Abstract artists have often represented their style as a deliberate break with tradition, a rebellion against the conventions of Western Realism. The Russian suprematists did so in the name of the revolution; Wassily Kandinsky rationalized his art through a sort of theology. Decades later, Pollock and de Kooning seemed to be on a quest for a more virile art form.
But not all artists pursued abstraction as a sort of grand rebellion. Georgia O'Keeffe, whose early works and later paintings are now part of an exhibition at MoMA, forged a different path— one in which the abstract and figurative are intertwined. On view at the MoMA are some of O’Keeffe’s earliest abstracts: series of remarkable charcoal drawings and limited-palette watercolors. Both the charcoals and watercolors are at once geometric and expressive, foreshadowing O’Keeffe’s mature style. Yet when O'Keeffe spoke about these works she didn’t insist on their non-figurative quality. Sometimes she described them as expressions of an inner vision, while at others she related them to elements of the landscape.
O'Keeffe created many of these drawings and paintings while working as a school teacher in Texas, before she gained any recognition as an artist. Soon after completing these works she decided to mail them to her close friend Anita Pollitzer, who was still living in New York. Pollitzer, herself an artist as well as a suffragist, showed the drawings to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz at his Fifth Avenue gallery. Stieglitz’s enthusiastic reaction to the drawings helped launch O’Keeffe’s career, and also led to the fraught romantic relationship between the two artists.
The sensual abstracted paintings that O’Keeffe created in the late 1910’s and 1920’s are often interpreted in the context of that relationship. Unlike the soft-edged charcoal drawings and watercolors, the florals are crisp and meticulously rendered, like photographic images. When the paintings were first exhibited, audiences and critics were aware of another set of images—a series of nude photographs that Stieglitz took of O’Keeffe.
More than a hundred years later, the biomorphic shapes that were attributed to some of the paintings no longer scandalize (or so one would hope). What makes O’Keefe’s work relevant and important is the lightness with which she approached the boundary between the abstract and the figurative. O’Keeffe must have realized early on that every object that comes under an artistic gaze can be made as abstract or as recognizable as the artist chooses; and that by the same token a concept or an emotion can be represented in a myriad different ways.
In the lesser-known works on display at MoMA, we see O’Keeffe move easily and without compunction between realism and abstraction, with many works drawing on both modes of expression. For instance, alongside the abstract watercolors, there are also expressive watercolor nudes—sketched quickly, apparently from a live model. Twenty years later, O’Keeffe drew a carefully-observed portrait of the Black artist Beauford Delaney. There are four versions of the portrait in charcoal and in pastels, showing that O’Keeffe took the project seriously.
Some of my favorite drawings in the show are charcoal renderings of an unfolding banana flower. Created on a trip to Bermuda in 1934, the drawings appear to simply record the growing plant, as the flower blooms and turn into fruit. Yet in several of the drawings the plant looks strange and otherworldly; without the description it could easily be taken for an abstraction.
As O’Keeffe’s relationship with Stieglitz became more troubled in the late 1929, she began spending more of her time in New Mexico, a place that later became her permanent home. There O’Keeffe dedicated herself to painting the majestic landscape and objects that belonged to it, such as the famous animal skulls. O’Keeffe’s landscapes are the most ‘representational’ of her major paintings, and perhaps for that reason seen as less important.
Yet the thing that is most significant in O’Keeffe’s body of work is most apparent in the New Mexico landscapes: it’s the artist’s courage to remain true to her own vision, to blur the boundaries between abstraction and representation, and between the artist and the object of the artist’s gaze. The mountains and valleys become living things and spiritual objects, and it seems only natural for them to be represented in a subjective manner.
O’Keeffe’s New Mexico work raises the question of her relation to the Native American communities that were largely displaced from that land. The MoMA exhibit doesn’t seem to say much on the subject, but, in contrast, there are quite a few articles criticizing O’Keeffe’s ignorance and insensitivity toward Indigenous cultures. I’m not knowledgeable enough to weigh in on the debate, but I think that at the very least O’Keeffe showed a deep curiosity toward these cultures, and a wish to respectfully inhabit the landscape alongside the these communities.
The strength of the MoMA exhibit is in the insights it provides into O’Keeffe’s development as an artist. When complemented with biographical and art historical materials, the show creates an intimate portrait of an intrepid young woman who took her own creative talents seriously and persevered through the rise and fall of numerous artistic movements. O’Keeffe’s leave us a remarkable body of work which, despite obvious influences, can’t be neatly categorized as an example of a single trend or historical moment.