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From Ashcan to Abiquiu

3:25 PM Friday, August 19, 2005

[No Patio Furniture: None]

What is Georgia O'Keeffe's role in the history of 20th Century art? Unlike artists like Dalí or Pollock, firmly identified with one of the century's many art movements, O'Keeffe could be viewed as a hard-to-classify maverick, or, conversely, too easy to pigeonhole as a regionalist, woman artist etc. The truth is that O'Keefe, though not as prolific or groundbreaking as Picasso, like that great Paris artist from Spain, was a hard-core Modernist, produced work that cut across the boundaries of many art fads, and made use of iconic, mythic images of and from the land where she painted.

It was her role as a regionalist, specifically a New Mexico regionalist, that I became sufficiently acquainted with Georgia O'Keeffe to post to the Coffeeblog about her. During my New Mexico trip in August, 2005, I revisited the museum of her work in Santa Fe, and had the relatively rare privilege of being whisked through her house in the tiny village of of Abiquiú on a tour that had to be reserved months in advance.

O'Keeffe was a Midwesterner from Wisconsin, trained at the Chicago Art Institute, transplanted first to the New York of the Ash Can School, and after the death of her husband, Modernist photographer Alfred Stieglitz, to New Mexico.

What impressed me especially about the house in Abiquiú, was its Spartan minimalism; and the effort that O'Keeffe went to to acquire the house from the Catholic church, get it rebuilt from a near-ruin, and to accommodate to the other villagers, where were (are) descendants from Spanish colonists and Native Americans, with little enthusiasm for outsiders and even less for photographers. (No photography was permitted on the tour). There are animal skulls on the home's thick adobe walls, small sculptures and original Modernist furniture in the living areas, sticks covered with earth for roofing. In the iconic patio, represented by a long bare wall with one dark door, and a well, but no patio furniture: none. A place to contemplate, to absorb while standing on one's feet, but not to sit. The foundation which administers the tour assured us that almost nothing was changed since O'Keeffe had lived there.

O'Keeffe had passed through stages of American Realism and Surrealism, to anticipate the Minimalism which would emerge a quarter-century later. She was an international artist, celebrated in Zürich in 2004, yet who but O'Keeffe is more deserving of the title of New Mexico's preeminent regionalist? Her yonic flower imagery is unsurpassed by the feminist artists who created their own movement during the final three decades of the 20th Century, yet O'Keeffe did not use words to express her feminism.

[Photocollage (above): The image of an O'Keeffe painting with mountains, stormy sky, skull, and flower is flanked with insets of cameraphone images of the desert and a Taos Pueblo Indian shop, which I took in Northern New Mexico. In O'Keeffe's work, the boundary between realism and surrealism can be very thin.—JDL]

| Modernism Surrealism NewMexico OKeeffe Desert

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