Etched with feeling
If you were going to sit down and talk about pioneering artists of the 20th century, any meaningful discussion would surely have to include Georgia O’Keeffe. She is a towering figure in 20th century American art and her works of surreal abstractions, rural landscapes, urban cityscapes and organic forms broke new ground for women artists at a time when it was very much a man’s world. O’Keeffe’s art has been seen all over the world, including recent retrospectives at the Pompidou centre in Paris, and the Tate Modern in 2016, to mark the 30th anniversary of her death – the same year that she was featured in Alan Yentob’s popular BBC series, Imagine.
And now she’s the focus of a new exhibition at the Point, in Doncaster. Georgia O’Keeffe: Memories of Drawings is a new Hayward Gallery touring exhibition featuring 21 photogravures of drawings produced by O’Keeffe between 1915 and 1963, the period in which she established herself as a major artistic figure.
Charlotte Baker, an assistant curator at the Hayward Gallery, says the exhibition is a chance to see some of her lesser known work.
“Georgia O’Keeffe is renowned for her distinctive balance of abstraction with figuration and tenaciously pursuing her innovative style. Though best known as a painter, drawing was central to O’Keeffe’s practice, so I hope exhibiting this aspect of her work will be interesting for both new and existing audiences.”
Photogravure is a printing method that produces etchings with the tone and detail of a photograph through exposure onto a copper plate. “Using this process, O’Keeffe worked together with her agent and long-term friend Doris Bry to create this collection of formative works,” says Baker.
O’Keeffe spent time periodically during her career focusing solely on drawing. “It reinvigorated her, with her saying that these were often the best times in her life. Channelling emotional experience into abstract forms was a skill O’Keeffe was revered for since her earliest exhibitions. She used drawing as a language to evoke important moments and emotions – the curve of a flower petal, a desert horizon, the wave of one’s hair, or the flow of a winding road,” Baker adds.
“The selection here charts key trajectories and motifs in O’Keeffe’s practice, spanning the period she established herself as a major figure in American Modernism. It includes nine of her earliest charcoal abstracts that were presented in her inaugural exhibitions.”
Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born in 1887, the second of seven children, and grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. By the time she left school in 1905, she had set her heart on becoming an artist. She studied in Chicago and at the Art Students League in New York, where she learned the techniques of traditional painting.
The direction of her artistic practice shifted dramatically when she studied the revolutionary ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow who offered her an alternative to established ways of thinking about art.
O’Keeffe created a series of abstract charcoal drawings which she sent to a friend in New York who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, a prominent art dealer and renowned photographer, who would eventually become O’Keeffe’s husband.
Stieglitz became the first to exhibit her work, in 1916, and then every year from 1923 until his death 23 years later, and she shot to notoriety posing nude for him in a series of photographic portraits.
O’Keeffe was perhaps a reluctant trailblazer.
She was the first female artist to be awarded a retrospective in several leading American museums during the mid-1900s, and her flower forms were seen by some as a shocking and vibrant display of femininity, though she persistently refused the gendering of her art as “feminine”, a stance that later helped galvanise a new wave of feminists.
She spent time travelling across America and beyond taking much of her inspiration from her environment, such as rooftops and skyscrapers in New York, banana groves in Bermuda and the landscape of New Mexico, which became her home and arguably her most fervent influence.
She was no doubt shaped by the tumultuous world around her. “O’Keeffe lived and worked
Georgia O’Keeffe was one of America’s most important artists of the last century and now an exhibition of some of her drawings is on show in Yorkshire. Chris Bond reports.
over almost a century of rapid modernisation and bewildering change, not only in America but across the world, not least due to industrialisation, women’s suffrage and feminism, two world wars, the Great Depression and the Civil Rights movement. Her iconic works uniquely captured the experience of an environment that I believe would have been felt both locally and worldwide,” says Baker.
Arguably, her greatest body of work was made during her years spent in New Mexico where she moved permanently in 1949. Despite her failing eyesight, she continued to work until she was 96. By the time she died two years later in 1986, her reputation as an important and influential figure was already cemented.
The artist herself once said: “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
So what, then, is her legacy? “O’Keeffe broke ground for all women artists that came after her by achieving a level of success that, at the time, had largely only been reached by male artists,” says Baker.
“This exhibition is a chance for a wide audience to view an underrepresented, but essential, body of work by one of the most important artists in 20thcentury American art.
“In a text she published alongside the portfolio, O’Keeffe wrote a commentary on why she made these drawings. These memories are retold within the exhibition, adding context from O’Keeffe’s personal and artistic timeline so visitors can gain insight and understanding into her practice and hopefully feel inspired by it.”
Georgia O’Keeffe: Memories of Drawings runs at the Point Gallery in Doncaster until March 20. Entry is free. www.thepoint. org.uk/