There are only a few American artists whose names elicit immediate recognition by the general public, such as Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, Jackson Pollock, Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe. Throughout the country it seems that people want to see more of these artists’ works, and especially O’Keeffe’s.
Is it the allure and aura of immediacy in O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers, bones, architecture, abstract forms and New Mexico landscapes that are of such interest? Or is it her varied and constructed personas? For whatever reason, the opportunity to see her work and photographs of her in exhibitions spans from coast to coast this summer and into next year.
On the West Coast, “Georgia O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle” is on display at the San Diego Museum of Art through September 28, the final stop on a national tour. O’Keeffe’s works presented in this exhibition are a remarkable play of dazzling color and provocative form that reveal O’Keeffe’s path-breaking modernist sensibilities. The exhibition also includes the work of five other women promoted by world-famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz before he discovered and promoted O’Keeffe. The exhibition recreates an important and formerly lost chapter in the history of American modern art.
Between East and West, see “Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities” at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to September 7. The exhibit will travel to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (September 26⁊anuary 4), the Norton Museum of Art (January 24⁍ay 3) and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (June 6⁓eptember 7, 2009). This exhibition celebrates the two iconic artists’ profound appreciation of the natural world and their deep commitment to conveying its beauty and fragility.
On the East Coast, “Georgia O’Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity” is on display at the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art through September 7. It then travels to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (September 26⁆ebruary 1). The exhibition demonstrates the persona that was created for O’Keeffe by Stieglitz in the 1910s, and the persona that O’Keeffe created of herself beginning in the 1920s that replaced Stieglitz’s through photographs by famous photographers such as Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Todd Webb, Irving Penn and Arnold Newman.
The exhibition also includes 18 O’Keeffe paintings that demonstrate various developments in her work, and the ways in which these developments relate to her two different public identities.
The San Diego Museum of Art is at 1450 El Prado, 619-232-7931; the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is at 217 Johnson Street, 505-946-1000; Maine’s Portland Museum of Art is at 7 Congress Square, 207-775-6148.
