Dusting Off the Stony Legend

Georgia O’Keeffe conducted her life pretty much as she wanted to but failed in her desire to live to her 100th birthday on Nov. 15, 1987. She succumbed early last year in her adopted Southwest at age 98. But the O’Keeffe legend lives and grows on this centennial of the artist’s birth on a Wisconsin dairy farm. An exhibit of her paintings opened the first of this month at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and runs there until Feb. 21.

Her extraordinary paintings of flowers, Manhattan office buildings, bleached animal skulls and stark New Mexico landscapes are accompanied by the publication of 125 of O’Keeffe’s letters, described by critic Jo Ann Lewis in the current issue of Smithsonian magazine as “surprisingly frank and endearing.” Lewis adds: “This celebratory enterprise should go a long way toward blowing enough dust off the stony legend to reveal the full sweep and range of both the art and the extraordinary woman who made it.”

O’Keeffe occasionally came to California to visit her friend Ansel Adams, the famed nature photographer. In the fall of 1938, Adams escorted O’Keeffe around his beloved Yosemite Valley and the High Sierra, but seemed keenly disappointed that she did not bring her paints and canvas along. In his posthumous autobiography, Adams quoted O’Keeffe as saying: “I must come back here some day. I may find something to paint.” In fact, O’Keeffe’s paintings and Adams’ photos often shared the same characteristics of simplicity and dramatic contrast in nature.

Still, Adams had to grapple with O’Keeffe’s art: “In the presence of O’Keeffe’s paintings, I cannot claim to fully understand them. I accept their power and dignity and the assurance that there is a tremendous reserve of beauty that fine artists, in all media, can give us.”

The one disappointment about the O’Keeffe exhibit is that it is not scheduled for a California museum. After Washington, the show will be at the Chicago Art Institute, March 5-June 19; the Dallas Museum of Art, July 31-Oct. 16, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nov. 19-Feb. 5, 1989.