 |
|
|
|
Art Review Archives:
|
Georgia O'Keeffe:
132 pages; 51 color plates, 26 black and white images
Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction joins a growing number of small exhibition catalogues focused on specific aspects of the artist's work. Here, the study is of her distinctive use of circular forms as an abstract motif. It had its genesis in a chance encounter by one of the authors with a cast of the spiraling O'Keeffe sculpture Abstraction (1946, cast 1979/80), a swirling tendril of organic motion rendered in white-lacquered bronze. This sparked the realization that shared with the painting Pelvis with the Moon - New Mexico (1943) a vision of the circular employed as an abstract element. It was a fortuitous glimpse, and one can see how it sparked such an exploration. Both are organic forms of concise simplification. Both are poised to feed an urgent curiosity to look through the circular voids. But these taut, electric voids were only one manifestation of the circular in O'Keeffe's work. Fifty-one plates trace the changing presence of circular motifs throughout her lifetime in pieces dating from 1915 to the 1970s. With each granted a full page to itself, these are large, well-done color reproductions that capture the luminous hues and weightless tensions embodied in the work. Early No. 2 (1915), Blue II (1916) and Lake George, Coat and Red (1919) all share a form of surging upward thrust that terminates in a curled-around circular nub, a compositional element to be recapitulated, with considerably more complexity, in the shifting auburn planes of Leaf Motif No. 2 (1924). Nestled between are the artist's exploratory interlude into still lifes of fruit in the early 1920s, often only a single fruit, showing the intense focus and paring-away to essentials she would later exhibit in her Southwestern pelvis paintings of the 1940s, with an important reversal. The fruit works exhibit taut observations of circular form in volumes of ripe fullness. In the pelvis paintings, that same superbly-observed, curving organic form sucks backward into the canvas, the bone as framework, the circle as ultimate void, crisply delineating a pinhole through which we see the world edited and constrained, as if through a camera. Two essays accompany the plates. Jonathan Stuhlman, former Curator of American Art at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, discusses the artistic influences on O'Keeffe's use of circular forms, tracing its lineage to diverse sources from the theories of her instructor to the tightly-cropped images of modernist photographer Paul Strand. In Strand's photographs, tight focus on simple subjects abstract them into geometric forms, something O'Keeffe too was experimenting with. Stuhlman notes Strand's connection with Stieglitz as well as his direct influence on O'Keeffe's paintings. At the same time, Stuhlman briefly places O'Keeffe among several peers by noting the increased frequency with which she explored the circular motif, as well as her interest in putting the form itself over the colors employed. In the second essay Barbara Buhler-Lynes, Curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM and a much-published authority on the artist, discusses O'Keeffe's shift in identity, often self-created, during differing periods in her life as framed by the locales in which she lived. Stuhlman's definition of abstraction as clarification and simplicity, as getting to the heart of things, make excellent jumping-off points to explore the works contained here, but the images are mainly left to speak for themselves. To state that the circle was O'Keeffe's contribution to abstraction seems a bit grand for this small sampling of fifty-one images. Still, it is an illuminating study to segment and consider O'Keeffe's works from the perspective of the circle, tracing its presence, use and evolution through selections from the entire body of her work. O'Keeffe's oeuvre continues to lend itself to fractional studies of this aspect or that. The beauty of it is that her images stand up to the scrutiny. --Katherine R. Lieber Katherine R. Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net.
Editorial Note:
The traveling exhibition for which this book is the catalogue will be at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL from February 10 - May 6, 2007; at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, May 25 - September 9, 2007; and at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN, October 7, 2007 - January 6, 2008. |
Home | Art Reviews | Bookstore | eArtist | Galleries | RSS
Search | About ArtScope.net | Advertise on ArtScope.net | Contact
