THE LEGEND NEVER WORE HIGH HEELS
A Woman on Paper: Georgia O’Keeffe
By Anita Pollitzer
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books; 2nd Printing edition (June 1988)
- ISBN-10: 0671662422
- ISBN-13: 978-0671662424
“ I said to myself I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me — shapes and ideas so near to my — so natural to my way of being and thing that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew to strip away what I had been taught… “
– Georgia O’Keeffe
O’Keeffe (photo by Stieglitz)
It is interesting that once I read a book in SFMoMa store, there was a photo of a beautiful young contemporary artist who was wearing the high heels while doing a gigantic painting. As the woman myself, I felt it was almost incredible. In my studio, I am even uncomfortable with any skirt or tight clothes. Then I read about Frida Kahlo a few months later, and surprised to find a photo of her painting with high heels also, and a primrose shawl! Not until read the biographies of Frida and O’Keeffe, then I realized art could mean so different to the different personalities.
If we call Frida as “hot” — the conflicting, struggling, screaming just jump out of the passionate colors and complex composition when we see her paintings — and her expression of life, always mixed with her performance; then O’Keeffe may stands for “cold”, with her meditating, experiencing, perceiving style, which kept her spirit away from the temporal world. In the famous photos of O’Keeffe taken by Stieglitz , she was peaceful, calm and deliberate, always wore a black silk, which she had often duplicated but rarely change in style. In the city like New York, which was swarming with the odorous fashion and materialism, O’Keeffe was immune to the desire for fame or success, and didn’t have many social presumptions, only wanted to live in her own art world. She was beautiful because she was what she was and didn’t try to make herself something else. She was always the only person not in evening dress in her exhibitions. She told Juan Hamilton that she’d once gone to Elizabeth Arden in New York and they’d made up her face. When she got home and looked in the mirror she was horrified. She washed it all off and said she would never do that again. When O’Keeffe was young, she used to do commercial art for advertising agencies quite successfully, but she began to doubt that she would be unable to live the life of freedom she had chosen, on to do her own painting, if she remained a captive of the advertising world. So she had returned to New York and, as it seizing on a antidote to the poison of materialism, she had joined the art class at Columbia without delay.
Stieglitz and O’Keeffe
O’Keeffe’s philosophy of living was running through her whole life, which was also the determinate factor of her legend — as the gifted artist and the independent woman. Her seclusion in New Mexican shocked the art world. For centuries, beauty, love, romance, those were always feminine longings which women were supposed to desire. But O’Keeffe was against those, as a woman, by considered herself not the “half”, but the sovereign whole — she nurtured Stieglitz and lived as a soul-mate with him, but she also challenged him, giving vent to her forceful creative personality, expression, and sense of rebellion and independence. In 1950s when O’Keeffe’s friend Anita wrote a biography of her and sent her the typescript, she refused the publication of that book because she thought Anita “Romanticized” her. It was her refusing of femininity made O’Keeffe the icon of “Feminism”.
In her time, when feminism was as alien as space travel, no woman artist in America is subject to more observation and speculation than is this utterly fine O’Keeffe. However, she never considered herself a “Feminist”. As an artist, she knew what indeed she was living for. When she was young and teaching in Virginia, she wrote to Anita: “I never felt such vacancy in my life — everything is so mediocre — I don’t dislike it — I don’t like it — it is existing — not living — and absolutely — I just wish some one would take hold of me and shake me out of my wits — I feel that insanity might be a luxury… All people I’ve met are all right to exist with — and it is awful when you are in the habit of living.” “Don’t you think we need to conserve our energies — emotions and feelings for what we are going to make, the big thing in our lives instead of letting so much run away on the little things everyday” — until she the moment she passed away, she was living for every second of her life — together with the nature and her arts.
I like the people who love the nature, the passion of their confrontation with the destiny is always fascinating. But only few of them can give up the material reality and live honestly in the spiritual world. O’Keeffe did it. In her statement she talked about her famous flower painting: “Everyone has many associations with a flower. You put out your hand to touch it, or lean forward to smell it, or maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking, or give it to someone to please them. But one rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted what each flower is to me and I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I see.” “Still — in a way, nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t the time — and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time… So I said myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into take time to look at it — I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see the flowers.”
