Georgia O’Keeffe was one of the most important and widely admired modernist painters of the 20 th century. Known not just for her amazing works of art but also her modernist vision and strong spirit, O’Keeffe was born in Wisconsin to a family of six siblings. Through much of her high school years, she engaged in extensive drawing leading to her teachers noticing her extraordinary ability. Her art career took hold more firmly at the Art Institute of Chicago and later on at the Art students’ league in New York. However, in 1908, she had won the League's William Merritt Chase prize for her magnificent oil painting, the untitled. By 1910, she had become highly proficient at imitative realism but believed it was impossible for her to distinguish herself within the tradition. This led to her abandoning her dream of being a painter and taking up a job as a commercial artist in Chicago. However, her return to professional painting which was catapulted by exhibitions of her much earlier paintings proved worthwhile (Galenson, 2007) . For the entire breadth of her career, O’Keeffe produced over 2000 paintings with about 200 flower paintings proving to be the most popular (Nicholls, 2016) . However, her paintings were not mere abstractions of reality. She sought to capture the power and emotion of objects. Her paintings of barren landscapes, flowers and close up lives have emerged as part of iconography and mythology of American Art landscape.
O’Keeffe’s influence in the world of art lies partly in her ability to employ techniques used by earlier artists and incorporating older approaches to art with the more novel ones. She, for instance, incorporated traditional imitative realism with aspects of Asian culture aesthetics. The influential artistic figure, Paul Strand, was an important influence. Strand was well known for his technique of cropping in photographs. Deriving from this, O’Keeffe was one of the pioneering artists to adapt the technique of rendering close-ups of unique American objects that were highly abstract and yet detailed (Galenson, 2007) .
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O’Keeffe was not known to belong to any particular artistic movement, but just like other influential artists like Arthur Dove, she experimented in abstracting motifs from nature. By synthesizing realism and abstraction, she produced works that underscored the essential forms of nature. While most of her works stood out for precision to details, in others, she tore away what she perceived as unimportant, focusing on color and shape (Nicholls, 2016) . It is this flexibility and irreverence to set trends that increased her popularity. At a personal level, she believed that an artist perfected his or her work with time. Thus, in 1928, at the peak of her career, she remarked to a journalist that in the world of art, there was no such thing as overnight success or a genius. Rather, artists just like writers, singers, and other creators grow with ‘hard experience.’ Daniel Catton, one of O'Keeffe curators, would observe 40 years later that her style had grown progressively, demonstrating a completely ‘organic development’ (Galenson, 2007) .
Her artistic path, however, led to crises of confidence on several occasions. For instance, her emphasis on producing abstract art-embodied most prominently in Steak/ streak and Red & Orange – led her to believe it was the basis for misinterpretation by the public. While she never entirely abandoned modernist abstraction as the core principle of her work, by mid-1920s, she had diverted her emphasis in a bid to redefine herself as an artist of recognizable forms, for which she is best known. Her later depictions of recognizable objects were full of abstract shapes she had identified and developed in the 1910s including spirals, V-shapes, and ovals. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, her artistic work pulled further away from the mainstream as she was one of the few to remain within the confines of representation at a time when others were pursuing non-representation or had abandoned painting altogether.
Blue II
Painted in 1916, this work depicted the environmentally vigilant eye of O’Keeffe. It is indicative of her early monochromatic watercolors and drawings and conjures natural movement through abstract forms. The curvilinear shape in Blue II evokes a plant form. However, during this time, O’Keeffe was playing the violin and, therefore, it is likely the shape captures the scroll-shaped extreme end of the violin’s neck that would have been in her line of sight while she was playing. The intensely blue color of the painting suggests she might have been acquainted with Vasily Kandinsky’s idea that visual art, just like music, ought to convey through the use of line and color. It is also possible that the intense blue suggests music sound and the mood it expresses or invokes.
