Reassessing the Legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe

If there is one thing we know about Georgia O’Keeffe, it is that she was not out to please anybody or take any guff from anybody either. When she was a young unknown artist a friend showed some of her work to Alfred Stieglitz, who ran a gallery and could help her career.

Instead of swooning like a proper debutante, she chewed him out (Katharine Hepburn laying into Spencer Tracy). When she was a crusty old matriarch living in the desert, she wrote Joseph H. Hirshhorn that if he didn’t get a proper curator to install his collection in the museum that was about to open on the Mall bearing his name, the whole project could founder because, well, of the uneven quality of the art he selected (Katharine Hepburn laying into Humphrey Bogart).

Tough and independent. Reclusive. In the last three decades of her life she had only about 10 exhibitions. She possessed a transcendent view of the American desert that made her a mystical and mythical presence. She was a revered pioneer American modernist who played a central role in bringing the art of this country into the 20th Century. That was the legacy O’Keeffe left when she died last year at age 98 at her home in Abiquiu, N.M.

Now the National Gallery unveils the first extensive posthumous survey of her art. On view to Feb. 21, it does not pretend to be a full-scale retrospective but rather a scan of her major themes in 120 paintings and works on paper, including about a third selected from the artist’s own collection by her friend Juan Hamilton. The folks are flocking to it. Not just arty types but solid citizens in hats and raincoats who coo over her color and cluck over her symbolism. For an artist who wasn’t out to please, she sure is charming.

A catalogue essay by curator Jack Cowart points out rather scoldingly that O’Keeffe became better known as a persona than as an artist. “Events conspired to produce not an informed awareness but a stark cliche, a stereotype,” he writes bravely.

Oh good. Any show that sets out like that is going to play it straight. We are going to get a sober analysis of O’Keeffe’s contribution to history and the poetics of vision. The text begins with a photo of the aged O’Keeffe that looks like a portrait by Andrew Wyeth. Never mind. Bound to knuckle down in a minute. Oops, a photo of O’Keeffe’s hands on an animal skull. Very sensitive. Then comes Cowart’s essay, which is an ecstatic paean, followed by Hamilton’s essay, which is awed and sentimental. Then reproductions of the works. Ah, at last. This must be the probing essay. Nope. O’Keeffe’s letters.

There is absolutely nothing in the catalogue that plants O’Keeffe’s feet on the ground. It is in fact an up-scale version of publications usually associated with third-rank hangers-on whose surviving relatives are attempting to elevate them to Olympus with blubbery pleading and muzzy stories about what interesting characters they were. Surely Georgia O’Keeffe can survive closer scrutiny than that. I mean she was one hell of a painter. Wasn’t she? Come to think of it, even professional art watchers of a certain age have had very few opportunities to see her work in depth. A floating skull here, a tremulous giant peony there.

Among the earliest works on view is a 1915 charcoal drawing called “Special No. 2.” It spurts up like a gray fountain supporting a black pearl. What a surprise. It looks for all the world like an abstracted version of an Art Nouveau design of the 1890s. We don’t associate O’Keeffe with the decorative decadence and sexual neurosis of the European fin du siecle but there it is. That nervous whiplash curve turns up in her work for the rest of her life, making it as tense and scented as the perfume counter at Nieman-Marcus. She may not have been out to seduce the viewer but the work is as gorgeous as rainbows and just as theatrical.

But everybody says she was a pioneer modernist. That must mean she did something first. Around 1918-23, she did abstract compositions that come close to the non-objective art of Wassily Kandinsky, but close is not a basket and she certainly had no theoretical attachment to the idea because the next thing you know she is painting little realistic still lifes of apples or grapes.

There are two consistent qualities in O’Keeffe’s work. It is always almost dangerously beautiful like the product of an aesthete for whom ravishing visuals are an end in themselves. Don’t forget that the artists around her and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, are sometimes called “The Immaculates,” implying pristine refinement and expressive coldness. There is an iciness in O’Keeffe that makes the work feel more interested in being impressive and admirable than in being empathic.

An argument can be made that she was fundamentally conservative. The closest she ever came to Cubism or Der Stijl was in New York skyline landscapes where advanced styles are backdated to old-fashioned representation. She is never credited as a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism but she may have absorbed some of its rhetorical scale in her later works.

You also get the feeling that anybody who mumbled the word Surrealism around her place at Ghost Ranch would have suddenly heard the klatsch! of a shotgun being cocked. But if O’Keeffe’s expressive vocabulary is anything it is Surrealism backdated to vacuum up the old-fangled symbolism of Dutch still life and post-dated to make it sexual.

In this exhibition the meanings of her art seem so blatant you wonder why there has ever been any argument about it. Nah, it’s so obvious it can’t be that. But it is, the symbolism of a feminine mystique. “Black Abstraction” of 1927 is not an abstraction at all but a virtually photographic close-up of a reclining woman’s hip and leg with a pearl at the curve of the knee. Oh precious pearl of womanhood shining and hidden. The recurrent shell motif is for self-involvement, the skull for death and sterility and the flowers for the petaled complexity of women’s sex.

Had O’Keeffe couched this severely limited set of preoccupations in less detached and aggressive formats they might be read psychologically as autobiographical expressions of personal obsession. But she no more wanted her painting to seem personally confessional than she wanted her real self exposed to general knowledge, so she made her work and herself larger than life, iconic. Thus, what might have been merely provincial Surrealism became American Original; what might have been egoistic narcissism became an embodiment of The Force of Mother Nature.

When you shake it all down it is O’Keeffe’s larger-than-life imagery that is her greatest strength. She took ordinary sights of nature and consistently imbued them with a sens of larger, metaphorical meaning.

There is nothing wrong with a successful metamorphosis or a whacking good job of sublimation but O’Keeffe was so good at keeping her most private self hidden in the work that they look very public, like Pop art made by a queen. Curiously they bring to mind the photography of Ansel Adams, work of immense talent but of such calculated grandiosity and obvious mass appeal that it threatens to lose any of the subtlety and challenge we expect from the most original kind of art.

Maybe that won’t happen to O’Keeffe. This is just one show and the chemistry of exhibitions is volatile. If O’Keeffe flunks the test of historic or stylistic originality, she certainly passes from mere personal eccentricity into the realm of the gritty individualist. In works like “Pelvis With Blue,” she did magical things with space. Her undoubtedly authentic response to nature sometimes reflects in a rhapsodic ecstasy that puts her in the company of William Blake. One impugns such clear accomplishment and personal integrity with caution. Don’t knock Katharine Hepburn--or John Wayne.