Georgia O'Keeffe held her own in the male-dominated world of American art, producing paintings of startling originality drawn from motifs in nature. Now an exhibition of her work can be seen at Imma, writes Aidan Dunne
Georgia O'Keeffe is an iconic figure in the history of American art: a strong, independent woman who held firmly to her own course in an art world dominated by men; a married woman who spent much of every year alone, in the relative solitude that her work demanded; a painter of startling vision and originality. She was also partly of Irish descent: her paternal grandparents had emigrated from Cork in 1848 (her mother's family were of Hungarian extraction). Yet her paintings have rarely been exhibited in any numbers on this side of the Atlantic. All the more reason to welcome Imma's new show, Georgia O'Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction, which features 28 works spanning her entire career.
It is not a full retrospective, but at the same time Nature and Abstraction pretty much sums up the core of what she was about. That was the reasoning of the show's curator, Richard D Marshall, a former Whitney Museum of American Art curator who met O'Keeffe twice, visiting her once in New Mexico. "Her work tends to be located somewhere between representation and abstraction," he notes. "It was never entirely representational, in that it was always stylised to some extent, and sometimes it pushed almost completely into abstraction, but even then it was usually derived from some motif in nature."
MOST FAMOUSLY, PERHAPS, many of O'Keeffe's paintings are close-up views of leaves and flowers, including sumptuously dark irises, dazzlingly white lilies or brilliantly coloured poppies. These images have been popularised through endless reproduction in posters and cards. It galled her that her employment of such a "pretty", girlie motif engendered a patronising response from her male counterparts. They preferred, she said, dull, dreary pictures - and to prove her point she made some, and duly earned their approbation.
O'Keeffe was born in 1887 on a dairy farm close to Madison in Wisconsin. She was one of seven children. Her aptitude for art was encouraged by her mother and her teachers and, in 1907, she went to study at the Art Students League in New York. At this point she first visited Alfred Stieglitz's gallery on Fifth Avenue, The 291. Stieglitz was a photographer, but his gallery had quickly expanded from its photographic beginnings to embrace contemporary developments in European art.
A foray as a commercial illustrator in Chicago, where she also studied at the Art Institute, ended with a bout of measles and recuperation with her family. Then she took a post supervising the teaching of art in public schools in Amarillo, Texas, where her independence of mind quickly led to clashes with the authorities.
More importantly, though, she had her first taste of the kind of rugged southwestern landscape that in many respects would come to dominate her life and her work. Travelling with her sister in Texas and New Mexico, she was smitten. Having visited Santa Fé she was, she said, "always on my way back". Her bold sense of design is evident from the first. When a friend took some of her work to Stieglitz's gallery he responded warmly. And his approval was extraordinarily important for O'Keeffe.
THERE ENSUED A series of complex emotional entanglements involving O'Keeffe, the photographer Paul Strand, whose work was a significant influence on her, Stieglitz, and several other individuals, including, in the long run, Rebecca Salsbury ("Beck"). In her biography of O'Keeffe, Full Bloom, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp does an exemplary job in tracing - or positing - a coherent narrative line through a veritable blizzard of documentary material relating to this period, much of it confusing. O'Keeffe, for example, was a prolific correspondent, but you would be hard put to figure out her real feelings on the basis of what she put on paper.
She and Stieglitz, who was well over 20 years her senior, eventually married in 1924. The first years of their relationship were intense. She played the role of muse and model. Increasingly burdened with domestic responsibilities, she had to struggle to make space for her own work. While she and Stieglitz drifted apart, with some acrimony, their relationship in many ways suited both. As a gallerist he was, in today's terms, a shameless spin merchant, and he marketed her work very well, helping to shape the myth of Georgia O'Keeffe.
When she and Beck visited New Mexico in 1929, it set a new pattern in her life. Her sympathy for the parched, radiant landscape was profound and lasting. "In New Mexico," she observed laconically, "half your work is done for you."
Thereafter she spent a portion of every year there, acquiring a house and studio in 1940 and settling there in 1949 (Stieglitz had died in 1946). The distinctive desert topography of jumbled hills, plains and cuestas, mesas and buttes, eroded slopes cut by gullies, livid sandstone and stubborn vegetation, adobe architecture and bleached animal skeletons: all of this became part of her unmistakable pictorial language. As did the hard, brilliant light. Her painting has been linked to the so-called American Luminists of the late 19th century but, historian Robert Rosenblum has pointed out, she translated Luminism into "a more audaciously modernist mode". Nor did she gaze out at the landscape from her studio window. She tramped the land in all sorts of conditions, and navigated her way around it in, at first, a Model A Ford. She maintained her ability to disconcert viewers. "Art movements came and went, but she stubbornly maintained her own vision," as Marshall observes. People would look at her work and see it as influenced by movements in art that it actually pre-dated. In the early 1970s, her eyesight began to fail, and it became impossible for her to paint. She died in 1986.
THE MAJOR REPOSITORY of her work is the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fé. "Unfortunately," says Marshall, "they didn't co-operate with us on this exhibition."
As a result, some works he would like to have included are represented only in reproduction in the catalogue.
Still, he has come up with a good range of work, drawn from many institutions in the US. Because, he says, "O'Keeffe's painting was very influenced by the physical environment around her, so that every time she moved to a new place, it lent a new character to her work", all of her habitual locations are represented in the show. "Each phase reflects a physical move. There is New York itself, then Lake George in upstate New York, where she and Stieglitz spent the summers, then New Mexico." In each case she takes motifs particular to the place and transforms them, with varying degrees of abstraction. Seeing the paintings in reality, one can readily appreciate her subtle tonal modulations, her flair for overall pictorial shape and her eye for tiny, telling detail.
The recurrent concentric, vulvate patterning noticeable in her floral, plant and some of her landscape paintings, combined with the flesh-like sensuality of her textures, has been the source of considerable debate - a debate she herself opted out of. Are there conscious references to the human body in her images? She painted relatively few female nudes per se. Art historian Barbara Rose has argued that her most substantial group of watercolour nudes are self-portraits. Drohojowska-Philip plausibly suggests that, disappointed with the results, she opted to "treat the female form symbolically in landscapes and still lifes".
It is unlikely someone so visually astute could have been unaware, and Marshall's hunch is that what he terms her "vaginal imagery" must have been "semi-conscious at least". He has an interesting theory as to how it came about. "Around 1918, she was terribly anxious about absorbing influences too easily. She felt that everything she was doing was derivative. So she set about purging her work of any conscious influences in an effort to find her own aesthetic and vision. I think that when she got rid of everything what she arrived at was a sense of her own femaleness. It's not that uncommon among women artists, just as I think there is often a phallic quality to the work of male artists."
Another characteristic of her work she did not explain was her penchant for bisecting a composition with a vertical or diagonal slash, which seems to cut right through the fabric of the painting, dispensing with the illusion of the picture space. She employed this device in all kinds of different paintings. "I'm not quite sure why," Marshall says. "Perhaps it's a very intentional way of making a physical statement; you know, in the midst of a very vaporous, appealing image, she will suddenly disrupt the continuity and remind us that it's a physical object."
O'Keeffe didn't necessarily have explanations for what she did herself. "I am one of the intuitives," she wrote of herself. But, she amended quickly: "Don't think that I really under-rate my way of thinking . . . If you sift to the bottom of any more reasonable approach to life . . . it really isn't any more rational than mine."
Georgia O'Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction, curated by Richard Marshall, is at Imma, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, until May 13; 01-6129900
Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, by Hunter Drohojowska-Philip (Norton, £12.99)