Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore @ MFA Boston - A Major Exhibition

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

October 13, 2024 - January 20, 2025

Georgia O'Keeffe 

Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3, 1930 

Oil on canvas 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 

Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1987.58.2. 

© Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Henry Moore 

Reclining Figure, 1959–64 

Elmwood 

©  The Henry Moore Foundation: 

Gift of Irina Moore 

Photo: Jonty Wilde

American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986) are among the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. They have long been admired for their extraordinary distillations of natural forms into abstraction—O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of flowers and Moore’s monumental public sculpture. The major exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is the first to bring these two artists together, using compelling visual juxtapositions to explore their common ways of seeing. Each artist experimented with unusual perspectives, shifts in scale, and layered compositions to produce works that were informed by their surroundings—Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico and Henry Moore in Hertfordshire, England.

Featuring over 150 works—including about 60 works by Georgia O’Keeffe and 90 by Henry Moore—the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, as well as faithful recreations of each of the artists’ studios containing their tools and found objects. Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is an unprecedented collaboration with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation.

“Looking at O’Keeffe and Moore together, we can see how both artists were inspired by and also made use of natural forms. O’Keeffe hoped that her paintings would make people pay attention to things they usually overlooked—the soft gradations of a flower petal, the patterns within a landscape, or the shapes between two objects. As O’Keeffe said herself, ‘to see takes time.’ The chance to see her work in person is not to be missed,” said Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings.

“While many of our visitors here in Boston will know O’Keeffe’s work and reputation well, they might be less familiar with Moore, one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. The generous loans from the Henry Moore Foundation allow us to recreate the artist’s studio and will really help bring Moore alive and show how found objects played a role in the creation of his large-scale public sculpture,” said Courtney Harris, Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture.

Through careful observation of their surroundings and the objects they collected, O’Keeffe and Moore reimagined natural forms—bones, stones, shells, flowers, and the land itself—into dynamic abstractions. Each played with scale, exploring the effects of making small things large. They twisted and turned pieces in space, searching for balance, looking within their complex interiors, and exploring how objects transform the spaces around them. The exhibition presents their works both individually and in dialogue, presenting unique juxtapositions such as:

O’Keeffe’s Red Tree, Yellow Sky (1952, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Moore’s Working Model for Standing Figure: Knife Edge (1961, The Henry Moore Foundation): Georgia O’Keeffe often envisioned how miniature forms might become monumental. In this painting she juxtaposed a small piece of wood against a distant landscape, conflating near and far, large and small. Henry Moore similarly made a small thing enormous, inspired by the breastbone of a bird to create a figurative sculpture that twists in space and encourages viewers to walk around it.

Henry Moore’s Helmet (1939–1940, The Henry Moore Foundation) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3 (1930, National Gallery of Art, Washington): This work by Moore was the first in a series of small sculptures with hollow shells that encased unique interior forms. O’Keeffe similarly used a technique of enclosure in her painting of a deep purple flower with its complex interior and billowing leaves.

O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV (1944, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) and Moore’s Reclining Figure Bone (1975, The Henry Moore Foundation): O’Keeffe plays with scale, depth, and perspective by showing an entire vista through the aperture of a sun-bleached pelvic bone. Her interest in simplification and negative space is mirrored in Moore’s reduction of the human figure to a simple curve. His choice of travertine, with its porous texture and off-white color, maintains its connection to his inspiration in a weathered animal bone.

There were many other artists active in the U.S. and Europe in the mid-20th century who also looked to nature. The MFA’s presentation of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore draws upon the Museum’s modernist collection to provide a broader context. O’Keeffe and Moore’s works are put into dialogue with photographs, prints, sculpture, and paintings by artists including Edward Weston (1886–1958), Alexander Calder (1898–1976), Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), Arthur Dove (1880–1946), Jean Arp (1886–1966), Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976), and Maria Montoya Martinez (Poveka or Water Pond Lily), (Powhogeh Owingeh [San Ildefonso Pueblo]) (1887–1980).

At the core of the exhibition are recreations of the artists’ studios, built with original contents from Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch studio in the hills of New Mexico and Henry Moore’s Bourne Maquette Studio in Perry Green, a small hamlet surrounded by sheep fields in Hertfordshire, England. Though both O’Keeffe and Moore remained within reach of city life, the two artists worked in rural settings, both amassing large personal collections of animal bones, stones, seashells, and other natural materials that served as key sources of inspiration. These found objects can be seen in these spaces alongside tools, unfinished works, and plaster maquettes. The studio installations illuminate the heart of O’Keeffe and Moore’s artistic practices—something rarely made visible in museum spaces—and create richer portraits of the artists by encouraging visitors to imagine how they worked and lived.

Georgia O’Keeffe Biography

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 and grew up in rural Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She first studied art in Chicago and then, in New York, with the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase. But she pursued a more modern approach, inspired by Arthur Wesley Dow, whose compositional theories were rooted in Japanese art. In the 1910s, O’Keeffe, then an art teacher in West Texas, began to make nature-based abstractions, learning to love the landscapes of the southwest.

Georgia O’Keeffe came to New York in 1916. Without her knowledge, a friend had sent her drawings to the New York art dealer, photographer, and champion of modernism Alfred Stieglitz, who gave O’Keeffe her first show at his gallery 291. With Stieglitz’s support, she came back to New York in 1918. They began a romantic relationship, marrying in 1924. O’Keeffe painted flowers, skyscrapers, and, following trips to New Mexico, bones, which she shipped back in barrels to New York. But the stark beauty of the southwest always beckoned. O’Keeffe visited for long periods and began to acquire property, first at Ghost Ranch and then in Abiquiú. She moved to New Mexico permanently after Alfred Stieglitz’s death in 1946.

Georgia O’Keeffe carefully nurtured her art, her career, and her persona, earning a place in the center of the New York art world. Her work was featured in a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1946—the museum’s first show devoted to a woman artist. She gained public recognition after a 1968 cover story in Life magazine. In 1997, The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico opened to the public.

Henry Moore Biography

Henry Moore was born in 1898 in Castleford, a mining town in the northern English county of Yorkshire. He served in World War I and upon his return, enrolled at the Leeds School of Art as the first student of a new sculpture department. Through the 1920s and ’30s he exhibited at shows in London and worked in a studio in Hampstead in northern London. During the World War II, he served as an Official War Artist, making drawings of Londoners sheltering in the Underground during the Blitz.

In 1940, after his London home was damaged by German bombs, Henry Moore settled permanently at Hoglands, a cottage in Perry Green in Hertfordshire, about 35 miles north of London. He spent the next four decades creating some of the most recognizable works of public sculpture of the 20th century. He was enormously successful and well known. He was honored with a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1946, the same year as O’Keeffe’s. He was appointed to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1948, and participated in the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Today, Moore’s legacy lives on through the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green and in Leeds. His work is also celebrated in an important suite of galleries at Tate Britain in London and in the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. His sculpture can be found in public spaces across the world.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore was organized by the San Diego Museum of Art in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is on view at the MFA in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery.

