Georgia O'Keeffe. Feminist, painter, creator of America modernism.

 

Georgia O'Keeffe. Feminist, painter, creator of America modernism. 

 

 

To look at a Georgia O’Keeffe painting is to see America. Throughout her career, from her first show in 1916 to the late 1970s, the indomitable artist was concerned with what it meant to paint her country – and she became captivated by the wide plains, rocky outcrops and bold blue skies of New Mexico, her adopted home.

O’Keeffe’s first show was at the 291 Gallery in New York, 100 years ago this May 2016– a fact that was celebrated in a major retrospective of her work at Tate Modern in London. Alfred Stieglitz,(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz)  who ran the most modern and influential gallery in New York , was shown her charcoal work by a mutual friend in 1916, and, impressed, included it in a group show without asking O’Keeffe’s permission. She wrote to ask him to take it down, he refused; a lively, flirtatious correspondence began.

Alfred Stieglitz took hundreds of pictures of O’Keeffe, who became his wife (Credit: Alfred Stieglitz/The J Paul Getty Trust)

By 1918, he’d tempted O’Keeffe away from a teaching job in Texas, with the offer of a flat financed by him in New York; within a month, he’d left his wife and moved in with her. There followed a creatively fertile period in both their lives, with O’Keeffe painting the city and their summer residence at Lake George in upstate New York, and Stieglitz taking hundreds of pictures of the woman who would become his wife in 1924.

But it wasn’t until their relationship ran into difficulties (due to her boredom with NY Life and their various affairs), and O’Keeffe took off west, that she really found her own distinct vision of the US landscape. The air crackles with static. Every shadow seems laser-cut.

It’s easy to imagine how inspiring it must have been for the artist. The high altitude and dry climate result in a crystalline light that seems to bring out astonishing colors: the chalky ochre and pepper-red of the rocks and the sun-bleached grey-gold of the prairie grasses flicker against the famous New Mexico skies, whose dark, rich blueness it would be easy to become addicted to. The air crackles with static. Every shadow seems laser-cut.

O’Keeffe first visited northern New Mexico in 1929, staying in the tiny town of Taos with friends. She needed to get away from Stieglitz, who was in the midst of an affair with the heiress Dorothy Norman and following her own numerous affairs. The trip proved a good idea creatively as well as emotionally: O’Keeffe was revitalized by the landscape, and fascinated by the Pueblo culture and architecture of the Native American tribes of the area.

She had found her place. O’Keeffe began to spend her summers alone in New Mexico, renting remote properties and ‘tramping’ around the countryside, taking her paints with her; in 1940 she bought an Adobe house called Ghost Ranch, and in 1945, another in the little village of Abiquiú, 48 miles north of Santa Fe. Stieglitz never visited: New Mexico remained hers alone.

The area around Sante Fe in New Mexico where the artist settled is known as ‘O’Keeffe country’ (Credit: Georgia O'Keeffe House, Abiquiu 5, View from House)

She had also found her own form of Modernism. In the 1920s, living in New York and hanging out with Stieglitz’s masculine art crowd – Paul Strand, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Edward Steichen – she complained that the US lagged behind Europe, because American Modernists failed to engage with their own country. No wonder no-one was writing ‘the Great American Novel’ or painting the ‘Great American Vision’. “I was excited over our country [but] I knew that at that time almost any of those great minds would have been in Europe if it was possible for them,” she commented. “They didn’t even want to live in New York – how was the Great American Thing going to happen?”

O’Keeffe grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, which is “why the landscape is important to her, becomes symbolic for her,” says Tanya Barson, curator of the Tate show. But it was when she went Southwest and discovered New Mexico, that O’Keeffe found her Great American Thing. Like her more famous close-up paintings of flowers, her vision of the Southern skies and mountains wavers between figurative and abstract; she crops in on a view, like a photographer, finding the abstract shapes and simplifying line and form, heightening color until it has an emotive effect. 

Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1 1932 fetched the highest price ever for a work by a female artist in 2014 (Credit: 2016 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS, London)

Showing many landscapes within a chronological survey of her work, the show at the Tate moved from the clichéd perception of O’Keeffe as ‘that famous female artist who painted swirling vagina flowers’. Such a Freudian reading was encouraged by Stieglitz from her earliest exhibitions, and later enthusiastically taken up by 1970s feminist critics – but O’Keeffe “consistently denied” such interpretations throughout her entire career. One could say that this was an example of "see what I tell you, not what is there in front of your eyes." 

Still, her close-up flowers images are beloved the world over. Her smooth painting style and huge popularity has seen O’Keeffe often reduced and sneered at by critics; she’s too easy.

Her smooth painting style and huge popularity has seen O’Keeffe often reduced and sneered at by critics

“Many of her works visually seem very simple; they’re approachable,” acknowledges Cody Hartley, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. “They also reproduce very well; they make good posters. The work appeals to a lot of people – it has an accessibility that a Jackson Pollock does not have. But actually to paint that way, so there’s not a lot of evidence of the labour involved, is very difficult. Her technique is amazing – long, continuous, smooth brushstrokes - but it’s hard to appreciate how much work and thought went into her paintings because they don’t make that obvious.”

O’Keeffe painted several pictures at her other home, Ghost Ranch, including My Backyard (Credit: 2016 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS, London)

Following Stieglitz’s death in 1949, O'Keeffe moved there permanently. She painted the distinctive, indigenous Adobe architecture of the region: low buildings of wide, softly curved walls made of straw and mud, that bake hard into a bright, distinctive red-brown finish. Both her homes were in this style, although she put in huge, plate-glass windows too.

She converted a car into a mobile studio so she could work in the landscape - as well as painting from memory back in her studios. She painted several pictures of the White Place, softly flattening out the jagged fingers of rocks, white-on-blue. Her form of abstraction is about “color and composition” suggests Caroline Kastner, curator of the O’Keeffe Museum: “she’s rejecting perspective… reducing and editing what you’re seeing in the landscape to the flat surface of a painting.”

Some critics say the skull paintings are a comment on the Depression, while for others they simply represent the realities of frontier country (Credit: The Brooklyn Museum)

Her ‘back yard’, meanwhile, looks towards striking cliffs where the different strata of rock - some dating back 200 million years – make a pastel layer-cake of colors, with improbable spires and spindly chimneys of stone jutting up towards the sky. O’Keeffe captured their varied tones, in sweeping landscapes and abstracted close-ups: elephantine mauve lumps, creamy yellow cliffs, braiding slopes of peach and pistachio, red-raw streaked rock-faces.

Her many paintings of these views seem smoothly stylized, exaggerated, too bright – but visiting, you can see how the contrasts do come from the land itself. These views also form a backdrop for her 1930s still lives of skulls and bones, sometimes floating – Surrealist-fashion – in the air; critics have suggested the morbid symbols against the desert landscape symbolize the Dust Bowl and the Depression, while for others they simply represent frontier country, O’Keeffe’s Modernist vision of the American West.

O’Keeffe painted what Barson calls “the chromatic landscape of Ghost Ranch” enough to fill a whole room of the Tate’s exhibition. Usually, she painted a subject – say, horse skulls - for around a decade, then moved on. But there was one image she never grew tired of: the Pedernal mountain. She just kept painting it, with later paintings framing the summit through the holes in sun-bleached pelvis bones.

O’Keeffe felt a profound emotional and artistic attachment to this landscape; after her death in 1986, the Pedernal was where her ashes were scattered. Not long before she died, she deemed the distant, blue-hazed summit her private mountain: “God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_O'Keeffe

https://collections.okeeffemuseum.org/

Faith Ringgold. Multi Talented black woman artist

 

Faith Ringgold . born October 8, 1930

October 08, 1930. Faith Ringgold (born October 8, 1930, in Harlem, New York City) is an artist, best known for her narrative quilts. Ringgold’s artistic practice was extremely broad and diverse, and included media from painting to quilts, from sculptures and performance art to children’s books. She was an educator who taught in the New York city Public school system and on the college level. In 1973, she quit teaching public school to devote herself to creating art full-time. n this image: Faith Ringgold, American People Series, The Flag is Bleeding, 1967, oil on canvas. Collection of the artist, c. Faith Ringgold. Courtesy ACA Galleries, NY.

