What Genre of Art Does Georgia O Keeffe Fit Ino
I first saw Georgia O'Keeffe'south pair of clam shells — one opened, one closed — at the Dallas Museum of Art. It was several years ago, when I attended the exhibit on Ida O'Keeffe (younger sis to Georgia) and stumbled upon the new acquisitions being debuted in another gallery. What I recollect most, sad to say, were the young man viewers parroting worn-out narratives nigh O'Keeffe and lady parts.
When I recently re-encountered the paintings at the McNay Art Museum in its "Georgia O'Keeffe and American Modernism" exhibition, in a quieter, more than relaxed surroundings, they felt less burdened. More present, and willing to reveal themselves. Similar a number of the other O'Keeffe paintings in the show, they are unglazed. That is, they are hung without any protective glass covering. And while this means they are more vulnerable to impairment, it also means that we get unimpeded views of their surfaces. And that's the view O'Keeffe meant us to have, non only because the surfaces are so beautiful, just because they are essential to what she wanted to say.
René Paul Barilleaux was Deputy Director for Programs at the Mississippi Museum of Fine art sixteen years agone when he co-curated an exhibit chosen "Georgia O'Keeffe: Color and Conservation" and co-edited the catalogue of the same proper name. By focusing on the conservation of O'Keeffe's paintings, the book offers us a rare glimpse into the inner workings of her artistic process. (If yous're interested in O'Keeffe's art and artmaking, I'd recommend this book, along with "Lovingly, Georgia," the consummate correspondence betwixt the emerging creative person and her fine art-school-BFF, Anita Pollitzer.)
Lucky for us in Texas, Barilleaux is at present Head of Curatorial Diplomacy at the McNay, and he was kind enough to requite me an upwards-close-and-personal tour of those clam shells.
"Open Clam Shell" and "Closed Clam Beat" were both painted in 1926, a remarkable year for O'Keeffe, during which she produced masterpieces of her early iconic themes: flowers, New York City skyscrapers, and Lake George barns. She thought highly plenty of these clam shells to include them in her 1946 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. (In that location is all the same a third one in the series, a pastel titled "Slightly Open Clam Crush," now at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Conservator Judith C. Walsh details the close relationship between O'Keeffe's pastels and her oil painting style in the "Color and Conservation" book.)
Start things first: You're not going to see that familiar clam vanquish shape. Instead, O'Keeffe has turned each one on its side lengthwise for a more complex view, kind of a double portrait. In the film of the closed shell, we run into its hinged border, very puckered, from the exterior. In the open ane, from the opposite point of view, we see past the smooth edges of the shells, parted like stage curtains, through to the interior, where we get a contrary expect at the muscled hinge from the inside.
Mounted side-by-side at the McNay on a wine-colored panel, each has a vertical, bulbous shape, its outer edges pressing at, fifty-fifty jutting beyond, the canvas. They possess a startling gravitas, similar icons. And they remind me of the African masks that O'Keeffe's husband, Alfred Stieglitz, was the first to exhibit in America. In later years, O'Keeffe remarked that she could tell if a painting of hers was any good if it could agree its own on a wall alongside ane of those masks. And come up to think of it, the open clam shell too reminds me of her skulls (similar "Summer Days," which opens the McNay exhibit), painted two decades later, with the same organically intricate holes and fissures, only more robustly depicted. And, okay, maybe I'm a little slow, but it dawns on me now, and Google confirms, that the mollusk shell is indeed the creature'southward exoskeleton.
"Information technology'south taking something that in life is small, and bravado it upwardly," Barilleaux says, looking at the mollusk shells. "But they're still intimate."
Not but does O'Keeffe play with contrast in scale. Between the two paintings she too plays with inside/outside, forepart/back, and convex/concave. And she plays with a cute juxtaposition in brushstroke and finish. The airtight beat is rather glossy, and smoothen. The open ane is dry out and rough.
"There is some visible brush work," Barilleaux elaborates. "But she goes between a kind of flattened application of paint, and then building it up a lilliputian bit."
O'Keeffe never piled on the paint. She worked moisture-into-dry, pretty much a single layer of paint requiring serious control to choreograph her textural effects. Within this narrow range that she chose to work, her variations are virtuosic. The pigment can be applied thickly, or barely grazing the canvass, its stroke long and contoured, or short and stubby. Or anywhere in between. And she strategically varies the paint torso, using additives to control for opaqueness and gloss.
