Georgia O'Keeffe: American and Modern
by Charles C. Eldredge
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Georgia O'Keeffe has become a legend in modern western culture. As an artist, she was able to garner and sustain the attention of the public and critics alike for well over six decades. Though O'Keeffe is particularly known for her canvases of large flowers and of bones and skulls, her oeuvre is far more extensive. Georgia O'Keeffe: American and Modern accompanies the first international retrospective of one of the most loved American artists. Charles C. Eldredge explores two qualities of show more the artist's work - the American and the modern - suggesting that they were the leading impulses for her extraordinary vision. Beginning with a discussion of O'Keeffe as an American artist, Eldredge describes the openly nationalistic billing that the photographer and art impresario Alfred Stieglitz, who later became her husband, gave to her one-woman exhibition in New York in 1923. Even in O'Keeffe's earliest works, her penchant for abstraction is evident. Eldredge also examines the artist's later preoccupation with common subjects such as barns, which reflected her desire to paint "something I know." He highlights these subjects as a mark of her modernism - her ability to borrow from the pedestrian world as a vehicle for transcendence. For the first half of the twentieth century, O'Keeffe was the preeminent woman artist of the United States. Eldredge explores this circumstance as well, discussing the psychoanalytic speculation surrounding the element of sexuality in the artist's drawings and paintings. In particular, her flower paintings grabbed the attention of the critics, who were quick to interpret them with the help of the increasingly popular Freudian theory. Despite the inclination to discuss O'Keeffe's art as feminine self-revelation, critics discovered that it transcended easy categorization. As Eldredge points out, her style and choice of subjects evolved from a variety of influences, not the least of which were the photographic techniques she adopted from Stieglitz. Other influences include the immensity of the American West, a profound commitment to nativism and modernism, and a true respect for American culture. As O'Keeffe's work suggests, her life was infused with a spirit reflecting a new outlook, a new approach that was wholly modern - and distinctly American. Eldredge further illuminates the artist's career with a chronology of her life, which is illustrated with photographs - portraits and snapshots - many of them unpublished, and drawn from O'Keeffe's personal archive and from those of renowned photographers. The chronology creates a historical and biographical context for O'Keeffe's career, emphasizing the maturity and talent of the artist, as well as the scope of her acquaintances and travels. This book, which reproduces more than eighty of O'Keeffe's paintings and drawings, and includes extended discussion of many of them, serves as the catalogue for the exhibition "Georgia O'Keeffe: American and Modern," shown at the Hayward Gallery, London; El Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; and the Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama in 1993 and 1994. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
For me, there can never be too many books of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings, arguably the most important of American artists. The present offering is the catalog for an international exhibition that was shown in England, Mexico, and Japan. From her first important showing at Alfred Steiglitz's 291 Gallery in New York in 1916, O'Keeffe has been recognized as uniquely American. In 1926, French painter Brancusi said of her work, "There is no imitation of Europe here; it is a force, a liberating free force" (qtd. in Eldredge 25). Eldredge offers an interesting, readable, brief biography of the artist and a thoughtful, coherent discussion of the paintings in the exhibit, most of which are reproduced as full-page color plates.
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22+ Works 296 Members
Charles C. Eldredge is Hall Distinguished Professor of American Art and Culture at the University of Kansas.
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- Georgia O'Keeffe
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