Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction

The name Georgia O’Keeffe solicits a slew of varied responses. Some view the artist with awe and appreciation, while others believe her to be overrated and mundane.

            Personally, O’Keeffe has always been an inspiration as a woman artist who truly understands the emotive power of art, and, more specifically, color.

            Known and popularized for her landscapes and floral paintings, O’Keeffe actually dedicated a large amount of her studies and work to abstraction. The new exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, at the Whitney Museum in NYC explores this side of O’Keeffe’s artwork.

            The exhibition compounds numerous abstractions from the very start of O’Keeffe’s career to the very end. By creating a timeline of these abstract pieces, the exhibition further tries to confront and explain the controversies that haunted O’Keeffe’s career. For one, the collection includes some of the ultra-magnified, cropped floral paintings that so many guesses to be symbols for the female anatomy. Abstraction acknowledges these opinions and presents O’Keeffe’s frustrated reaction to the public connection of her work with sexual imagery.

            The exhibition also includes Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of the artist and the background story of their significance to her enormous reputation, as well as the link of her art to female sexuality. In the beginning of their relationship, O’Keeffe posed for Stieglitz in a series of intimate nude photographs. O’Keeffe gained a measure of celebrity from this series and from her controversial affair with the much-her-senior Stieglitz.

            Later O’Keeffe posed for Stieglitz again, but this time posed in a profile of calm dignity: a remade portrait of female independence and confidence. The two series offer an interesting juxtaposition of youth and old age, creating a portfolio of maturing femininity.

            The story on the sidelines of the Abstraction exhibition, however, may point to what is so polarizing about O’Keeffe’s art. As a living legend, it seems O’Keeffe was always fighting the public interpretations of her works, and ultimately of her own persona. Even in the Whitney’s postmortem exhibition, the experience of the art is still irrevocably linked to the story of the artist.

            As for me, I look at O’Keeffe’s work as an exploration of color and shape. I was particularly drawn to the works of the “Eternal Star” series and the “Abstraction: Alexius” piece.

Here is a link to the Whitney website.  

And a write-up of the exhibition in WSJ.