Georgia O'keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their major works. In the same series Georges Bataille Stuart Kendall Franz Kafka Sander L. Gilman Charles Baudelaire Rosemary Lloyd Frida Kahlo Gannit Ankori Simone de Beauvoir Ursula Tidd Yves Klein Nuit Banai Samuel Beckett Andrew Gibson Akira Kurosawa Peter Wild Walter Benjamin Esther Leslie Lenin Lars T. Lih John Berger Andy Merrifield Stéphane Mallarmé Roger Pearson Jorge Luis Borges Jason Wilson Gabriel García Márquez Stephen M. Hart Constantin Brancusi Sanda Miller Karl Marx Paul Thomas Bertolt Brecht Philip Glahn Henry Miller David Stephen Calonne Charles Bukowski David Stephen Calonne Yukio Mishima Damian Flanagan William S. Burroughs Phil Baker Eadweard Muybridge Marta Braun John Cage Rob Haskins Vladimir Nabokov Barbara Wyllie Fidel Castro Nick Caistor Pablo Neruda Dominic Moran Coco Chanel Linda Simon Georgia O’Keeffe Nancy J. Scott Noam Chomsky Wolfgang B. Sperlich Octavio Paz Nick Caistor Jean Cocteau James S. Williams Pablo Picasso Mary Ann Caws Salvador Dalí Mary Ann Caws Edgar Allan Poe Kevin J. Hayes Guy Debord Andy Merrifield Ezra Pound Alec Marsh Claude Debussy David J. Code Marcel Proust Adam Watt Fyodor Dostoevsky Robert Bird John Ruskin Andrew Ballantyne Marcel Duchamp Caroline Cros Jean-Paul Sartre Andrew Leak Sergei Eisenstein Mike O’Mahony Erik Satie Mary E. Davis Michel Foucault David Macey Arthur Schopenhauer Peter B. Lewis Mahatma Gandhi Douglas Allen Susan Sontag Jerome Boyd Maunsell Jean Genet Stephen Barber Gertrude Stein Lucy Daniel Allen Ginsberg Steve Finbow Leon Trotsky Paul Le Blanc Derek Jarman Michael Charlesworth Richard Wagner Raymond Furness Alfred Jarry Jill Fell Simone Weil Palle Yourgrau James Joyce Andrew Gibson Ludwig Wittgenstein Edward Kanterian Carl Jung Paul Bishop Frank Lloyd Wright Robert McCarter Georgia O’Keeffe Nancy J. Scott reaktion books To the memory of my mother, Lelia, and the pioneer grandmothers I never knew, women who devoted themselves to education and the cultivation of heart and mind Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2015 Copyright © Nancy J. Scott 2015 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78023 428 1 Contents Introduction: Pioneer, Independent Spirit, Visionary 7 1 Family Untied: An Artistic Education 16 2 Breakthrough: ‘Charcoal Landscapes’ 34 3 Painting in Canyon: ‘Between Heaven and Earth’ 55 4 A Portrait: Woman 77 5 New York: ‘The Nimbus of Lustre’ 95 6 New Mexico: ‘I Feel Like Bursting’ 114 7 The Great Depression: New York and Lake George 134 8 Ghost Ranch 15 3 9 Sky Above Clouds 174 Epilogue: Ancient Spirit 197 References 205 Select Bibliography 243 Acknowledgements 247 Photo Acknowledgements 251 Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918, platinum/palladium print. Introduction: Pioneer, Independent Spirit, Visionary Art became Georgia O’Keeffe’s lodestar from her earliest childhood, as she navigated towards her goal, both in and out of art schools. American pragmatism and love of the tangible, the cleanly sculpted line and the technical mastery of colour informed her art making. She first trained to be an art teacher, and in later years – though she never taught again after 1918 – demonstrated her didactic manner in terse but distilled ways of seeing. She articulated her artistic priority clearly: ‘I think I’d rather let the painting work for itself than help it with the word.’1 The artist taught her public to ‘take time to see’, admonishing those ‘busy New Yorkers’ who never stopped to look at a flower. Engrossed by the worlds within flora, O’Keeffe unfurled purple petunias and calla lilies, and magnified the simple stalk of corn, taking her gaze down to the ‘fine little lake of dew’ nestling at the core of the plant. She wrote spare, poetic statements on nature, her meditation and ‘the forms in my head’ that she always identified as the source of her daring abstractions. In one evocative passage in a letter of 1917 from O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz she wrote of ‘the space that is watching the starlight’ – ‘that space that is between what they call heaven and earth – out there in what they call the night’.2 This liminal space, a seeming nothingness, became the centre of her creative invention. Georgia Totto O’Keeffe’s story is one that not only is rooted in the American prairie, where she was born on a Wisconsin dairy 7 farm on 15 November 1887, but also reflects the pioneer daring of the mid-nineteenth-century Dutch, Hungarian and Irish immigrant generations that formed her ancestry. She followed a peripatetic pathway to later success in New York, first studying and teaching art in both public