artist's diary

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