Artists We Love: Georgia O'Keefe

Reducing her work to symbols of female sexuality trivializes what really captured the world’s attention

Reading the descriptions of Georgia O’Keefe’s work on georgiaokeefe.net sheds a light on why my middle school art teacher might have brought up O’Keefe during a painting unit, but I can’t hear O’Keefe’s name and not think she painted labias disguised as lilies. That’s totally wrong and only what Sigmund Freud wanted us to believe. Flowers have male and female parts. As the site puts it, “these ravenous views are tributes to the sensual forces and ecstasy of nature itself.” O’Keefe’s vivid work transports viewers to another world with joyful release. Let’s scratch the idea of her as a feminist icon and only consider her as the mother of American Modernism. Born in 1887, she shunned European traditions. Her vision focused on finding the essential, abstract forms in subjects, using emptiness to signify fullness, making the large small and the small large. O’Keefe stressed visual edges with metaphysical implications: day and night, earth and sky, life and death. O’Keefe took chances, “sometimes upsetting conventions of visual harmony in order to startle the eye into new kinds of seeing,” according to the site.

What seems most inspiring heading into a new year is the way O’Keefe overcame various struggles to paint for as far into her life as possible and keep creating art. —MV

O’Keefe painted things we’ve all seen but in ways we couldn’t: flowers (though “Music Pink and Blue II” (1918) is simply abstract...) and the view of clouds from an airplane (“Sky Above Clouds IV” (1965)).

O’Keefe said, “The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable and knows no kindness with all its beauty,” according to georgiaokeefe.net. “Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses” (1931)