Georgia O’Keeffe died aged 98 in 1986, having lived long enough to see the perceived meaning of her unique floral and geological abstractions change and change again.
“What I do moves people today in a way that I don’t understand at all,” she told the New Yorker in 1974.
She’d stopped painting as a consequence of her failing eyesight a couple of years earlier, but she’d probably given up on the notion of having any real influence over how her work was interpreted decades before that. Half a century earlier, then virtually unique as a prominent female American artist, she’d begun her hopeless fight against a legion of critics who read her irreducibly sensuous abstractions as an unsubtle metaphor for feminine sexuality. (But on the other hand, just look at the pictures.)
Her friend, the photographer Ansel Adams, was far more comfortable with his own success and celebrity, becoming known as a conservationist as well as an artist. His ease with public life was such that O’Keeffe accused him in the early 1940s, unfairly and for reasons unclear, of “making a monkey of himself to attract attention.”
But O’Keffee and Adams were kindred spirits nonetheless, both artists finding inspiration in the rugged landscape of the Southwest, particularly New Mexico. “Natural Affinities,” the new joint O’Keeffe/Adams exhibit organized by Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and on view at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art for the remainder of the year, examines for the first time the influence the two venerated American artists exerted over one another during their oft-strained 50-year friendship. (O’Keeffe was married to Adams’ mentor, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and the latter’s death in 1946 ushered in a period of particularly curt relations between the two.)
The different lighting requirements of paintings versus photographs prevented SAAM from displaying related piece by each artist side-by-side, says Chief Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey. The solution was “thematic clusters” of work arrayed together. Still, it’s easy enough to cross the room from O’Keeffe’s 1937 oil “Charma River, Ghost Ranch” (for example) to Adams’s “Ghost Ranch Hills, Charma Valley,” photographed the same year but printed in 1972.
O’Keeffe’s 1922 observation that “nothing is less real than realism” appears stenciled on one of the gallery walls. “It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.”
She said this seven years before she met Adams. It certainly doesn’t contradict his work, which selects and emphasizes with almost preternatural skill, but her ghostly, luminous paintings of Santa Fe seem to capture the spirit of the place more effectively than Adams’ sharp-edged photographs all the same.
In conjunction with the “Natural Affinities” exhibit, SAAM will present the Washington premiere of “A Brush with Georgia O’Keeffe,” an off-Broadway play by Natalie Moscow, who also plays the title role. The show made its debut in New York last spring, and will be reprised for a single performance at SAAM’s McEvoy Auditorium at 3 p.m. Nov. 1.