O’Keeffe’s artist personality was quiet and distant, too. To her, isolation was welcome after the difficulties she’d had living in the city. She once told Hamilton that Stieglitz like to have audience. He like to have a lot of people around, while O’Keeffe would only communicate with people she understood and was interested in, and preferred to distance herself from critics, biographers, art historians, or others who probed. She could travel for miles without human contact or traces of development, accepting the risks posed by weather and wild animals. Her slow and peaceful way of observing and living seemed akin to the artists in ancient China, where the philosophy and art was married to poetry rather than to science as it is in the West. A Chinese scholar who came to US for study and teaching in the early twenty century wrote a book named <the Importance of Living>, which was considered “wise” and “suggestive” in American intellectual community. In the book, he said: ” The final product of this culture and philosophy is this: in China, as compared with the West, man lives a life closer to nature and closer to childhood, a life in which the instincts and the emotions are given free play and emphasized against the life of the intellect, with a strange combination of devotion to the flesh and arrogance of the spirit, of profound wisdom and foolish gaiety, of high sophistication and childish naïveté.” When she traveled to Asian, she found “the masterpieces of Asian and Oriental art are particularly dear to her. She feels a closeness to their dignity and perfection of workmanship.” It is interesting that when we compare the flower paintings of O’Keeffe and ancient Chinese brush art work, we can also see some similarities between them — fantasy renderings, delicate compositions, dreaming influences, and emotional colorings.
Colors and objects fascinated Georgia from an early age, and her life on the farm fostered a close relationship with nature and an understanding of natural processes. It is as though she had taken to heart permanently from her mother’s reading aloud of the Bible: “Look to the earth and it shall teach thee.” At all periods of her life, the hours spent in contemplation and meditation had produced works of great integrity. The poetic language O’Keeffe used in her landscape paintings evokes me the same feelings of Giorgio De Chirico’s metaphysical art, who always liked using the sky to cleave the buildings and who in his paintings accentuated the greatness of mysteries and the insignificance of men.
O’Keeffe’s art refers to determinants, to those things or event that have caused her, provoked her, to create. In the letter to Anita, she talked about the necessities which obliged her to make art: “One can’t work with nothing to express…” “Did you ever have something to say and feels as if the whole side of the wall wouldn’t be big enough to say it on and then sit down on the floor and try to get it onto a sheet of charcoal paper — and when you had put it down look at it and try to put into words what you have been trying to say with just marks — and then — wonder what it all is anyway … maybe the fault is with what I’m trying to say — I don’t seem to be able to find words for it…” “Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my effort to create an equivalent with paint color for the world — life as I see it.” She left us the record of all her experience in her art. Her paintings allows us to remember things she had seen, experienced, or sensed, and she conscious nurtured her memories of events, giving them new life as art.
As Lewis Mumford wrote in his article in 1927, “Miss O’Keeffe has not discovered a new truth of optics, like Monet, nor invented a new method of aesthetic organization, like the Cubists; and while she paints with a formal skill which combines both objective representation and abstraction, it is not by this nor by her brilliant variations in color that her work is original…” As a beginner in art student, I was really excited when I first saw O’Keeffe’s art and read about her story. The process of growing up to the emotional and professional artist, gave me a new world of art and a new view of the role as being the artist. Her ability to capture the unknown and made it known inspired me, and her work will be always a mirror of the person we have lost.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Georgia O’Keeffe, Art and Letters, by Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton and Saran Greenough
Lewis Mumford, New Republic, March 2, 1927
Becoming O’Keeffe, the Early Years, by Sarah Whitaker Peters
O’Keeffe’s O’Keeffes, the Artist’s Collection, Barbara Buhler Lynes with Russell Bowman
Georgia O’Keeffe, Canyon Suite, by Barbara J. Bloemink
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_O%27Keeffe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz
Nostalgic for Childhood
Twenty years ago, I was fascinated by the beauty of the fine arts and desirous to learn the drawing. However, as an ungifted kid with a great diffidence deeply in the heart, I always hesitated to draw —— can I draw the lines in the right place? Can I paint the colors in a harmonious way? This kind of diffidence led me to another way of life —— I became a normal adult struggling with the normal life. But there were always something commotion beneath the surface of the normal life, and this commotion led me back to art again —— about 1 year ago, I started to learn drawing and painting from the very beginning. At that time, I delightedly found myself can see something that other person cannot see. Unexpectedly, I absorbed the traditional art techniques like the sponge and sometimes could impress people with the realistic pictures. However, as I made progress with my technique I lost my spirits unawares, which is the most important thing in art. Until one day, the instructor asked me the question —— “What do you want to express?”
