Georgia O’Keeffe has finally become an artist whose work speaks for itself
After graduating secondary school, Georgia O’Keeffe told her classmates, “I am going to live a different life from the rest of you girls. I am going to give up everything for my art.”
It was 1905; 15 years before American women would gain the vote. Women who painted weren’t considered artists, but rather, hobbyists filling their time before their inevitable marriage and motherhood. But O’Keeffe eschewed the marriage track, cropped her hair short and donned masculine outfits a decade before it was trendy, and resolved to live her own life. She would spend the rest of her life trying to carve out a space and the independence required to produce her art.
As an artist she similarly bucked convention, drifting between pure abstraction and detailed representation. But as much as she fought constriction, ironically, her legacy has been boxed in. O’Keeffe is still viewed in mass popular culture as the promiscuous American woman who painted petalled pussies. But to suggest O’Keeffe evokes only vulvas and violets is a mistake.
Her famous flowers are just a segment of her vast canon of work, not its sum – and the American modernist spent much of her life bristling at the Freudian reading of her delicate folds of flora.
“You hung all your association with flowers on my flower,” she rebutted the ( male) art critics who lauded her work’s sexual overtones. In the 1970s, O’Keeffe snapped at a TV interviewer who asked about the vaginal imagery in her flowers that she wouldn’t talk about “such nonsense.”
Her biographer Roxana Robinson suggests the lush layers and delicate creases in all of O’Keeffe’s work are unintentional, an effect of a “natural sexuality” inherent to the flowers and landscapes and nature that inspired her as opposed to the vulgar subversion ascribed to them.
“The vulval imagery in O’Keeffe’s flowers has been much discussed, but in fact it is something for which botany should take the responsibility,” Robinson writes in Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.
As much as art remains in the eye of the beholder, it’s clear the artist’s intent diverged from the interpretation. It’s emblematic, in many ways, of how little is truly known about on of North America’s most famous artists.
Like most myths, there are drops of truth amid oversimplification. For O’Keeffe, the mere act of painting and living by her work was rebellion in an era where she was half a person under the law.
“She lives life on her terms the way she wants to from this moment on,” said Georgiana Uhlyarik, the curator of a new Art Gallery of Ontario ( AGO) retrospective on O’Keeffe opening on Saturday. She gestures to O’Keeffe’s early abstracts, the complex compositions, bold forms and spaces of which portend the artist’s more famous later works. “All of the work you’re looking at she makes prior to being recognized as a full citizen of the country in which she belongs.”
The show opens with the works that l aunched O’Keeffe's career a decade after she left that high school, after stints studying art in Chicago and New York and later teaching in South Carolina and Texas. The panhandle’s wide open spaces echoed the open spaces of her happy childhood in Wisconsin and inspired her nascent abstract expressionism. Those years also brought her briefly to New Mexico for the first time – a space that would become synonymous with her final years and where she would return to the same level abstraction from which she began.
O’Keeffe’s petals and poppies might fill calendar and cover gift- shop totes and coasters, but her canon is much broader; her contribution to the arc of American modernism and abstraction much deeper.
That breadth is on display in the travelling exhibit in Toronto – the only Canadian stop on the tour, and the most expansive dis- play of her work ever shown on this side of the border. With the exception of a lone white rose, there are no flowers hanging in the exhibition’s first room, filled with O’Keeffe’s earliest work.
The exhibit, as with the artist’s professional l i fe, starts with black charcoal cutting across white paper. It was the Texas landscape and the freedom O’Keeffe enjoyed that prompted her to strip down her work and erase the impositions of her formal education. She sent her works from this period to a friend, who showed the collection to Alfred Stieglitz. The photographer and curator was shocking American sensibilities with the work of European modernists at his 291 gallery.
There he introduced New York to Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne and Rousseau. He was, in many ways, the man who brought modernism and abstraction to America. And then he brought Georgia O’Keeffe to fame, before almost becoming her ruin.
In 1915, before ever meeting her, the photographer s howed those charcoal drawings in 291. A year later they would meet. A year after that, on April 3, 1917, O’Keeffe’s first solo exhibit was 291’s last.
By 1919, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were living together, despite the fact he was married. She became his muse and collaborator, and most famously, an active participant in an intimate series of nudes that, when exhibited in 1921, cemented the sexualized narrative that would define her career.
By 1924, he divorced his first wife and finally married O’Keeffe to little ceremony. It was at this time that they began to drift apart. Stieglitz, for all his worldly pretensions, his avant garde art, could be oppressively controlling of her work and life.
Once a mentor, he turned saboteur, denying her desire for children and hating the travel for which she longed. Before and after marriage, they split their time between New York and a family cottage on Lake George, but O’Keeffe still craved the open spaces that spurred her earliest work.
By the l ate 1920s, she started travelling again, at least partly in response to the fact the much- older Stieglitz had found himself yet another ingénue, Dorothy Norman. A trip to Gaspé was her first time outside the United States and produced haunting, stormy images that captured the tumult in both the St. Lawrence and her marriage.
Eventually, O’Keeffe rediscovered herself in New Mexico. She learned to drive in 1929, another rarity for women of the era. And she may have engaged in an affair or two on those trips as she started to split her time between New York and the open skies of the southwest.
The AGO makes a physical space for that transition. Visitors walk from the room filled with her flowers through a tighter hallway i nto a wide, open space filled with the plains and mountains of New Mexico. It marks a shift in her work and her life.
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz always drifted back together over those years until his death in 1946, after which she moved permanently to New Mexico. She worked into the 1960s before spending her final two decades engaged in her gardens and community. Just as her work returned to abstraction, so too did her body return to working the land as it had during her childhood in Wisconsin.
Reclaiming her popular narrative also consumed O’Keeffe in later life; she penned an autobiography and ensured her prolific correspondence with family, her husband, her lovers and friends was preserved.
However, instead of clarifying, the vast documentation has obscured the truth. Her biographers vary greatly on how many of her close male friends and confidantes she took as lovers, and some dismiss the widely held belief in her bisexuality. Others, in turn, counter that dismissal is a form of latent homophobia.
“She lives in the popular imagination. There’s always going to be stories and you can’t undo them and you can’t deny them,” Uhlyarik said.
O’Keeffe herself would likely say it doesn’t matter. That who she is in the work, between the four corners of a tightly stretched canvas. Composition, shape, lines, colours and contrast defined her art and her life.
That’s why Uhlyarik laboured to ensure the AGO show is as O’Keeffe would have wanted, going so far as to reframe Eggplant The Plant – the first work O’Keeffe ever sold internationally, to a Canadian, and which is now part of the AGO collection. The artist worked with the same framer for much of her career and favoured clean, burnished silver frames, which the gallery worked to restore with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Sante Fe. Inside the exhibit, every wall is white, just as the artist insisted in life. A few days before opening, a series of metal outlet covers were quickly being replaced with white to complete the effect.
Uhlyarik said: “This is how she would have wanted you to encounter her.”
A century after her work was first displayed, O’Keeffe has finally become an artist whose work speaks for itself.
The chance to see her as she would have intended causes the myths surrounding her work and her life to dissolve against her true legacy: the solidity and stark softness of her art.
ALL GEORGIA O’KEEFFE EVER WANTED WAS FOR HER WORK TO SPEAK FOR ITSELF. WITH A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE AT THE AGO, IT’S FINALLY HAPPENING