Category: blog

  • Georgia O’Keeffe: houseplant advice

    Alongside the very elegant rocks at O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu home, she cared for a collection of container plants, including geraniums and a huge jade plant that she had nurtured from a six-inch pot, providing her with “something green.” In case you have insects on your houseplants, O’Keeffe advised: “Puff cigarette smoke on them.”

  • Georgia O’Keeffe: what I meant, what you saw

    Georgia O’Keeffe: what I meant, what you saw

    The young Georgia O’Keeffe, working relentlessly to find her voice as an artist, was ambivalent about viewer reception. She longed for people to understand her art, but she resisted that desire at the same time. Modern art was for art’s sake, and the meaning was hers to know and not necessarily for her viewer to…

  • Georgia O’Keeffe: feminist forever

    Georgia O’Keeffe: feminist forever

    Right from the get-go, Georgia O’Keeffe resisted patriarchy. “I have always resented being told that there are things I cannot do because I am a woman,” she told a National Woman’s Party audience in 1926. “I remember how I used to argue with my brother about which were best, boys or girls. When I argued…

  • Homage to O’Keeffe

    Homage to O’Keeffe

    I have been meaning to share this video for a while… It’s by a young photographer, Petra Collins, created to celebrate the opening of the Tate Modern’s O’Keeffe retrospective last year. Interestingly, I think Collins nails O’Keeffe’s aesthetic in an interview with Vogue: “I was so drawn to her work, the shapes and lines, how…

  • Happy Birthday, Georgia!

    One of my favorite photographs of O’Keeffe, so majestic and rooted, like a tree. (She claimed to prefer trees to people.)

  • Georgia O’Keeffe, like a cat

    As a journalist and historian, I bring a perhaps too-healthy skepticism to documentaries and memoirs about O’Keeffe. They suffer, most of them, from nostalgia, or romanticism, or psychological projection. This one manages to be different. Christine Taylor Patten, interviewed by the BBC for a documentary marking the O’Keeffe retrospective at the Tate Modern last year,…

  • Before it was “O’Keeffe Country”

    Before it was “O’Keeffe Country”

    As a historian, I am always on the lookout for contemporary documentation, in order to understand what/how things meant in their own day. Somehow I stumbled upon this film about New Mexico by Carl Dudley, an American director and producer well-known for his short travelogues. It was copyrighted in 1947, at the same time that…

  • Making modernism

    Making modernism

    Three women, two continents. Artists who dwell in modernism — abandoning sentiment for the acute eye. That eye turns toward the landscape, and claims a place in the world. “O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism.” The Art Gallery of New South Wales. Through October 2, 2017.

  • O’Keeffe: seeing the world from uncanny angles

    O’Keeffe: seeing the world from uncanny angles

    “O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism.” The Art Gallery of New South Wales. Through October 2, 2017. The exhibit includes 30 of O’Keeffe’s paintings, three gallery’s worth. They include none of my favorites, and a number I don’t even like. (All the cottonwoods.) My goal during this second visit is to take a deep dive…

  • But is it art?

    But is it art?

    After a break, I went back to reading My Faraway One. In my June 20 post about the first two hundred pages of correspondence between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, I asked myself: At this point, does O’Keeffe think of herself as an artist? Lo and behold, within another hundred pages, O’Keeffe addresses this very…