All of sudden, I realized drawing technically well alone meant nothing. I love drawing not only because I like to impress people, but also because I want to say something by my charcoal. Then I reviewed the drawings of the contemporary artists in VITAMIN D, I got a totally new perspective of them, especially Yoshitomo Nara’s little girls. My first impression of Nara’s drawing was: there were just illustrations. But when I reviewed it, I strongly felt the rebellion nature of humanity came alive through his robust, manga-looking figures. The images are accessible, arbitrarily drawn, the narrations are compelling and rough, and any viewer can interpret them in a deeply personal way. As an 80’s grew up with mangas, comics and animations, I found those primitive and innocent images stoke my heart by evoking the little me who was lost in my adult body years ago, reminding me that the fable of love and loneliness had never lost its power. Large crescent eyes, sneer on the lips, Nara’s vulnerable little girls are standing up defiantly to the world of adults. The drawings show the Nara’s nostalgic for the childhood, which is always an inseverable part inside the adults. The part that is showing the refusal to make the soul slave of the body, the part that loves simple ways of life and that is somewhat impatient with the business of making money. Nara’s drawings bring the emotion of inquietude and angry from his heart and arouse the sympathetic response from the viewers. He breaks the rules of traditional aesthetic, Asian kitsch and Disney dreams, just like his characters fight against the ordinary boring adult life —— with self-confidence, self-determination, individuality and freedom, which all the actists would learn from.
Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing by Emma Dexter (Author)
Rodin! O Rodin!
I learned about Auguste Rodin’s Sculpture when I was very little, as symbols of human emotion and character. I was deeply inspired by his emotion-laden representations of human body, and began to observe and think, trying to discover the beauty of ordinary men and women
It was my first time to watch the real Rodin sculptures in Standford Museum 20 months ago, so close, so clear. I stood in front of them almost for a whole day, just cannot withdraw my eyes from them. They looked realistic — the sense of movement was so strong and the form, light and shadow was astonishingly accurate. However, as Rodin said, “It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture”, he also freed the art of sculpture from the repetition of traditional patterns, and combine Michelangelo’s mystery of the human form with his own sense of human nature.
Besides emphasizing of emotional tension, Rodin’s “unfinishedness” which characterized many of his sculptures also showed his contemporary spirit. From his sculpture “Mediation”, we can see the left arm was “broken off” at the shoulder, the right leg was crashed and the back of the torso was absent, but the “missing parts” made the audiences more focus on the intellectual theme of his work, and his talent for texture allowed him to let every part of the body speak for the whole.
Standing in front of Rodin’s sculptures, I see the magic of line, form, light and textures; feel the emotion of suffering, conflict, passion and desperation; hear the screaming and singing from the bronze , from time to time, for hours and hours.
The Train From Munich
With its great curving of the flock of white doves leading up to the the shallow foreground where groups of figures climb the stairs form the left and descend the stairs at right, the composition of ” The Train from Munich” instantly arrest the viewers. The artist constructed a very compact, finite space of a train station with a doorway to the tunnel ( from where we can see the train’s headlight) and a waiting room in the center. They are two male figures standing in front of the structure and frame this center area. Inside the waiting room sits a Young girl looking out through the window in a deep though. A man stands in her opposite side, while another man seated in the back of the room, who looks like the sitting figure in Interior I. A dog is running down from the stairs at the right side of the space. At the top right is a tiny city scape and some banners ( Per museum’s comment, they are military banners and they evokes a portent of evils to come). There are some empty trains in the top left. A group of three boys are standing and looking at the unknown space. Three standing men in the same oppressive gesture creating a poignant atmosphere, in contrast to the sleepy and indifferent characters in the left bottom.
This composition shows many levels of the image as it is in the whole series —- 2-Dimensional surface with meticulous details, 3-Dimensionality of spatial illusions with meditative center and focal point (the girl in the waiting room and the male figure with dog standing in front of the waiting room), and 4-Dimensionality with time: past and present exist synchronously that bring the viewer drama and emotional impact.
