Not just a flower painter: O'Keeffe opens at Phillips

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is one of the most over-commodified yet most misunderstood artists of the modern era. Known as the painter of flowers and New Mexico landscapes, O’Keeffe was rarely allowed out of her feminine, representational, artistic box. The Phillips Collection’s Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction frees O’Keeffe from this confinement and reintroduces her as one of the pioneers of abstractionism in the early twentieth century – a title for which she is rarely acknowledged or showcased.

A curatorial conglomeration of muscle, Abstraction is a three-way alliance between D.C.’s own Phillips Collection, The Whitney in New York City and The Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe. The traveling show will only showcase in these three venues throughout the 2009-2010 season.

It is fitting that the Phillips is one of the three presenting museum spaces, since Duncan Phillips was the first museum director to purchase works by O’Keeffe back in 1926. The breathtaking exhibit showcases over 100 paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculpture dating from 1915 to the late 1970s. It also includes 14 photographic portraits of O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz (photographer, gallery owner, and O’Keeffe’s husband beginning in 1924), which are incredible reflections upon her methods of gestural painting and cropping.

The exhibit unfolds roughly chronologically, opening with a round of O’Keeffe’s revealing visceral charcoal abstractions from around 1915. These charcoals serve as motifs for the entire show – always returning to the expression of the intangible.

The exhibit then progresses into her watercolors, which marks her as a graphic imager willing to portray the rhythms of experience. One truly gets the feeling of “infinity” and “boundlessness” in the midst of her colorful abstractions. Favorites include Tent Door at Night (1916), Pink and Green Mountains (1917) and Music, Pink and Blue (1918).

The exhibit then moves into O’Keeffe’s more well-known “erotic, symbolic, color work” and finally comes full circle with her late abstractions of flat, geometric, expansive planes of color. These mural-sized constructions of space reinvigorated her art in the mid-1940s and provided a precedent for a younger generation of abstract painters.

Yet even within a majority of her displayed abstractions, one can see how O’Keeffe was a misrepresented artist. For most of her career, she struggled with how others perceived her work, being a woman who insisted on expressing herself abstractly. Many have always interpreted her work as Freudian, psychological expressions of her sexuality. In reality, however, O’Keeffe was an expresser of intangible feelings, inspired not by objects but by the dynamic quality of the natural world. She never considered herself a feminist painter.

Aware of the public’s lack of sympathy and support for her abstraction and hoping to direct the critics away from sexualized readings of her work, O’Keeffe began to pull away from abstraction into the more representational, recognizable images she is so known for. Nevertheless, abstraction remained the guiding principle of her art, even at the most representational.

"The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint."   –Georgia O’Keeffe, 1976

At the very least, this once-in-a-lifetime exhibit is a refreshing reconnection with an artist that we, after all this time, never knew at all. The Phillips Collection is the perfect venue for this beneath-the-surface experience of O’Keeffe abstraction. For your inquiring and humble soul, it is an imperative experience.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction is on view at the Phillips Collection from February 6 to May 9, 2010. From here, it will by on view at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe from May 28 to September 12, 2010.