Georgia O’Keeffe
A retrospective at the Tate Modern
Georgia O’Keeffe was a trailblazer without even trying to be. Born in 1887, she was the first acclaimed female modernist—she is known as “the mother of American modernism”—and she was the first woman artist to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946. “Men put me down as one as the best woman painters,” she once said. “I think I’m one of the best painters.” Last fall she had her first major retrospective in Europe in 20 years, at the Tate Modern in London. It features more than 100 major works by O’Keeffe, including Jimson Weed, below, from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, which purchased it in 2014 for $44.4 million, the most ever paid at auction for the work of a woman artist.
Profoundly influenced by the work of early modern photographers, in 1924 O’Keeffe married Alfred Stieglitz, who, at 60, was 23 years her senior and already well known as an innovative photographer and gallerist (his iconic 1918 portrait of her is below). He was her mentor, and gave her her first solo show at his 291 Gallery in New York in 1916, and she was his muse, often posing for him in the nude. “I feel that some of the photography being done in America today is more living, more vital, than the painting and I know that there are painters who agree with me,” she wrote in 1922. Stieglitz died in 1946. Later in life she would travel out West with her friend Ansel Adams, whose landscape photography would come to define the genre.
O’Keeffe is best known for her heavily abstracted, highly magnified paintings of flowers and her paintings of New Mexico vistas, such as Black Mesa Landscape, above. In 1929 she began making annual pilgrimages to New Mexico and settled there permanently in 1949. She died in Santa Fe in 1986 at the age of 98. Courtesy of the Tate Modern retrospective, PROVOKR presents a choice selection of her deeply sensual art.
