Art: Austere Stripper

“Singing,” says Artist Georgia O’Keeffe, “has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. Since I cannot sing, I paint.” Last week 57 examples of her kind of song went on view in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. Each one had the contrived spontaneity of music, and in each the melody of line and color meant more than the bones, blossoms, skyscrapers, barns, crosses and canyon walls she used for lyrics.

Whatever else can be said about her, no one paints a pelvis or a skull more cleanly or searchingly than O’Keeffe. Her brush, like a surgical knife, pares the bony involutions to paper thinness, sculpturing them in icy white against the ice-blue sky of New Mexico—where she spends half of each year.

To flower painting she brings a technique familiar in photography but seldom attempted on canvas: the dramatic closeup. Like a bee, she explores the innermost recesses of hollyhocks, irises and morning-glories, and manages to extract an almost cloying degree of honey-sweet, cream-smooth satisfaction from them.

Canyons, in City and Country. But O’Keeffe’s chief claim to fame lies in the brilliant hardness of her most ambitious work. Her cityscapes look as unyielding as asphalt, and sharp as broken glass; her barns are as antiseptic as hospitals; her crosses as forbidding as the real thing.

O’Keeffe’s art, says Museum director of painting and sculpture James Johnson Sweeney, in a forthcoming Museum book on O’Keeffe, is “stark but always constrained. . . . And the way she came to this was by the severest self-stripping.” O’Keeffe, a thin, austere-looking woman, has been stripping herself for a long time. Born 58 years ago in the small town of Sun Prairie, Wis., she decided to paint as she pleased, because “it seemed to be the only thing that I could do that did not concern anyone but myself. . . .”

After studying in Manhattan, doing commercial art in Chicago, and teaching in Texas, she locked herself into a room and “held a private exhibition of everything I had painted. I noticed which paintings had been influenced by this painter, which by that one. Then I determined which . . . represented me alone. From that moment forward I knew exactly what kind of work I wanted to do.”

In 1916 a friend showed O’Keeffe’s drawings (without her permission) to Alfred Stieglitz, pioneer photographer and missionary of modern art. Said he: “Finally—a woman on paper.” When he put her work on exhibition, O’Keeffe stormed into Stieglitz’ gallery to protest, afraid that gallerygoers would find the drawings incomprehensible. Stieglitz asked gently whether she herself knew what her drawings meant. Huffed O’Keeffe: “Do you think I’m an idiot?” Eight years later they were married.