Georgia O’Keeffe: Proto-Riot Grrrl

According to the press release for the Whitney exhibit, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction [2],” “When one thinks of her work it is usually of her magnified images of open flowers and her iconic depictions of animal bones, her Lake George landscapes [and] her images of stark New Mexican cliffs.” All this is true. But, really, when one thinks of O’Keeffe’s work, only vaginas come to mind. When Whitney curatorial assistant Sasha Nicholas was researching O’Keeffe for the show, she saw a group of school girls standing in front of Georgia’s giant, pastel-rich blossoms, giggling. “I thought, oh, God, even kids are looking at it and thinking that her paintings are just all about sexual organs.”

This stunning survey, which opened on Sept. 17, is in some part an effort to change that. The Whitney wants to re-educate the public about O’Keeffe, who is one of the most significant and successful female painters in American history but also one of the most misunderstood. The painter, from a poor family in Sun Prairie, Wis., was a more radical artist and person than the gender-trapped explorer she’s been pegged as. What might be taken from the 100-plus piece show and the accompanying hardcover catalogue full of essays and images is that O’Keeffe would be an excellent role model for the current climate of reality TV and third-wave feminism.

This was a woman who had to work to foster her public brand, a challenge she met energetically, though seemingly without trying. She had the promotional savvy of Tyra Banks, the hardcore quirk of Kathleen Hanna, and the talent and discipline of, well, Georgia O’Keeffe. She was a card-carrying member of the National Woman’s Party and in her early days she voiced a desire to express female perspectives. “I am trying with all my skill to do painting that is all of a woman, as well as all of me,” O’Keeffe said. And while she always balked at the suggestion that she was a feminist painter—see, very contemporary!—she worked to shift the prototype of femininity toward something dynamic and complex.

Georgia O’Keeffe became a celebrity overnight when, in 1921, Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe’s idol, lover, dealer, eventual husband, soul mate, and heartbreaker, hung a batch of his black and white photos of O’Keeffe’s naked torso, breasts, neck, and head in his retrospective show at the Anderson Galleries. They were photographs he had taken while the couple was falling in love, when Stieglitz was a very married, very public figure and O’Keeffe was an unknown and ambitious young thing. With Stieglitz’s exhibition began the scandal of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, as did the public’s romance with their new icon of femininity.

First impressions—and, indeed, scandals—last. Those photographs were to O’Keeffe’s career what the conspicuous union between Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi was to the Top Chef host and envied pop personality. The photographs hurled O’Keeffe and her seductively waifish form to fame at the same time that Freud was giving his first lectures in the United States. So by the time of O’Keeffe’s second and most visible solo show in New York, the public gleefully received them as an expression of this mystifying new creature: the sexually liberated female.

This limited reading of O’Keeffe mortified her. She had worked for years studying new modes of thinking about art. In the 1910s, the Dow-Fenollosa system was gaining steam, re-emphasizing beauty in art as a means to ethical and social reform. O’Keeffe studied this system, taught it, and applied it to her work in ways that she hoped would both change painting and express her self as completely as possible.

But after her racy public debut, O’Keeffe quickly learned that she was going to have to work on more than her painting if she was going to change the world. Stieglitz’s lens had made her an object of the gossip pages, so she insisted in the years to come that Stieglitz photograph her in austere poses and conservative dress. The Lifetime biopic that premiered earlier this month, Georgia O’Keeffe: Her Life Was a Work of Art, shows her during this phase. Joan Allen as O’Keeffe skulks around town in a bowler hat and tomboy boots, and frequently disappears to the desert to study the landscape and, more importantly, work out of the influence of the public gaze. Through this and her own paintings, she cultivated an image of a hermit in the desert: a woman more at one with nature than with society, a woman in love with the American West. She spent the majority of her working life between New York and New Mexico, developing her abstract language from the sunsets, the landscapes, and the flora.

But all this abstraction—O’Keeffe’s mission to “make the unknown known”—was received with one thing on the brain: sex. Her early paintings were very purely abstract; there was no real-world origin for them. But those ambiguous abstractions were perceived as orgasms, anyway. O’Keeffe was determined to beat her critics at their clueless game, so she began to paint landscapes, skyscrapers, and particularly flowers in ways she believed could not be misread. And she never gave them what they wanted. “I said to myself … I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers,” she said in 1939. “Well–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 own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower–and I don’t. Then when I paint a red hill, because a red hill has no particular association for you like the flower has, you say it is too bad that I don’t always paint flowers.”

O’Keeffe had the hyper self-awareness that defines this current generation well before her time. She cultivated an image as a recluse, but as one critic once intimated, might well have been the most photographed hermit in history. And while she submitted to painting something close to realism—an inferior form of expression of which she said "there is nothing less real than realism"—it’s not as if she gave up on the flowers that perpetuated O’Keeffe as provocateur. She continued painting them bigger, more colorful, and seemingly more exuberant each time. She was labeled, by The New Yorker, “Our Lady of the Lily.”

A high-profile woman taunting a narrow-minded public: Sound familiar? O’Keeffe’s dialogue with the public was not unlike that which the riot grrls started when they scrawled the word “bitch” across their stomachs in an effort to reclaim it. And it worked both for and against her. The public loved and love (and buy!) O’Keeffe’s flowers but they have also worked to diminish, in the eyes of her critics, the depth of her talent. “People love her work because it’s not inscrutable the way that a lot of modern art is for people,” Nicholas explains.

“Being a part of pop culture tends to flatten people out,” she continues. Of course, it’s not exactly a sad story. O’Keeffe’s flowers made her the “the most famous and highly-paid woman artist in America.” But a lot of O’Keeffe’s more inscrutable works are part of the Whitney show: geometric paintings with lines and swelling shapes resembling little; black-and-white paintings with rigorous, layered details. “People are going to be very surprised,” says Nicholas. “She was a technician, doing incredible things with light and with form. We want to remind people that she was a serious painter.” And thereby put the substance back into the celebrity.