THE PAINTER : GEORGIA O'KEEFE
The PAINTER: GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
By Joshua A. TRILIEGI / From The BUREAU Archives
Georgia O'Keeffe, as a person, was precocious, defiant, intelligent, unwavering and spirited. Throughout her education and early years as a painter, she produced an original abstractionist style that had preceded a group of New York painters of the male variety that has, to this day, remained wholly original, breathtakingly expansive and sexually charged in a way that empowers feminine energy and iconography. O'Keeffe rejected analysis of her works from start to finish, from her early years in New York, to her later years in The West, everyone seemed to get it wrong. So then, let us look again at the paintings and life of Ms. Georgia O'Keeffe and see if we can put this incredible body of work into a new and contemporary context with a fresh eye and revisionist look at this phenomenally bold American.
" ... Breathtakingly
Expansive and
Sexually Charged ... "
Georgia O'Keeffe is born in Wisconsin in 1887 to Irish - Hungarian parents. By the time her years equal her fingers, she discovers art. Early study of watercolors leads to college, art school in Chicago and the Arts Student League in New York City. She recalled, later in life, "I only remember two things that I painted in those years - a large bunch of purple lilacs and some red and yellow corn." Subjects and colors she would return to throughout her life. By her twentieth year, she is awarded prizes and still seems to reject the praise, due mostly to the fact that her art education seems to reward technique over originality. Adding, in those later reflections, "… I never did like school." While in New York, she and a group of fellow students visit the progressive Art Gallery, 291, eight years later, her own drawings will land in the hands of 291's founder, Alfred Stieglitz, who will become one of her greatest friends, confidants and legally, her husband. In the interim, Georgia O'Keeffe quits painting for four years straight, then, at the University of Virginia and later while studying for a teachers credentials at Columbia College, she falls under the tutelage of Arthur Dow and is set free to pursue something new and wholly original. "I decided to start anew - to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true, my own thinking. This was one of the best times in my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing - no one interested - no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown - no one to satisfy, but myself." This particular statement is extremely important to the core of her character, as it displays O'Keeffe's disdain for any particular reactions to the work, either casually, by fellow artists or formally, by the art critics. As a woman who was decades ahead of her contemporaries, in terms of abstraction in both form and color as well as feminine energy personified freely and independently in an iconic manner: O'Keeffe took a beating by the critics. Some of the blame often falls on Alfred Stieglitz and his in depth photographic series of Ms. O'Keeffe in all her natural beauty as a young woman. Unfortunately, the public discovered Georgia O'Keeffe as the muse of an older male rebel on the front lines of intellectual battles which included, photography as art, the importance of european abstraction and American art as a whole, before they had gotten to discover the original paintings and watercolors of O'Keeffe as Artist. The timing was off and Ms. O'Keeffe, although celebrated on a national level in art circles, was also widely dismissed through the lens of new psychological trends that included the great Freudian fraud which attempted to minimize the feminine energy that Georgia O'Keeffe's work so boldly personified. Once again, from the beginning of time and written history, the female is minimized by rhetoric & ideology through the powers that be, when all along, Georgia O'Keeffe is actually winning the game. From the modern perspective of 2015, it is time to liberate O'Keeffe's eroticism.
"Georgia O'Keeffe The Artist, was Seldom in Search of a Style ... "
O'Keeffe's journey into public notoriety had all started through a mutual friend in 1916 when Stieglitz famously receives a series of charcoal drawings by a young Miss O'Keeffe and immediately is smitten by the originality, the boldness and no doubt by the fact that the drawings are created by an American who is both young and female. He has seen nothing like it before and in a letter that is formally typed and mailed to O'Keeffe, he expresses his admiration. "What am I to say ? It is impossible for me to put into words what I saw and felt in your drawings. As a matter of fact I would not make any attempt to do so. I might give you what I received from them if you and I were to meet and talk about life. Possibly then, through such a conversation I might make you feel what your drawings gave me. I do want to tell you that they gave me great joy… If at all possible, I would like to show them." O'Keeffe would later describe the 291 gallery, "The things you saw at Stieglitz's place sent you off into the world, just like his conversations did… It was a place that helped you find your own road: It was the only place." Alfred Stieglitz and his artistic efforts had been on the verge of the vanguard since the early 1890s. In the beginning, through his own photography in New York City and later in Austria, Italy and Germany. His trips to Paris and his friendship with Edward Steichen had exposed him to the works of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and Rodin, all of whom would later be exhibited at 291 Gallery. Culturally speaking, there was a fight for the new and Stieglitz had taken the side of The Moderns, "The search for the truth is my obsession." he describes, "The camera fascinated me and photography became my life." While many people enjoyed the new found art of the photograph, there were purists, such as Baudelaire, who hated photography. Although, at the same time, a new group of painters, also in search of truth on American soil, began to create a new type of painting, which became known as the Ashcan School, painters such as Bellows, Shin, Luks and Sloan, who did not shy away from everyday people, subjects and locations of the populist working class lifestyle.
