Georgia O’Keeffe at the new Tate: the unexplored about women that only a woman can explore

It’s a hot summer’s day in London; looking up at the surrounding high rise buildings, including the new £260m extension to Tate Modern, the sunlight is too strong for the eyes. The buildings appear to disintegrate into the glare. Light transforms substance.

 

Inside the Tate the crowds have been building steadily since opening time. The line at the ticket office for Georgia O’Keeffe’s second major retrospective show in the UK is unusually long, even for this prestigious venue. For the art-loving tourist, the summer of 2016 will most likely be remembered for this blockbuster of a show.

 

That O’Keeffe has returned in so celebrated a fashion after the Haywood Gallery exhibition of 1993 may surprise those critics who lambasted her achievements as a painter. For example, Andrew Graham-Dixon claimed that O’Keeffe was a mediocre painter and little more than a self-publicist. Other critics were of much the same opinion at the time. But O’Keeffe’s reputation has gained additional, and literal, value after her ‘Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1’ (which adorns the cover of the sizeable catalogue) was bought, via Sotheby’s, from The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum for $44.4m in 2014. This made it the most expensive work of art painted by a female artist to date.

 

Tanya Barson has curated the Tate show expertly. Although there are over one hundred paintings on display (plus a similar number of photographs from Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Ansel Adams) the arrangement is never crowded. In many of the rooms particular walls stand out to present just three or four canvases. This curated feature enables a punctuated flow to the exhibition. To add an air of scholarship, additional elements include displays of many publications, including Stieglitz’s ‘Camera Works’, and books from O’Keefe’s personal collection. Documentary evidence of this nature further endorses an overt historical status to the artist.

 

Undoubtedly the hype provided by Stieglitz for gallery 291, that accompanied O’Keeffe’s emergence on the contemporary art scene of New York a century ago, has paid off. 291 was a restricted but influential space for introducing European avant-garde art and American painters to his clientele. Without this fortuitous opportunity (O’Keeffe had not sought exposure directly from her future husband) her near mythological fame as a woman artist might otherwise have been based on a similar ‘outsider’ distinction to that afforded to Agnes Martin (resident of Taos, New Mexico).

 

As a similarly reclusive (but not lonely) figure, O’Keeffe developed a notable range of paintings that forged the genres of still life with landscape painting. These often resulted in surreal-like imagery. But it is the sexually suggestive images of flowers that have mainly established O’Keeffe’s reputation for both a general and a feminist audience. ‘Calla Lily in Tall Glass No.2’ [1923] and ‘White Iris’ [1930] will ensure that some blooms will never look the same again.

 

Interestingly, this time last year, the queues for the Agnes Martin exhibition at the same venue were not so long, and the populist appeal was far less evident – although the longer term influence on emerging styles and interests of subsequent artists in the latter half of the century and beyond is possibly equal. Born a generation earlier than Martin, it was her promotion and arrival (in that order) in New York that quickly established O’Keeffe.

 

Possibly the most positive aspect of O’Keeffe’s historical status is that the hegemony of the very best artists as being almost exclusively male was successfully challenged. This enduring reputation was based on Stieglitz’s and his circle’s claim that O’Keeffe’s imagery revealed her gender and female sexuality as a revelatory aspect in a burgeoning, and modern, American art.

 

But the pronouncement, in 1917, that O’Keeffe “…has found expression in delicately veiled symbolism for ‘what every woman knows,’ but what women heretofore have kept to themselves”, by critic Henry Tyrell, sounds peculiar, trite, or even uncomfortable, today. And it was O’Keeffe who challenged this assumption in the context of the culturally assumed second-class status of the female artist. She considered it constricting to be labeled a ‘woman artist’, as it implied less importance than that given to her male equivalent. Although she did make prescient statements, such as, “I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore” that suggest that she had some notion of gender differences. This would interest the emergence of a feminist interpretation of art history and practice established by Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Linda Nochlin and others from the early 1970s onwards. Subsequently, O’Keeffe, especially through her flower paintings and the photographic portraits, provides an iconography for feminist art.

 

But the exhibition is not presented to serve any didactic platform, except to celebrate a fully realised career. Displayed in more-or-less chronological sequence, opening with O’Keeffe’s graphical and highly subjective charcoal studies of 1915/6. Stieglitz considered these studies as personifications of O’Keeffe’s female psyche, not just as playful abstractions. There are several of the early abstract paintings on display too: compositions of the mind and partly inspired by her reading of Kandinsky and an interest in chromesthesia – a form of synaesthesia which associates sounds with colour.

 

We also see a small selection of watercolours, including, ‘Pink and Blue Mountain’ [1916] and ‘Blue Hill No. II’ [1916], which reveal an emotional reaction to landscape. If there is a criticism of the show, it is a shame that significantly more of O’Keeffe’s paintings in this liquid medium are not on display. Arguably, the watercolours are amongst the most dynamic and satisfying of the whole show. They suggest the promise of a more lyrical and expressionistic abstraction in the future. But the bulk of the exhibition reveals a laborious, yet methodical, wet-in-wet admixture of white and colour that became a dominant characteristic of O’Keeffe’s practice.

