Exhibits offer look at Georgia O'Keeffe
Dec. 16—Georgia O'Keeffe toggled between abstraction and literalism, between the finely wrought and the slapped-together, between the traditional and the contemporary.
The New Mexico artist felt comfortable navigating those seeming contradictions as they surfaced regularly in both her life and her art.
Two exhibitions open at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, "Radical Abstraction" and "Georgia O'Keeffe: Making a Life" showcase those variables as the artist's personal belongings take center stage for the first time in more than a decade. Many of the paintings recently returned from a European tour that included Madrid, Paris and Basel, Switzerland.
Curators have called O'Keeffe one of the first American abstractionists, dating to drawings and paintings the artist created in the early 20th century. She was well aware of the work of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, considered one of the pioneers abstraction in western art through his geometric forms, lines and colors exploring his own inner life.
Academically trained in both Chicago and New York, O'Keeffe began working in the representational style of her mentors. But she felt stuck. Abstraction freed her.
Painted in 1919 when the young artist was in San Antonio, Texas,"Series I: From the Plains" reveals the jagged geometry and convulsive swirls of a stormy landscape.
The recent acquisition "Trees" (1918) could be seen as entirely abstract if the artist had not titled it.
O'Keeffe curator Ariel Plotek argues O'Keeffe juggled both realism and abstraction.
"It's kind of an image of a form that is kind of celestial," he said, "a sun or a moon."
A similar painting conveyed a terrible headache or migraine.
"It's about capturing a feeling rather than revealing a landscape," Plotek added.
Many of the works date to the 1950s and '60s, when O'Keeffe began traveling.
"Sky Above Clouds/Yellow Horizon and Clouds," 1976-77, captures her airplane view.
"When she begins to fly in the 1950s and 1960s, she's seeing the world like it's never been seen before and it captivates her," Plotek said.
In "Pink & Green," (1960) she painted an abstracted aerial view of an olive green river zigzagging through a salmon-pink ground. Again, she pares the composition to its essentials.
In "My Last Door," one of many works depicting her patio door, she strips away all the detail to a black shape above a series of stepping stone squares.
"It's all about the geometry," Plotek said.
The exhibit, "Making a Life," portrays the artist as more than a painter, she was a maker who designed her own kitchen table from plywood slabs.
Crude furniture aside, she also owned a lamp by the great Japanese American designer Isamu Noguchi and a Charles Eames chair. Conversely, the Abiquiú house also dangles bare lightbulbs. Both the lamp and the chair were gifts from their creators.
She designed her own clothing and even made her own art materials, creating pastels from crushed pigment.
She created an organic garden in Abiquiú decades before it was fashionable. The exhibit includes coffee pots, tea services, gardening tools and dinnerware from her homes in both Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch.
"Radical Abstraction" will be on view through Oct. 2023; "Making a Life" will hang through spring 2024.
'Radical Abstraction' and 'Georgia O'Keeffe: Making a A Life'
WHERE: Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St., Santa Fe
WHEN: Through October 2023 and spring 2024, respectively
HOW MUCH: $20 at 505-946-1000, okeeffemuseum.org
