Nobody's business but hers
John McEwen
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE by Barbara Bubier Lynes Yale, L'100, 2 volumes, pp. 1198 Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) is prob- ably America's most famous female artist. Her pictures are reproduced as postage stamps, her work is in every major public collection and has a museum, research cen- tre and foundation devoted to it, the foun- dation co-sponsoring this publication, whose author is a director at the research centre and curator of the museum. Yet, as far as I know, not one public collection in this country has an O'Keeffe.
This is slightly shocking but not surpris- ing. Until very recently Stanley Spencer was similarly unrepresented in America and for much the same reason. He is as English as meat and two veg, just as O'Keeffe is as American as blueberry pie. And she is not unknown here. She is in all the history books and there was a major exhibition of her paintings at the Hayward Gallery six years ago.
Now she receives the ultimate accolade of a catalogue raisonne, illustrating and cer- tifying 2,045 objects made between 1901 and 1984, mostly oil paintings but also watercolours, drawings, the contents of sketch books and her brief forays into sculpture and pottery. It is a picture book, a reference for dealers and other special- ists, with all the relevant written material, including her own published texts.
Turning the pages, certain things emerge. As a child and student she showed no particular talent, emphasising the point that artists are invariably made not born. Art comes from art — the budding artist begins by imitating other artists in the hope that the mix will eventually produce indi- viduality. Art also comes from persever- ance. For every satisfactory conclusion there are countless false starts. Once an artist has a discernible view repetition fol- lows. Luck plays its part as in all human endeavours. •O'Keeffe is no exception to these norms.
She was born in Wisconsin and had a noble beauty which suited her later status as a reclusive 'grande dame'. Some of her best paintings are of New York, but she was always a country girl at heart, brought up on a dairy farm near Sun Prairie, which might be a title for the sort of picture which earned her immortality. One feels she could have spat tobacco and shoed a horse, if required. There is a local twang to her first catalogue statement penned in 1923.
I grew up pretty much as everybody else grows up and one day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself — I can't live where I want to — I can't go where I want to — I can't do what I want to — I can't even say what I want. School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself — that was nobody's business but my own.
Of course the record shows the influ- 'Yellow Calla', 1927 ences, perhaps the most subliminal and least mentioned being the beguiling Japon- isme of Aubrey Beardsley, an oriental dis- regard for perspective and chiaroscuro enforced by the art-teaching guru of the time, Arthur Wesley Dow, whose ideas influenced her as profoundly as they did her English contemporary Ivon Hitchens. Abstraction was the latest fashion, and her transitional period shows a marked debt to Rodin, Kandinsky and her compatriot Arthur Dove. A hazy sense of spiritualism is inseparable from all this.
Her art began to emerge from the chrysalis of influence in 1915, the year of her first abstractions. They were brought to the attention of the photographer and gallery owner, Alfred Stieglitz, foremost advocate of the European avant-garde in New York, and he became successively her dealer, lover, husband (in 1924 after a divorce) and lifelong mentor until his death in 1946.
It is the alliance of the abstract and the landscape, particularly that of her favourite New Mexico, which has given O'Keeffe a special place in the minds of Americans — a place made additionally romantic by her love affair with Stieglitz, immortalised by his photographs of her, clothed and naked, sonfe of the most beautiful of their kind.
O'Keeffe's pictures appeal on a number of counts: they are sexy (her enveloping enlargements of floral interiors in particu- lar), a Freudian aspect promoted by Stieglitz but suppressed by her, lonesome (no people appear) and, latterly of great feminist consequence, they are by a woman. Above all they stand for freedom: freedom of choice and space. From an English point of view it is interesting to note that a decade before Henry Moore she was (pictorially) punching holes in forms to the wide blue yonder.
It is also to her advantage that her paint- ings reproduce well, having — that Beards- ley influence again — a strongly graphic aspect. An O'Keeffe flower could happily decorate a box of tissues; her garish sunsets may well have influenced the flaming designs on the bodywork of custom-built roadsters and hot rods.
In reality her pictures tend to be smaller and cruder than one expects; and much of her work, the kind that endears her to a mass audience, is pure hokum, over sensational and soppily sentimental. This is particularly true of her postwar, coinciden- tally post-Stieglitz, production. It is indica- tive that the Museum of Modern Art has bought nothing by her from this period, in fact the discerning MoMA has precious little by her at all.
But she has her place, artistically as well as sociologically. Her pictures of New York's awesome canyons can capture the excitement of that most scintillating of cities; some of her landscapes do have an exquisite limpidity, the occasional flower does express ecstasy; and there are moments — the view of the sky from inside a tent; a pine tree against the stars — when the liberated whiff of Thoreau, Twain, Hemingway and, pictorial- ly, Winslow Homer, creeps in as pleasingly as woodsmoke. Most of her best work was done in the first throes of that famous love affair, but how many artists blaze with con- viction for more than a few years?
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