 

A particular aspect of O’Keeffe’s early work, and more subtly evident in later years, is the combination of the straight edge and the curve. For example, the extraordinary ‘Red and Orange Streak’ [1919] features a Bowie-esque (viz. Aladdin Sane) lightening bolt that curves diagonally from top-right to bottom left. A sharp geometric feature is also found in, ‘Black Lines’ [1919] and echoed later in more drawings and oil paintings: e.g. ‘Blue and Green Music’ [1919/21]; ‘New York Street with Moon’ [1925] and ‘Black, White and Blue’ [1930]: or much more discretely in ‘Blue I’ and ‘Blue II’ [both 1958].

 

Perhaps it is for subject and content, rather than any extraordinary range of painting skills, that O’Keeffe’s work can claim a place in the history of modernism? For example, in response to the initially biased, but well-meaning, readings of her works, the strong willed O’Keeffe re-directed her attention (a literal referencing, via the advent of the photographic image) to New York Cityscapes to designate modernity.

 

The strongest wall in Room 4 included, ‘New York Street with Moon’ [1925]. This is O’Keeffe’s first painting of the city and is another early example of presenting an intriguing relationship between one aspect and another, i.e. the built and the natural environment (later this is replaced by bones and skulls in the landscape). ‘East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel’ [1928] records an almost monochromatic depiction of the architecturally crowded cityscape. The river offers the only physical, and visual, escape from a claustrophobic space. Even the smog-bound sky has been compositionally reduced to a thin band of pink and blue.

 

“I want to live alone in the desert / I want to be like Georgia O’Keeffe”
Warren Zevon (‘Splendid Isolation’, 1989)

 

Surely, O’Keeffe was a country girl at heart? During the 1920s, O’Keeffe’s escape from the city was often recorded in landscape paintings, many from visits to Lake George in upstate New York where the Stieglitz family had property. ‘Lake George’ [1922] exemplifies a predilection for simplicity of colour range and execution that was still evident in her final years.

 

There is a sense of O’Keeffe establishing her maturing identity as an artist after a trip to New Mexico in 1929 where she felt at home. She settled there permanently in 1949. ‘Black Cross with Stars and Blue’ [1929] is a graphically strong composition that virtually pushes the cross in the foreground into the viewer’s face, but offers a distant view of mountains and a starry sky to relieve the visual confrontation.

 

From hereon the still-life/landscape iconography develops significantly. The space of the American West, in contrast to the more urbanised East Coast, enables O’Keeffe to fully develop the imagery that forms the central core of the exhibition. ‘Summer Days’ [1936]; ‘Deer’s Skull with Pedernal’ [1936]; ‘From the Faraway, Nearby’ [1937] might allude to vanitas paintings, reminders of the certainty of death in the European still-life tradition. In pictorial terms, space is typically juxtaposed as near and far.

 

The mythic persona is also further established. She was celebrated photographically all through her life; photogenically supported by her attire. The legend of Georgia O’Keeffe also encompasses the celebrity status of the 20th century artist. Like Salvador Dali in the same era, and prior to fellow Americans, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, photographs of O’Keeffe are as well known as her paintings.

 

In the latter sections of the exhibition the advent of commercial flight, offering a new aerial perspective on the landscape, and recognition of Native American culture encroaches upon her work. (The ‘Kachina’ drawings and paintings in Room 12 are studies of dolls representing a spirit being from western Pueblo Indian culture.) And in the final room, ‘Sky Above the Clouds III / Above the Clouds III’ [1963] stands out as an organic and abstract composition as it suggests a pool of lilies on a pond – but is a view of the clouds from above.

 

But just before the end of the show: ‘Wall with Green Door’ [1953], ‘In The Patio No. IV’ [1948] and ‘My Last Door’ [1952/4], forms an astounding wall. These virtually minimalist, geometric/abstract canvases, demonstrate that ‘late periods’ are not only the domain of male painters. From a dominant preoccupation with landscape, there is a final flourish of abstraction that approaches the arena of post-painterly abstraction.

 

This exhibition demonstrates that O’Keeffe had a visual-poetic sensibility: from the use of lightness and spatial configurations, to object transformations, to simplicity of execution. Therefore, as viewers of any exhibition we must beware of ‘received’ interpretations – however compelling. The commentary that opens up, rather than closes down, our understanding are the most productive. For example, the artist Ian McKeever has written:

 

“What I admired particularly in her work is the quality of stillness… and the fragility and brittleness I sense there too. One can feel in O’Keeffe the dryness of the arid New Mexican landscape. Feel that quality which the American poet William Carlos Williams referred to as a world of actions being stilled as in a world of stones: in this case bleached stones. Her work is dry in subject matter and dry as painting.”
(From his essay, ‘Light and Heat / Black and White’, 2005.)

 

As viewers too, with or without an agenda or prior knowledge, the paintings have to be the starting point for a meditation of sorts. We shall have to see if this exhibition purposefully contributes to the ongoing debate on the status of women in art and in the wider domains of culture. Gender and feminist issues aside, the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition will undoubtedly attract visitors and media coverage simply because of the sheer visual enticements of the work itself. Especially the flowers…

July 20, 2016