Roots of Modernism

The first painting for which Georgia O’Keeffe received recognition is now hanging in the office of the Art Students League of New York. It’s a still life with a dead rabbit, painted while O’Keeffe was a student in William Merritt Chases’s class, and for which she won a scholarship in 1908. It bears little resemblance to the work O’Keeffe would produce the following decade, when she was conceiving a personal abstract idiom. Even so, the still life varies from Chase’s example in at least one respect that would be a characteristic of O’Keeffe’s maturity, a lack of technical flamboyance. Her methods were tersely elegant, and provide no indication that she fussed over things.

The current show at the Museum of Modern Art, Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time, aims to change that impression. Curator Samantha Friedman has designed the exhibition to reorient our view of the artist by deemphasizing her well-known iconography in favor of her working process, as it evolved primarily on paper. The mother lode of O’Keeffe’s youthful invention occurred between 1915 and 1918, years when she was teaching in Virginia, South Carolina, and Texas. Far from New York City, O’Keeffe nonetheless stayed up to date on developments in modern art, but she was isolated enough to develop her own vernacular in a conscious departure from her academic training. The show is also weighted toward this period because O’Keeffe would never again draw so searchingly or so much. Cleanly arranged and the result of excellent scholarship, MoMA’s show—the first the museum has devoted to O’Keeffe in over seventy-five years—is a meal of appetizers.

The drawings and watercolors chosen by Friedman often form series that seem to have emerged organically, rather than via premeditation (this is not to say that they’re impetuous). There are the Blue Lines drawings, the nude self-portrait watercolors (Friedman notes their similarity to Rodin’s watercolors, which O’Keeffe would have seen in New York while studying at the League) and the Evening Star watercolors inspired by the glaring Texas sun. O’Keeffe varies media and approaches while alternating between representation and degrees of abstraction. What is remarkable is that she sought mercurial expression as she never would again, swinging from the proto-minimalism of Blue Lines to the fluid heat of the Evening Star series.

Among O’Keeffe’s most moving watercolors here are Morning Sky and Morning Sky with Houses, hardly less radical than the Evening Star paintings, even if they are one-offs that don’t add up to a stand-alone series. A series of red cannas, reminiscent of her Stieglitz gallery stablemate Charles Demuth, is not only more ably painted but more sensual than the nudes. Better drawings came later, as in a city view from her window at the Shelton Hotel in Midtown, the twin spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral emerging from the smog, and the highly realized charcoals of banana flowers O’Keeffe created during a recuperative stay in Bermuda in the 1930s. They are better not because they’re breakthroughs—they are not—but because they are truer to the artist’s mature vision.

“Better” is a relative term. Notwithstanding the show’s ambitions, O’Keeffe’s oils are her finest works. More than thirty years ago, I drew inspiration from her ability to synthesize shape when I was painting sunflowers and cityscapes. We tend to look to the exploratory work for signs of a spark that may or may not culminate in something more finished, and to carry a spontaneous energy that is often compromised as the idea reaches fuller resolution. In short, we hope to find the artist in their most intimate creative moments, unvarnished. During the years from 1915 to 1918, when O’Keeffe was trying out novel idioms, her experiments were moderated by an internal restraint; even when the subject and scale were intimate, her touch was calculated rather than reflexive. A series of nude self-portraits was indeed rare for a female artist to undertake at the time. But O’Keeffe wasn’t interested in self-revelation, and she obliterated her face in pools of watercolor.

Elegant restraint serves her best in the large paintings and pastels. In pastels like An Orchid and Music-Pink and Blue—a premonition of her later paintings of animal bones against the sky—O’Keeffe’s drawing is more exacting. Yet color is the transcendent element. The dagger-like spareness of the Blue Lines drawings resulted in an oil of sumptuous form (not in show). Likewise, the late aerial views, drawings placed alongside the large finished oil, drive home the importance of lyrical color in O’Keeffe’s work, and show how naturally she responded to and utilized scale. When she wrote “to see takes time”—the quote that serves as the exhibition’s title—O’Keeffe had a specific intention very different from that of the current show:

A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower—the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower—lean forward to smell it—maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking—or give it to someone to please them.

Still—in a way—nobody sees a flower—really it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.

So I said to myself—I’ll paint what I see—what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

To see also takes space and quiet, two conditions conspicuously absent at MoMA, where attending to O’Keeffe is like reading Dickinson on a subway platform: it’s possible, but benefits nobody much. By contrast, Arthur Dove: Sensations of Light, now at Alexandre Gallery on East 73rd Street, was (for my purposes) blessedly empty on a midweek morning. The concurrent exhibitions are serendipitous, and worth the walk along Fifth Avenue on a spring day. It’s been done before under one roof—Debra Bricker Balken, who helped organize the show at Alexandre, previously curated an exhibition that paired O’Keeffe and Dove at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

Both artists were among the group of American modernists represented by Alfred Stieglitz, whom Dove relied upon for support and whom O’Keeffe married. Many years later, O’Keeffe stated, “It was Arthur Dove who affected my start, who helped me to find something of my own.” For his part, Dove claimed to have been inspired by O’Keeffe’s handling of watercolor when he began using the medium in 1930. A series of watercolor sunrises and sunsets from the early 1940s appears to support that connection.

After graduating from Cornell, Dove went into illustration, but was encouraged by Robert Henri and John Sloan to become a painter. During a lengthy stay in Paris from 1908 to 1909 he painted landscapes in a post-impressionist manner that he found unsatisfactory, yet the experience proved transformative. The previous generation of Americans had gone to Paris to study academic art and were confronted with Impressionism and its aftermath; Dove, an intuitive artist, anticipated the break to non-objectivism. He returned to New York and painted the first complete abstractions by an American artist. Initially, the revolution was unobtrusive. The abstract paintings were small and Dove didn’t exhibit them. At Alexandre, a sun-saturated  Landscape (Cagnes-sur-Mer) is hung next to three early abstractions. All share density of overlapping forms and paint application, a tactile pleasure that distinguishes Dove from O’Keeffe. Contemporary criticism sometimes phrased the distinction in stereotypical gender terminology, with Dove’s painting displaying virile characteristics and O’Keeffe’s embodying feminine qualities. Certainly Dove’s work is more given to spontaneity, which is consistent with his desire to craft an emotional response to American materialism. At one point he stopped painting to farm chickens, itself a pretty good refutation of materialism.

Like O’Keeffe, Dove spent the balance of his creative life distilling from the forms of nature, often drawing on celestial sources; a half dozen pieces at Alexandre refer explicitly to the sun, moon or both. The show suggests that except for a period in the 1920s when he produced highly finished abstractions of specific forms (River Bottom, Silver, Ochre, Carmine, Green; Silver Log), Dove preferred to work rapidly. Although his eye and hand are readily apparent, he never established a trademark “look,” as did O’Keeffe, who became associated with a recognizable style and subject. Dove wrote in an almost mystical fashion of a kind of light that

applied to all objects in nature, flowers, trees, people, apples, cows. These all have their certain condition of light, which establishes them to the eye, to each other, and to the understanding.

If all things “have their certain condition of light,” perhaps it’s logical that his late works were kaleidoscopic, purely abstract constructs of color arranged in geometric shapes. Dove experimented to the end. O’Keeffe eventually settled on a signature style. To see them both is to leave with a fuller understanding of the roots of American modernism.

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