A Love Letter to Georgia O'Keefe
An analysis of my contrasting visits to her exhibits and museum in Boston, Chicago, and Santa Fe.
The first time I saw a painting by Georgia O’Keefe has become over the years a core memory for me, as it was the day we saw the first impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Walking through the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston by my mother, I was struck by both the beauty of the space and the works that it held, but also by its stark emptiness. It was a moment when my mother and I felt we were the last to know of the virus that was quickly spreading across our nation. On our way home from the museum, we stopped at the grocery store. We then realized the reason for us being some of the only people walking through the exhibit space from the news on our iPhones as we became engrossed in the increasingly frantic nature of our local Wegmans grocery store.
The day we went to the museum, we bought tickets to a special exhibit they were holding surrounding work of female empowerment. While I was first amused in an unserious way by the tampon chandelier which gave both me and mom a laugh, I turned a corner to see one of O’Keefe’s works. I’ve searched the corners of my brain for the name of the pieces, but alas It was two rolling hills depicted in a pastel palet, described in the forward as a representation of the female form.
Of course, I had seen nude portraits, and the female form depicted in all sorts of ways through my twenty years of life, but a woman portraying her own body in nature felt raw and blunt in a way that possessed me with both discomfort and admiration. Looking at O’Keefe’s work was a gateway to analyzing the perception I held of my own body and my own feminine, a mirror of sorts.
It was unclear to me if the painting by O’Keefe was burned into my mind solely due to the impact of the pivotal time blanketed behind the moment or by the impact of viewing her work in real life until I had an opportunity to view an exhibit of O’Keefe’s work while on a trip to Chicago to visit one of my dearest friends, Annika.
As I rode the L to my friend's apartment from the airport in early August, I noticed a flyer for a special exhibit of O’Keefe’s work being held at the Chicago Art Institute titled My New York's. I felt giddy by the coincidence of my timing with the exhibit as I remembered seeing her work in Boston now four years prior.
As we entered the museum and the exhibit’s space, Annika and went our separate ways to enjoy the gallery at our own pace. I again became overcome by the work I was seeing; her abstract portrayals of the New York cityscapes felt familiar yet new. I became engrossed in her choice of color, use of subliminal space, and the stories that accompanied her paintings of learning to love New York for its architecture as a woman who identified with the country.
I learned O’Keefe traveled to New York to be with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a seemingly polarizing, complex character in the artist's life.
Watching the documentary on O’Keefe’s life, what rang true to me was O’Keefe’s reluctance to join Steiglitz as it appeared to interfere with the individuality she searched for in her younger years. While Stieglitz may have been the first to see O’Keefe and her work as the wonder it is, he appears to have fostered the title as both mentor and oppressor simultaneously in O’Keefe’s life.
My perception of O’Keefe’s work as a representation of the female form is not a unique one. When I told my friend about my experience in her gallery, she followed my remarks saying, “That’s the woman who paints the vulva-flowers, right?”
And it’s an interpretation that’s difficult to unsee. O’Keefe’s painted flora does indeed resemble a vagina, blatantly. However, in listening to an interview of her, it appeared to never be the intention.
"I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty," O'Keefe said of her floral paintings.
“I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't," she continued.
While there is a beautiful notion that everyone will see something different in one's art, it was never O'Keefe's intention for viewers of her paintings to find and offer their interpretations. She wanted people to see what she saw in the flower, offering her paintings as a portal to her perception of the world and its natural beings.
It also seems O’Keefe never intended to be an advocate for sexual freedom or a feminist icon at any point in her life or in her career.
"She was not to become a feminist icon if she could help it," a friend says of O'Keefe in Peter Jones Production's documentary about her life.
I find the contradiction of O'Keefe's association as a feminist and her lack of stating such an identity to be fascinating. In watching her documentary, I believe I uncovered the root of the miscommunication.
I learned watching that Stieglitz set O’Keefe up in one of his New York apartments to allow her to create freely. What began as a generous helping hand from a mentor quickly turned into an affair between the two, both romantic and professional in manner. O’Keefe would pose in the nude and allow Steiglitz to photograph her, she would paint and look for his eye and critique amid her creative process.
