Georgia O’Keeffe — Larger Than Life

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE - LARGER THAN LIFE Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton and Sarah Greenough. Georgia O'Keeffe Art and Letters. Washington: National Gallery of Art with New York Graphic Society Books and Little, Brown and Company, I987. ix + 306 pp. Illus. Jan Garden Castro. The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1985. x + 192 pp. Illus. Madeline Lennon Georgia O'Keeffe distrusted words. For most of her long life she declined to cooperate with those who would write about her. Published critical analyses and interpretations of her paintings so dismayed her, that in 1976 she authored her own book of careful reproductions of selected paintings representing her favourite themes of landscape, flowers and still life, interspersed with her commentary (Georgia O'Keeffe. New York: Viking Press). Her frustration was evident from the very introduction: The meaning of a word-to me-is not as exact as the meaning of a color. . . . I write this because such odd things have been done aboutme with words.... I make this effort because no one else can know how my paintings happen. Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest. The text is her account of where she had been, juxtaposed with the illustrations of her paintings as evidence of what she had done. It is a starkly elegant production reflecting her personal style. The two major books on O'Keeffe published recently, exemplify the opposing categories she implicitly defined in her text: one focusing on the paintings accompanied by spare commentary and her own words; the other linking biographical data with critical analyses. In some ways the more impressive of the two, Georgia O'Keeffe Art and Letters is a catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe: 1887-1986, which was organized by the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.). A fine celebration of her centenary year, the book illustrates 114 Madeline Lennon in colour all 120 paintings and drawings included in the exhibition, prefaced by two short essays and concluding with a selection of the artist's letters, a chronology and bibliography. In his introductory essay, Jack Cowart, curator of twentieth-century art at the National Gallery, explains how the exhibition was developed from an initial suggestion by O'Keeffe in 1985, with the project understandably taking on added significance after her death the followingyear. However, the most interesting and helpful aspect of Cowart's essay is his summary of the existing body of criticism of her work and O'Keeffe's response to it. Cowart states quite baldly that O'Keeffe's work has yet to be adequately evaluated and offers the current exhibition, which focuses on her "greater, earlier achievements," as the logical beginning point for critical assessment. Very effectively, hejuxtaposes the romantic image of the artist/recluse with the woman revealed in her letters, the critics' breezy dismissals with her pained rejection of their misinterpretations. An example of critical perversity is the continuing negative comparison of O'Keeffe's paintings with photography. Cowart cites the powerful critic Clement Greenberg writing in 1946: '' ... the greatest part of her work adds up to little more than tinted photography"(3). With some sense of deja vu, we read in the ARTnews review of the current exhibition that most of the paintings "simply mimic(s) the experience of taking a photograph" (John Yau, Feb. 1988: 114-19). Here, once again, a critic has dismissedher work as derivative and uncompelling, even going so far as to imagine the artist as bored with her paintings. In contrast, Cowart offers his own balanced view of her art as concrete, yet incorporating the fantastic, while his prose captures the intensity and fascination of her vision. There is no doubt that few critics have been able to put Georgia O'Keeffe's life aside and judge her work alone. The fascination with her biography is difficult to avoid, given the toughness of character she projected and the interesting facts of her life. Much has been made of her origins in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and the circumstances of the...