Tar Beach (Part I from the Woman on a Bridge series) (1988)

Tar Beach, Ringgold's best known work, is the first quilt in her Woman on a Bridge series about a young African American girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, growing up in Harlem. In 1991 Ringgold published Tar Beach as a children's book for ages four to eight, and the book was named a Caldecott Honor Book, A New York Times Best Illustrated Book, and won the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration and the Parents' Choice Gold Award. Featured on Reading Rainbow, widely recommended by librarians and read by countless school children, Ringgold became a household name.

The story quilt depicts a family spending time outdoors on the rooftop or 'tar beach' of their apartment building. In the center image; clothes are drying on a clothesline; four people are gathered around a table playing cards, another table has food, and Cassie and her younger brother are resting on a blanket. The background depicts the New York City skyline, where Cassie is also is shown flying over the George Washington Bridge.

The scene is bordered by fabric squares, many of them with floral patterns, and at the top and bottom of the quilt another border of rectangles contains text, telling the girl's story. At top left the story begins," I will always remember when the stars fell around me and lifted me above the George Washington Bridge." Another section reads, "Sleeping on Tar Beach was magical ...only eight years old and in the third grade and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want to for the rest of my life."

In 1963, tensions between black and white Americans grew feverish. Though the momentum of the Civil Rights movement peaked that summer with the March on Washington, racism remained at the core of American society. For many black residents of cities across the country, frustration over the stagnation, exclusion, and violence that racism wrought on their lives boiled over into rage—and in 1964, they began to riot.Faith Ringgold was in her early thirties at the time of the race riots and focusing on painting landscapes. The daughter of culturally engaged parents, she had been making art since her childhood. Despite making their home in a neighborhood that had become the seat of black art and literature during the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century, and despite its location in one of America’s most progressive cities, Ringgold and her family were also impacted by racism. In the 1960s, opportunities for black artists in the mainstream art world were close to zero and, in a double blow for Ringgold, women artists were also barely allowed in. Persisting in the face of these challenges, she brought her landscape paintings to the gallerist Ruth White, hoping for a show. White told her that, as a black artist, she should not paint landscapes during such a charged time.

“Some people might have been upset or hurt by it,” Ringgold said. “But I was happy that she had the courage to tell me that.” Channeling her own anger at the injustices she experienced and saw around her, she set aside her landscapes and began work on what would grow into a defining series of 20 paintings, titled “The American People,” with canvases populated with black and white protagonists that represented a society riven by racial division, and black people both caught within and striving against its constraints.“It was what was going on in America and I wanted [people] to look at these paintings and see themselves,” she explained

For more than a half-century, Ms. Ringgold explored themes of race, gender, class, family and community through a vast array of media, among them painting, sculpture, mask- and doll-making, textiles and performance art. She was also a longtime advocate of bringing the work of Black people and women into the collections of major American museums. Faith Ringgold passed away on April 13, 2024, leaving ALL of us a priceless legacy. 

https://www.npr.org/2013/07/28/205773230/stories-of-race-in-america-captured-on-quilt-and-canvas

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ringgold-faith/artworks/

William Blake. Poet, printmaker, visionary artist

 

William Blake, born on this day 1757: Albion Rose (Glad Day), c 1796.

“He that has never travelled in his thoughts and mind to heaven is no artist.” William Blake did not indulge in sketching tours and sojourns at aristocrats’ country piles. The artist had more adventurous journeys in mind: mysterious, enigmatic, terrifying visions, which apparently came to him at night from the age of eight—the product, it is thought, of his eidetic (photographic) memory. Their son’s transports must have been alarming for his parents, but they had the good sense to finance his artistic ambitions by supporting his studies at the Royal Academy. Its founding president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, was the man Blake accused of never travelling “in his thoughts and mind to heaven”, and whom he later described as “hired to repress art”. Unsurprisingly, the art establishment viewed Blake as, at best eccentric, or at worst a madman, and largely disregarded his talents. 