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON - MFA

465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.mfa.org

O’Keeffe et Henry Moore : Géants de l’art moderne @ Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal

O’Keeffe et Henry Moore : 

Géants de l’art moderne

Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal

10 février – 2 juin 2024

Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002), Georgia O’Keeffe, 1956 

MBAM, don d’Estrellita Karsh à la mémoire de Yousuf Karsh 

Henry Moore dans l’atelier « du haut », à Perry Green. vers 1953 

Reproduit avec l’autorisation de la Henry Moore Foundation 

Photo Roger Wood

Le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (MBAM) présente, en première canadienne, O’Keeffe et Henry Moore : géants de l’art moderne, une exposition d’envergure qui met pour la première fois en dialogue l’œuvre de la peintre américaine Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) et celle du sculpteur anglais Henry Moore (1898-1986). Organisée par le San Diego Museum of Art, cette grande exposition dresse un parallèle inédit entre la vie et la production de ces deux artistes qui ont marqué le XXe siècle. A travers plus de 120 œuvres et la reconstitution de leur atelier personnel, elle retrace l’évolution de leur pratique artistique et témoigne de l’influence profonde du monde naturel sur leur travail.

Bien qu’ils aient vécu sur deux continents distincts, O’Keeffe et Moore ont partagé une vision semblable de l’art moderne. Le point commun entre ces deux artistes réside dans l’inspiration que chacun tire de la nature et dans leur association durable avec les vastes paysages ruraux environnants. Si d’autres de leurs contemporains, comme Piet Mondrian et Hans Arp, empruntent la voie des formes organiques pour atteindre l’abstraction, O’Keeffe et Moore centrent leur approche sur cet aspect fondamental.

Au cours de leurs excursions quotidiennes et de leurs voyages, les deux artistes amassent des pierres, des crânes et ossements d’animaux, des racines, des morceaux de bois, ainsi que des coquillages dont leurs ateliers regorgent. Leur vaste collection révèle des similitudes étonnantes. Pour la première fois, la reconstitution méticuleuse de leur atelier respectif permet au public d’observer comment ces objets trouvés façonnent leurs créations et leur inspirent certaines de leurs œuvres les plus importantes.

« À notre connaissance, les deux artistes ne se sont rencontrés qu’une seule fois, à l’occasion de la rétrospective Moore tenue au Museum of Modern Art en 1946. O’Keeffe a eu droit elle aussi à une rétrospective la même année. Il y a lieu de se questionner sur le message que cette grande institution a voulu lancer en mettant ces deux artistes à l’affiche à un moment où le monde se relevait du traumatisme de la guerre. A-t-elle voulu dire que leur œuvre offre quelque chose de vivifiant, de positif et de bienfaisant par le lien humaniste qu’elle entretient avec la nature ? », poursuit Anita Feldman, directrice adjointe de la conservation et de l’éducation, San Diego Museum of Art.

Georgia O’Keeffe et Henry Moore ont fait l’objet d’innombrables expositions. Pour la première fois sont réunies des œuvres des deux artistes provenant majoritairement de la Fondation Henry Moore, en Angleterre, et du Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, au Nouveau-Mexique, ainsi que d’une vingtaine de collections muséales et privées. L’exposition comprend des peintures, des œuvres sur papier et des sculptures réalisées à partir de diverses matières allant du plâtre au bronze, sans oublier le marbre, le calcaire Hoptonwood et l’albâtre de Cumberland. On y retrouve même une sculpture taillée à même une stalactite. Parmi les chefs-d’œuvre présentés, mentionnons Panier à oiseaux (1939), Figure allongée (1959-1964), « Trois morceaux no 3 : vertèbres », (1968) et Modèle de travail pour « Ovale avec pointes » (1968-1969) de Moore, et Arisème petit-prêcheur III (1930), Tête de bélier, belle-de-jour bleue (1938) et Le mont Pedernal vu depuis le ranch no 1, (1956) d’O’Keeffe. La présentation montréalaise est par ailleurs enrichie d’un « dessin de transformation » et de quatre sculptures de Moore, en plus d’un portrait d’O’Keeffe réalisé par Yousuf Karsh, tous issus de la collection du MBAM.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE ET HENRY MOORE : 

GÉANTS DE L’ART MODERNE

PARCOURS DE L'EXPOSITION

Déployée en six sections, l’exposition propose une série de galeries thématiques qui portent un regard approfondi sur les formes naturelles qui ont marqué les créations d’O’Keeffe et de Moore. Elle débute par une présentation des premières études d’après nature des deux artistes. Elle offre un aperçu de l’influence, sur leur travail, du mouvement surréaliste qui se répand dans les années 1930. Ce mouvement se caractérise par un intérêt pour les thèmes de la transformation et de la métamorphose, ainsi que pour les juxtapositions d’objets insolites et les ruptures d’échelle.

Une section de l’exposition est consacrée à l’une des plus importantes sources d’inspiration de Georgia O’Keeffe et de Henry Moore : les ossements. Les deux artistes explorent la complexité interne des crânes et admirent la puissance et la robustesse des ossements, tout comme leurs arêtes tranchantes. Tous deux les mettent en relation avec le ciel qu’ils regardent par leurs ouvertures de manière à jouer avec la perspective et l’échelle.

Dans les années 1940, Georgia O’Keeffe et Henry Moore quittent respectivement les centres artistiques de New York et de Londres. La première s’installe dans les collines désertiques du Nouveau-Mexique, où elle vit et travaille au gré des saisons : à Ghost Ranch (en été et en automne) et à Abiquiú (en hiver et au printemps). Comme O’Keeffe, Moore travaille dans divers ateliers avant de s’installer dans le paysage rural de Perry Green, dans le Hertfordshire, après que sa résidence londonienne a été endommagée par les bombardements. Là-bas, il occupe plusieurs ateliers aménagés dans des hangars et des écuries reconvertis, au milieu de vastes pâturages.

Des meubles originaux et des répliques donnent vie aux ateliers reconstitués dans les salles de l’exposition et illustrent l’environnement dans lequel Georgia O’Keeffe et Henry Moore travaillent, entourés d’objets trouvés dans la nature. L’atelier d’O’Keeffe à Ghost Ranch intègre notamment un chevalet et des tableaux inachevés de l’artiste, ainsi que des pinceaux taillés par ses soins, des pastels de sa confection, des fiches chromatiques destinées à consigner des couleurs précises et même des outils lui servant à tendre ses toiles. L’atelier de Moore, Bourne Maquette Studio, contient pour sa part des étagères pleines d’objets trouvés et de petites sculptures directement moulées sur ces objets, notamment des maquettes en plâtre de figures humaines, des coquillages, du bois flotté, des bouts de silex ainsi que des os et cornes d’animaux amassés au cours de ses promenades dans les champs de moutons. On y trouve également quelques raretés telles qu’un crâne de rhinocéros noir et une vertèbre de girafe que l’artiste a reçus en cadeau de la part de l’éminent biologiste Julian Huxley. Cet arrangement de formes et d’objets souligne la relation intrinsèque qui unit tous les êtres vivants.

