A revisionist reading of Georgia O’Keeffe

According to the press release for the Whitney exhibit, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction,” “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.

Tags: Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, riot grrls, Sasha Nicholas, Tags: Georgia O’Keeffe, Whitney Museum

Emma Pearse is a staff writer for New York magazine.

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