Pictured here, his ca. 1805 depiction of the biblical story of Jacob and his dream of a ladder leading to heaven. His was truly revolutionary art, working against the backdrop of the social and political convulsions of the American and French Revolutions and the European wars which followed. In his particular and eccentric way, he projected the hopes and fears of his age. 

Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Who else remembers reading this aloud in school and marveling at asymmetry? Ah, William Blake.

Around 1788 Blake invented a new form of printing in colour, combining text and image, painter and poet. He described it as his “infernal” method, which he claimed he had learnt from the ghost of his dead brother Robert. So his art came as a sort of added bonus to his verses neither of which gave him establishment kudos. He earned what little he did as an engraver, and sold his art to a small coterie of friends and supporters who were seduced by his fantastical, and for the time, risqué images. The earliest owners of Blake’s illuminated books included a number of rare book collectors, some of whom were dubbed “The Lunatics”. Another owner of Blake books, Isaac Disraeli, the father of the future prime minster, Benjamin, described how his guests would “disport” themselves with Blake’s books “beneath the lighted Argand lamp of his drawing room” delighting in his engraved images of “angels, devils, giants, dwarves, saints, sinners, senators and chimney sweeps.” As T.S. Eliot later wrote in 1921, Blake was “a wild poet for the super-cultivated”.

Did he who made the lamb make thee? The lamb, another page from Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1789

Even the sun is raging, as dark clouds gather over guilty Cain. Finding of the body of Abel.

At the other end: Great red dragon & the woman clothed in the sun, from Revelations

One of his most powerful images, The Ancient of Days (right, 1827), a figure from his imagination, Urizen, the man who measures the world at the moment of creation. Naked, bearded and sinuous, the old man leans out from the sun with vast compasses; a grim scientist measuring the world at the moment of creation, measuring what can never truly be measured. This work was coloured in the last days of Blake’s life and he declared it to be the “best I have ever finished”. He died in August 1827. An obituary in the Literary Chronicle expressed the conflicted contemporary view, that he was “one of those ingenious persons . . . whose eccentricities were still more remarkable than their professional abilities”. Blake would not have cared: in 1809, following a disastrous one-man show in London, he had written that, “if a man is master of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so; and if he is not employed by those who pretend to encourage art, he will employ himself, and laugh in secret at the pretences of the ignorant”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake

Albrecht Dürer, Polymath star of the Northern European Renaissance

 

Among the masterpieces of European draftsmanship, this iconic self-portrait study evokes the awakening artistic consciousness of the twenty-two-year-old German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. Probably produced with the aid of a mirror, the head and the hand were preparatory for his painted Self-Portrait of 1493 (Musée du Louvre, Paris), considered one of the earliest independent self-portraits in Western painting. Durer’s exploration of self-portraiture in several drawings and paintings is characterized by an arresting directness that was highly unusual at the time. The artist’s calligraphic precision and expressiveness of line is also found in the study of a pillow at the bottom of the sheet, a subject that he continued to explore on the reverse.

Perfection of humanity as we were at moment before the Fall. As represented with infinite care in 1504 by Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg. He was born May 21, 1471.

In 1513 his mother, to whom he was deeply attached, sickened and died a painful death, and Dürer produced three of his most densely detailed and symbolically fraught images, the engravings titled “Knight, Death and the Devil,” “St. Jerome in His Study” and “Melancolia I.”

Saint Jerome in his study, 1514. What atmosphere -- quiet, warm, sunny, & all done in b/w lines. Transcendent. Epitome of the engraver's art by the great Albrecht Dürer

Just a complete dandy in his 1498 self portrait. I mean, the cap! The braided strap! And the gloves!! Not to mention the long curly locks.

Albrecht Dürer does the face-of-Christ look in self-portrait. 1500

A supremely gifted and versatile German artist of the Renaissance period, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was born in the Franconian city of Nuremberg, one of the strongest artistic and commercial centers in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He was a brilliant painter, draftsman, and writer, though his first and probably greatest artistic impact was in the medium of printmaking.

More than any other northern European artist, Dürer was engaged by the artistic practices and theoretical interests of Italy. He visited the country twice, from 1494 to 1495 and again from 1505 to 1507, absorbing firsthand some of the great works of the Italian Renaissance, as well as the classical heritage and theoretical writings of the region.