Une autre section porte sur les vastes collections de galets, de silex, de roches de rivière et de roches ferrugineuses des deux artistes qui, superposés et imbriqués, servent à réaliser bon nombre de leurs œuvres. Tous deux sont fascinés par l’immense variété des pierres aux surfaces tantôt corrodées et texturées, tantôt lisses et nuancées, allant même jusqu’à explorer des sites archéologiques pour étudier la manière dont ces pierres monumentales s’intègrent les unes aux autres. L’exposition examine par ailleurs l’évolution du travail de chaque artiste avec les formes organiques, explorant des formes internes et externes comme celles des fleurs et des coquillages. Le dialogue fécond entre les œuvres présentées jette un éclairage nouveau sur les peintures florales d’O’Keeffe qui tranche avec l’habituelle interprétation sexualisée de son œuvre, qu’elle n’a cessé de réfuter.

Le parcours se termine par la présentation d’œuvres tardives, des paysages caractérisés par des formes épurées et des échelles démesurées qui créent une monumentalité dans la simplicité. Certaines œuvres de Moore illustrent sa façon de transformer une figure en paysage métaphorique, tandis que les compositions d’O’Keeffe, constituées de bandes de couleur et de lumière, illustrent l’immobilité et le passage du temps.

Une exposition organisée par le San Diego Museum of Art, en collaboration avec le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal.

Commissariat : Anita Feldman, directrice adjointe de la conservation, San Diego Museum of Art. Iris Amizlev, conservatrice – Projets et engagement communautaires, est responsable de la présentation montréalaise.

Publication : L’exposition est accompagnée d’un élégant ouvrage illustré, publié en anglais par Marquand Books, et adapté en français par les Éditions du Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. Sous la direction d’Anita Feldman, il réunit des essais d’Hannah Higham, de Jennifer Laurent, de Barbara Buhler Lynes, d’Ariel Plotek et de Chris Stephens, qui offrent un éclairage nouveau sur les méthodes de travail d’O’Keeffe et de Moore, artistes dont la pratique est profondément ancrée dans leur environnement.

MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS DE MONTRÉAL

1380, rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montréal (Québec) H3G 1J5

mbam.qc.ca

Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer @ MFAH, Houston + other venues

Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer 

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 

October 17, 2021 - January 17, 2022 

Todd Webb, Georgia O’Keeffe with Camera, 1959

Printed later, inkjet print, Todd Webb Archive

© Todd Webb Archive, Portland, Maine, USA

Georgia O’Keeffe is a groundbreaking figure of American Modernism, widely recognized for her paintings of New York skyscrapers, radical depictions of flowers, and stark landscapes of the American southwest. Less known is that she quietly honed a photography practice just as distinct as, yet complementary to, her paintings and drawings.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents the first exhibition devoted to O’Keeffe’s photographic practice with the debut of Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer. Organized in partnership with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, the exhibition reveals the wider scope of the artist’s career through some 90 photographs from a previously unstudied archive—a discovery led by MFAH associate curator of photography Lisa Volpe. Photographs in the exhibition are complemented by 17 paintings and drawings of landscapes, flowers, and still lifes from public and private collections across the USA.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer is on view in the Upper Brown Pavilion of the MFAH Caroline Wiess Law Building, before travelling to the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; the Denver Art Museum; and the Cincinnati Art Museum. 

“Georgia O’Keeffe has long been the subject of exhibitions, portraiture, and volumes of scholarship. She captivated the art world with her works on paper and canvas, yet her photography has never been studied or known despite being essential to her practice,” said Gary Tinterow, Director, the Margaret Alek Williams Chair, MFAH. “We are pleased to present this revelatory exhibition and expand appreciation of one of the most innovative and expressive artists our culture has produced.”

While Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) forged a career as one of the most significant painters of the 20th century, she also had a lifelong connection to photography. Captured on film throughout her life—in early family photos, travel snapshots, and portraits by a cavalcade of photographic artists including her husband, Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946)—O’Keeffe was no stranger to the medium. She expressed her unique perspective through all aspects of her life, and by the time she began her photographic practice in the mid-1950s, her singular identity and artistry were well developed. 

Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer is the culmination of three years of research led by Volpe, who analyzed hundreds of works in different collections and identified more than 400 photographic images by O’Keeffe. Volpe attributed, dated, and catalogued the photographs by examining small details in the images and analyzing the artist’s distinct style.

“In her 1976 book, O’Keeffe mentions her use of photography. Yet her mastery of painting stymied any research into this area for decades. It was a part of her artistic practice waiting to be examined,” Volpe said. “This exhibition reveals the ways in which she used photography as part of her unique and encompassing artistic vision. She claimed the medium for herself and her own artistic use—a radical act late in her career that begs for continued scholarship.”

The exhibition is organized around key tenets of O’Keeffe’s photographic approach: reframing, the rendering of light, and seasonal change.

Reframing views through the lens of her camera, Georgia O’Keeffe saw her environment as an array of possible shapes and forms. Moving from right to left, angling the camera from high to low, or turning it vertically and horizontally, she composed and recomposed her photographs to find harmonious compositions. Prints from Georgia O’Keeffe’s serial captures of the Natural Stone Arch near Leho’ula Beach, ’Aleamai, Hawaii are a highlight, demonstrating the artist’s intuitive search for the ideal relationship of expressive forms.

On paper, canvas, or in a photograph, dappled light and dark shadows are not merely fleeting effects for Georgia O’Keeffe. They provide weighty and essential forms. Sensitive to this formal potential, the artist often photographed the same view throughout the day to create varying compositions. A striking example is Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1964 Forbidding Canyon, a series of five Polaroids that capture changing light between two rock faces. Photographs of her beloved Chow Chows also express such possibilities, contrasting dark dog fur against the sun-washed landscape to find the tension between depth, flatness, realism, and abstraction.

Georgia O’Keeffe also explored seasonal changes by photographing her environment of evolving foliage and light year-round. Her photographs of the Chama River and a kiva ladder in her New Mexico home capture changes in vegetation, precipitation, and sunlight. Similarly, Georgia O’Keeffe regularly photographed the jimsonweed around her home, watching as the trumpet-like flowers obeyed both the cycle of the seasons and a shorter daily cycle, opening in the afternoon and closing with sunrise, from late summer until first frost. Georgia O’Keeffe’s jimsonweed prints signal the artist’s ongoing fascination with the transformations of nature.

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON

1001 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas 77005

www.mfah.org

Georgia O’Keeffe @ The Cleveland Museum of Art

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Through March 3, 2019

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern offers a unique look into the fascinating connections among the paintings, personal style, and public persona of one of America’s most celebrated artists. Throughout her 65-year career, Georgia O’Keeffe defied convention and forged a fiercely independent identity that was integral to her art. Showcasing approximately 140 objects, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures alongside her garments (many shown for the first time) and photographic portraits of her, the exhibition reveals Georgia O’Keeffe’s determination to be strikingly modern in both her art and her life. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Gallery. 