schools and colleges. Her exhibition life as an artist began in a hastily arranged, experimental group show in May 1916, when the renowned photographer and gallery impresario Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) first showed her recent charcoal abstractions at 291 Fifth Avenue. O’Keeffe’s art emerged precisely at the time that American women gained the right to vote, signalling her own struggle to make her voice heard through artistic expression. The reality of the harsh winters in Wisconsin gave her grandmothers’ and mother’s generation of pioneer women the strict resilience of making-do, learning basic life skills and surviving unforeseen crises, whether due to climate or in times of illness and death in the family. Her upbringing and childhood on a farm cultivated an independence that was both powerful and inborn. O’Keeffe’s gaze favoured wide-open spaces – her love of the wind-blown prairie in Texas and, later, the high desert vistas of New Mexico. Like the nineteenth-century pioneers moving west, O’Keeffe sought out an extraordinary landscape, what many thought a desolate land. She stamped her vision of the land with the imprint of strength and endurance: ‘the desert even tho’ it is vast and empty and untouchable – knows no kindness with all its beauty.’3 O’Keeffe’s art articulated both a modernist expressive vision, ‘filling space in a beautiful way’ based on her study of Asian composition with Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University. Her paintings and abstract designs avoided the human figure, and she certainly never wanted to become a portraitist (though drawings of family members exist from her early training). Instead, she described her process in her own way: ‘There are 8 people who have made me see shapes . I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions – no one seeing what they are.’4 Her innovative and sensuous embrace of nature imparted a powerful organic expression to the simple still-life, once associated with women’s art. As she established her presence in New York with yearly exhibitions, beginning in 1923, her studies of flowers, shells and stones became sites of powerful meditation, and controversy. She then expanded her view of the landscape to enlarge the crosses and relics of the southwest, starting in the summer of 1929, ultimately defining a new iconography of skull, pelvis and floating antlers, ethereally and mysteriously elevated above the land, against the vast sky.5 O’Keeffe was regarded as a woman artist of the first rank in America painting in an abstract style from 1915, and her reputation had solidified by the 1940s when she first showed her work in retrospective exhibitions in Chicago in 1943 (‘the most famous woman painter in the world’ exclaimed the Chicago Tribune) and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946, the first woman artist to be so honoured there.6 Her commitment to equal rights for women emerged from early friendships, influences and reading, and her support for the ideas of the suffrage movement also came early, although the artist rarely involved herself directly in activism. As she attained prominence, O’Keeffe gave a speech before the National Woman’s Party in 1926. Later, in 1944, she wrote a personal letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, arguing a point on forthcoming legislation in her direct manner of speech: ‘women do not have it [legal equality] and I believe we are considered – half the people.’7 After the Second World War ended, art historians, curators and critics grappled with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, 9 and plotted the genealogy of the ‘triumph of American painting’. Only in the mid-1960s did O’Keeffe begin to receive accolades as a pioneer of Color Field and Minimalist painting. As her 79th birthday approached, in May 1966 her painting Pelvis Series – Red with Yellow spread across the cover of Artforum, marking the occasion of her retrospective, originating at the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in Texas.8 By 1967 O’Keeffe’s reputation at last had moved past the issues of her gender. An astute art historical essay described O’Keeffe as ‘a thoroughly representative American artist of the first rank with a vision that helps to define just where our art has been and where it might be going’. The author, a curator, asserted that O’Keeffe’s name, ‘engraved on the cornerstone of American art’, and her actual contributions had been obscured by her fame.9 This evaluation of her work’s evolution no longer depended on the ‘first woman’ category of her past achievements.

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