Georgia O’Keeffe @ Tate Modern, London

Georgia O’Keeffe
Tate Modern, London
6 July – 30 October 2016

Tate Modern presents a major retrospective of American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), the first UK exhibition of her work for over twenty years. Marking a century since O’Keeffe’s debut in New York in 1916, this ambitious and wide-ranging survey will reassess the artist’s place in the canon of twentieth-century art and reveal her profound importance. With no works by O’Keeffe in UK public collections, the exhibition will be a once-in-a-generation opportunity for audiences outside of America to view her oeuvre in such depth.

Widely recognised as a founding figure of American modernism, Georgia O’Keeffe gained a central position in leading art circles between the 1910s and the 1970s. She was also claimed as an important pioneer by feminist artists of the 1970s. Spanning the six decades in which Georgia O’Keeffe was at her most productive and featuring over 100 major works, this exhibition will chart the progression of her practice from her early abstract experiments to her late works, aiming to dispel the clichés that persist about the artist and her painting.

Opening with the moment of her first showings at ‘291’ gallery in New York in 1916 and 1917, the exhibition will feature Georgia O’Keeffe’s earliest mature works made while she was working as a teacher in Virginia and Texas. Charcoals such as No. 9 Special 1915 and Early No. 2 1915 will be shown alongside a select group of highly coloured watercolours and oils, such as Sunrise 1916 and Blue and Green Music 1919. These works investigate the relationship of form to landscape, music, colour and composition, and reveal Georgia O’Keeffe’s developing understanding of synaesthesia.

A room in the exhibition will consider Georgia O’Keeffe’s professional and personal relationship with Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946); photographer, modern art promoter and the artist’s husband. While Stieglitz increased O’Keeffe access to the most current developments in avant-garde art, she employed these influences and opportunities to her own objectives. Her keen intellect and resolute character created a fruitful relationship that was, though sometimes conflictive, one of reciprocal influence and exchange. A selection of photography by Stieglitz will be shown, including portraits and nudes of O’Keeffe as well as key figures from the avant-garde circle of the time, such as Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) and John Marin (1870-1953).

Still life formed an important investigation within Georgia O’Keeffe’s work, most notably her representations and abstractions of flowers. The exhibition will explore how these works reflect the influence she took from modernist photography, such as the play with distortion in Calla Lily in Tall Glass – No. 2 1923 and close cropping in Oriental Poppies 1927. A highlight will be Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 1932, one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s most iconic flower paintings.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s most persistent source of inspiration however was nature and the landscape; she painted both figurative works and abstractions drawn from landscape subjects. Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out of Black Marie’s II 1930 and Red and Yellow Cliffs 1940 chart O’Keeffe’s progressive immersion in New Mexico’s distinctive geography, while works such as Taos Pueblo 1929/34 indicate her complex response to the area and its layered cultures. Stylised paintings of the location she called the ‘Black Place’ will be at the heart of the exhibition.

Georgia O’Keeffe is curated by Tanya Barson, Curator, Tate Modern with Hannah Johnston, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition is organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. It will be accompanied by a catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

TATE MODERN
www.tate.org.uk

Marsden Hartley, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT

Marsden Hartley
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
January 17 – April 20, 2003

The first Marsden Hartley retrospective in over twenty years is being organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Comprising 85 paintings and 20 works on paper that represent each important stage of the artist’s creative life, Marsden Hartley will open at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., January 17 – April 20, 2003. The survey will travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., June 7 – September 7, 2003, and to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, October 11, 2003 – January 11, 2004.

Widely acknowledged as the greatest of the early American modernists, Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) belonged to a circle of artists promoted by photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz that included Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and Charles Demuth. He was also a widely published poet and essayist whose work appeared in Camera Work, The Dial, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and Yankee. 