“Georgia O’Keeffe is a beloved icon of 20th-century American art,” said William Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The exhibition offers an intriguing look at how O’Keeffe shaped the world’s perception of her identity, artistic values, and style.”

Rejecting the restrained Victorian world into which she was born, Georgia O’Keeffe absorbed the progressive principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, which promoted the idea that everything a person made or lived with should reflect a unified, visually pleasing aesthetic. 

“Throughout the exhibition, we discover an artist who drew no boundaries between the art she made and the life she lived,” said Mark Cole, curator of American painting and sculpture. “Elegant simplicity is a hallmark of O’Keeffe’s streamlined style, manifesting itself through every object in Living Modern.” 

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is organized in sections that chart a chronology of Georgia O’Keeffe’s career. One large section is devoted to her early decades as a young artist in New York, specifically the 1920s and ’30s. At this time O’Keeffe honed a restrained palette of black and white, and a plain, relatively unornamented style that dominated much of her art and wardrobe.

The exhibition’s next section is devoted to Georgia O’Keeffe’s mature career in New Mexico, where her art and clothing changed in response to the surrounding colors of the American Southwest. She began wearing blue jeans, which she proclaimed to be America’s national costume, and coupled them with long-sleeved cotton men’s-styled shirts. At this time, she routinely introduced color into her clothing, mostly blue, occasionally red—the palette of her wardrobe mirroring her New Mexico canvases. 

Another section of the exhibition addresses Georgia O’Keeffe’s appreciation of Asian cultures. She professed an interest in Chinese and Japanese painting as early as the 1920s and amassed an extensive library of books devoted to both. In 1959 she was finally able to travel to Asia, where she augmented what would become a collection of nearly two dozen kimonos, some of which she wore for bed and bath.

The final section explores the significant role photography played in establishing O’Keeffe’s late-career celebrity. Some 50 photographers asked her to pose over her lifetime, solidifying her status as a pioneer of modernism and promoting her as an iconic artist with style. For the camera, O’Keeffe dressed in impeccably tailored black suits by designers such as Balenciaga, embodying a toughness, austerity, and individualism befitting someone who had lived life on her own terms. 

Highlights

Georgia O’Keeffe, c. 1920–22. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946). Gelatin silver print; 11.4 x 9 cm (4 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.). Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Gift of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 2003.01.006

In this early photograph, Georgia O’Keeffe wrapped herself in a black cape and accessorized it with a bowler hat. Posing her against the lightness of the sky and photographing her from a low vantage point, Alfred Stieglitz interpreted Georgia O’Keeffe as androgynous and “mannish.” Like other nonconformist women during the 1920s, O’Keeffe loved challenging and confounding society’s conventional dress codes, and Stieglitz enjoyed dramatizing her boldness and O’Keeffe’s cape can be seen in the exhibition. 

Blouse (detail), c. early to mid-1930s. Attributed to Georgia O’Keeffe. White linen. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Gift of Juan and Anna Marie Hamilton, 2000.03.0248. 

Photo © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

The decoration at the neckline of this blouse recalls Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of crinkled autumn leaves and corrugated seashells. The blouse and the ornament are shaped by tiny pin tucks—each done by hand-- that look like the veins of a leaf. 

The Mountain, New Mexico, 1931. Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986). Oil on canvas; 76.4 × 91.8 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 32.14. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Digital Image © Whitney Museum, New York 

Georgia O’Keeffe’s love of color in nature found its match in the Southwest, and she explored its hues avidly in her paintings and, more modestly, in her wardrobe. Describing her palette in New Mexico, O’Keeffe explained, “All the earth colors of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochres—orange and red and purple earth—even the soft earth greens.” 

Catalogue: Published by the Brooklyn Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern explores how Georgia O’Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O’Keeffe’s clothes. Author and exhibition curator Wanda M. Corn has attributed some of the most exquisite of these garments to O’Keeffe, a skilled seamstress who understood fabric and design, and who has become an icon in today’s fashion world as much for her personal style as for her art.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is organized by the Brooklyn Museum with guest curator Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University and made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44106
www.clevelandart.org

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

Exposition Georgia O’Keeffe, Musée de Grenoble - "Georgia O’Keeffe et ses amis photographes"

Georgia O’Keeffe et ses amis photographes
Musée de Grenoble
7 novembre 2015 - 7 février 2016

Première monographie consacrée en France à l’artiste peintre américaine Georgia O’Keeffe, cette exposition au musée de Grenoble constitue un événement exceptionnel. Réalisée avec la participation de la Fondation O’Keeffe de Santa Fe (Nouveau Mexique, Etats-Unis) et le soutien du réseau franco-américain de musées FRAME, elle retrace la carrière d’une icône de l’art américain aussi célèbre aux Etats-Unis que Jackson Pollock. Celle-ci se développe sur plus d’un demi-siècle, des débuts du modernisme américain à l’abstraction des années 1960. De ses premières créations à New York à son installation au Nouveau Mexique en 1949, O’Keeffe fut fortement influencée par la photographie moderne. L’exposition fera ainsi dialoguer ses peintures avec les images de ses amis photographes et formera, un ensemble total de 80 œuvres issu de quinze prestigieux musées américains mais également de grandes institutions allemandes, espagnoles et françaises.

Georgia O’Keeffe occupe une place singulière dans le contexte de l’art américain. Ses peintures, reconnaissables entre toutes, se distinguent par leur immédiateté, la sensualité de leurs couleurs et la clarté de motifs qui s’imposent, avec insistance, à la mémoire. La force de ces images, qui viennent question- ner le visible, tient au trouble créé par des formes énigmatiques oscillant sou- vent entre abstraction et figuration. Abandonnant l’abstraction organique de ses débuts, l’artiste se fait connaître, dans les années 1920, par des pein- tures de fleurs et de buildings au réalisme photographique. Elle assimile alors l’esthétique précisionniste des peintres du cercle de Stieglitz – Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles Demuth et Marsden Hartley, pour ensuite donner corps à un répertoire formel unique, profondément marqué par sa vie dans le désert du Nouveau Mexique. A partir des années 1960, en communion spirituelle avec son environnement du Sud-Ouest, O’Keeffe peint des compositions abstraites, dont la pureté formelle et la sensualité des tons se font l’écho des travaux de Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly ou Agnes Martin.

Née en 1887, dans le Wisconsin à Sun Prairie, Georgia O’Keeffe élabore très jeune une œuvre personnelle inspirée par les vastes plaines du Texas et marquée par les arabesques de l’art nouveau. A la suite de sa rencontre avec le photographe et défenseur des avant-gardes, Alfred Stieglitz, elle s’installe à New York en 1918 pour se consacrer exclusivement à son œuvre. Muse puis épouse du photographe en 1924, O’Keeffe découvre l’avant-garde européenne à la galerie 291 et fréquente le cercle de Stieglitz.