Petunia No. 2
This 1924 piece was different in that it was her first large rendering of a flower and in significant ways marked the start of her exploration of a topic that would characterize the rest of her career and life. In this painting, O’Keeffe magnifies the form of the flower to accentuate its color and shape. Explaining the reasoning behind this action, she argued that nobody sees a flower since most flowers are too small for people to have the time to see them. To remedy this, she decided to paint a flower big enough that people will be sufficiently awed to take time and look at it. However, the flower received varied interpretations that she often had to rebut. To her feminist critics, for instance, the painting was a veiled illusion of female genitalia. This view had been fostered to a certain degree by his husband who doubled as his art dealer and photographer, further fuelling the reputation that she has inappropriately portrayed women sexuality. She would spend a good deal of her career denying that such representations were her intention. For her, there was no concealed symbolism, just nature of the flower. If anything, the anatomy of petunia reveals that it is incredibly detailed and, therefore, possible that O’Keeffe was underscoring the Androgyny of her reproductive parts to counter the notion that her subject was somehow connected to her gender. Although subsequent artists in Europe and America had experimented with abstraction for nearly a decade, it was O’Keeffe, like Dove, that gave attention to images from nature, and she was the only painter to constantly employ flowers as a motif.
Part 3
O’Keeffe’s feminist credentials are beyond dispute. She was a member of the National Woman’s Party, arguably the most radical feminist movement of 20 th century America. The party strongly rejected the essentialist idea that women naturally possess certain character traits. She, therefore, strongly rejected attempts at gendered interpretations of her work as well as the sexualized image Stieglitz had attempted to paint of her in the eyes of the public (Wong, 2015) . She consequently, through her art, tried to portray herself as a hardworking and serious professional.
At a time when women’s voice had not fully gained respect and women were expected to conform to arbitrary social prescriptions, O’Keeffe was a notable exception. Her paintings demonstrated not just her individualist character but also independence of mind. Paintings like the Petunia generated considerable controversy even within the feminist movement itself and yet did not dissuade her. She countered critics blow by blow and in so doing challenged prevailing orthodoxies even within the feminist movement itself. In many ways, therefore, she embodied the independence of mind that many feminists have come to forcefully advocate for (Wong, 2015) . Her willingness to defy tradition even within the artistic world as demonstrated by her embrace of modernist aesthetic combined with a fascination with the abstract and Asian art speaks to this independent-mindedness. Put briefly, she embodied the notion that a woman can explore and paint on any topic even in the most provocative of manner.
This feminist character is also embodied in the trajectory of her life choices. By the late 1920s, she strongly felt that the dynamism of New York City no longer sustained her creative effort. Lake George’s lushness simply did not stimulate her art and, therefore, she felt the need to look for a new stimulus. In 1929, she decided to spend some time in New Mexico where she had been briefly in 1917. It was here that she discovered a beautiful landscape that triggered her creative genius. However, the decision to move to New Mexico more permanently put considerable strain on her relationship as it meant leaving the husband Stieglitz in New York. It was a battle of loyalties. Her decision to settle in New Mexico, notes Nicholls (2007), strongly demonstrated her independence of mind and willingness to transcend social dictates on the role of a woman within a family context.
Conclusion
Georgia O’Keeffe was undeniably one of the leading artists of the 20 th century. Her work stands out for turning conventional practice in the art world on its head and demonstrating the ability to combine different artistry techniques. O’Keefe engaged in art at a time when feminism was taking hold in America. It has been argued that she was an important voice in the feminist movement through her artwork as well as her personal life. Her artwork, therefore, ought to be not just in descriptive but also in normative terms and within a particular historical period.
References
Galenson, D. W. (2007). Who Were the Greatest Women Artists of the Twentieth Century? A Quantitative Investigation. The National Bureau of Economic Research .
Nicholls, C. (2016). Understanding the Feminist Art of Georgia O'Keeffe. Welldoing.org , https://welldoing.org/article/understanding-feminist-art-georgia-okeeffe.
Wong, Z. (2015). Why Georgia O'Keeffe has remained a feminist icon (and, that it wasn't always about the flowers). Vogue , https://www.vogue.com.au/culture/features/why-georgia-okeeffe-has-remained-a-feminist-icon-and-that-it-wasnt-always-about-the-flowers/news-story/4acc0ff6ce48758902e91f0f7d8944e6.