Unlike his colleagues, however, he was ceaselessly experimental, unusually peripatetic, and deeply spiritual. His greatest misfortune was timing. Falling out of synch with historic events and public sentiment, the politically naïve Hartley was plagued by professional setbacks. His first breakthrough achievement, the symbolic and abstract “War Motif” series, painted in Berlin during 1914-15, featured the Iron Cross, German imperial flags, and regimental insignia. Upon the outbreak of World War I, American viewers interpreted these bold, colorful paintings as pro-German statements. Later, critics saw his stylistic shifts and wanderlust as troubling signs of “personal incompletion.” And in 1929 Henry McBride wrote, “Americans should not flee their country but should work in America even though the conditions for the artist be impossible here.”

The rebuke rankled. Although Hartley traveled incessantly in Europe and North America, and lived in France and Germany for lengths of time, he was proud of his New England roots. Steeped in Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, place mattered to Hartley. He aimed at “voicing the soul” in his art, and viewed the totality of his landscape, figure, and still life paintings as “portraits” of the spiritual essence he divined in nature and mankind alike.

Marsden Hartley opens with several early Maine landscapes that were first shown in 1909 at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery, followed by the “Pre-War Pageant,” “Amerika,” and “War Motif” series painted in Berlin during 1913-15. Returning to North America, Hartley produced the “Province-town” series, the most abstract work by any of the Stieglitz circle, in 1916; still lifes in Bermuda in 1917; and depictions of the New Mexico landscape and Hispanic church imagery in 1918-19. He made an artistic pilgrimage to France in 1925-27, capturing the Vence landscape and Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire. Returning to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1931, he began the cubistic “Dogtown” series; painted in Mexico during 1932-33, and sought inspiration in the Bavarian Alps in 1933.

In the last nine years of his life, however, Hartley reinvented himself as “the painter from Maine.” Coinciding with the Great Depression, this period marked his first sustained venture into figurative painting, for which he consciously adopted a primitive style to celebrate the “sturdy simple people” with whom he identified. It was his second breakthrough achievement. 

Indeed, love, loss, and memory impelled Hartley to create his most compelling images. The “War Motif” series recalls his beloved German officer, Karl von Freyburg. Eight Bells’ Folly (1933) is a memorial for fellow poet Hart Crane. A variety of late portraits, seascapes, and still lifes are remembrances of the Masons, a Nova Scotia fishing family whose sons Alty and Donny, along with a cousin, were drowned. 

Some of these and other paintings in the exhibition are undeniably homoerotic, yet one must remember that Hartley concealed his identity as a gay man to all but a few intimates. In the 1930s and ’40s, critics decried the “emasculation” of American art. Meanwhile, homosexuality was increasingly criminalized just as the U.S. Army, Hollywood, comic books, and magazines celebrated the “common man” with images of brawny men.

“The distance of time allows us a deeper understanding of Marsden Hartley’s persisting quality and originality. This complex and fascinating artist is finally getting his due,” said Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, deputy director, chief curator, and Krieble Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum. “This exhibition not only explores the high points of his career, but takes issue with the assumption that what came in between is of less consequence. As he moved to new subject matter and styles, navigating between abstraction and realism, Hartley achieved remarkable single works and new series within each of his four decades as a painter,” she concluded.

Lenders include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago; Bates College in Lewiston, Maine; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, and Weisman Art Museum at University of Minnesota; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Saint Louis Art Museum; Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and many private collections.

Catalogue: Yale Press, London, is publishing the accompanying 330-page catalogue (plus index) with 150 color illustrations and 50 in black and white. The hardback edition is $55; the soft-cover is $39.95, and will be available at the Museum Shop at the Wadsworth Atheneum. It features an introductory essay by exhibition curator Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser; essays by Donna Cassidy, Wanda Corn, Amy Ellis, Randall Griffey, Patricia McDonnell, Bruce Robertson, Carol Troyen, Jonathan Weinberg, and conservators Stephen Kornhauser and Ulrich Birkmaier; and entries by Townsend Ludington and Kirstina Wilson.

Symposium: The Wadsworth Atheneum will present a symposium on Marsden Hartley on Saturday, March 1, 2003. 