Fruit d’une individualité forte, son œuvre unique puise ses sources dans la nature. Entre abstraction et figuration, son travail se développe en séries selon un parti pris résolument moderniste. Ses compositions naissent avant tout de son observation du monde. Ce sont d’abord les ciels du Texas, les montagnes de Lake George, les buildings de New York et les fleurs. A partir de 1929, l’artiste choisit de passer ses étés à Santa Fe avant de s’installer définitivement au Nouveau-Mexique en 1949. Elle vit alors en communion intime avec la nature, goûtant la solitude des grands espaces, conduisant sa voiture à travers le désert. Cette expérience lui inspire de nouveaux sujets : architecture vernaculaire, canyons, os, ciels et rivières. 

Tout au long de sa carrière, Georgia O’Keeffe est attentive aux développements de la photographie moderne. La vision photographique qu’elle assimile explique en partie la force de ses images. Aussi jalonnant le parcours de l’exposition, au-delà des célèbres clichés de Stieglitz qui le premier sut saisir la beauté de l’artiste, sept photographes qui ont marqué son œuvre peint, qu’elle a elle-même influencés – Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter et Todd Webb - seront présentés. Georgia O’Keeffe partageait avec eux non seulement une communauté de motifs mais des lieux de prédilection – New York, le Nouveau-Mexique – qui forgèrent leurs regards respectifs.

Commissariat de l’exposition
Guy Tosatto, conservateur en chef, directeur du musée de Grenoble
Sophie Bernard, conservateur, chargée des collections modernes et contemporaines

Musée de Grenoble
5, place Lavalette, 38000 Grenoble
www.museedegrenoble.fr

Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life @ Philadelphia Museum of Art

Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life
Philadelphia Museum of Art
October 27, 2015 - January 10, 2016

This fall, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a major exhibition surveying nearly two centuries of the most intimate, intricate, and varied genre of painting practiced in the United States. Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life will explore the nature and development of still-life painting in this country from the days of the early American republic to the emergence of Pop Art in the early 1960s, providing a fresh perspective on the evolution of this genre over time and the various ways in which it has reflected our history and culture. Nearly one hundred artists will be represented, ranging from Philadelphia’s Peale family of painters and masters of trompe l’oeil such as William Michael Harnett to modern masters like Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, said, “Still life is an important subject that continues to fascinate us today. It can be a meditative study of a single, small object and yet also serve as a metaphor for the world. The story of American still life begins in Philadelphia, and we are delighted to have an opportunity to share this exhibition with our audiences. This is the first major show of its kind in more than thirty years and brings together works of great beauty and historical significance from collections around the country.”

The exhibition surveys the history of American still life. The earliest section addresses the interest of late 18th and early 19th-century painters, a period interested in precise visual description. In their efforts to understand and categorize nature, art and science were linked in the minds of such leading figures of this period as John James Audubon, whose Carolina Parrot (about 1828) depicts a species now extinct and provides a signal example of the combined artistic and scientific ambition that motivated his celebrated Birds of America. The exhibition also explores the pleasures of the senses and sensuality that became the primary focus of American still-life painters at the beginning of the Victorian era. The works of this period exemplify a spirit of newfound prosperity and abundance, as can been seen in Severin Roesen’s vivid floral still lifes and in tables overflowing with nature’s bounty, such as Andrew J. H. Way’s Oysters in Half Shell (1863). Discerning appetites and distinctions of the affluent after the Civil War, as recorded in images such as The Blue Cup (1909) by Joseph DeCamp will be highlighted along with works that address the technological and psychological preoccupations of early 20th-century American artists.

Visitors will encounter audio and visual representations of the iconic 20th Century Limited locomotive, the subject of Charles Sheeler’s classic Rolling Power (1939). Signaling the reach of a burgeoning media culture, the installation will dramatize how masterfully the artist evoked power and modernity, extending the idea of what still life could be. The exhibition concludes with a selection of Pop Art icons, including Roy Lichtenstein's Still Life with Goldfish (1974).

The exhibition will evoke the different ways of looking that American still-life painters have explored of the course of more than two centuries, immersing visitors in fully developed environments. The still lifes of the mid-19th century, for example, were typically created for parlors and dining rooms. A re-created Victorian parlor will invite visitors to appreciate these semipublic social settings, where educated and erudite conversations were sparked by artworks such as Edward A. Goods’s Fishbowl Fantasy (1867). The artworks themselves will be arranged in small groups to encourage comparison and discussion among visitors, as they did for their early audiences. The exhibition will also include evocations of Theodore Stewart’s famous New York City saloon, which drew crowds from nearby City Hall and around the world to admire William Michael Harnett’s large-scale After the Hunt (1885), which was displayed there in its own theatrical setting for many years. Themes such as music, literature, popular media, and science—including tangible ephemera such as bird specimens, magazines, and pocket watches—will bring forward the immediate inspirations and contemporary contexts of the art.

The impact of the Philadelphia region on the emergence and development of American still life is a theme that spans the entire exhibition. Mark D. Mitchell, the Associate Curator of American Art and Manager of the Center for American Art, said: “We examine not only still life’s development in America—motivated as much by wider cultural dynamics as by artistic taste—but also the distinctively regional association of American still life as a Philadelphia story.”

Catalogue

A fully illustrated catalogue, with essays by Bill Brown (University of Chicago), Carol Troyen (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Katie Pfohl (Harvard University), and Mark D. Mitchell (Philadelphia Museum of Art) will accompany the exhibition and be distributed by Yale University Press. The catalogue will be available in October.

Sponsorship

The exhibition is made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Peter R. & Cynthia K. Kellogg Foundation, and The Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions. Additional support is provided by Leigh P. and John S. Middleton, Mr. and Mrs. William C. Buck, the Estate of Phyllis T. Ballinger, Frank J. Hevrdejs, Bonnie and Peter McCausland, Russell C. Ball III, Sondra and Martin Landes, Jr., Washburn and Susan Oberwager, Sarah Miller Coulson, Leslie Miller and Richard Worley, an anonymous donor, other generous individuals, and by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Related educational programming and resources are supported by The Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The publication is supported by the Davenport Family Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art and The Andrew W. Mellon Fund for Scholarly Publications at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Curator

Mark D. Mitchell, formerly Associate Curator of American Art and Manager, Center for American Art, now The Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Location

Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor

Philadelphia Museum of Art
www.philamuseum.org

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
November 10, 2010 - April 10, 2011

Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand, three masters of photography, will be featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from November 10, 2010, through April 10, 2011, in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand.

The diverse and groundbreaking work of these artists will be revealed through a presentation of more than 100 photographs, drawn entirely from the Museum's collection. On view will be several of the Metropolitan's greatest photographic treasures from the 1900s to 1920s, including Stieglitz's famous portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe, Steichen's large colored photographs of the Flatiron building, and Strand's pioneering abstractions.

