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"I
found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say
any other way - things I had no words for..."
-- Georgia O'Keeffe
A
delightful new exhibition Georgia
O'Keeffe: Abstraction opens
at the Whitney Museum September 17, and showcases
O'Keeffe's abstract work, paintings often overlooked with the
historical emphasis on her familiar representational paintings
(flowers, skulls, bones, desert landscapes). One realizes
that abstraction is really the ordering principle in her work, a
compositional basis for her objective paintings.
Interestingly, repeated Freudian interpretations of her work by
critics vexed the artist who instead saw in them a reverence for
nature's inspiring beauty. The show will include some of the
famous photographic portraits of O'Keeffe by her long-time
companion (and later, husband), the photographer and impresario
Alfred Stieglitz, as well as a selection of letters from the
voluminous correspondence between the two. O'Keeffe's
'abstract period' lasted roughly from 1915 to 1930 and picked up
again after the mid-1940's. Tent
Door at Night (1916),
above, in watercolor: simplicity - a few melodious, wavy lines,
curtains parting the night air or sails in the midnight
blue. Black, blue, and light gray combine to represent the
infinite night and one lone beautiful tent, and can just as easily
be viewed as a confluence of rivers or simply color on color,
abstraction at its most wondrous. O'Keefe said, "The
abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible
thing in myself that I can clarify in paint." A
new movie premieres on Lifetime Television September 19,
titled simply Georgia
O'Keeffe,
with Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons, an electrifying duo that starred
opposite each other earlier this year in another story about love
and art, the Broadway play Impressionism. The movie
traces O'Keeffe and Stieglitz's life together, a passionate
relationship between two sometimes temperamental artistic
geniuses. A story that spans O'Keeffe's determined search
for independence, Stieglitz's later dalliance with the younger
Dorothy Norman, and O'Keeffe's growing dominance in the art world
and her commitment to her work. The film also documents the
difficulties that O'Keeffe's fame caused for a man used to being
the center of attention, and her move West to New Mexico.
Stieglitz and O'Keeffe wrote to each other, sometimes several
times a day, and a 2-volume edition of the letters will be
available shortly. O'Keeffe is certainly having a revival of
sorts! See:
Georgia
O'Keeffe: Abstraction, Whitney Museum
See:
The Lifetime movie: Georgia
O'Keeffe, September 19.
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 Georgia
O'Keeffe 1918, Alfred Stieglitz Metropolitan
Museum of Art
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