Art: Wonderful Emptiness

Reflecting on the austere ankle-length skirt, the long black coat and the antiseptic white scarf that have become Artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s habitual dress, a friend recently observed: “Georgia decided a long time ago how she wanted to look, and she hasn’t changed since.” Much the same might be said of Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting. But if she has not fundamentally changed in her 72 years, the most eminent of U.S. women painters has continued to grow in technical mastery and emotional depth. Last week, at the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum, gallerygoers could see the extent of her range in her first major show in 14 years—the work of a superb and unerring craftsman who has always walked alone.

Down to the Bone. Born in Sun Prairie, Wis., the daughter of an Irish farmer and a Hungarian mother, who each night read her to sleep with tales of travel or the old West, Georgia O’Keeffe never nad any intention of staying down on the farm. In 1904, an intense, headstrong girl, she went off to study art, first in Chicago and then in Manhattan. After months of stuffy academic training that was limited to imitating the old masters, she firmly resolved never to paint again.

Her resolution did not last long. In time she fell under the spell of the late Arthur Dow, whose art classes at Columbia University were breaking new ground in the U.S. “Art,” Dow declared, “is decadent when designers and painters lack inventive power and merely imitate nature or the creation of others.” Driven by this distaste for the conventional, Georgia began experimenting with shapes and colors that had nothing to do with subject. Or, shifting from the abstract to the representational, she would paint a single flower again and again to find new facets of truth. These early experiments became the preoccupation of a lifetime. She could turn out a single swooping bird, a tumbling abstract landscape or a pair of solitary antlers planted in the desert (see color), but in everything she did she pared reality to the bone. And though critics were later to try to fit her into one or another of the modern U.S. “schools” of painting, her art was from the start totally personal and inimitable.

An Unforgettable Loneliness. In 1915, when she was teaching art in Amarillo, Texas (“My country—terrible winds and wonderful emptiness!”), Georgia sent some of her charcoal sketches to a friend in Manhattan. The friend in turn took them to Photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who had opened a gallery for unsung artists. Stieglitz was so impressed that he began hanging O’Keeffe paintings alongside his Braques and Marins, and eight years later he and Georgia were married. The partnership lasted until his death in 1946, when the spotlight had already begun to shift to a wilder and more chaotic kind of abstraction than anything O’Keeffe would ever tolerate.

Today Georgia O’Keeffe lives in the tiny (pop. 500) town of Abiquiu, N. Mex. in a century-old adobe house that still has its original hand-hewn doors and earthen floors. She has installed huge picture windows that look out on the curving Rio Chama, the wild juniper and aspen trees, and the barren hills beyond that glow red in the sunset. Occasionally she takes an exotic trip—she was in Tokyo last week starting an Asian tour—but mostly she spends her days puttering about her garden, exploring the Jemez Mountains, or simply sitting upon her roof to stare at the distance. She has never been known to paint a human being, and her severe and silent canvases—whether bold closeups or vast landscapes—all have an unforgettable feeling of loneliness. “It was all so far away,” she once wrote of a place she loved. “There was a quiet and an untouched feel to the country.” And she ended the letter with the words: “And I could work as I pleased!”