“White Flower,” 1932. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller gave this Georgia O’Keeffe painting to the College of William & Mary to mark the artist’s honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts. (Copyright Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, ARS) (Muscarelle Museum of Art) That Kate Alfriend must have been one heck of a charmer. In 1938, Georgia O’Keeffe made no speech when […]
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 may be the most egregiously over-interpreted artist of all time. The interpretations, and the narratives, have gotten so thick that it’s hard to see past them to the paintings. This 1935 review, one of my favorites, is a clear view to the paintings, “freed [ . . .] from literalism.” “So intensely felt […]
If the Arts News review of the Texas watercolors exhibited in 1958 made the backhanded compliment that they were Georgia O’Keeffe’s best works — and that she had peaked early — other critics and historians chose to look forward, rather than backward. Could the artist’s primal abstractions, they wondered, be a precedent for the latest […]
Here’s an interesting take on Georgia O’Keeffe’s Texas watercolors (click here for my review of their current exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) when they were shown in 1958, for the first time in some 40 years: “.. an astonishing and, in many ways, touching group of watercolors now on view at the Downtown Gallery, […]
So much inanity has been written about Georgia O’Keeffe, from her first show to the current retrospective at the Tate Modern. But here, here, is perhaps the finest commentary ever made on her work. It’s by the artist Charles Demuth, and was published alongside the checklist of paintings of her 1927 exhibit at The Intimate […]
Note to (male) critics: A work of art can be “corporeal” without being “sexual.”