O’Keeffe exhibit shows artist’s evolution

Even after the first snow, flowers will still be in full bloom on the Upper East Side. In an exhibition that runs now through Jan. 17, the Whitney Museum of American Art is presenting the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, TC ’15, a leader in the early 20th century move toward abstract art in America.

The exhibit chronicles the evolution of O’Keeffe’s artistic style, from dreamy charcoal sketches to commanding oil paintings. The chronological display reflects the artist’s growth, as her place of residence, artistic interests, and love interests change over the course of five decades.

O’Keeffe, a Wisconsin native born in 1887, responded to the changing early 20th century art climate by producing abstract art that diverged from Cubist traditions of fragmentation and disjunction. The artist instead embraced the mysteries of nature by painting close-up, detailed images inspired by the relatively new medium of photography. O’Keeffe often chose to portray the same subject in varying degrees of realism. Her painting “Jack-in-the-Pulpit,” however, led to her belief that abstraction was the most real part of life.

For an artist associated with gushing colors, charcoal and black paint compositions are a jolting opening to the exhibit. In her composition “Drawing No. 8,” for instance, O’Keeffe layers her canvas with charcoal spirals that permit a viewer to visually tumble through a swirl—it is evident that she is already experimenting with abstraction through her omission of the foreground and background. Seeing O’Keeffe’s early experiments with the line and the loop provides a unique view into her artistic consciousness.

The artist’s vivid floral compositions are the climactic display of O’Keeffe’s realized potential. Plunging into scenes of sentiment, the observer easily becomes entranced by the lack of depth in her paintings, which is fostered by her curved strokes. Her tints simply seem to pop from the canvas.      

The exhibit also features semi-nude photographs of O’Keeffe taken by her husband Alfred Stieglitz, which introduce the viewer to her sexual liberation. The next room blossoms with the artist’s flower paintings, which some have interpreted as both expressions of female sexuality and O’Keeffe’s own attempt to understand her body. The juxtaposition of nude photos and voluptuous flowers reinforces this connection, but does not become an overbearing comparison, as the photos and paintings are in separate rooms.

The chronological structure of the exhibition provides an illuminating context of O’Keeffe’s life. The painter’s moves from Texas to New York City to New Mexico are highlighted, for example, as well as her relationship with photographer Stieglitz. The curator’s setup allows the viewer to make comfortable connections between the artist’s personal life and her work, encouraging him or her to look at the paintings through more of a formal lens than a biographical one.

O’Keeffe develops a new artistic language in her paintings, engaging the viewer in a dialogue about unexplainable human emotions. The curator’s structure may prevent the viewer from examining the multiple formal elements in each composition that make O’Keeffe such an artistic pioneer, but the opportunity to gain a thorough understanding of the evolution of her craft is reason enough to view the exhibit.

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