Alfred Stieglitz walked the streets of New York from 1893 to 1895 capturing photographic images of everyday life. He came from a wealthy family, married into another wealthy family & soon found incompatibility, he took refuge into photography. In 1902 Stieglitz started a magazine, opened a gallery and founded a new group of photographers with Edward Steichen called The Photo Secessionists, by it's very name and definition, it was a rebel act of separation from the norm and it began a steep and unsteady incline towards a peak of cultural defiance that would slowly lead upward to the very top. At the start, Alfred Stieglitz's fight was for photography as art and he indeed found supporters and subscribers. Eventually, he began to fight for modernism at all levels, which included much of the art from the newest and most outrageous European painters. In 1907, while on a ship headed for Europe, Stieglitz has an epiphany through a photographic image that, as he describes was, "A Step in my own Evolution." While in Paris, Alfred Stieglitz photographs Rodin, he views Cezanne's new cubist watercolors and Picasso's paintings, including, "Madame's De Avegnons." A year later, in 1908, his exhibition of the sculptor Rodin's drawings causes a stir by their very nature and erotic simplicity, again, he is ahead of the pack and slowly loses the photographic subscribers who originally supported 291 Gallery and the magazine. In 1911, Stieglitz's Gallery is the first American gallery to exhibit the drawings of Pablo Picasso. The public reaction to Picasso's new modernist and primitive approach is abhorrent and with only a single sale, Stieglitz felt obliged to purchase a work himself. His magazine, "Camera Work," was the very first to publish the writings of Gertrude Stein, who would go onto become a modernist wonder of literature and a champion of Picasso's work around the world. Then in 1913, The New York City Armory Show pierces the veil of modernism and justifies many of Alfred Stieglitz's prior decisions. Soon he realizes that the struggle for American Art is lagging behind the europeans and his next cultural battle is for the validity of an American modernist art form by American artists.
Why all this history, you wonder ? I thought this was an article about Georgia O'Keeffe, you ask ? Yes, dear reader, it is, but to comprehend the importance of the beauty, the freedom and the defiant nature of Ms. O'Keeffe's work, you must first understand the fight that preceded her grand entry and the very importance of the simple fact that Georgia O'Keeffe was a very solid American woman with ideas and images stirring inside her imagination that would come into existence and be related directly with a man that had been searching for just such an ideal for over a decade. When he found Georgia O'Keeffe, he had found: "The Great American Thing." As Georgia O'Keeffe herself had described time and time again, looking back at those heady times, "Everyone began talking about the search for the next Great American Novel, the next Great American Poem, the next Great American Painting, The next Great American Thing." Well, my dear readers, I am very happy to inform you that Georgia O'Keeffe not only filled that void, she had been working on the equation, without actually defining it as such, from the time she was ten years old. Now she was twenty-nine years old, had been discovered by Stieglitz and was about to take center stage.The world of the 1920s and it could be argued, that the world of today, is a male dominated world, where woman are subjugated to second class citizenship. Georgia O'Keeffe along Steiglitz's other contemporary painters including John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove helped to define a new and original abstract form in painting that had never, ever, been expressed before. Ms. O'Keeffe did not copy, she did not follow, she did not supplicate, she Invented a whole new 'Thing' and it had all been based on her inner life, her female power, her very sexual and erotic nature. It was new, it was beautiful, it was bold, it was sensual, it was exciting, it was tempestuous, it was authentic, it was avant-garde, it was unblemished, it was purely Georgia O'Keeffe and above all: It was a New American Art Form.
