GEORGIA O’KEEFFE’S LEGACY

One death makes us think of others, so when Georgia O’Keeffe died 10 days ago one thought, rather loopily, of the German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys who had died of a heart attack last month. Aside from their coincidental demise, the two seem an unlikely pairing. He was relatively young at 64 and made an art still esoteric to the general mind. She loomed as an American landmark nearly a century old with a face as beautiful and awesome as eroded desert.

But their near-simultaneous ends in widely separated parts of the globe insisted that one search for some common quality that made them forceful artists and perhaps unites them with others who impose themselves on our memories without our having to make the slightest effort to keep them in mind.

Finally, both captured something elemental in human experience that seemed to make them the avatars of primal forces. Great artists are likely to have this quality. Picasso was creative ferocity itself. Rembrandt was compassion and Rubens physical energy.

Georgia O’Keeffe was the absolute last survivor of the first generation of American artists to forge an avant-garde art on the anvil of the American sensibility. She outlived contemporaries like John Marin, Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella and her husband, Alfred Steiglitz, by decades. Her art was shaped, like theirs, as a combined response to the look of the American landscape and the feel of the American character. In those days, it was still intransigent, passionate and idealistic. She made one think of Willa Cather and later of the young Joan Baez.

If all that suggests a certain toughness, that is right. Although she painted many subjects, O’Keeffe’s trademark work will always be that of a horned animal’s skull standing in the pure desert sky like the emblem from a coat of arms. Often, as in “Summer Days” of 1936, a blossom floats nearby.

Over the years, critics and commentators attached elaborate symbolic meanings to the elements in O’Keeffe’s paintings, and more often than not, those interpretations were sexual and feminine. The skull is the uterus in cross section. The horns are the Fallopian tubes. The skull and desert stand for sterility, the blossoms for fecundity.

O’Keeffe always rejected such interpretations in her salty, telegraphic style. Oh, Alfred started all that sexual business, but there is nothing to it. She’d say something like that.

Well, there is something to it, but it is literal-minded to try to tack such meanings down to specifics. Good art is more numinous than that. O’Keeffe tried to avoid meanings that were pinned down like specimen butterflies. She took sanctuary in the simple facts of daily life the way she took refuge in her Spartan New Mexico studio retreat in Abiquiu. Well, it is a skull that I painted bEcause you find them around here. Well, it is a flower that I painted because I liked it, and you don’t see too many of them around here. She would say something like that.

She talked like a pioneer woman, an appropriate way for one of the greatest American artists to talk. She blazed her own trails. O’Keeffe made her first visit to Europe in 1953. By then, they didn’t have much to teach her.

She was down-to-earth and no-nonsense. But that style of speech has another resonance. It sounds oracular, as if a human medium is delivering occult wisdom.

In reality, it all may have been an elaborate ruse to cover up the fact that the artist could not quite figure out why people held her work and her person in such high esteem. It is common among artists to be puzzled and a bit frightened by success and complex interpretation evolving from what they do so naturally.

Which is not to style the artist as any kind of idiot savant. Very few people actually understand the nature of their own intelligence.

But O’Keeffe combined sinewy spunk with a poetic keenness of observation that mixed into an essentially metaphysical view of the world that can only ring true if the synapse that gaps it together has about it a kind of cosmic innocence. In O’Keeffe’s work, that universality is embodied in her pure, limpid painterly touch and the apparently uncalculated way the composition arranges itself in the picture.

What was finally painted was an essence of spirit that only required objects to make the invisible transparently observable. Some people are like that. They give the impression that their bodies only exist as disposable packaging for important contents.

As physically striking as Georgia O’Keeffe and her art always were, they had a wonderfully disembodied air, like things seen through desert heat waves.