Georgia O’Keeffe: Love, Creativity and Control

Words by Katherine Niland

[Edited by Myfanwy Greene]

Georgia O’Keeffe's marriage with American photographer Alfred Stieglitz remains one of the most notable artistic relationships in 20th-century American modernism. However, Stieglitz, who first exhibited O’Keeffe's work, constructed a personal and critical authority, which characterised the reception of her work. From her nature and flower paintings, a thick incense of sexuality was extracted from the eclipses and cusps of form. The narrative of the sensing, eroticised, female body is one that O’Keeffe rejected: “You hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you wrote about my flowers as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don’t.” The abstraction of line and form in her still life and landscape paintings, using ebbs of colour and movement, instead attempts to synthesise and expand her subject. The relationship between love, creativity, and control becomes formative in this actualisation of subject and O’Keeffe’s curation of self: authorship.

Georgia O’Keeffe was first discovered when her drawings were shown to prominent American photographer and Gallery 291 owner Alfred Stieglitz, in 1916. He attested that the drawings were, “the purest, finest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long while.” In 1918, their professional and personal relationship developed, when O’Keeffe began living with Stieglitz. Yet, his authority as sponsor and teacher, simultaneously translated her as muse. This relationship became established within the art world, when in 1921, Stieglitz exhibited photographs of a nude (and passive) O’Keeffe. Despite O’Keeffe’s consent, this sexualisation arguably marred future interpretations of her work. Paul Rosenfled, who created an essay on fourteen American modernists, attributed Georgia O’Keeffe as absence of intellect and instead, “from the nature of women, from an American girl’s implicit trust in her senses, from an American girl’s utter belief, not in masculinity nor in unsexedness, but in womanhood”. Truly, an infantilising perception of a sensing feminine vessel.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Corn, Dark, No.1, 1924. Oil on board. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Georgia O’ Keeffe, Corn, No.2, 1924. Oil on Canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Corn, No.III, 1924, Oil on Canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the same year that Rosenfeld’s criticism was written, O’Keeffe created her Corn, Dark series (see above). The layers of unfolding fronds are arguably similar to the shapes of a vulva. Yet, O’Keeffe’s attribution of “the light coloured veins of the dark green leaves reaching out in opposite directions… and every morning a little drop of dew would have run down the veins into the center of this plant like a little lake” instead echoes a transcendentalist sensitivity to nature. Inspiration from sensuality, not necessarily imbued with sexuality. Furthermore, O’Keeffe’s reworking of corn in three different paintings shows O’Keeffe’s exploration of the varying effects of canvas, composition, colour and line. In Corn, Dark No.1, a long canvas accentuates the reaching horizontals, compressed in swathes of shadows. The progression from Corn Dark No.1 to Corn Dark No.3 shows O’Keeffe’s gradual experimentation with wider canvases, a lighter palette and increasingly positioning the leaves around angled lines. This frees the tension in the composition, accentuating a spinning, outstretched movement, suggestive of growth, which opposes the fixed architecture of the plant's original constriction. The reworkings reflect a modernist assessment of the visual language of the corn and embody her ethos of, “I work on an idea for a long time… it’s like getting acquainted with a person, and I don’t get acquainted easily.” This quote reflects her process of sensing her way through the different elements of a composition, using her intellectual and individual assessment of the effects of these elements to portray her experience of the plant. These large-scale, close-up paintings abstract and expand subjects to a marvellous and terraneous magnitude.

