Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things
California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco
19 February - 14 May 2000
Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.Georgia O'Keeffe, 1922
Sixty-eight signal works by Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), will be on view in San Francisco in the only West Coast showing of Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things. This major exhibition is the first to focus entirely on the artist's depictions of objects. The selection of paintings and works on paper on display spans the period from 1908 to 1963, and explores Georgia O'Keeffe's aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual relationships with the objects she chose to paint.
In 1915 Georgia O'Keeffe divided her work into two categories: "land-scapes" and "things." Georgia O'Keeffe's "things" have a decidedly organic nature and veer toward the abstract rather than the representational. Flowers, leaves, bones, shells, and fruit are among the objects explored by the artist in these works, which reflect her sensual regard for objects in nature.
A Giant in the History of American Art
Georgia O'Keeffe has endured as the preeminent woman artist in the United States since her first critical success in the early 1920s. At that time, her fresh outlook defied the traditional norms of space, scale, perspective, and time promulgated by her contemporaries. Her work focused on things close at hand, such as the fruits and vegetables grown in her garden at Lake George, or the leaves she picked up, or the clam shells she gathered in Maine. Unlike traditional compositions, Georgia O'Keeffe did not place her subject in the usual domestic space of a garden or kitchen, but rather in an indefinite, timeless space. Her use of color, shape, and patterns operated independently from the discipline of botany or the 19th-century standards of landscape and still-life painting. When inventing her own new form, O'Keeffe shunned these traditions and said to herself, "I'll paint what I see--what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it...."
Her now well-known canvases epitomize by their precision of design, simplicity, and refinement the spirit of the modern age. They also brilliantly attest to the primacy of nature in American art and thought, even in an industrial era. Georgia O'Keeffe's art remains as provocative today as when it first came to public attention in the early decades of this century.
Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things focuses on the artist's most important series: her studies of nature. Through these, the exhibition reveals her rapid development as an abstract painter, as she scrutinized objects from nature for their essential forms. The petals of a flower become in her work undulating rhythms, the skin of an apple a sea of light and color. The exhibition also demonstrates how closely connected these objects are to the artist personally and psychologically. They are, for Georgia O'Keeffe, souvenirs of places and experiences. They are also emblems of the vastness, mystery, and dynamism of nature. "I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it," she once wrote.
Eastern Theories, Western Genre of Painting
Georgia O'Keeffe's aesthetic synthesized Eastern theories and principles with a Western genre of painting, thereby redefining the still life tradition in Western art. During her studies in 1914 with Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University, she was introduced to Dow's classroom text Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, by Ernest Fenollosa. This book revealed to O'Keeffe an Asian art of live, precise detail whose eloquence had come from clarity, not sentiment. O'Keeffe owned a copy of Epochs, along with many other publications on Asian art and philosophy that she collected throughout her life and kept in her library at Abiquiu, New Mexico.
Exploring a range of her invention, Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things reveals her deepening understanding of her materials and process as well as the essential components of her developing aesthetic. Georgia O'Keeffe's imaginative process was poetic and precise. The images she conveyed in her paintings can be said to mirror an active mind discovering something new and then registering it into the field of consciousness. Therein lies her artistic poetry of selection, elimination, and emphasis.
Shared Aesthetic with f 64 Photographers
The San Francisco presentation of Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things will be augmented by a display of works by f 64 photographers, which acknowledges the shared sensibilities and interconnections between O'Keeffe's vision of the natural world and that of her contemporaries who worked in the photographic medium. The display of approximately 30 photographs borrowed from Bay Area institutions will include works by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorthea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Paul Strand, Roger Sturtevant, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston, among others.
Some of the f 64 photographers--a group of colleagues who took their name from the smallest aperture setting, or f stop, on the camera, which rendered the sharpest focus and greatest depth of field possible--were Bay Area residents for all or part of their lives. Of special interest is the fact that the work of these photographers was first brought to public attention in the landmark f 64 exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in 1932.
In addition, a selection of photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, lends an important biographical element to the exhibition and demonstrates as well the extent to which O'Keeffe was a principal subject of Stieglitz's art.
Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things is co-organized by The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Elizabeth Hutton Turner, The Philips Collection.
Venues
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, 17 April-18 July 1999
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 7 August-17 October 1999
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, 7 November 1999-30 January 2000
California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, California, 19 February-14 May 2000
Catalogue
A comprehensive catalogue accompanies Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things. The first work to deal exclusively with O'Keeffe's still-life paintings, the catalogue contains essays by prominent art scholars and color plates of the works in the exhibition. In addition, the publication includes comparative black-and-white illustrations and descriptions of each work in the exhibition, as well as contextual photographs of O'Keeffe's studios and related historical and contemporary works.
California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA
www.thinker.org