ALFRED STIEGLITZ (1864–1946) was a photographer of supreme accomplishment as well as a passionate advocate for photography and modern art through his gallery "291" and his sumptuous journal Camera Work. Stieglitz also laid the foundation for the Museum's collection of photographs. In 1928, he donated 22 of his own works to the Metropolitan; these were the first photographs to enter the Museum's collection as works of art. In later decades he gave the Museum more than 600 photographs by his contemporaries, including Edward Steichen and Paul Strand.

Among Stieglitz's works to be featured in this exhibition are portraits, views of New York City from the beginning and end of his career, and the 1920s cloud studies he titled Equivalents, through which he meant to demonstrate how "to hold a moment, how to record something so completely, that all who see [the picture of it] will relive an equivalent of what has been expressed."

The exhibition will also include numerous photographs from Stieglitz's extraordinary composite portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986), part of a group of works selected for the Museum's collection by O'Keeffe herself. Stieglitz made more than 300 images of O'Keeffe between 1917 and 1937—some of them candid shots, some focusing on her face, hands, or feet alone, and many of them showing her nude. Through these photographs Stieglitz revealed O'Keeffe's strengths and vulnerabilities, and almost single-handedly defined her public persona for generations to come.

Stieglitz's protégé and gallery collaborator, EDWARD STEICHEN (1879–1973), was the most talented exemplar of the Photo-Secession, the group founded by Stieglitz in 1902, seceding, in his words, "from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph," but also from the camera clubs and other institutions dominated by a more retrograde establishment. In works such as The Pond—Moonrise (1904), made using a painstaking technique of multiple printing, Steichen rivaled the scale, color, and individuality of painting.

Steichen's three large variant prints of The Flatiron (1904) are prime examples of the conscious effort of Photo-Secession photographers to assert the artistic potential of their medium. Steichen achieved coloristic effects reminiscent of Whistler's Nocturne paintings by brushing layers of pigment suspended in light-sensitive gum solution onto a platinum photograph. Although he used only one negative to create all three photographs, the variable coloring enabled him to create three significantly different images that convey the chromatic progression of twilight. The Metropolitan's three prints, all donated by Stieglitz in 1933, are the only known exhibition prints of Steichen's iconic image.

In 1908 Steichen photographed the plaster of Rodin's sculpture of Honoré de Balzac in the open air, by the light of the moon, making several exposures as long as an hour each. In Balzac, The Silhouette—4 A.M., the moonlight has transformed the plaster into a monumental phantom rising above the brooding nocturnal landscape. Steichen recalled that when he presented his finished prints to Rodin, the elated sculptor exclaimed, "You will make the world understand my Balzac through your pictures."

Stieglitz's and Steichen's younger contemporary, PAUL STRAND (1890-1976), pioneered a shift from the soft-focus aesthetic and painterly prints of the Photo-Secession to the straight approach and graphic power of an emerging modernism. Strand was introduced to Stieglitz by his teacher, Lewis Hine, the social reformer and photographer, and quickly became part of the coterie of artists that gathered at "291," where he was exposed to the latest trends in European art through groundbreaking exhibitions of works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi.

Strand incorporated the new language of geometric abstraction into his interest in photographing street life and machine culture. His photographs from 1915-1917 treated three principal themes: movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits. The final double issue of Stieglitz's Camera Work (1917) was devoted to this young photographer's work, marking a pivotal moment in the course of photography.

In From the El (1915), Strand juxtaposed the ironwork and shadows of the elevated train with the tiny form of a lone pedestrian. In 1916, he experimented with radical camera angles and photographing at close range. Strand's Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut is among the first photographic abstractions to be made intentionally. When Stieglitz published a variant of this image in Camera Work, he praised Strand's results as "the direct expression of today."

In the same year, Strand made a series of candid street portraits with a hand-held camera fitted with a special lens that allowed him to point the camera in one direction while taking the photograph at a 90-degree angle. Blind, his seminal image of a street beggar, was published in Camera Work and immediately became an icon of the new American photography, which integrated the objectivity of social documentation with the boldly simplified forms of Modernism. As is true for most of the large platinum prints by Strand in the exhibition, the Metropolitan's Blind, a gift of Stieglitz, is the only exhibition print of this image from the period.

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand is organized by Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand: Masterworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 160-page volume, by Malcolm Daniel, will feature 125 illustrations, including reproductions of many of the crown jewels from the Museum's collection of photographs. It is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press ($35).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

Related Posts in this blog

The Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs [Wanafoto, October 2010]

"Our Future Is In The Air": Photographs from the 1910s, also on view at the Met from November 9, 2010 through April 10, 2011 [Wanafoto, October 2010]

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction at the Whitney Museum of American Art – This exhibition featured famous photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz.[Wanafoto, December 2009]

This post has been updated in October 2010.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction – US Landmark Exhibition

 

                            

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Series I—No. 1, No. 3 and No. 4, 1918

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction is a US landmark exhibition debuting at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Following its New York debut, the show travels to

The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., February 6– May 9, 2010, and to

the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, May 28 – September 12, 2010.

 

While Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) has long been recognized as one of the central figures in 20th-century art, the radical abstract work she created throughout her long career has remained less well-known than her representational art. By surveying her abstractions, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction repositions O’Keeffe as one of America's first and most daring abstract artists. The exhibition is one of the largest of Georgia O'Keeffe's work ever assembled.

Including more than 125 paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculptures by Georgia O'Keeffe as well as selected examples of Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographic portrait series of Georgia O’Keeffe, the exhibition has been many years in the making.

 

While it is true that Georgia O’Keeffe has entered the public imagination as a painter of sensual, feminine subjects, she is nevertheless viewed first and foremost as a painter of places and things. When one thinks of her work it is usually of her magnified images of open flowers and her iconic depictions of animal bones, her Lake George landscapes, her images of stark New Mexican cliffs, and her still lifes of fruit, leaves, shells, rocks, and bones. Even O’Keeffe’s canvasses of architecture, from the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the adobe structures of Abiquiu, come to mind more readily than the numerous works—made throughout her career—that she termed abstract.

This exhibition is the first to examine Georgia O'Keeffe's achievement as an abstract artist. In 1915, O'Keeffe leaped into the forefront of American modernism with a group of abstract charcoal drawings that were among the most radical creations produced in the United States at that time. A year later, she added color to her repertoire; by 1918, she was expressing the union of abstract form and color in paint. First exhibited in 1923, Georgia O’Keeffe’s psychologically charged, brilliantly colored abstract oils garnered immediate critical and public acclaim. For the next decade, abstraction would dominate her attention. Even after 1930, when Georgia O’Keeffe’s focus turned increasingly to representational subjects, she never abandoned abstraction, which remained the guiding principle of her art. She returned to abstraction in the mid-1940s with a new, planar vocabulary that provided a precedent for a younger generation of abstractionists.

Abstraction and representation for Georgia O’Keeffe were neither binary nor oppositional. She moved freely from one to the other, cognizant that all art is rooted in an underlying abstract formal invention. For O’Keeffe, abstraction offered a way to communicate ineffable thoughts and sensations.

