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PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST
August 31, 1997NEWSHOUR TRANSCRIPT |
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Georgia O'Keeffe was ahead of her time -- not only as an artist, but as a woman. Paul Solman of WGBH-Boston examines the life and art of this true American master.
A RealAudio version of this NewsHour segment is available.
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June 17, 1997:
A look at the sweeping history of American art.
August 21, 1996:
Browse through an exhibit of French painter Paul Cezanne's work.
January 29, 1996:
Paul Soloman looks at theVermeer exhibit at the National Gallery of Art.
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View some photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe's work and read about her history.PAUL SOLMAN: In Santa Fe, New Mexico, this summer a very public event: A new museum has opened devoted to America's endlessly popular and famously female artist Georgia O'Keeffe, featuring her signature flowers, her skulls and bones, her visions of the American Southwest.
Meanwhile, at New York's Metropolitan Museum, an intimate look at the woman, herself, has just opened, images made by her husband, the famed photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. They provide glimpses of a life that's become a legend.
But then some say Georgia O'Keeffe's major work was her life, a life of ferocious, even transcendent, American independence.
O'Keeffe began about as independently as you could get 80 years ago--an abstract woman artist in an era when both abstraction and women artists were anomalous. The museum's president, Jay Cantor, likes to start with drawings like this one. When Alfred Stieglitz first saw them, he supposedly said--
JAY CANTOR, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum: "Oh, at last, a woman on paper." The meaning is very clear that Stieglitz and his male contemporaries didn't believe a woman could do tough, hard imagery, could really look into the frontiers of abstraction and conquer it. So he was very excited by work like this.
PAUL SOLMAN: O'Keeffe was raised in Prairie, Wisconsin, studied art in Chicago in New York, was teaching art in small town Texas, when she began to develop her own style. She set the scene in a 1977 PBS documentary Perry Miller Adato did for New York's WNET.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE: My sister and I used to walk out from canyons. And the evening star would come when it was still sunny. It would be still bright daylight, and there would be the evening star sitting up in the sky, which I thought was very exciting, and I began painting the evening star. And I think there are eight of these variations of this that I did at that time.
PAUL SOLMAN: This was back in 1916, when Picasso and Braque were still inventing cubism. Images like these had no precedent in American art, as they attempted to capture the feelings and the image induced, rather than the image itself. As her friend, Anita Paulitzer, put it in a letter to O'Keeffe, "To live on paper what we're living in our hearts and heads and all the exquisite lines and good spaces and rippingly good colors are only a way of getting rid of these feelings and making them tangible. Meanwhile, Alfred Stieglitz was having feelings of his own.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE: They photographed me till I was crazy. And he'd be photographing every day. And he started photographing me with
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