Georgia O’Keeffe : A look at the reasons for her vast popularity sheds light on the trends within the art community

We were talking about Georgia O’Keeffe at the office before her exhibition opened at the County Museum of Art, where it will remain until June 18. One editor wondered why it is that O’Keeffe is one of those relatively rare fine artists who is popular with the public. This group--a seemingly heterogeneous lot--includes Michelangelo and Leonardo, Renoir, Van Gogh, Edward Hopper, Dali, Warhol and David Hockney. Why them? How did they attain the popular eminence of Norman Rockwell?

The short answer, of course, is that each has qualities accessible to the unlettered eye. Either they made work that is obviously compelling or were great personalities, or both. In other words each has characteristics that make it possible to turn them into archetypes of Creative Nobility, Creative Suffering, Creative Eccentricity or Creative Charm.

Such highly simplified caricatures of artists--or anybody else--are bound to be wrong simply because people are more complicated than that and artists are more complicated than most people. That means that most highly popular fine artists have been turned into cliches by their adoring fans. Michelangelo is revered for his great David and everybody feels as if he owns a piece of the Sistine ceiling--witness the current fuss over its restoration--but nobody pays much attention to his tragic, near-abstract “Prisoner” series because it is truly complicated.

Degas is beloved for the charm of his ballet dancers, but the fact is, he was a crusty old misogynist who saw the dancers simply as a neutral formal motif and a symbol for his cranky notion that women are not much more than crafty little animals.

O’Keeffe is a feminist hero despite the fact she specifically rejected having her art identified with any ideology. She started out as a no-nonsense schoolteacher who as a fledging artist had the guts to tell off the legendary dealer and photographer Alfred Steiglitz for mishandling her work. Then she upped and married that selfsame influential broker of avant-garde. He had one of the saltiest mouths in cheeky Manhattan. She was a match for him. He forged her youthful image in photographs so noble and sexy she would have been a personality if she’d never touched a brush. But she had a long time to do that too. She was nearly 100 years old in 1987 when she died in Santa Fe. A late photograph looks exactly like a portrait by Andrew Wyeth. (Now there is a marriage made in Popular Art Hero Heaven. They could go on the road with Rep. Claude Pepper as Gray Panther celebrities.)

The curators who originated the present 100-work touring show for the National Gallery set out with the avowed intention of taking the spotlight off O’Keeffe’s iconic personality and putting it back on her painting where they think it belongs. Instead nobody talks about anything but how popular the show is. Better reserve your tickets now. The catalogue is full of O’Keeffe’s letters and the entrance to the galleries is festooned with photomurals of her ever-handsome visage.

Ah, the fate of good intentions.

Something is afoot here that is even more interesting than the interesting question: Why Is Georgia O’Keeffe So Popular with the Populace? The real question is: Why Is That Question So Interesting?

It represents a trend that is so persistent, pervasive and important as to make the very notion of a trend appear topical and slightly silly. It represents a mega-trend in the way art is appreciated and will therefore ultimately determine which art is appreciated. It is an epochal roll-over whose ultimate drift is to Make Art Like Everything Else.

Back in the ‘60s there was a new trend every five minutes--Pop Art, Op Art, Kinetics, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Photorealism. Then artists began complaining that these trends were the bogus concoctions of curators and dealers, that in fact all kinds of art was made simultaneously all the time and that the new styles were just a form of commercial packaging.

The whole notion of trends was discredited. Naturally, this resulted in a new trend. The ‘70s were dominated by a tendency for art to call attention to itself under the banner of various social issues--Women’s Art, Gay Art, Chicano Art, Black Art. None of this was deterred by the fact that scarcely anybody could find any coherent style or formal direction in any of these movements. According to existing standards of winnowing and sorting art, these movements simply did not exist, and yet there they were, fueled by political energies.

So far these varying eddies continued to come from within the art world. A smart dealer of the epoch observed that the fine arts were the only art world where the public did not have a vote. The activities of the sphere were determined by a loop that included artists, dealers, critics, collectors and museums. The general public played no role in the determination of what was to be esteemed.

This cabal is by no means broken. A former director of one of New York’s major modern museums recently admitted that its exhibitions are organized for art insiders. John Q. Viewer just has to get along as best he can. Let him eat cake, preferably Twinkies.

Unbroken but not unbowed. The first fissure in the fault line came one hot August day in 1986 when both Time and Newsweek magazines took the unusual step of running cover stories about the purchase of a block of paintings by Andrew Wyeth. They immediately became famous as “The Helga Paintings,” went on a museum tour and played to a large popular audience.

In retrospect, it was a benchmark event that signaled the entrance of Mr. Regular Citizen--reflected in the popular media--into the art game. Since then the tendency for artistic interest to be molded outside the art world has only grown.

Increasingly, large social forces call the tune. The Soviet Union launches glasnost and there is a sudden spate of interest in contemporary Russian art. Little of it has been seen here and that has been egregiously bad, but never mind. Museums scramble to organize exhibitions. Japan looms large as a social force and suddenly everybody wants to know what their contemporary artists--if any--are up to. A recent issue of Time carried a story about art being made in Africa, not because the art has any aesthetic merit but because it grows out of a religious revival afoot on the great continent.

