by MARINA VAIZEY

IN THE WAVE of increasing interest in categorising achievement by gender, enormous claims have been made for the art of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern, London (to 30th October).1 She dedicated her life in art to show ‘the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it’. This is a case of an artist whose biography is so intriguing that there is a danger that it overtakes and even at times submerges her art. It is a fascinating trajectory: from her dairy farming family in Wisconsin, where at the age of eleven she announced her determination to be an artist, to her studies in Virginia, Chicago and New York, her relatively short-lived teaching career, notably in Texas, her long attachment to Albert Stieglitz, her place in the American avant-garde and her life in New Mexico. Throughout she was haunted by ill health, both mental and physical. Her acerbic, wry and humorous personality led to her forming deep friendships with the intelligentsia, especially writers, artists and photographers, including Paul Strand, his wife Rebecca and Ansel Adams. Her distinctive appearance led to her being one of the most photographed artists in existence.

In the course of O’Keeffe’s training in New York, with teachers like the superb William Merritt Chase, whose technique could rival Sargent’s, she was an adept student who soaked up all her teachers could show her and who could imitate and copy with the best. But she had ‘things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me’. Her mentor was Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) at Teachers’ College, New York, who had ‘one dominating idea; to fill a space in a beautiful way’. For several years she had teaching jobs, most notably in Texas, and her work from this period, already experimental and abstract, includes a choice group of superbly skilled and suggestive watercolours of a young naked woman.2

O’Keeffe’s exchange of letters with Alfred Steiglitz (1864–1946) began at this time; in total there are some 25,000 letters. It was her friend the suffragette Anita Pollitzer who brought O’Keeffe’s work to Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in New York; it caught his eye – and mind. Like Kandinsky, who also exhibited at the gallery, O’Keeffe responded to music, translating as it were musical impulses into orchestrations of coloured form. Before she was thirty she was exhibiting at 291. Stieglitz was not only a great photographer and the publisher of Camerawork, but the gallerist who exposed Americans to the European avant-garde, and his and O’Keeffe’s twenty-two years of marriage was ended only by his death in 1946.

The extensive exhibition at Tate Modern is spaciously laid out. Its well-chosen selection of paintings, watercolours and drawings are arranged both chronologically and by theme, interspersed with photography by Stieglitz, Strand, Adams and others and with work by O’Keeffe’s peer group (John Marin; Marsden Hartley). Accompanied by an ample catalogue, 3 it is the largest exhibition of her work ever to be shown outside the United States.

Although much of O’Keeffe’s work can be seen as almost completely abstract, the selection makes it clear that the striking amalgam of colour and form into composition treads a fine line between abstraction and recognisable subject. In the early watercolours there is a spontaneity and excitement that somehow, in the use of oil paint, is often flattened out into semi-abstract patterning. The scenes of New York, some aerial views painted from the apartment she shared with Stieglitz, are as dedicated to the modernist vision of the city as any by her male peers, almost sizzling with suppressed tensions, and reveal a fascination with the bold and unprecedented shapes of skyscrapers and the city grid, as in New York Street with Moon (cat. no.71; Fig.66).

O’Keeffe had a complex relationship with Stieglitz’s objectification, even commodification of her body, clothed and unclothed. This extraordinary project (1917–37) consists of hundreds of photographs, which were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the O’Keeffe Foundation. It was perhaps partly to escape his influence, attempts at control and aggravating interpretations of her work that she spent more and more time in New Mexico. Entranced by its landscape, she lived in several places – Taos, Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú from 1929 and took up full-time residence at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú from 1949.

The New Mexico landscape is overwhelmingly beautiful, bleak yet extravagant, with huge skies and vistas. If anything, O’Keeffe’s interpretations are understatements of the reality. By her play with elements of landscape, her best work sharpens the vision of the spectator (no.153; Fig.65). There is a fascinating parallel in the black-and-white photographs also on view by her friends Paul Strand and Ansel Adams.

In New Mexico, it was not only the unique landscape, but the animal detritus in the shape of skulls – notably cows’ skulls – and bones. The landscape, the adobe houses and the churches became primary subjects; never again after her early Texas watercolours did studies from the life, either human or animal, preoccupy her. In her final phases she was captivated by those views of the sky that only became available to us in the twentieth century – the views of clouds and space visible from aeroplanes. Among these are some of her largest paintings: Sky with Flat White Cloud (no.203) and Sky Above the Clouds (no.204) from the early 1960s.

O’Keeffe’s flower paintings - close-ups of natural marvels of coloured shapes - are in their semi-abstract exuberance among her best work. She famously resented the Freudian and sexual interpretations of her startling abstract paintings and imagery based on the close observation of flowers; the latter of course, the sexual organs of plants, are deliberately alluring, not only to pollinators but to humans (no.115; Fig.67). But these interpretations, which were eagerly adopted by critics, were instigated by Steiglitz. And if she so resented their contemporary interpretation as anthropomorphic sexual fantasies, why did she go on painting them?

O’Keeffe’s compositions are so fascinating, often so original, so fervent, that it can be disappointing to see them in the flesh: the paint is flat, rarely dappled, textured, teased, almost banal in physical execution, for example, Wall with Green Door (no.210). It is her ambition that is so captivating: a life dedicated to art, an intelligent apprehension of its problems, a tenacity and determination that triumphed over many odds, including early success when she was treated as much as an oddity as a serious artist. Her biography, and the subject matter of her art, will ensure that it endures, but her execution is more prosaic than magical, alluring when dedicated to experiments in synaesthesia, musical rhythms and interpretations of plant life, but curiously deadening when faced with the stupendous landscapes that surrounded her in New Mexico. She triumphed paradoxically when she allowed her imagination full rein, absconding from observation, to weave symphonies of curving, flowing wave-like shapes in extraordinary colours with only the titles to indicate that the inspirations were living growing things: flowers and trees.

1 The show subsequently moves to the Kunstforum, Vienna (7th December to 26th March 2017); and then to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (22nd April to 30th July).

2 A telling small exhibition of watercolours painted in Canyon, Texas, 1916–18 is currently on show: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Far Wide Texas, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico (to 30th October).

3 Catalogue: Georgia O’Keeffe. Edited by Tanya Barson. 272 pp. incl. 270 col. ills (Tate Publishing, London, 2016), £40 (HB), ISBN 978–4976–371–4; £30 (PB). ISBN 978–1–8–976–403–2. This is an essential addition to the corpus. Also published in the series Tate Introductions, Georgia O’Keeffe by Hannah Johnson, is a succinct, fact-filled and lively essay, £7.99. ISBN 978–1–84976–404–9.