The utilization and distribution of light are also significant. The light smoke fills the dim background, and comes to the front through the tunnel, creating a mystery and enigmatic atmosphere. The birds give us the brightest light on the print, draw the viewers’ attention at first sight and rendering more emphatic the feeling of struggle —- are they trying to escape the suffocating surroundings?
The print as a whole is a triumph of equilibrium in the balance of flight and rest. There are flying birds, moving people and running dog in the foreground, while in deeper space the characters are just standing or sitting. But they are linked —- the girl in the waiting room is looking outside and the bird in the top is flying inside. Then we get the collage that intersects and converges on the mystery of the artist’s inner space.
Milton emphasized the importance of the shadows and reflection by using the mirrors. The viewer is made to feel that the space is far deeper than is possible with the reflections in the doorway glass. The coming train look so tiny and distant that the space is pushed back farther psychologically, through perspective construction. The reflection figures of the doorman are transparent and ghostlike, fading into the architecture. The repetitiveness makes them look like the crowd of impersonal, anonymous and mechanical, as if they are echoing in the space. The collage of the train headlight and the shadow figures dramatize the story with the oppressive, dark, smoky atmosphere, and give the whole picture its gripping power.
Appreciating the Milton drawing is typically a pleasurable experience. His works are filled with delightful and provocative images that hard to be interpreted into words. As a critical writing says: ” it recalls the linear precision of Durer, the sinuosity of Blake, the tenebrosity of Rembrandt, the luminosity of Turner.” *
_______________________
* James A. W. Heffernan, Peter Milton’s Turn: An American Printmaker Marks the End of the Millennium. From Word & Image, Vol. 16, No. 2, April – June 2000, and Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions, James A. W. Heffernan, Baylor University Press, 2006.
About the Show: ” POP to Present” is an exhibition in Stanford Museum which has 60 works of modern and contemporary art on view created since the 1950s. According to the Museum, the aim of “POP to present” is to encourage the viewer’s engagement with this art by sharing a variety of different interpretations and comments about the work on display. The works on the show are encompassing different approaches and media, and evoke complex feeling through their dynamic visual impact.
About the Series: ” Interiors Series” contains seven individual prints and five of them are on the show. They are: Interiors I: Family Reunion, 1984; Interiors IV: Hotel Paradise Cafe, 1987; Interiors V: Water Music, 1988; Interiors VI: Surroundings, 1989, Interiors VII: The Train From Munich. All of these prints were done by artist’s exquisitely sinuous draftsmanship, and combined mystery and reality in a unified pictorial space. In this series, The viewer comes upon lots of unexpected things but all drawings seem so harmonious and all-of-a-piece.The artist definitely has the master storyteller’s technique for making the incongruous seem altogether coherent.That makes the series quite out of common in this contemporary exhibition.
Interiors VII: The Train From Munich, 1991 resist-ground etching and engraving Peter Milton
Where are the songs I used to know
I am always fascinated by gardening and plants like flowers. They grow out of an intense love of life. Some artist said they show the refusal to make the soul selave of the body. I think there is inner richness of soul in those artists who love simple ways of life and who are somewhat impatient with the business of making money. Nowadays, even in China, where the Taoist philosophgy has been worked for several thousand years, life still goes in merrily with lots of people beliving in wealth and fame and power. Every time I see my water bottle, a picture of Tao Yuan Ming, the greatest poet and recluse in China, always comes to my mind. It was his love of nature and ignorence of social success that were expressed in the poem written in November, A.D. 415:
“… …
Why not go home,
Seeing that my field and garden with weeds are over grown?
Myself have made my soul sever to my body,
Why have vain regrets and mourn alone?
These the trees, happy of heart, grow marvelously green,
And spring water gushes forth with a gurgling sound.
I admire how things grow and prosper according to
Their seasons
And feel that thus, too
Shall my life go its round.
… …
Enough!
How long yet shall I this mortal shape keep?
Why not take life as it comes, and
Why hustle and bustle like one on and errand bound?
Wealth and power are not my ambitions, and
Unattainable is the abode of the gods!
I would go forth alone on a bright morning
Or perhaps, planting my cane
Begin to pluck the weeds,
And till the ground
… …
(*the poem was translated and published by Chinese scholar Lin, Yutang in 1937)
Why not go home
schordingerscat