Student art--usually considered too green for the rigors of critical scrutiny--can come to public attention these days if it manages to ruffle the feathers of the social fabric. Witness recent flaps in Chicago where one student got the nation’s attention by painting the city’s late mayor in drag and another laid Old Glory on the floor.

In these ways art is being made to appear understandable to anybody with eyes--or without them for that matter. You can feel you are getting it by knowing the surrounding story--or The Price.

Ah, The Price. What could be more comforting in a materialistic society than posted auction prices that let the confused onlooker know exactly what a work of art is worth? (I used to teach a class called “The Value of the Arts.” A number of people would always walk out on opening night when they discovered that the “value” in question was intrinsic.)

All right. You say you are convinced all this popularization of the fine arts is happening. The next question is, So What? Is this justice at last for the little guy or a disaster for art?

The critic Hilton Kramer thinks it’s a disaster, if I read him right. In a recent issue of his magazine, the New Criterion, he fumed on about how art history and connoisseurship are being annexed by the social sciences, thus destroying a concern for quality crucial to a proper appreciation of the true meaning of art. It’s true that even in academic circles these days art is being examined for its sociological and political content.

I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wrong with that. What makes art interesting is that it can be legitimately read in so many ways. The better it is, the more readings it yields. But some readings are more obvious than others--things like story-telling, resemblance to the model and historical circumstances can be readily determined with a good look and a little reading. But art is a language unto itself that has little or nothing to do with words.

Picasso once said to Andre Malraux, “When people want to understand the Chinese they say, ‘Well I’d better learn to speak Chinese.’ But when they want to understand art they don’t say ‘Well, I’d better learn to speak Art.’ ”

When I was a kid I loved the records of Edith Piaf so much I decided to learn French. When I could actually understand what she was saying I was a little disappointed, but at least I knew what was really going on.

Being happy with one’s own ignorance is a comforting illusion but it is Philistinism. There is plenty of that loose in the popularization of the fine arts. We are probably headed for a two-tiered value system that is closer to that long established in the performing arts. The Mandarins of the sphere go to the movie, concert or play and pronounce it a stinker because they have spent a lifetime refining their perceptions and ignoring their emotions. The Public responds that the critics are snobs and boobs because it’s pulling huge crowds and grossing millions. Besides, the entertainment makes them feel good.

The two sides always have something to learn from one another.

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Hey! What about Georgia O’Keeffe?

She comes very close to being a perfect compromise. The show looks even crisper at LACMA than when I reviewed it at the National Gallery, but it plays up both the striking beauty of the work and its rigid limitations.

Her work appears challenging when encountered in a state of innocence and stays that way as long as the viewer doesn’t change much. When he does, then 10 miles down the road there is a tendency to tip one’s hat respectfully and move on to richer ground.

When push comes to shove, art people--painters especially--tend not to put her in the very first rank. In the language of the subculture some say that is because she failed to come to grips with Cubism. That epochal style that restructured painting at the turn of the century was the savior or bugbear of virtually every serious painter to come along subsequently--you either had to deal with it like DeKooning or find a way around it, like Pollock.

O’Keeffe painted as if Cubism never existed. Her vision was essentially that of a close-cropped photograph. “Black Abstraction” of 1927 is not an abstraction at all but a rendering of a woman’s leg with a white orb painted at the bend of the the calf. The Princess and the Poil.

She had a real knack for distinctive imagery. Nobody really needs to describe what an O’Keeffe looks like. Her animal skulls, baroque flowers, seashells and woozy Taos architecture have been so widely reproduced they now exist somewhere between artistic icons and cultural cliches. It is a little disturbing that looking at the originals yields very little more than looking at the post cards.

The current LACMA exhibition does provide new information about O’Keeffe. An early work such as “Special No. 2” (1915) reveals an attraction to the decadent metaphysics of Art Nouveau. For all her reputation as the Ultimate Flinty Earth Goddess she was intensely stylized, refined and--as a painter, prissy, antiseptic and cautious. Contrarily, she was given to lumpy painterly rages as in a stylized 1916 landscape vaguely reminiscent of early Kandinsky or Arthur Dove.

Later, she resolved this contradiction in works such as “Nature Forms,” which is as overly stylized as a fit of planned hysterics or an animated backdrop for “Fantasia.”

She really was awfully mannered. And--once again contradicting her myth as an obdurate independent--profoundly seductive.

Her world really looks as if it was made of exquisite fluttering silk ribbon. Sometimes it is as sensual as rich perfume, as in the modest “Red Poppy.” She did not remain modest. By mid-gallery she’s moved up in scale. Sometimes she is delicately grand, as in “An Orchid.” In others, she is merely cranky and bombastic.

But even when she is in a thundering fury she is always surprisingly accessible and controlled. She will always yield to readings as an abstractionist, a realist or a symbolist. But that’s it. There is something public and closed off about this performance--a grand dame of art doing her polished turn, revealing nothing of herself. She does what she knows she can do: the safe areas of color, carefully blended, rarely overlapped . . . risk free.

There is marvelous chutzpah in this essentially conservative art. There is a bit of Surrealism too. We’ve seen it before. We’ve also seen the emblematic skull on a red, white and blue background. It reads as an icon of the American West, an impersonal symbol of sterility and renewal. Here for the first time it also looks like a kind of metaphysical Pop Art.

What kind of art-babble is that? The people love her. The show will probably break a box-office record.