The Interesting thing about O'Keeffe is her ability to learn from the Stieglitz gang and the opposing faction of artists commonly called the precisionists group, which culled inspiration from factories, architecture & machinery, leading the way into modern pop such as Andy Warhol's work. O'Keeffe's work includes both a very personal inner emotional and naturally inspired oeuvre and a very precise and overall interest in architecture & modernism. She won by simply using techniques, ideas and methods that did not devote themselves to any school or group. But not so fast, there is still so much to say, so much more to explain, this is really just the beginning and yet, due to O'Keeffe's consistency, in both style and technique, the works she will produce, from 1918, when she moves to New York, up to her big abstract art exhibition in 1923, compare, very much in power, in expression and in composition with the works she will produce for the rest of her life: Amazingly so. Georgia O'Keeffe the artist, was seldom in search of a style, if anything she had abandoned her own original approach briefly, only to return to it and then held steadfast to what has now become the O'Keeffe method, with a clearly recognizable iconic brand in todays contemporary world of art. Her move from teaching in Texas to living with Stieglitz in New York happened relatively easily and her adjustment to the big city, where she had briefly studied was seamless. Having been promised by Alfred Stieglitz that she could work for a year straight, without interruption, the original vow had turned into the pledge of an entire lifetime. Though, there were times when his photographic objectification not only was a hinderance to her personal space, it did ultimately damage her perception in the public's eye and personally, she was hurt by the mainstream reaction, especially by the critics. Two years prior to her one person abstract exhibit, Stieglitz displayed 145 new photo works, many of them were of his new muse and lover, Georgia O'Keeffe.
The images of O'Keeffe are comparable, in modern times, to that of, say, a celebrity power couple such as Jay-Z and Beyonce'. The sexualization of Georgia O'Keeffe had begun. Lets remember, this is by no means the 1930s with Clara Bow or the 1940s with Greta Garbo or the 1950s with Marilyn Monroe or the 1960s with Bridgette Bardot or the 1970s with Raquel Welch or the 1980s with Madonna or the 1990s with Sharon Stone or the 2000s with What's - her - name: This is 1921. On top of that, we are talking about a very serious artist, not a broadway showgirl, not a singer, not an actress, an intellectual visual artist who, in the words of Arthur Dove, one of the male painters in the Stieglitz art gallery stable, "…Is Actually Doing What All The Guys are Trying to Do." O'Keeffe's Abstract Art show is more than impressive, but due to the harsh criticisms, she gives up abstraction for the next few years and switches to representational objects. Though, her choice of subjects such as fruit and flowers is a rather subtle change. If we look closely at the psychology behind this maneuver, we can see that it was entirely calculated and was actually a bold move toward flipping the script on the subjective mind-scape that had pervaded the times via Freudian theories that were trendily in vogue. By creating representational works that still contained a fierce and even blatantly sexually charged nature, Georgia O'Keeffe was tempting critics to fall on their own swords. The critics had originally tried to intimate that she was a sensual animal, expressing her hidden desires through her paintings. Two years later, when O'Keeffe showed up with pears, apples, flowers and the like, all incredibly and beautifully rendered, with the definite possibility of being interpreted as orifice - like shapes and feminine curves that one might taste or touch, she had set a trap for the critics and still marched on into the next sixty years doing exactly as she had from the very start.
On the one hand, O'Keeffe had won the battle, on the other hand, we still must wonder what might have been, had the critics not been so foul. It seems that in Georgia O'Keeffe's very nature, there was a sly, humorous, independent human being with a philosophical bent that took each challenge, like a boxer might take a rap on the chin, she simply shook her head and got right back in the ring. A year later, Stieglitz handed her a different type of ring and the two began a journey that would last up until his death in 1949, he was twenty-three years her senior. Many years after his death, O'Keefe described their relationship in the simplest of terms, "I was interested in what he did and he was interested in what I did: Very Interested." Decades later, Georgia O'Keeffe had also taken a much younger lover and partner, shocking those around her and creating the same type of stir that had originally started her career in the first place. Her life had come full circle. Georgia O'Keeffe's first visit to New Mexico in 1929, five years after their marriage, started a new love affair with the landscape, which included annual summer stays and eventually a permanent home that would provide an entirely new style, technique and viewpoint which harkened back to her earliest works, before the critics had tried to sexualize, demonize and project a nasty glaze over her very robust, sensually charged paintings that, to this day, will get just about anyone thinking about the beauty of love. If I find myself looking at an O'Keeffe for very long, well, there is no other way to put it, I get turned on. Anyone who says different is either sexless, afraid or most likely, simply too young or a virgin. O'Keeffe's images simply approve of passion, desire and the art of lovemaking. It is also safe to say that, were she alive today, O'Keeffe would most likely dismiss this entire analysis. The fact of the matter is, for a painter so, 'In Love with Color,' language, words and any verbal communication seemed almost rudimentary compared to the purity of visual expressions by a genius.
The BUREAU ICON : Georgia O'Keeffe / Summer 2015 / Written By Joshua A. Triliegi