The Peak

Visual Art: Brave new walls / Treading the edge

By Stephanie Orford, Peak Staff

Georgia O’Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction will be showing at the Vancouver Art Gallery until January 13, 2008.

“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get to the real meaning of things,” said painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Perhaps this frank simplicity is why O’Keeffe’s work is everywhere: from the walls of Holiday Inn budget rooms, to your mum’s fridge magnets, to art lovers’ New York lofts, to — for the next three months, anyway — the Vancouver Art Gallery.

O’Keeffe’s paintings bring out the essence of beauty in their subjects. But, as the exhibit’s name suggests, Georgia O’Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction isn’t about her still lifes. “We tried to go for the slightly less straightforward pictures,” said Ian Thom, VAG senior curator and art historian. His favourite piece in the exhibition, Over the Plains II, encapsulates the spirit of the show. “I like the way it’s a landscape but not a landscape — how it just treads that edge really elegantly,” he said.

The walls of the VAG were intense with colour and simple shapes — nature taken to extremes. According to the exhibit’s curator, Richard Marshall, O’Keeffe often abstracted these objects “by looking close up.”

Her painting of two leaves overlapping, Yellow Leaves (1928), magnifies the leaves to 100 times their size and intensifies their golden yellowness to the point of impossibility. The painting is strong, yet if you look closer, the leaves are fragile and intimate: one embracing the other, their colours blending so that in some places you can’t be sure exactly where one ends and the other begins. Their edges are brown with dryness, and tinged with green at the same time. Think about that next time you’re about to crunch a leaf under your boot.

O’Keeffe took inspiration from the natural objects and landscapes around her when she painted. In her early career, that meant landscapes of Lake George, a family getaway of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz. Later in her career, her inspiration sprung from the sun-bleached bones and bare landscapes around her home in New Mexico, Ghost Ranch. Regardless of her surroundings, O’Keeffe always painted her subjects pared down to their most essential qualities: bones appear architectural, flowers a joyous burst.

While some works have obvious subjects, much of her art at the VAG leans more toward abstraction, such as the flowing, metallic-looking painting called, well, Abstraction (1926). Another abstract piece is the roiling-underwater-volcano of an image, Abstraction Blue (1927), which depicts, as Marshall says, “gradations of colour like veils that seem to float upward.”

In both of these pieces, a line painted down the middle bisects the canvas — an element common to many of O’Keeffe’s paintings. Even Yellow Leaves shows a gentle line down its centre in the curved central veins of the leaves. Many giggle that O’Keeffe meant this to suggest female genitalia, and maybe she did. She was a confident, self-contained woman who, during her long career, was acutely aware that she was making her distinctly feminine mark on a man’s art world. However, her works are layered with meaning and it would be a shame to gloss over any one of them as a mere ‘crotch shot.’

That said, O’Keeffe’s work is certainly bright and voluptuous. According to Thom, she was “very much aware of herself as a sexual person,” and “a very confident sexual person” at that. “When Stieglitz was having an affair,” he said, “she went out and had an affair too.” However, the attitudes of her time barred explicit sexual content in public art. “It was outrageous enough to paint sexual organs of flowers,” Thom said. “But at that time, if she painted women’s sexual organs directly — which these [paintings] often make allusions to — no one would have shown them. It’s that simple.”

Alongside O’Keeffe’s paintings, the exhibit features photographs of O’Keeffe by Stieglitz and Todd Webb. Progressing through the show in chronological order, I first saw Stieglitz’s photos of a young O’Keeffe, then farther, as I passed her later paintings, which are larger and more abstract, Webb’s photographs captured a quiet and confident older O’Keeffe. “She was an extremely striking woman and she very conscious of presenting herself to the world,” said Thom. “She used to dress all in black or all in white . . . not wearing makeup.”

Looking at these photographs, Marshall added, one can tell that O’Keeffe “is in control.” Immediately from the image that begins the exhibition, a piercing Stieglitz photograph of O’Keeffe, it is clear that O’Keeffe did what she wanted, when she wanted to do it. “She’s a woman who, in the end, defined herself rather than allowing others to define her,” Thom said. “She shares that aspect, I suppose in a way, with Emily Carr.” In light of the fact that the VAG has the best collection of Carr’s work in the world, O’Keeffe is in good company here.

Comparisons between the two artists are inevitable, considering Carr and O’Keeffe both laboured for recognition as painters in a male-dominated art world, and that the two actually met early in the 20th century.

Almost 100 years later, the artists meet again — this time as enduring icons in art history and, most of all, great painters. “We try and bring great things to Vancouver and we hope people will agree that Georgia O’Keeffe is a great thing,” Thom said.