Travels to The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, June 7 – Sept. 7, 2003

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, Oct. 11, 2003 – Jan. 11, 2004

WADSWORTH ATHENEUM MUSEUM OF ART
600 Main St., Hartford, CT 06103
www.wadsworthatheneum.org

Georgia O'Keeffe: Works on Paper at Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe - "O'Keeffe on Paper" Exhibition

O'Keeffe on Paper

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe

July 29 - October 29, 2000

Drawing on new scholarship and including many rarely seen works from private collections, O'Keeffe on Paper presents 55 stunning watercolors, pastels and charcoals by Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986). The exhibition offers fresh insights into this distinctive and little-known aspect of the artist's oeuvre. 

Georgia O'Keeffe created works on paper throughout her long career and did some of her most innovative work in watercolor, pastel and charcoal. By including sheets produced over a half-century period, starting in 1915, the exhibition illuminates the artist's technical virtuosity, while tracing the development of her personal artistic language. In a broader sense, O'Keeffe's work reflects the dialogue in 20th-century American art between representation and abstraction.

In the 1910s, Georgia O'Keeffe created some of the most innovative images of early American modernism, starting with charcoal drawings such as No. 2 - Special (1915). The following year her work was introduced to photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924.

Georgia O'Keeffe's watercolors from the teens range from the spare and highly abstract, such as Black Lines (1916), to broad fields of clear, bold color as in Blue No.II (1916) and Evening Star V (1917), to more representational images, Roof with Snow (1916) and Train at Night in the Desert (1916). Of particular interest are three fluid watercolors Ð all known as Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand) Ð from private collections. Created in 1917, they refer to the photographer and friend of the artist and reflect O'Keeffe's experimentation with different forms of imagery.

Georgia O'Keeffe settled in New York in 1918 where she became part of the circle of modernists gathered around Stieglitz, many of whom, like Stieglitz himself, embraced the city as one of their subjects over several decades. Georgia O'Keeffe employed pastel to record buildings silhouetted against the East River and charcoal to depict the skyline of Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge. Blue Flower (1918), a delicate early pastel, presages the large-format oil paintings of flowers close-up for which O'Keeffe is famous, while A White Camellia (1938) is a late pastel on a similar theme. After her permanent move to New Mexico in 1949 she again chose to work in charcoal. Among those late works is the highly abstract From a River Trip (1965), the latest drawing in the exhibition.

Co-curators of O'Keeffe on Paper are Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, author of the catalogue raisonné, and Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center, and Ruth E. Fine, the National Gallery's curator of modern prints and drawings and co-director of the catalogue raisonné project. Selections were made by Fine and Lynes with Judith Walsh, the National Gallery's senior paper conservator, who participated in the catalogue raisonné project, and Elizabeth Glassman, president emerita of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation and co-director of the catalogue raisonné project.

The exhibition is organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. It is made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation, The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation and the National Advisory Council of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

The exhibition celebrates the publication of the two-volume O'Keeffe catalogue raisonné, a major scholarly project of the National Gallery of Art in partnership with The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation. "We are delighted to collaborate with the National Gallery in presenting this exceptional exhibition, honoring the publication of the catalogue raisonné and bringing before the public works of such significance," said George G. King, director, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. He noted that the O'Keeffe Museum celebrates its third anniversary in July as well.

The fully illustrated exhibition catalogue demonstrates the depth of work conducted by the catalogue raisonné project and how the research has facilitated greater understanding of O'Keeffe's art. Essays by Fine, Glassman, Lynes, and Walsh place O'Keeffe's works on paper in the context of her American contemporaries and in relation to her oil paintings, and examine the importance of the artist's choice of materials in the development of her aesthetic. The catalogue is available for $25 (softcover) and $35 (hardcover, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., publishers) in the Museum Shop and on the Museum web site at www.okeeffemuseum.org. 

Also available in the Museum Shop, on the Museum web site, is Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné by Barbara Buhler Lynes, published by Yale Press, the National Gallery of Art and The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation. A two-volume set in a slipcase, it presents more than 2,000 paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculptures by Georgia O'Keeffe, many of which have not previously been reproduced, along with factual entries for each. There is a full bibliography, exhibitions listing and chronology of the artist's life. With 2,050 illustrations in color and 100 in black-and-white, it is available for $195.

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE MUSEUM

217 Johnson Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501

www.okeeffemuseum.org