As she said in 1976, “The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.”

Through her personal language of abstraction, she sought to give visual form (as she confided in a 1916 letter to Alfred Stieglitz) to “things I feel and want to say - [but] havent [sic] words for.” Abstraction allowed her to express intangible experience—be it a quality of light, color, sound, or response to a person or place.

As Georgia O’Keeffe defined it in 1923, her goal as a painter was to “make the unknown—known. By unknown I mean the thing that means so much to the person that he wants to put it down—clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand.”

This exhibition and catalogue chronicle the trajectory of Georgia O'Keeffe's career as an abstract artist and examine the forces impacting the changes in her subject matter and style. From the beginning of her career, she was, as critic Henry McBride remarked, “a newspaper personality.” Interpretations of her art were shaped almost exclusively by Alfred Stieglitz, artist, charismatic impresario, dealer, editor, and O’Keeffe’s eventual husband, who presented her work from 1916 to 1946 at the groundbreaking galleries “291”, the Anderson Galleries, the Intimate Gallery, and An American Place. Alfred Stieglitz’s public and private statements about O’Keeffe’s early abstractions and the photographs he took of her, partially clothed or nude, led critics to interpret her work—to her great dismay—as Freudian-tinged, psychological expressions of her sexuality.

Cognizant of the public’s lack of sympathy for abstraction and seeking to direct the critics away from sexualized readings of her work, Georgia O’Keeffe self-consciously began to introduce more recognizable images into her repertoire in the mid-1920s. As she wrote to the writer Sherwood Anderson in 1924, “I suppose the reason I got down to an effort to be objective is that I didn’t like the interpretations of my other things [abstractions].” Georgia O’Keeffe’s increasing shift to representational subjects, coupled with Alfred Stieglitz’s penchant for favoring the exhibition of new, previously unseen work, meant that Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstractions rarely figured in the exhibitions Alfred Stieglitz mounted of her work after 1930, with the result that her first forays into abstraction virtually disappeared from public view.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM. The curatorial team, led by Whitney curator Barbara Haskell, includes Barbara Buhler Lynes, the curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center; Bruce Robertson, professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Elizabeth Hutton Turner, professor and vice provost for the arts at the University of Virginia and guest curator at The Phillips Collection; and Sasha Nicholas, Whitney senior curatorial assistant.

 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by the organizers. In addition to rethinking Georgia O'Keeffe's place in American modernism, the book reappraises the origin and singular character of her abstract vocabulary and the stylistic shifts which her art underwent over the span of her long career. It adds significant new insight into her art and life, publishing for the first time excerpts of recently unsealed letters written by Georgia O’Keeffe to photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924. These letters, along with a contextual chronology and other primary documents referenced by the authors, offer an intimate glimpse into her creative method and intentions as an artist.

 

Whitney Museum of American Art
September 17, 2009-January 17, 2010

 

Image Credits, from left to right:

Georgia O'Keeffe, Series I—No. I, 1918
Oil on composition board, 19 3/4 x 16 in. (50.2 x 40.6 cm)
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Purchase with assistance from the Anne Burnett Tandy Accessions Fund, 1995.8
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

Georgia O’Keeffe, Series I—No. 3, 1918
Oil on board, 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Milwaukee Art Museum
Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation
M1997.192, © Milwaukee Art Museum
Photography by Larry Sanders

Georgia O'Keeffe, Series I, No. 4, 1918
Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation
© Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus

Carr, O’Keeffe and Kahlo: Places of Their Own at Vancouver Art Gallery

Carr, O’Keeffe and Kahlo: 

Places of Their Own

Vancouver Art Gallery

June 15 - September 15, 2002

For the first time in western Canada, this exhibition brings together the work of Emily Carr, Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, three extraordinary artists widely acknowledged as outstanding 20th century painters in their respective countries - Canada, the United States and Mexico. Their art reveals a singleness of spirit and a shared fascination with themes of nature, culture and self.

The Vancouver Art Gallery retains one of the most significant Emily Carr collections in the world and is justifiably proud to present this outstanding exhibition. Comprising 56 paintings, the exhibition was inspired by Dr. Sharyn Udall’s book of the same name and curated by Dr. Udall for the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. The works are hanging according to artist, inviting an intimate study of individual style yet enabling comparison of common themes.

“The Vancouver Art Gallery is honoured to present the work of three women artists who have become cultural icons of their nation. This exhibition reveals individual creative vision and the shared spirit of courage, passion and integrity”, said Kathleen Bartels, Director, Vancouver Art Gallery. “This is the last remaining opportunity to view the work of Carr, O’Keeffe and Kahlo under one roof. It broke previous attendance levels when shown in both Ontario and Santa Fe and we anticipate it will be a huge success in Vancouver.”

Each artist felt a connectedness to nature and their work reinvented traditional imagery relating to the natural landscape. With stunning clarity their paintings convey a sense of the landscape as female, from Carr’s symbolic forests to O’Keeffe’s anthropomorphic plant forms and Kahlo’s earth-mother self portraits.

The exhibition also brings to light aspects of the shared histories and cultural differences between Canada, the United States and Mexico. Carr, O’Keeffe and Kahlo interpreted and expressed the essential character of their region. They defined, for the period, a distinct Canadian, American and Mexican experience. Collectively, their work can be seen to play a critical role in defining the art of North America by linking region and nationality.

Emily Carr (1871-1945) was born in British Columbia, painted for most of her life and began a writing career only a few years before her death. Her interest in the lives and rituals of indigenous Canadians is reflected in the totemic animals and mythic females of her paintings. Carr also depicted the vast natural beauty of the Pacific northwest, going beyond the presiding misty landscapes of the day by creating a unique visual idiom. Few Canadians have achieved the legendary stature of Emily Carr.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was an American painter who found most of her inspiration in nature. O’Keeffe’s animal skulls and desert landscapes are famous icons of modernism and her anthropomorphic plant forms distinguish her highly personalized style. Her work is characterized by sensually smooth forms and stunning use of colour. O’Keeffe, married to photographer Alfred Stieglitz, lived between New York and New Mexico, eventually moving permanently to New Mexico after her husband’s death where she painted some of her best work.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was an influential Mexican painter known for her harsh, revealing self-portraits. Kahlo was born in Coyoacan, southwest Mexico City. She lived in constant pain after being seriously injured in a bus accident when a metal rod pierced her body. Through the use of jarring colour and odd spatial relationships her self-portraits reflect her long-term physical and emotional suffering. Kahlo’s stormy marriage to famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera is well documented. The intensity of Kahlo’s work and her strong creative legacy resonate beyond her brief, turbulent life.

Carr, O’Keeffe and Kahlo: Places of Their Own opened in Canada at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in June 2001 prior to touring to the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts and the National Museum of Women in Art, Washington. Co-ordinated by Ian Thom, Senior Curator, Historical, Vancouver Art Gallery. Organized and circulated by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. This exhibition is presented by The Audain Foundation.