Like the soft muscle and hard crush of the clam shells, the painting surface offers both flow and structure. O'Keeffe seems to delight in exploring with her brush every contraction, every pinch, every crack, every dark recess that the clam shell offers upwards. The topography here is equally rich and complex as anything she'll find in the New Mexico mural.
The color has its own every bit deceiving simplicity. "They're nearly monochromatic," Barilleaux observes. "But with just kind of bluish and grayness and a trivial xanthous and white, nosotros go a lot of colour. Gray that'south leaning toward blue, or grey that'due south leaning toward brown, or gray that'southward leaning toward a cool or warm. It's simply so subtly modulated."
For colour, the star of the prove is "It Was Blue and Green" (1960), on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Information technology'southward one in a series of oil paintings focusing on startling color combinations, hung on the slightest fleck of grade — serpentine lines that go equally far back in her visual repertoire equally 1916. And even though the painting is under glass, you lot tin still see the perfect marriage of texture and tone. Blue and green (light-green translucent as the sea) gently converging and diverging through a white gauze (with a hint of pinkish?). It's pure color and light. No wonder that O'Keeffe, who resented being labeled as anything, let lone a "precisionist," made certain to send this 1 off to be exhibited in 1960, as a wry response to a bear witness chosen "The Precisionist View in American Art," which opened that year at the Walker Art Center.
In a brilliant bit of exhibit design, "It Was Blue and Green" hangs next to a pair of watercolor abstractions from 1916, and next to them hangs the McNay'southward own O'Keeffe masterpiece, one of the "Evening Star" watercolor series (1917). In this grouping you tin see how O'Keeffe kept on working at a primal formal trouble: how to create shapes out of color without resorting to drawing a line around them.
In "Evening Star No. V" she leaves bare paper as the boundary between her colors. In the watercolor abstractions, she puddles each color, playing with how they overlap. In "It was Blueish and Green," she models the colors with a system of tonal expanses contrasting against sharp, ridged paint edges. Information technology's like a bas-relief, in paint. The range and brilliance of the colors hither are as unfathomably subtle as the "Evening Star" are singularly bold.
"Leaf Motif, No. ii" (1924), has been part of the McNay collection since 1975. It's a painting I love to revisit, considering information technology'south often and imaginatively rehung. I couldn't help only write about one particularly effective installation when O'Keeffe was flanked by Pollock and Klee. (Hither is that blog mail.)
In the current exhibition, "Leaf Motif, No. two" has been hung next to a window, to connect with the natural world, and besides nearly to an Alexander Calder mobile. I especially like seeing the shared affinity that O'Keeffe and Calder (and many other early modernists) had for biomorphic shapes. Merely in the case of "Leafage Motif, No. 2," the biomorphic shapes are the curved spaces between the leaves rather than the leaves themselves.
"It doesn't have a lot of surface buildup," Barilleaux observes. "The pigment is non fat on the surface, but at that place's an expanse correct in the center, where there's a fleck of work washed there. At that place's a kind of a scrumbly surface area downwardly here. I love the style she creates these fiddling halo effects to bring out the composition, or to bring up the volume. It'southward forcing dimension, and then it kind of dissolves here into brainchild. That'due south the joy of the piece of work. It's ever playing between abstraction and representation."
Every bit a card-carrying modernist, having captivated the lessons of Cubism, O'Keeffe excelled at creating ambiguous space. She could sculpturally model to the point of trompe-l'oeil, like that curled leaf border cutting diagonally across the top of the picture, only she doesn't let the states forget that it's just a painting, flat as a board, and completely bogus. In these deeply crack leaves, she makes yous wonder: are those voids or masses, and are they advancing or receding? There's and then much motion. Y'all experience like you could take quite a ride along the intricately layered curves.
"Very animated," Barilleaux remarks, "for expressionless leaves."
"There is definitely a dark-against-light effect pulsating through the composition. And also, you have a bright eye here, which is kind of popping out and the nighttime receding. Your centre goes toward that center and then keeps moving around. It won't permit your center rest."
As Barilleaux explains, O'Keeffe deployed a variety of brushwork. "She's not always doing it the aforementioned way. Her brushwork often fits the field of study of limerick. She'south tailoring the arroyo of the paint to the subject, to the mood, to everything."
Textbook example: the two New Mexico mountains, hung nearly facing each other. Striking opposites. Fifty-fifty under glass, the textures are palpable. "The Mountain, New United mexican states" (1931) looks dry out, sunlit, the paint loose, open up, in some spots thinly laid down in swatches. I love the renegade swipe of dark-green rolling downwardly 1 gully. That dusty red clay mountain, feet sinking with each pace, would be hard to walk. "Purple Hills" (1935), in contrast, feels shine enough to slide downwards. It has a more precise, sleeky appearance. The brushstrokes accept withdrawn, in service of those colored shadows and deep crevices.
