Kenneth BakerUpdated 5:45 pm, Friday, February 14, 2014
"Modern Nature: Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George," which opens Saturday at the de Young Museum, takes us back to the early decades of her very long career. She wanted to live to 100 but died at 98 in 1986.
A pleasing but hardly stirring exhibition, "Modern Nature" logs another safe choice on the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's calendar. The David Hockney extravaganza, recently closed, appeared safe on paper, but it included some blatant artistic failures that challenged - all but dared - visitors to recognize them. Nothing like that happens here.
Between 1918 and 1934, O'Keeffe lived part of each year at husband Alfred Stieglitz's family property on Lake George in upstate New York. The garden and enveloping rural landscape there provided the subject matter, or pretexts, for most of the paintings in "Modern Nature." The exhibition also presents O'Keeffe as an artist inspired by place, but in an earlier incarnation, not yet the myth-enshrouded dowager of the desert.
O'Keeffe moved to New Mexico in 1949, after many visits, and welcomed the isolation it provided. Her mature landscape work, having struck deep roots in painting tradition, shaped public imagination of the Land of Enchantment more effectively than any tourist bureau. She portrayed it as a vacant place where the body of the earth surfaced to meet the bones of dead fauna, where life on a planet showed for what it is.
The young O'Keeffe, working at an obscure teachers college in Texas, experienced the sort of meteoric rise of which artists still dream. A friend in New York to whom she had sent a sheaf of visionary abstract drawings - some of the most radical things O'Keeffe ever made - showed them to Stieglitz (1864-1946), the New York impresario and promoter of photography, including his own, as fine art.
Stieglitz immediately recognized her gift and began to present her work in his Fifth Avenue gallery, then known by its street number, 291. With a year's stipend, Stieglitz persuaded O'Keeffe to move to Manhattan, where she entered his forward-thinking circle of artists, including John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Paul Strand.
Stieglitz and O'Keeffe became lovers and eventually married in 1924, though even without his sponsorship, her work might have made its way. Her handling of imagery caught a rising wave of interest in what modernist painting, American style, might look like.
Benefits, burdens of fame
"Modern Nature" opens with two photographic portraits of O'Keeffe by Stieglitz and a series of engravings and other historical pictures situating Lake George as a feature of America's collective self-image.This introduction makes explanatory sense, but it has a power more felt than articulated.
We can see from the portraits of O'Keeffe - just a pair out of the 300-odd that Stieglitz made - what they both intuited: Not only did he love her, the camera did also. Their collaboration offers the earliest case - half a century before Andy Warhol (1928-87) - of an American artist not merely prosecuting a career but starring in it.
But that novel propellant of success had explosive properties that soon caused O'Keeffe to feel burned.
Between her early showings at 291 and the extensive painting exhibition Stieglitz staged for her in 1923, he had presented publicly a large suite of his portraits of her, including many nudes. Part of their public impact was to encourage - we might even say inflame - erotic readings of her flower paintings, and even of some abstracted landscapes.
Beyond erotic reverie
Although feminist artists of later generations might celebrate the in-your-face impression made by the sometimes undeniably phallic or vulval qualities of O'Keeffe's imagery, to her that fixation represented a defeat. She wanted recognition of her prowess at composition and color-handling. Erotic reverie counted for her as far too narrow and compulsive an instance of the sort of deepened perception she meant to evoke.The stately presentation given the paintings at the de Young does nothing to resuscitate prurient readings of O'Keeffe's pictures. In fact, several wall labels interpret images as symbolic family allegory, more psychodynamic than merely erotic.
In the context of today's pornographic popular culture and post-post-movement feminism, perhaps we can relax scrutiny of O'Keeffe's surreally ambiguous early pictures. We might see them instead as precursors of color field painting and its sometimes uneasy uncertainty about its connection to realities outside art.
Modern Nature: Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George: Paintings, works on paper and photographs. Opens Saturday. Through May 11. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, S.F. (415) 750-3600. www.deyoungmuseum.org.
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