‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction’ a retrospective on artist’s life, work

Eight years before she married him, Georgia O’Keeffe sent Alfred Stieglitz a letter. “Why you liked my charcoals that Anita Pollitzer showed you — and what they said to you — I would like to know if you want to tell me,” she told him. More than 20 years her senior, Stieglitz already was a famous and influential photographer, critic and gallery owner, while O’Keeffe’s career was just beginning.

She and Stieglitz soon would fall in love and would remain entangled for the remaining three decades of his life. But O’Keeffe, whose work already was striking for its originality and maturity when first she wrote to solicit Stieglitz’s opinion, would come to lament his influence over how the public interpreted her work. Stieglitz promoted a Freudian, strongly sexual reading of her drawings and paintings, and the erotic photos he took of her beginning in 1918 sealed the deal. By the mid-1920s, eager to escape being pigeonholed as the Madonna of the Jazz Age, she was making more frequent forays into representational painting, with the result that early abstractions are now rarely exhibited.

“Georgia O’ Keeffe: Abstraction,” now on view at the Phillips Collection, rescues many of these seminal works from their relative obscurity. Organized in conjunction with New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, N.M., the mammoth show thoughtfully compiles some 125 paintings, drawings and sculptures culled from a 60-year swath of O’Keeffe’s extraordinary career, beginning with that a radical-for-its-time 1915 series of charcoal drawings that began her involvement with Stieglitz up through her 1970s minmalist watercolors. The show eloquently makes the case that neither representation nor abstraction is an absolute, and one does not preclude the other.

Even when she painted rock faces and fruit skulls and flowers, she seemed to see more of them than other, more photorealistic painters, and to show us more. Indeed, many of her paintings of natural places and objects featured her from the mid-20s — “Corn” or “Lake George,” for example, though many others would suit just as well — depend largely upon their titles to communicate to the viewer that their flowing but minutely calibrated permutations of contour and shade actually have analogs in the physical plane.

O’Keeffe may have painted them from life, but mostly she painted from impulses she couldn’t write or vebalize, though her attempts remain revealing.

“Abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint,” she said in 1976.