Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer

In Santa Fe this past spring I spent a good day wandering through the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and actually spending time in front of each of her paintings, trying to understand what made it so beautiful, so interesting, so penetratingly different, and so moving  to the viewer. It seems Georgia had put such intense observation, but also so much love and emotion, into each one of her subjects, that she was able to find, and paint, “the soul” of the object, be it a part of a flower or the red mountains of her beloved New Mexico desert.

 

A great new exhibition at the Denver Art Museum provides wonderful new insights into our understanding of O’Keefe’s art. The exhibition was originally organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts with the collaboration of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museumin Santa Fe.In Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer, this exhibition presents and offers for analysis ways in which O’Keeffe saw the shaping of objects and landscapes under different light conditions and from different angles. While the emphasis of the exhibition appears to be on revealing the learning process and the skills that Georgia acquired over time as a photographer, I think that the deeper value of the exhibition is that it helps us understand more about the ways in which O’Keeffe observed, subtracted, eliminated, and explored ways of viewing images, landscapes, and objects. Much like the Impressionists’ explorations of light on object outline and color – different seasons, different hours of the day – O’Keeffe the photographer studied objects and their views intensely in her pictures, and because her only control over these images was her choice of angle and her time-of-day lighting, her photographic experiments reveal her concerns for the image and her curiosity for the differences in that image under changing position and lighting circumstances. It is also interesting that dispersed among her photographs in this exhibition are some of her paintings, presumably inspired or affected by specific photographic images, sometimes years after she had taken those images. To me it says that she used her photography not as a source for the images she painted, but rather as an intense use of the medium to supplement her own eyes in analyzing shapes, proportions, shadows, and compositions that eventually found their way into her paintings.

 

This is the first major investigation of O’Keeffe’s photography and traces the artist’s thirty-year exploration of the medium, including a complete catalogue of her photographic work.I think that this summer exhibition at the Denver Art Museum is a great new contribution to our understanding of O’Keeffe’s concerns about her art, her ways of thinking about the image, and the process of isolating the vital visual elements in it. I wish I had the opportunity to see it in person. I hope that some of you will have that opportunity!

 

For more on O’Keeffe as a photographer, and on the Denver exhibition, please see:

 

https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/exhibitions/georgia-okeeffe

 

https://303magazine.com/2022/07/georgia-okeeffe/

 

“Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer” is on view at the Denver Art Museum (100 W 14th Ave. Pkwy.
Denver) through November 6, 2022. Admittance to the museum is free to anyone under the age of 18, and $13 for adult Colorado residents.