Dürer’s talent, ambition, and sharp, wide-ranging intellect earned him the attention and friendship of some of the most prominent figures in German society. He became official court artist to Holy Roman Emperors Maximilian I and his successor Charles V, for whom Dürer designed and helped execute a range of artistic projects. In Nuremberg, a vibrant center of humanism and one of the first to officially embrace the principles of the Reformation, Dürer had access to some of Europe’s outstanding theologians and scholars, including Erasmus (19.73.120), Philipp Melanchthon, and Willibald Pirkheimer, each captured by the artist in shrewd portraits. For Nuremberg’s town hall, the artist painted two panels of the Four Apostles (1526; Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich), bearing texts in Martin Luther’s translation that pay tribute to the city’s adoption of Lutheranism. Hundreds of surviving drawings, letters, and diary entries document Dürer’s travels through Italy and the Netherlands (1520–21), attesting to his insistently scientific perspective and demanding artistic judgment.

The artist also cast a bold light on his own image through a number of striking self-portraits—drawn, painted, and printed. They reveal an increasingly successful and self-assured master, eager to assert his creative genius and inherent nobility, while still marked by a clear-eyed, often foreboding outlook. They provide us with the cumulative portrait of an extraordinary Northern European artist whose epitaph proclaimed: “Whatever was mortal in Albrecht Dürer lies beneath this mound.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Born May 12, 1828 in London

Fascinated by women’s physical allure, Rossetti here imagines a legendary femme fatale as a self-absorbed nineteenth-century beauty who combs her hair and seductively exposes her shoulders. Nearby flowers symbolize different kinds of love. In Jewish literature, the enchantress Lilith is described as Adam’s first wife, and her character is underscored by lines from Goethe’s Faust attached by Rossetti to the original frame, “Beware . . . for she excels all women in the magic of her locks, and when she twines them round a young man’s neck, she will not ever set him free again.” The artist’s mistress, Fanny Cornforth, is the sitter in this watercolor, which Rossetti and his assistant Dunn based on an oil of 1866 (Delaware Art Museum).

Jane Morris

Fanny Cornford

Born in London in 1828, the child of Italian immigrants, Rossetti divided his work between art and poetry all his life. The founder of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, his relationships with women were complex and largely destructive to the women in his life; his first wife became an addict and probably committed suicide, his long term relationship with William Morris' wife helped to destroy that marriage and made her ill health more difficult to bear. 

But Rossetti was also self destructive, addicted to chloral and alcohol, became paranoid and depressed and largely withdrew from society until his death in 1882. 

Many of Rossetti's self-estimates of himself as a writer vs his talent as a painter were accurate. Had he been able when young to choose a literary career, he would probably have been a better poet than painter; he was a genuinely original and skillful writer. In part, his achievement was vicarious: he galvanized others in many ways not easily measured. However, insecurity and self-reproach manifested themselves in all but his earliest poems. Rossetti was haunted by a (perhaps partially accurate) private assessment of his weaknesses as a painter and obsessed with Jane Morris as a model. Yet he was perhaps right that his intense response to such private archetypes was the chief distinction of his work. But it would be wrong to sentimentalize Rossetti as a victim of “tragic loves.” It seemed to serve some inner purpose for Rossetti to idealize women who were withdrawn, invalid, and/or melancholic. Their genuine alienation seems to have provided some counterpart for an inner sense of inadequacy and isolation in him. In some way he seemed to need serious emotional attachments with women poised on the edge of withdrawal. In any case, a sense of this equilibration heightened the effects both of his paintings and of his poetry.

Elizabth Siddell

Jane Morris

"It would be difficult to imagine later nineteenth-century Victorian poetry and art without Rossetti's influence. His writings can perhaps best be viewed as an unusually acute expression of Victorian social uncertainty and loss of faith. Rossetti's poetry on the absence of love is as bleakly despairing as any of the century, and no poet of his period conveyed more profoundly certain central Victorian anxieties: metaphysical uncertainty, sexual anxiety, and fear of time."

Astarte