GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986)

by Nan Colton

Georgia O'Keeffe is now an iconic figure. She is known as one of the most original painters America has produced. Her vivid visual vocabulary - sensuous flowers, bleached bones against read sky and earth – shows her as a master of the ecstatic eye and she has had a lasting influence on American art in this century. She represents an essential part of the American Dream – the individual’s quest. 

O'Keeffe's personal mystique is as intriguing as the boldness of her art. In an era in Western culture when women were just beginning to recast the possibilities of their sex, Georgia lived her life not confined to the conventional pattern of mother and submissive wife. By 1930 few women artists were professional and even fewer dared to paint abstractly. Unlike most of her contemporaries, Georgia’s training and most of her subject matter were purely American.  O’Keeffe’s way of living and expressing what she saw was out of the ordinary. She is known to have stated: “If only people were trees…I might like them better.”  She was an original artist, an unconventional beauty, and a person of nonconforming taste in dress and behavior. Her independence and professionalism created the path for the “new woman”. Georgia was devoted to creating imagery that expressed what she called “the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.”

"I have picked flowers

where I found them -

have picked up seashell and rocks,

and pieces of wood where there were

seashells and rocks and pieces of wood

that I liked

When I found beautiful white bones on the dessert,

I picked them up

and took them home, too

I have used these things to say what is to

me the wideness and wonder

of the world as I live in it."

- Georgia O'Keeffe, with punctuation used by the artist.

Many theories have been advanced as to the meaning of her abstract art work. Much has been made of the “female” qualities of her large - scale flowers. O’Keeffe always denied that there was any symbolism, sexual or otherwise, in her flower paintings. She claimed their size was inspired by the new skyscrapers being built all over New York, a rapidly growing modern city. “I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers”. 

The multiple critical responses to her work during her lifetime were complicated. Stieglitz encouraged the speculations about the possible sexual and symbolic aspects of her work but O’Keeffe found the questions invasive and always insisted that her paintings speak for themselves. She was openly, unabashedly proud of her work. “I still like the way I see things best.”

The artistic brilliance of Georgia O’Keeffe revolutionized modern art in both her time and in the present. With her painting she vividly portrayed the power and emotion of objects and nature. She died at the age of 99, leaving behind a vast body of work uniquely expressive of her singular vision of life. During her lifetime she won countless awards and honors but O’Keeffe disdained the use of superlatives to describe her life and work, preferring to be acknowledged as “a painter- just a painter”. Her only regret at the  loss of her eyesight was "that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore... unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone."

Georgia O’Keeffe quotes from book by Barbara Buhler Lynes, O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1989.

RECOMMENDED READING

Corn, Wanda. The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935. Berkley: University of California Press, 2000.

Hassrick, Peter H. Director, ed. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997.

Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. (rev. ed., 1st pub. 1980). New York: Washington Square Press, 1987.

Lynes, Barbara Buhler. O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929. Ann Arbor:             University of Michigan Press, 1989.

Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe, a Life. Hanover:University Press of New England, 1989.

Wright, Susan. Georgia O’Keeffe an Eternal Spirit. New York: Todtri Productions Ltd., 1996.

Good web site to visit:

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, opened to the public in July 1997, eleven years after the death of the artist from whom it takes its name. Welcoming more than 2,225,00 visitors from all over the world and being the most visited art museum in the state of New Mexico, it is the only museum in the world dedicated to an internationally-known woman artist.

http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/her-life.aspx

NAN COLTON

Nan Colton is a produced playwright, director, storyteller, actress and teaching performing artist having performed and lectured professionally on stages throughout South Africa, Great Britain and the United States.

Nan's entrepreneurial spirit created Solo Productions in 1995, and she has committed her talents to create and present theatrical solo performances and workshops that are interactive, educative and entertaining in museums, art galleries, schools, universities and at conferences.

Nan has been the Performing-Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg for the 13 years, having researched, produced and performed over 35 vastly different original scripts (historically accurate or humorously fictitious) characters written to explain the art and the exhibitions.

For the past 6 years, Nan has been contracted as a "Literacy and Performing TeachingArtist" for "CLASS ACTS" cultural programming of the Mahaffey Theater Foundation. Her focus working with students and teachers is to successfully integrate her arts modality as an exciting teaching tool into the classroom curriculum.

Nan’s 5 historical character project entitled Upstairs/Downstairsat Tampa Bay Hotel

(Henry Plant Museum) has won national recognition with an Award of Merit from the American Association of State and Local History. It is her commitment to her local community that has won Nan recognition by the Pinellas Arts Council awarding her the prestigious Artist of the Year 2000 - Friends of the Arts Award. 

QUOTES

- “I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could…..I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at….not copy it.”

- "Tonight I walked into the sunset". (in a letter to her friend Anita Pollitzer, 11 September 1916)

- "When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not."

- "You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare."

- "Filling a space in a beautiful way. That is what art means to me."

- "...whether you succeed or not is irrelevant. There is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing and keeping the unknown always beyond you, catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead - that you must always keep working to grasp. The form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear. I some way feel that everyone is born with it clear but that with most of humanity it become blasted one way or another. I can never show what I am working on without being stopped. Whether it is liked or disliked I am affected in the same way - sort of paralyzed." (to Sherwood Anderson, a writer, September 1923)

- "Still Anita - I don't see why we ever think of what others think of what we do - no matter who they are - isn't it enough just to express yourself..." (in a letter to her friend Anita Pollitzer, 11 October 1915)

- "At last, a woman on paper!" - Alfred Stieglitz, photographer.

TIMELINE

A couple of Interesting Characteristics and Facts: