Early Works
A new Georgia O’keeffe exhibition examines an early, under-studied period of the artist’s magnificent career
In 1912, at the age of 25, Georgia O’keeffe attended a summer program at the University of Virginia. She enjoyed the classes, and returned four additional summers as an instructor. that period of her early career will take center stage in a new exhibition at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. Unexpected O’keeffe: the Virginia Watercolors and Later Paintings, which opens October 19 at the museum in Charlottesville, Virginia, will explore an early period of O’keeffe’s career.
“O’keeffe came to UVA at a critical moment in her life. She had more or less given up on becoming an artist,” says Matthew Mclendon, J. Sanford Miller Family Director at the Fralin Museum of Art. “at UVA she studied with Alon Bement who introduced her to the revolutionary pedagogical theories of Arthur Wesley Dow. In his important treatise, Composition,
Dow outlines a method that stresses line, lightness, darkness and color in teaching a sense of design rather than description. It was about personal experience rather than imitation, and you see this throughout her later career in her careful selection of form and how in the ways she divides and creates space in her paintings. It all comes back to her time at UVA, and then later when she went to Newyork to study directly with Dow.”
He continues: “This is one of the few understudied moments in O’keeffe’s storied life and career. I think it’s important to stress that in a time when education for women was not widely supported, O’keeffe continuously sought out higher education opportunities and was one of the first university-trained female artists of her time,” he says. “it’s important, too, to see that great artists don’t emerge fully-formed. In these early works we really get a sense of O’keeffe experimenting and learning.we see the foundations for what will later become
recognizable to so many people.the exhibition will help fill out, or give nuance, to one of the great personas in art history.”
Mclendon, who joined the museum in early 2017, was shocked to see the extent of O’keeffe’s relationship to UVA when he started diving through the material, much of which comes from the Georgia O’keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“After becoming director of the Fralin, toward the end of the first year, I realized we had a spot open in the exhibition calendar so I approached both the O’keeffe Museum about the possibility of loans while also talking with Elizabeth Hutton Turner, professor of art history here at UVA, about her interest and a potential collaboration,” Mclendon says. while much of the
work comes from the museum that bears O’keeffe’s name, Mclendon adds, two later works—pattern of Leaves, 1923, from The Phillips Collection, and New York—night (Madison Avenue), 1926, from the Museum of Fine Arts,
St. Petersburg, Florida—will round out the exhibition and “demonstrate that the lessons O’keeffe learned while a student, then instructor, at UVA in the summers of 1912 to 1916 would set her on the course to her mature style.”
The watercolor works, including paintings of the UVA campus, come from a notebook that O’keeffe kept with her for her entire life. “the University is renowned, of course, for the architecture designed by its founder, Thomas Jefferson, and so the Rotunda and parts of Jefferson’s original Academical Village are featured,” Mclendon says. “but, O’keeffe was here at a time of new building, so one of the watercolors is of the then new Law building which was only a year old when she arrived. She’s looking at both the old and the new. The watercolors are her explorations of Dow’s exercises. She did return to watercolor throughout her life. there are watercolors from her time in Texas and at Lake George. She returned to watercolor at the end of her life when she was mostly blind, making gestural watercolors.”
The works will also show O’keeffe’s dramatic shift to modernism, which can be seen in abstracted viewers campus and surrounding areas.
“I hope [viewers] come away with a fuller understanding of who O’keeffe was. Certainly, most people are not aware of the important work she was doing in these years,” Mclendon says. “There’s also a connection between Dow’s method of translating observation into personal experience and what we might more broadly term mindfulness today.the graduate students who have been working on the exhibition and have written the labels have really stressed aspects of this and encouraged visitors to pay attention a little more closely.
I think that’s really added a dimension. Isn’t that what we hope with every exhibition, that you’ll leave seeing the world a little differently?”
Unexpected O’keeffe: the virginia Watercolors and Later Paintings continues at the Fralin Museum through January 27, 2019.