Georgia O’Keeffe. Radiator Bldg - Night, New York. 1927. Oil on canvas.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

O’Keeffe’s 1927 oil painting Radiator Bldg - Night, New York, further displays the breadth of her skills and her dispute with Stieglitz's narrative that his wife was “more at home in the soil, while I am a city person.” The image of the impassive skyscraper mimics the authority of Stieglitz Art Circle and Gallery on her life in New York. Furthermore, if we apply the Freudian discourse that surrounded the vaginal interpretations to the curving hollow’s of O’Keeffe’s flower drawings, we can infer a phallic protrusion of the building. Vivien Fryd interprets this appropriation of the Freudian language promoted by Stieglitz, as destabilised by the orifices of hollowed-out windows and the undulating layers of smoke, accentuated and reverberating through the highlighted top of the building. Fryd argues that O’Keeffe, “shifts between masculine and feminine modes, showing the conflict that existed on many levels” of Freud’s theories. Additionally, O’Keeffe’s painting of a subject in order to actualise and assert her relationship, positions her series of paintings of Skyscrapers as an attempt to assimilate herself into her New York surroundings. In a year of emotional turbulence, when Stieglitz began an affair, she appropriates and adapts his narrative. Thus, she recognises and asserts herself within the critical discourse surrounding her work.

Georgia O’Keeffe. Ram’s Head White Hollyhock Hills. 1935. Oil on Canvas.

The Brooklyn Museum.

However, in 1929, O’Keeffe decided to leave New York for New Mexico, geographically extracting herself from Stieglitz. What began as a series of trips, surmounted in a permanent residence at Ghost Ranch. She was inspired by the expanse and varied forms of the landscape. This oil painting, Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock Hills, reflects her compilation and integration of her artistic language, with the new landscape of Ghost Ranch. She integrates the hollyhock (a flower exhibited in her close-up flower paintings) alongside her interest in the new, yet similar, curvilinear forms of bones. The combination of hollyhock, a flower known for the fertility of its numerous seeds, is strikingly paralleled next to a bleached skull, implying the death of drought. This central monument and memorial is heralded by the heavy waves of clouds, which echo across the top half of the canvas. It promises a new artistic season of rain, above a landscape of expanse. Her previous subjects are thus extracted and reframed in an entirely new way. This New Mexico period marked O’Keeffe’s nourishment of her independence and individuality.

O’Keeffe has created a prolific body of work, exploratory of essence and self, in a signatory language of colour and shape. She has consistently expanded from her relation with Stieglitz and his patriarchal art world's curation of a heteronormative image of a ‘women artist,’ which rejects interpretations of the eroticised and passive female body. At 89 years old, her desire to curate her work on her own terms surmounted in her 1976 biography Georgia O’Keeffe; published with her singular creative control. The massive book exhibited her artworks, without titles or dates or page numbers (displayed alongside fragmented lines of poetry or prose) has been criticised for its lack of analysis and detail. Furthermore, in a timeline at the back, her relationship with Stieglitz is reduced to a marriage date and a death date. Consequently, O’Keeffe’s rejection of traditional modes of authorship can be read as a reaction to the narrative that Stieglitz and other art critics imposed on her work. The book’s cover, Georgia O’Keeffe, does not distinguish between author and title, presenting a final testament to her painting’s distillation of an essential experience of form, the kaleidoscope of her boundless career. 
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Works Cited:

Corn, Wanda. “Telling Tales: Georgia O’Keeffe on Georgia O’Keeffe.” American Art, vol. 23, no. 2, 2009, pp. 54–79, https://doi.org/10.1086/605709.

Fryd, Vivien Green. “Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Radiator Building”: Gender, Sexuality, Modernism, and Urban Imagery.” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 35, no. 4, Dec. 2000, pp. 269–289, https://doi.org/10.1086/496831.

Hall Mitchell, Marilyn . “Sexist Art Criticism: Georgia O’ Keeffe: A Case Study.” The University of Chicago Press Journals, vol. 3, no. 3, 1978, pp. 681–687.M. 

Mintz Messinger, Lisa. “Georgia O’Keeffe.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin , vol. 42, no. 2, 1984, pp. 3–64, https://doi.org/10.2307/3258762.

Rosenfeld, Paul. Port of New York. University of Virginia, 1924.

Image Credits: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Brooklyn Museum.