Beyond the O’Keeffe Mystique

Looking at the art of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is difficult. First, before you can even get to the paintings and drawings, it’s necessary to sweep away the dense bramble of personal mythology that still surrounds the legendary artist. The cult of personality, which is a defining characteristic of American mass culture in the 20th century, found its first artist-subject in O’Keeffe. Her 98-year life span helped to put the talented painter in exactly the right place at precisely the right time for an outsize role.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things” is symptomatic of the difficulty. Organized jointly by the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Dallas Museum of Art, and currently installed at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in the last stop of its four-city tour, the show is an insightful, carefully chosen exhibition of O’Keeffe’s work. Yet the museum couldn’t resist exploiting the cult.

The entrance to the small presentation (about 50 works, several quite diminutive) is dominated by enormous black-and-white photomurals displaying aspects of the famous artist’s famous lifestyle. They chronicle the classroom in a hardscrabble Texas town where she taught during World War I; her lovely adobe ranch in New Mexico, both inside and out; her studio overlooking a vast expanse of desert, with tubes of paint carefully laid out amid jars filled with brushes. Over in the corner, a video monitor shows a continuous loop of O’Keeffe’s world in glorious living color.

At the center, wedged between two of the giant photo enlargements, hangs “Oriental Poppies” (1928), one of the more powerful and dramatic pictures in the show. Two orange-red, blackhearted poppies are pushed up so close to the picture’s foreground plane as to virtually eradicate any naturalistic background, while also offering a bumblebee’s-eye view of the flowers. These otherwise startling poppies, overwhelmed and trapped in lifestyle hell, fairly wilt.

The cult of personality around O’Keeffe is distinctive, partly because of her gender. As an ambitious, career-minded woman operating in a patriarchal society, she automatically stood out from the pack. Yet the cult is unusually powerful--and instructive--for another reason.

O’Keeffe fit an unspoken stereotype, established in American culture by the end of the 19th century, when she was born, and still very much in place today. The arts are marginal in American life because they’re considered to be a feminine interest rather than a masculine one. With O’Keeffe, the gender of the artist conformed with the gender socially ascribed to American art--and the rest is history.

O’Keeffe divided her oil paintings into two main subject categories--landscapes and objects--and “The Poetry of Things” (emphasis on things) singles out the latter for examination. Typically they’re better than her landscapes, except for the amazing series of watercolors she began in the late 1910s. They aren’t exactly still life paintings, in the usual sense of that term and as represented by the earliest picture in the show, “Dead Rabbit With Copper Pot” (1908).

Painted in New York while she was still a student of William Merritt Chase, this dark, tonal picture is a kitchen still life in the tradition of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin. The upper left quarter holds a richly painted copper pot, while the carcass of a rabbit laid out next to the pot cuts the canvas in two along a diagonal. Both rabbit and pot occupy an undefined, atmospheric space--a field of brown, whose tonalities blend with the sympathetic colors of chestnut-hued copper and cinnamon-flecked bunny fur. But the fact of their location in a three-dimensional world is clear. These are things of the domestic realm.

Perhaps the most daring aspect of the design is the way the carefully composed rabbit and pot fill half the picture, balancing another half that is essentially an empty field of color. “Dead Rabbit With Copper Pot” remains a traditional Realist picture, but it also stands as a harbinger of things to come--specifically Modernist things.

“Green Apple on Black Plate” (1922) is the first great Modern picture in the show (it’s featured on the cover of the exhibition’s informative catalog). A green apple floats against a black disk, which itself hovers in the upper part of a modulated field of off-white. The modest little painting builds on the sense of abstraction seen developing in several charcoal and watercolor drawings hanging nearby.

Objects found in traditional still life paintings usually have metaphoric or narrative implications, but this painting begins to ignore those habitually accepted characteristics. Something very different starts to happen. Like a homespun Malevich painting, “Green Apple on Black Plate” picks up Cezanne’s apple and lofts it out into the void. The stylishly placed apple and the floating plate are dislocated from the space of daily life, becoming instead things that occupy the space of art.

The poetry of O’Keeffe’s things also begins to assert that reality in art is found in the sensational effect of color. In the exhibition, many of her pictures are clustered not by date but according to the dominant hue of an object category: a red wall of tropical canna blossoms, all from the 1920s; a white-and-gray wall of seven pictures of shells and bones; a purple wall of delightfully vulgar petunias; a wall of gold and tan leaves.

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Flowers, leaves and shells are bits of nature normally gathered for domestic display. However, O’Keeffe’s paintings obliterate the domestic setting, instead zooming in for an up-close view. Her greatly magnified little prizes are displayed in the blank spatial void newly characteristic of Modern painting.

O’Keeffe was one of many American artists, including Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, who moved in this direction in the 1910s and 1920s. The exhibition shows how her early study of Asian design, as propounded in the enormously influential teaching and writing of Arthur Wesley Dow and Ernest Fenellosa, shaped the direction of her work. Close scrutiny, careful placement of objects in space and reverence for the cycles of eternal nature are but three of the defining features of traditional Chinese and Japanese art shared by O’Keeffe’s pictures.

Things served this newly evolving approach to art quite well. Natural objects could be pared down, arranged and put into precise relationships with one another--and with the rectangle that forms a canvas. Landscape is more recalcitrant, far less malleable.

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One reason the show succeeds is because its focus has been kept exceptionally tight. (There are some clunkers, as O’Keeffe could be a remarkably dry and brittle painter--witness the ugly tree-branches-as-river-landscape in 1959’s “It Was Yellow and Pink.”) All but eight of the pictures date from before 1939, and even though she painted for another 40 years, her most impressive work was behind her.

Not insignificantly, 1939 was the year the world changed--but O’Keeffe didn’t. Thirty years old at the end of World War I, and around 50 when Europe dissolved into Holocaust and chaos, she was very much an artist whose aesthetic was embedded in the period between the wars. “The Poetry of Things” eloquently shows how O’Keeffe came to understand--and harness--the emotive power to be found within the space of a Modern painting.

Still, she never seems to have grasped that a painting is itself a thing--an object with its own complex, potentially powerful physical relationships to the world. A 1979 cast of an anomalous 1945 sculpture called “Abstraction (Spiral)” suggests her awareness of the dilemma; but the sculpture, shaped like a stylized seashell, is as thuddingly inert as an overblown knickknack.

The drifting, unmoored, floating internal design of “Green Apple on Black Plate” might recall Malevich, but Russian Suprematism also regarded painting as an object with a profound material presence. From Jackson Pollock to Ellsworth Kelly, postwar American art likewise came to regard painting as just this sort of thing, filled with its own poetic possibilities. If she never got there in her own work, part of O’Keeffe’s importance lies in having helped to establish the critical foundation for it.

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“GEORGIA O’KEEFFE: THE POETRY OF THINGS,” California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 34th Avenue and Clement Street, San Francisco. Dates: Through May 14. Prices: Adults, $10; students, $8; free to children under 12. Phone: (415) 863-3330.