VANCOUVER ART GALLERY

750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6Z 2H7

www.vanartgallery.bc.ca

O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes: The Artist's Collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum + Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes: The Artist's Collection

Milwaukee Art Museum

May 4 - August 19, 2001

The Milwaukee Art Museum presents O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes: The Artist's Collection, the first exhibition to showcase the artist's works from her own collection and to explore how her management of this collection shaped her public image. An intimate portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, the exhibition features many of the works she treasured for their beauty and significance, including works which she kept hidden from public view. O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes presents visitors with a groundbreaking voyage through Georgia O'Keeffe's life as an artist, collector and craftswoman of her own legacy. It reveals a woman who actively worked to control the public perceptions of herself and of her work, demonstrating that Georgia O'Keeffe was much more than the secluded painter of desert subjects that many believe her to be.

O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes: The Artist's Collection encompasses 73 works, spanning more than 50 years of art, from the 1910s through the 1960s. The exhibition draws from the Milwaukee Art Museum's significant collection of Georgia O'Keeffe's work, which is the fourth largest of its kind of any museum in the United States. O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes is the premiere exhibition in the Museum's new exhibition galleries, located in the new Santiago Calatrava-designed Quadracci Pavilion. 

After the Milwakee Art Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, where it will be on view September 14, 2001 through January 13, 2002.

O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes is co-organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and is curated by Barbara Buhler Lynes, Curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center, with Russell Bowman, Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

"We are delighted to have the opportunity to present the first exhibition exploring Georgia O'Keeffe's motivations as an artist, collector and patron of her own work," said Russell Bowman. "It is especially fitting that we focus on the work of this Wisconsin-born artist as we begin to open our new Quadracci Pavilion and celebrate the increased opportunities our newly expanded Museum will provide for visitors from the region and beyond."

This major exhibition explores a new perspective on the artist's life and celebrated career and demonstrates how O'Keeffe managed her collection and career in a way that countered stereotypes about her life and work. During the early years of her career, O'Keeffe's artistic output was managed by Alfred Stieglitz, the renowned photographer who became her husband in 1924. Following Stieglitz's death, Georgia O'Keeffe assumed responsibility for the administration of her career and she created a lifestyle - through the carefully phased sale of her work - that allowed her freedom to paint. At the core of this was a fluid system for ranking her work that determined which works would be made available for sale or exhibition, which would be lent or given to private and public collections, which retained, and which reacquired. By presenting a broad selection of works that O'Keeffe held in her collection or placed with public institutions, O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes offers insight into the artist's personal and artistic assessments and what motivated her to lend, sell or keep certain works out of public view.

Georgia O'Keeffe and her Collection

At the time of her death in 1986, O'Keeffe owned more than half of her body of work. Her personal collection, distinguished by its range and depth, included more than 700 sketches spanning from 1901 to 1984; originals and casts of the three sculptures; all of her works in clay; and approximately 350 works in oil and on paper created from 1915 to the mid 1970s. The collection also included approximately 250 works previously unknown to scholars and the public.

"Georgia O'Keeffe is one of America's best-known yet most enigmatic artists. The mythology that has grown up around her - her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz and her persona of self-reliant individualist taking refuge in the desert - has obscured her contributions as an artist of the very first rank," said Barbara Buhler Lynes. "We are very pleased to partner with the Milwaukee Art Museum on this important exhibition which will illuminate a dramatically new aspect of O'Keeffe's career."

Nearly one-third of the works O'Keeffe owned at her death were produced during the first seven of the more than 70 years of her mature career. More than half of these early works were abstractions, many of which had not been seen since they were first exhibited around 1920. Other early abstractions - some of which are among her most outstanding achievements - were never exhibited, including a number of early charcoal drawings, watercolors and most of the important Series paintings of 1918 ?1920 which are featured in O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes. O'Keeffe's secreting of these early abstractions and her decision to make them unavailable for exhibition are part of several strategies that she adopted in an attempt to discourage Freudian interpretations of her art, which Stieglitz applied early in her career and which remained central to much of the critical appraisal of her work. She was also aware that the market for the abstractions was not particularly strong and she retained these works, a decision that was likely part of a conscious strategy to control the perception of her work, the market for her work, as well as to maintain control of works that she regarded as particularly important. While she chose to define herself as a painter of landscapes, flowers, and bones, she recognized the importance of her early abstractions to her own history and to American art.

O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes presents works in the context of the artist's somewhat flexible ranking system which provides a broader understanding and appreciation of O'Keeffe's personal motivations and assessments. For example, substantial differences in prices provide insight into O'Keeffe's rationale for selling and her reticence to part with certain works because they were of particular importance to her personally. Georgia O'Keeffe also carefully controlled how works entered the public domain. In addition to sales of her work, she regulated gifts and bequests to institutions which further shaped public access to and perception of her work.

The Milwaukee Art Museum's Georgia O'Keeffe Collection

The Milwaukee Art Museum is a leading repository for Georgia O'Keeffe's work. Most of the Museum's first 11 O'Keeffes were gifts of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley. In fact, the artist graciously attended the 1975 opening of the Museum's last major addition which houses the Bradley collection. During the late 1990's, the Museum received a gift of 10 additional O'Keeffe works, from the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation and Jane Bradley Pettit, who continued and expanded her mother's legacy. With this acquisition and one additional work from the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, the number of O'Keeffe works in the Milwaukee Art Museum's permanent collection is now at 22, making the Milwaukee Art Museum an important center for the study and presentation of this celebrated artist's work. All the works will be permanently installed at the Milwaukee Art Museum when the exhibition concludes its travels.

O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes: Exhibition Catalogue

A scholarly exhibition catalogue includes color reproductions of all the works showcased in O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes. The catalogue also includes a preface by Russell Bowman and George King, directors of the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum respectively, an introduction by Bowman, and an extensive examination by Barbara Buhler Lynes of O'Keeffe's intentions as both collector and distributor.

O'Keeffe First Exhibition in Museum's New Galleries

The Milwaukee Art Museum is currently undergoing a $100 million renovation and expansion project that encompasses a dramatic new 142,050-square-foot addition, the Santiago Calatrava-designed Quadracci Pavilion; renovated gallery spaces; and the Cudahy Gardens, a new public garden. This ambitious project significantly expands the Milwaukee Art Museum's role as a comprehensive art institution and strengthens its position as a cultural cornerstone for the Milwaukee community and region, as well as a cultural center of national importance. On May 4, visitors will have their first opportunity to view the Museum's new exhibition galleries - located in a portion of the new building designed by Calatrava - and the extensive, renovated permanent collection galleries located in the existing buildings designed by Eero Saarinen and David Kahler. The opening of these galleries will be marked by a day of festivities and free admission to the O'Keeffe exhibition. Other portions of the Quadracci Pavilion will open September 14.

MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM

700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, WI 53202 

www.mam.org