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georgia o'keeffe: an american perspective book review
paul cadmus
f.auerbach |
Biography
"Objective
painting is not good painting unless it
is good in the abstract sense."
Georgia O'Keeffe signed items and handwritten letters @ ebay.com (direct link to signed items)
Georgia O'Keeffe was the most distinguished American female artist of the twentieth century. She was born in November 1887 near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the second of seven children. Her father was a farmer. According to her own account, she decided to become an artist at the age of ten. For the next two years she had weekly drawing lessons, and these continued when she was sent to a convent boarding school run by Dominican nuns.
In 1902 her family moved to Virginia, but at first she continued to look to the Middle East for her artistic education. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905-6, but her training was interrupted when she contracted typhoid fever.
In 1907-8 she attended the Art Students League in New York, where one of her tutors was William Merritt Chase. She saw Rodin's first US exhibition and an Henri Matisse exhibition at 291, Alfred Stieglitz's gallery in New York in 1908. She won the Chase Still Life Prize which enabled her to spend part of the summer of 1908 at the League Outdoor School at Lake George in New York State, a place with which she was later to have a long association.
In 1908 she decided to abandon her ambitions to be a painter, and returned to Chicago where she worked as a commercial artist, drawing lace and embroidery for advertisements; she was forced to give up this work when her eyesight was affected by an attack of measles.
Meanwhile the illness of her mother had led the family to move to Charlottesville, Virginia. In the summer of 1912 O'Keeffe visited an art class at the University of Virginia, which led to a renewal of her interest in art. In the autumn she took a ob as Supervisor of Art in Public Schools at Amarillo, Texas - she had always felt a romantic attraction to the American West, and later declared:
She kept this job for two years, also teaching during the summers
at the University of Virginia Art Department. In 1914
she went to New York to study at Teachers' College,
Columbia University.
In the autumn of 1915 she accepted another teaching
job, this time at Columbia College, South Carolina. It was
at this moment that she reached a turning point:
She reviewed her existing work and decided to begin
again, using only the simplest means. At first, in this
period of exploration, she made only black and white
drawings in charcoal:
Eventually she bundled the drawings up and sent
them to a girlfriend in New York, with strict instructions
that they were not to be shown to anyone else. The friend
disobeyed her, and took the sheets to the photographer-
dealer Alfred Stieglitz at 291. Stieglitz was impressed,
and kept them. In April 1916, still without O'Keeffe's
knowledge, he hung them as part of a three-person show.
As it happened, O'Keeffe was back in New York, and
hearing of the matter, went to the gallery to make
Stieglitz take them down. She failed; the result was the
tentative beginning of a long relationship. In the autumn
of 1916 she took another teaching post in Texas, this
time as Head of the Art Department at West Texas State
Normal School at Canyon. In May 1917 Stieglitz mounted
a solo show for her, his last at 291, and O'Keeffe went
to New York to see it. It had already been taken down,
but Stieglitz rehung it so that she could judge the effect.
At the same time he took the first of a long series of
photographs of her. She returned to Texas for the rest
of the summer, and visited New Mexico, with which
she was later to become closely associated, on her way
to Colorado.
In 1918 illness forced her to take leave of absence
from teaching. Stieglitz then offered her a subsidy to
enable her to take a whole year and do nothing but paint.
She accepted, and resigned her post. For the next decade
she was to divide her time between New York and Lake George, with occasional visits to Maine, and Stieglitz
was to be her mentor, as well as her dealer. In 1919 she
made what she considered to be her first fully mature
oils - they were mostly abstracts, though she was never
to abandon figurative painting altogether. She once said
In 1923 Stieglitz mounted
a major show of one hundred other paintings at the
Anderson Galleries, and in the same year they married.
It is clear that he was now having an aesthetic as well
as a purely practical influence on what she did: in
1924 she made her first paintings of greatly enlarged
flowers, and in 1926 her first of soaring skyscrapers,
both of which series owe more than a little to the way
the camera sees.
O'Keeffe was fortunate in never having to struggle
once Stieglitz took charge over affairs - unlike most
Modernist painters she was favourably reviewed from
the very first. The annual commercial exhibitions he
arranged for her spanned a long period - from 1926 to
1946 - so her work was constantly in the consciousness
of the gallery-going public. In 1927 her first retrospective
was held, at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1929 she paid a
planned visit to New Mexico, staying at Taos with Mabel
Dodge Luhan, and living in a house recently vacated by
D. H. Lawrence. She fell in love with the landscape, and
from now on she summered in New Mexico and divided
the rest of the year between New York and Lake George.
In 1934 she spent her first summer at the remote Ghost
Ranch, north of Abiquiu. She returned in 1935 and
eventually bought the property in 1940. At the same time
she began to venture rather tentatively abroad - in 1932
she went to the Gaspe country in Canada to paint the
landscape and the stark farm buildings; in 1934 she went
to Bermuda and in 1939 to Hawaii. Stieglitz's death in
1946 brought with it other major changes in the pattern
of her life. In 1945 she had bought a house in Abiquiu
itself, so that she could spend winters as well as summers
in New Mexico - the ranch was too remote for severe
winter weather. She now devoted three years' work to
settling her husband's estate and setting up memorials
to him, and then retired permanently to New Mexico.
In the 1950s O'Keeffe's output of paintings was
relatively small, as she began to travel abroad for the
first time. Her first visit to Europe was not until 1953,
but during the 1950s and early 1950s she became a
tireless traveller, visiting most parts of the world, and making a complete round-the-world trip in 1959.
O'Keeffe received all the usual honours given to an American artist of her eminence, among them election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1963, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966.
In 1973, O'Keeffe was befriended by a talented potter, Juan Hamilton. Despite the differences in their ages (when they met, he was twenty-eight and she was eighty-six), he became her confidant and constant companion, to the point where he was accused of keeping old friends at arms' length and exerting undue influence over her. Hamilton managed her affairs and, as her eyesight deteriorated, attempted to teach her pottery skills. In 1984 O'Keeffe went to live with Hamilton and his family in Sante Fe, where she died in 1986.
 
 
 
 
 
biography gallery posters georgia o'keeffe: an american perspective book review
stanley spencer |
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