The showroom gives pride of place to "Summer Days" (1936), on loan from the Whitney. O'Keeffe used this painting for the cover of her eponymous book in 1976, after it had proven such a favorite in the retrospective given her by the Whitney in 1970. Later a number of years comparing unfavorably with Abstruse Expressionism, this exhibit marked her big comeback, at age 83. From all reports, the younger oversupply loved "Summer Days." Me, not and then much. Just after having had time to sit down and wait at it at the McNay (every gallery needs a bench, thank y'all), I've go a fan. Which just goes to prove — in one case again – what Dale Kronkright told me at the get-go of my research: Georgia O'Keeffe is an artist who rewards marvel. As Conservator at the O'Keeffe Museum since its inception, Kronkright has the inside runway on O'Keeffe's art and art-making. You tin read more from him in the "Color and Conservation" book.
In "Summer Days," we're greeted (confronted?) by a very big skull with antlers in total arabesque, emerging through a white fog. Hovering beneath information technology is a loose agglomeration of wildflowers, as if laid at a shrine. Together they loom large over a neat row of red mountains ranging full across the bottom edge of the canvass, which in some moments read as an altar. Basically, it's an out-sized still life floating at superlative and a relatively diminutive mural grounded at bottom, with an expanse of clouds and strip of marvelous blue sky in betwixt. Every bit usual, O'Keeffe is confounding traditional perspective: her trademark "faraway nearby." (O'Keeffe ever reminds us: whatever signal of view is valid; none is negated; all coexist.) That skull floats similar a vision, what The New York Times chosen a "suspended apparition" when information technology was first exhibited in 1937, and a rather psychedelic ane at that. Easy to encounter why information technology went over big with the younger generation in 1970.
I begin to enjoy the absurdity. And how self-conscious the applesauce is. As a gardener, I'd call it a "folly." And I don't remember that O'Keeffe would disagree. She started painting "Summer Days" in Baronial 1936, the start summertime she stayed in the Ghost Ranch house she would eventually purchase. She was feeling good. On first mention of the painting to Stieglitz (who, by the way, hated the painting'due south championship), she wrote that it was "ane of those paintings that I am virtually positive is going to exist a good one." About a calendar week afterwards, she wrote to him that: "[I]t will make you laugh pleasantly – even if it has bones – a cute deers [sic] head confronting about (not quite) white with a few wild flowers – really lovely – even if they are mine – at the stop of his nose – I similar it – You will like it – it fifty-fifty makes me laugh – in that location is an indian paint brush – a blood-red 1 – two little lavander asters – tiny ones – and a brownish eyed susan sun flower – I am not quite positive about what volition grow on it tomorrow–"
And the side by side night, later a full day of painting: "I thought I'd be through today but I find I take at least some other solar day on information technology – and I must do it now – it isn't something I can put away and do later on – it seems to abound as I go along with information technology and information technology is actually lovely and so far – I'g much excited over what I plan to put in tomorrow – maybe a bit foolish – just that is alright I gauge."
Related: 'Digging for Stars: Georgia O'Keeffe in the Texas Panhandle'
Come her annual exhibit with the debut of "Summer Days," The New York Times commented that O'Keeffe was "doing the most brilliant work of her career. The brushwork has grown, if possible, all the same more elusive in its myriad delicate nuances of tone and blendings of colour, be the subject skulls or mural."
There's as much pleasure in looking at the unglazed moving picture up-close, in small-scale $.25 — themselves like miniature paintings — every bit in the first arresting glimpse of the full picture. Like the lovingly rendered skull, the sharply etched horns in dissimilarity to the sfumato clouds, the clouds moving across the landscape. And that lovely little wispy stroke of a cloud in the lower right. It's O'Keeffe at her best, and I call back she knows it.
"Georgia O'Keeffe and American Modernism" also includes O'Keeffe'south "Barn with Snow" (1934), "Pinkish and Yellow Hollyhocks" (1952), and "From the Plains I" (1953), along with more than l works by young man modern artists. (Don't miss the Helen Torr paintings or "Black Duck No. 1" by Marsden Hartley.) The showroom runs through May 8.
"Georgia O'Keeffe and American Modernism" is at McNay Museum of Art in San Antonio. mcnayart.org
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Source: https://sightlinesmag.org/georgia-okeeffe-rewarding-curiosity
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