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Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills encapsulates O'Keefe's art and life
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Yesterday we went to the
Brooklyn Museum to see
Georgia O'Keefe: Living Modern that ends July 23. She is an artist I have admired for a long time and many years ago copied her paintings in pastel. She encouraged me to be fearless, using big strokes, and express myself through vibrant colours.
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| Four cream-coloured outfits O'Keefe made early in her life |
We caught the museum's 1pm tour through the exhibit and the docent was very knowledgeable about O'Keefe and picked certain pieces to show how the curators presented the show.
It wasn't just about O'Keefe's paintings, but also her clothing, a few miscellaneous things from her home and many photographs of her in the clothing, hats and shoes that were also exhibited.
She was born in Wisconsin in 1887 and at a young age showed a talent for art. The family moved to Virginia and when she was a teenager studied at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.
Later she taught art and as our guide explained, after work she would work on her own art, creating abstract watercolours. A friend showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, a well known photographer and art dealer in New York who was impressed by such modern art by a female artist.
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| This painting was first shown at the museum |
He sold some of her pieces -- over US$1,000 in the late 1920s which was a lot of money in those days -- and eventually the two fell in love. Stieglitz was married at the time with a daughter, and was 23 years older than O'Keefe, but he divorced and married O'Keefe.
They lived in Manhattan and one of the paintings shown in the exhibition was of the New York skyline -- something that was usually depicted by men and not women. But O'Keefe was keen to show that she too could do it too -- and just as well. Not only did she paint the skyscrapers, but also in pink, and with three flowers to give them a feminine touch.
At the time she was known for her flower paintings. Women usually painted flowers, but they were small most of the time. O'Keefe felt if she painted flowers really small, no one would notice, so why not big too, like skyscrapers?
She also insisted there wasn't any deeper meanings behind the some 200 flower paintings she made, as some tried to insinuate there were sexual meanings behind the works.
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| Pink skyscrapers and flowers |
One of the paintings on show is called
Black Pansy & Forget-Me-Nots painted in 1926 and our guide explained it was first shown in a solo exhibition O'Keefe had in the Brooklyn Museum in 1927.
At the show, one of her friends bought the painting and O'Keefe managed to persuade that person to donate it to the museum afterwards. O'Keefe also gave some of her works during her lifetime to the museum, and after her death.
Our guide pointed out that many of O'Keefe's clothes were monochromatic -- she didn't want to have to worry about colour in her wardrobe when she would rather focus on the colours of her canvas.
Featured in the exhibition are several items of clothing, cream-coloured dresses she made and they are very delicate and reveal her skill in dressmaking. There are also a trio of white blouses, one of which shows very fine tailoring and could very easily be worn today.
She also had a penchant for black with a bit of white contrasting, be it from the collar of a shirt or the cuffs of shirts sticking out from black blazers. Later on she was obsessed about the V-shape and many dresses and jackets had this shape, whether the neckline or pattern on dresses.
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| One of the delicate blouses O'Keefe made |
As more of her work was sold, she and Stieglitz would move to higher floors in the hotel apartment building they lived in. And this wealth would also help O'Keefe become even more independent, buying a car and buying a home and then another one in New Mexico.
She first went there in 1929 thanks to the patronage of an heiress, and O'Keefe immediately fell in love with the place and kept going back there every year until she finally settled there.
In New Mexico she stopped wearing suits and adopted denim as her fabric of choice, wearing shirts, jeans and even fashioned a Chinese-style dress out of the blue cotton.
However, after O'Keefe's first visit to New Mexico for six months, she came back to New York to find Stieglitz was having an affair with another woman; O'Keefe was devastated and even suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in 1933, mostly because her husband was continuing with the affair.
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