The Colorado Springs Gazette final

Through a camera quietly

BY JENNIFER MULSON jen.mulson@gazette.com

To stand before a Georgia O’keeffe work is to stand in quiet contemplation.

Her intimate paintings of black irises, lemon-colored calla lilies, bleached cow and horse skulls, deer bones and New York City skyscrapers have a way of transporting viewers inside the landscapes.

Though best-known for her abstracts that pay homage to the natural world, O’keeffe was more than her canvases. She also was a photographer. And while absorbing her small, less than 4-by-6 photos might require more patience and time, the shots will likely exert the same pull toward tranquility.

The new exhibit “Georgia O’keeffe, Photographer” will feature more than 100 of her photos, 10 paintings, several drawings and O’keeffe-related ephemera. It’s the culmination of three years of research by Lisa Volpe, curator of photography at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The show opens Sunday at the Denver Art Museum and runs through Nov. 6.

“It (O’keeffe’s work) can turn you inward and put you in touch with your inner peace,” said DAM’S curator of photography, Eric Paddock. “That equates to the kind of experiences people have in the desert Southwest. If you’re flying over you might get interested in the colors or forms of the landscape, but if you’re in the landscape and you slow down and breathe you become aware of this profound silence.”

Because most of the artist’s prints were unsigned and undated, Volpe worked to decipher the year, location and even time of day of each photo. She compared the edges and surfaces of the prints using Yale University’s database of historic paper types, visited New Mexico multiple times, and interviewed experts, including the head of botany at New Mexico State University and Santa Fe’s architectural preservation officer.

O’keeffe used photography to explore some of her favorite subjects: the architecture of her home in Abiquiú, N.M., the jimson weed blossom, the play of shadows around her property, her beloved chow chow dogs.

“The way she approached her photography was a little bit like the way she made her drawings,” said Georgia O’keeffe Museum curator of fine art Ariel Plotek. “She would choose a subject and explore it from different angles, sometimes simplifying it, and finding the essence of the form. She is in some ways doing the same thing with the camera.”

Volpe believes the artist might have used the former as reference material or inspiration for paintings. She notes in the exhibit’s catalog that the prints “show evidence of frequent handling: ink and paint stains, fingerprints and scratches in the emulsion, and, in some, shallow skinning on all four corners of the verso indicates they were taped to a surface at one time.”

“I turned the camera at a sharp angle to get all the road,” O’keeffe wrote in her 1976 autobiography about the road in front of her Abiquiú home. “It was accidental that I made the road seem to stand up in the air, but it amused me and I began drawing and painting it as a new shape.”

The young artist

It’s no surprise O’keeffe gravitated toward the camera. Even at 10, she knew she would be an artist, taking watercolor lessons from an artist in Wisconsin, where she grew up near the turn of the 20th century. With her family’s camera, a young O’keeffe often took shots of her relatives, but it was her love of painting that landed her at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then The Art Students League of New York.

By 1908 she was a fully formed artist, though her detailed work didn’t resemble the abstract work people know her for now. Around 1914 she began to move in that direction, and a solo show in 1917 heralded her ascent into modernism, a breaking away from the traditions of European art in the early part of the 20th century. Artists in the genre experimented with abstraction, blending realistic details with abstract elements.

She began to connect with photographers, including her soonto-be husband, Alfred Stieglitz. O’keeffe and the avant-garde photographer and gallerist married in 1924 and went on to have “a long, sometimes deeply romantic, rather fractious relationship,” Paddock said.

Thanks to Stieglitz, who took more than 300 photos of O’keeffe during their relationship, she gained the experience of being a photographer’s model and muse. She also received firsthand experience in developing photos, and doing the final retouches, comparable to modern-day Photoshop.

“It was done in the early 20th century with a brush and sometimes with a crayon and other retouching tools,” Plotek said. “We know this to have begun as early as 1918, as the quality of his retouching dramatically improves once she enters his life. She was a more deft hand with the brush than he had been.”

Leaving a legacy

A fateful trip to New Mexico in 1929 spurred O’keefe to finally begin creating her own photos. She spent the summer in the Southwest, met and befriended more photographers, including lover of landscapes and environmentalist

Ansel Adams, and bought a car, driving all over the northern part of the state, sketching and painting along the way. Inspired by the land, she settled in Abiquiú in the ‘30s, where her photos began to accumulate. Around 1960, after Stieglitz had been dead for almost 15 years, O’keeffe began taking photos in a committed way, Plotek said.

Most of the photos in the new exhibit are from 1953 to 1972 and depict northern New Mexico, though a batch are travel photos from the ‘30s, including a trip to Hawaii commissioned by the Hawaiian Pineapple Co.

“The photographers she knew — Stieglitz, Adams, Paul Strand — were intent on making very carefully crafted prints of their pictures,” Paddock said. “She never treated photos as finished objects or as works of art in the same way.”

In a devastating twist of fate for a visual artist, macular degeneration began devouring O’keefe’s central vision in 1968, leaving her with only some peripheral sight three years later. It was impossible for her to paint without the use of an assistant, so she sought out other ways to capture her world, including photography and pottery.

Her approach to modernism in her works, some of which are almost a century old, has aged well. And her whole aesthetic, including the idiosyncratic way she dressed in black and white wrap dresses and styled her hair, has staying power.

“Whether it’s her photos or her paintings, there’s something contemporary about them,” Plotek said. “Fashion styles come and go, but the simplicity of the way she lived in her homes or the way she dressed or her way of seeing her subjects, reducing them to their most elemental forms, still resonates so strongly.”

LIFE

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2022-07-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-07-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.gazette.com/article/282617446445835

The Gazette, Colorado Springs