to move away from her Modernist explorations towards a personal, intimate grasp of landscape and the people who inhabit it.
In 1929 O’Keeffe made her first journey to New Mexico which also happens to be the poorest state. (In fact, even today, many people from the New Mexico return to Europe in order to access benefits and welfare.) O’Keeffe went to Taos pueblo at the invitation of a friend, Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962), an art critic, writer and socialite who also happened to be married to Tony Luhan, a native American. It was here that she was to meet the photographer Ansel Adams (1902-1984). Another guest of Luhan had been D.H.Lawrence and his wife Frieda but Lawrence’s relationship with Luhan was predictably rather difficult. O’Keeffe made repeated visits to Taos or Alcalde over the next few years, painting the adobe or mud hut buildings in Taos, one of the oldest continuously occupied settlements in the New World having been first established 1000AD – 1450 AD. Her subject is also the landscape and the typical churches and crosses that signify the older Spanish colonial influences and the native American influences too. One of her most notable paintings from this period is Black Cross with Stars and Blue (1929) which sums up the new influences and directions of O’Keeffe’s art. O’Keeffe also collected bones and skulls during her walks across the New Mexico landscape. She made many paintings of these including From the Faraway, Nearby (1937). They seem to sum up the era of the dust bowl and the Great Depression, the aridity, desolation and despair that most felt. To O’Keeffe these images were ‘the Great American Thing’ that writers and painters sought.
O’Keeffe began living in an adobe dwelling at Ghost Ranch from 1934 onwards. Ghost Ranch was a so-called ‘dude ranch’ where wealthy tourists from the east would come to gain a taste of the ‘wild west’. It might be conjectured that Ghost Ranch was safer for O’Keeffe but it may be that she also wished to exploit wealthy clients and also wished to exploit her locale for commercial images of quaint wild west antiquities to be sold to clients on the gentrified east coast. Eventually she decided to distance herself a bit from the local community and we know that she did not want to marry a native American (even though her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan did) or live in a pueblo like Taos. In fact, Taos already had a sizeable artistic community who gathered there for the same artistic or putative commercial interests that Georgia had and because it was probably very cheap.
O’Keeffe’s paintings certainly capture the landscape and in some paintings such as Red and Yellow Cliffs (1940) she does away with the horizon line to create abstract fissures and geological scars harrowing the landscape. She also painted, what she called, the black place and the white place representing grey white cliffs and the black place some 150 miles east of Ghost Ranch. O’Keeffe turns to the landscape (as the Ulster poet John Hewitt once said) because men disappointed her.
O’Keefe worked in series through the 1940s and 1950s and especially after Stieglitz’s death in 1946. Her new preoccupations were Abiquiu patios, pelvis bones and cottonwood trees. O’Keeffe’s work was now increasingly prominent with major solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. O’Keeffe’s visual eye through the aperture of the bone to look afresh at the sky or a landscape. The door of her second New Mexico home becomes a visual gateway to the dialogue between naturalism or abstraction that summarises her work and to her new series of cottonwood trees that are abundant with seeming conventionality. Yet they also appear starkly abstract and part of the specifically American Modernism which she yearned to create.
‘When I started painting the pelvis bones I was most interested in the holes in the bones – what I saw through them – particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky. They were most beautiful against the Blue – that Blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.’
O’Keeffe also began painting ‘Kachinas’ – figures of beings carved in wood or modelled in clay and painted. Was O’Keeffe celebrating indigenous culture or embarking on a search for further antiquities for sale in the east? Whichever O’Keeffe is viewing native culture through the eyes of the occupier of native territories and, for that reason, they retain a kitsch quality. Her work Kachina (1934) explores this duality of vision and purpose.
O’Keeffe’s final paintings of the 1950s and 1960s reflect her increasing celebrity as she starts flying around the world. Also, she is now being referenced in poems and songs, by pop stars like Patti Smith, as an icon of modernity and art progress. O’Keeffe’s paintings of this period are of rivers glimpsed distantly from an aeroplane or cloudscapes that take on the now dominant aesthetic of colour field painting in American art.
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