Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow
Dallas Museum of Art, through Feb. 24
Had Georgia O’Keeffe’s younger sister received serious critical attention during her lifetime, “American art history could have been very different,” said Javier Pes in ArtNet.com. Ida O’Keeffe used to say that she, too, would have become famous if she’d had her own Alfred Stieglitz, the great photographer who married Georgia and tirelessly promoted her work. The claim was not baseless: Ida was also a boldly innovative painter, yet she never won the freedom to pursue art exclusively, and Georgia at one point remarked that Ida’s 71 years had been “a wasted life.” Still, though “no one would say that Ida had the sheer talent and tenacity of her older sister, hers was an achievement worthy of study,” said Rick Brettell in The Dallas Morning News. The Dallas Museum’s “beautifully curated” exhibition of more than 30 Ida O’Keeffe works makes that clear.
There were elements of soap opera in the rivalry between the sisters, said Michael Hardy in Texas Monthly. Ida came late to painting, and she initially enjoyed full support from Georgia, who often invited her to visit the summer home she and Stieglitz shared. “But beneath this apparent idyll were darker currents.” Stieglitz, who once wrote that Ida’s paintings “compare with Georgia’s best,” openly flirted with Ida and wrote her mash notes for years. It didn’t help the sisters’ relationship that Ida began exhibiting in New York around the time Georgia had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized, said John Dorfman in Arts & Antiques. With her most acclaimed series, from the early 1930s, she transformed a Cape Cod lighthouse into “a beacon of modernism,” making its light beams as solid as the building walls and spinning out geometrical abstractions apparently based on mathematics’ celebrated Fibonacci sequence. By 1933, when The New York Times predicted that the art world would soon consider O’Keeffe “a family name,” Georgia had had enough, ordering Ida to stop exhibiting. Ida refused, then discovered making her way without powerful allies “could be very difficult indeed.”
Still, despite her sister’s claim, Ida hardly wasted a moment, said Laura August in ArtsAndCultureTX.com. She held nursing and teaching jobs throughout the country, founded the art department of what is now the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and worked on technical drawings of aircraft during World War II. Unfortunately, the constant changes in her life affected her art, which unraveled into “a confusing mixture of styles.” But maybe we shouldn’t be comparing the sisters’ art without considering the many ways we might define a successful life. Yes, Georgia achieved lasting fame in her chosen field. “Ida reminds us of the importance of complicated lives—lived deeply and well—lived on their own terms despite a world of endless challenge.”