Before showing her collection of O’Keefe’s florals in his New York Gallery, 291, Steiglitz decided to show his nude photographs of O’Keefe.
According to the documentary, O’Keefe did not enjoy the attention she received regarding Stieglitz's work or the interpreted correlation between his photographs and her gallery showing to follow. It seems while she strived to paint for a living, she wanted the attention to be centered around her artwork, not on herself as an artist.
The film continues to say that following both gallery showings, O’Keefe began to dress more modestly and appeared more androgynous, often doting long black dresses and hats that covered most of her skin.
Although she is written as a woman who loved colorful self-expression, it seems that as her career progressed, she chose solely to represent herself in her artwork and paintings, not through herself as an artist or person as she chose to live an increasingly isolated lifestyle into her old age in the deserts of New Mexico.
Steiglitz projected his Freudian fascination with sex and the female form onto O’Keefe and her artwork. He put her into a box of being an advocate for sexual freedom as she emerged into the public eye, a box O’Keefe cannot escape from beyond the grave as even today her work is presented in galleries of female empowerment. People know her as the woman who painted “vulva flowers”
This fact saddened me, almost as much as it saddened me to accept my own feelings that visiting her museum in New Mexico did not live up to my expectations.
I had just quit my job at the local paper and was looking to make good use of my time by embarking on an adventure I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to take amid my typical schedule.
My friend Julia and I packed up my Subaru Forester with water snacks and a day's worth of clothes and drove the 4 and a half hours down Interstate 25 from Colorado Springs to Santa Fe New Mexico.
I learned in Chicago O’Keefe lived and spent many of her years split between New Mexico, New York City, and Lake George. Following her passing in 1986, A museum in O’Keefe’s name was created in the late 90’s to house much of her works. The Georgia O’Keefe Museum was and remains the only gallery in the U.S. solely dedicated to a female artist today.
Walking throughout the gallery with Julia, who herself is an educated artist specializing in realism, I was left waiting for the feelings to emerge that I had felt in Chicago and Boston, but they never came.
Although I carried a deep sense of admiration while experiencing the collection, I left the museum feeling slightly unfulfilled. After talking it over with Julia over margaritas and tacos and the famous Tomasita’s in downtown Santa Fe, I realized my dissatisfaction to be the lack of storytelling present throughout the space. While we learned of the color choice and technique utilized, and some of the places O’Keefe spent her time creating, the forwards accompanying her paintings felt to be lacking intention, the why.
After learning more about O’Keefe’s story, I realized the lack of detail present in the museum could be due to the fact that the details remain unknown; O’Keefe didn’t seem to provide much detail to the reasonings behind her pieces, aside from a few interviews featured in both the museum and the documentary I watched of her life.
Following the passing of her husband, Alfred Steiglitz, who she married in 1924 following the divorce between Steiglitz and his first wife, O’Keefe moved to living in the New Mexico desert full time. While her time in New York appears to have been to satisfy others, her time in the deserts around Santa Fe were for herself. It seems to me she didn’t allow herself to become the full, authentic version of her own until he died.
In her life, O’Keefe painted roughly 2000 pieces of work, a collection of pieces valued in the millions. Described as shy, and mysterious in appearance, O’Keefe’s becoming an artist was never to be rich, a celebrity, or a feminist icon - it was simply her way of navigating and coping with the world around her.
O’Keefe’s paintings were for her, to satisfy the creative need inside her. To visualize her unique perception of the world around her on a canvas. To show others what she saw.
People loved her paintings. They love to apply meaning to her work, and they love to speculate on the artist and her art. While some take her abstract interpretations at face value, others find a series of meanings. O’Keefe is said to have told people what her art wasn’t, but never what it was.
I find my love of O’Keefe comes from her unknown, and reluctance to share. Creating art is a vulnerable craft, many believe to be an artist is to live life vulnerably. However, O’Keefe only lived her life publicly through her paintings - privately, her life was for her and for those she chose to let in.
While I’m not sure what to make of her paintings the more I find out about the painter herself, I would call myself an admirer of the artist. A lover of her life, seemingly more curious about what she is not than who she truly was.
I’m sure the answer has passed as did the long, beautiful life of Georgia O’Keefe.