The Public Love Affair With O’Keeffe

The “national tour” of a major exhibition of works by Georgia O’Keeffe originally ventured only as far west as Dallas, but now the itinerary has been extended to Los Angeles. “Georgia O’Keeffe,” including more than 100 works by the legendary artist, will have its only West Coast showing at the L.A. County Museum of Art from March 30 to June 18, 1989.

“From the start we had hoped to take this exciting retrospective to the West Coast, but it didn’t seem possible because of time limitations (imposed by lenders),” said Gerald D. Blatherwick of Southwestern Bell Foundation, which funded the traveling show. In a prepared statement, Blatherwick credited the County Museum of Art’s persistence and the “public’s overwhelming enthusiasm” with persuading the public and private collectors to allow their O’Keeffe works to travel to Los Angeles.

As a pioneering American modernist and the wife of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe gained an important audience while she was in her 20s and 30s. In her later years in New Mexico, her fame grew to such proportions that her images of enormous flowers, bleached bones and desert vistas were frequently reproduced on greeting cards, posters and calendars. No doubt the current rage for Southwestern decor and cuisine owes something to the O’Keeffe style and legend.

As an artist who has garnered both critical and popular acclaim, she is frequently acknowledged as America’s best known and best loved woman artist. O’Keeffe resisted feminist attempts to claim her, however, and her writings express consternation over having her work reviewed as woman’s art and interpreted in a sexual context.

Since her death, in 1986 at 98, interest in O’Keeffe has resulted in several books and exhibitions. “Georgia O’Keeffe,” the most expansive show to date, was organized by co-curators Jack Cowart of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and Juan Hamilton, a sculptor and representative of the O’Keeffe estate. After its November, 1987, debut in Washington, the exhibition moved on to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Dallas Museum of Art, where it continues to Oct. 16. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will host the show in New York, Nov. 19 to Feb. 5, 1989.

Billed as a centennial, the exhibition has already attracted 850,000 viewers, extensive press coverage and conflicting assessments. Times Art Critic William Wilson found O’Keeffe’s work both dangerously beautiful and icy. She flunked his test for historic and stylistic originality but nonetheless emerged in Wilson’s review as a gritty individualist of “clear accomplishment and personal integrity” who “did magical things with space.”

In the New York Times, critic Michael Brenson credited O’Keeffe with helping to formulate “a new kind of imagery and a new perspective on interiority,” thus paving the way for such abstract painters as Cyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. But Brenson found some of O’Keeffe’s imagery repetitive and concluded that her efforts to unite the human body with nature sometimes “became less windows to the soul than skillfully designed and sometimes dramatic decor or walls.”

Newsweek’s Janet Hobhouse said that O’Keeffe “has always been more important as an exemplar of the artist than as a maker of art” and that her icon-like status precludes a clear view of her art.

Jo Ann Lewis disagreed in the Washington Post, calling the show “a purifying, clarifying exhibition that begins the process of tearing down 70 years of musty mythology by letting the best work speak for itself.”

The exhibition’s illustrated catalogue contains essays by Cowart and Hamilton and some of the artist’s previously unpublished letters.