Georgia O’Keeffe remains one of the most fascinating artists of the twentieth century because of her bold art. She grew up in Wisconsin and studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago and learned the techniques of traditional realist painting under Luis Mora. William Merritt Chase and Kenyon Cox (About Georgia O’Keeffe 2016). Her distinct flowers, theatrical cityscapes, glowing landscapes, and images of bones against the blunt desert sky are original contributions to American Modernism. O'Keeffe played an essential role in the development of American modernism and helped flourish its relationship to avante garde movements (Georgia O’Keeffe 2016). She is the first female American modernist whose barren landscapes, paintings of flowers and still life became an iconography of the American artistic landscape. She was one of the original artists to adopt the technique of painting by rendering close-ups into highly detailed yet abstract. Her synthesis of abstraction and realism emphasizes the primary forms of nature with a focus on shape and color. O'Keeffe was much drawn to the abstract and especially the flowers. She was preoccupied with those simple forms and use of bold and yet subtle colors. She wanted people to observe the exquisiteness of flowers and enjoy their true beauty.
The three works chosen by the artist for this essay are The Radiator Building: Night, New York (1927), Black Iris (1926) and Black Place II (1944). All are oil on canvas and show the popular themes of landscape, flowers and New York skyscrapers embraced by the artist.
These artworks are a good example of how the artists makes a thorough powerful observation of nature plus her experimenting with size and scale, and nuanced use of line and color. O'Keeffe's art remained stranded in design even while pushing at its limits. From the 1940s through the 1960s in particular, O'Keeffe's art remained stranded in representation even while pushing at its limits. She was one of the few artists to obey to representation during an era when others were discovering non-representation in art (Georgia O’Keeffe 2016).
O'Keeffe believed that no one had time to see the beautiful details of those small flowers. Moreover, her big flowers definitely grabbed the attention of viewers who were drawn to those monumental flowers. By enlarging those tiny petals to fill a huge canvas, those shapes and lines made them appear abstract (Messinger 2004). Those daring compositions earned her the reputation of an innovative modernist. Looking at the colossal painting of “Black Iris”, which is one of the early masterpieces of the artist. Here she has enlarged the petals beyond life-size proportions and forces the viewer to look at the minute details of the flowers that he would otherwise overlook. When one looks at those works for the first time, they tend to get shocked by their audacity. Considered as one of the masterpieces by her, one can see her subtle shading of impenetrable black-purple and how those deep maroons turn into soft grays, pinks, and whites. The artwork captures the short-lived bloom of spring. By enlarging the petals, O'Keeffe turns the ordinary to the extraordinary (Black Iris 2016).
The large-scale renderings by O’Keeffe that marked a theme that she would explore for a long time in her career. The painting shows how she magnifies the theme in size, emphasizing on its shape and color. According to her, no one is able to see a flower clearly, and this is her motive behind painting theme so big and huge. Her paintings were often criticized for their resemblance to the illusions of female genitalia (Georgia O’Keeffe 2016).However, O'Keeffe focuses on the androgyny of the reproductive parts.
Those magnified close-ups of flowers brought the viewer right into the picture. She often painted the cliffs and mountains in dramatic close-ups (Messinger 2004). For example, in the “Black Place”, she displays panoramically tight views that emphasize the ragged juncture of two hills. This was one her favorite painting sites in Navajo country. According to the artist, those stretches of desolate dark hills looked like a mile of elephants from a distance. One can see the black and grey hills with gaps of white sand curving around. The white strata run through them and flow downward (Black Place I2016).
It was because of her keen observation and a great finesse with a paintbrush that she was able to capture the subtle nuances of color, shape, and light of her subject on the canvas. She was primarily interested in flowers, landscapes, and bones. Her favorite flowers were canna, iris, poppy, and petunia. O’Keeffe’s paintings are associated with the abstracted aesthetics of the modernist style. (Fryd 2003).
The Radiator Building: Night, New York (1927) is another of the monumental painting by O’Keeffe’s where she captures the ambivalence of consumer culture. The Radiator Building stands as an absolute advertisement of the products made by the Corporation, One is immediately left in awe by its drama as it is unusual to see a building made of black brick and one with a gold trim. The massive American Radiator Building was designed by Raymond Hood and it glowed at night. The window openings lighten the heaviness and O'Keeffe painted the Radiator Building all the windows illuminated at night. She made the painting in response to the changing skyline of New York. The painting is remarkable for its color and depicts artificial light of the city. The windows glow in warm incandescent while the smoky steam echoes out from the flipped curved cornices (The Building that Would Glow at Night 2008).
The above discussion on O’Keeffe and her artworks only enhances an understanding of her style of working. She liked to express her ideas in personal visual language that was an alternative to realism. Her highly abstract drawings, her paintings of New York skyscrapers and distinct flowers made her one of the most prominent artists. Some of her strongest abstractions were monochromatic. Over the years, she became a sort of revolutionary because of her lifestyle as she shunned European tradition. She never signed her painting as stated by Potter (558). Later she moved to New Mexico looking for a more authentic artistic experience. There she was able to create work that was timeless and impersonal. Those wide open spaces of the desert inspired her to create works that were both realistic and abstract. She was inspired by the fossilized formations of the ragged mountain terrain with its naked wilderness. Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses are some of the remarkable works that are worth mentioning (Potter 559). The mythical world of the Mexican deserts with their enduring allure only added to her artistic potential.
O’Keeffe studio and its immediate surroundings were inspiring for the artist as it was surrounded by magnificent views and landscape. Her studies carries a large window that offers a panoramic view of the Chama Valley (AD Revisits: Georgia O’Keeffe 2016). Some of her best-known paintings have been made in her studio.
Although the integrity of O’Keeffe’s art rose above public opinion, her work was viewed through the standard social conceptions of the woman and was regarded to be mysterious and different. They were interesting to the public but interpreted to be inferior. As for the art community's reception, there was a critical response to her work. Gendered ideas had a significant impact on her reputation and position in contemporary art. Whatever she painted, she displayed an essence of womanhood in her art, according to the early critical response to her artwork in a patriarchal society. O’Keeffe dismissed sexual readings of her paintings and stated theta the critics were not able to reach her mind and what she was thinking (Georgia O’Keefe 2012).
In my opinion, O’Keeffe was a great artist who broke away from the constraints of scale and portrayed the grandeur of life and nature on her canvases. Her telescopic images that preferred the distant and she made them seem large and the larger small so that one was forced to focus on a single isolated object, which could be a bone, a flower, building or mountain. In other words, she signified fullness with an emptiness in her panoramic paintings. She truly was a great painter who was simply ahead of her time. In contrast to the other modern artists, O’Keeffe created gently pulsing organic forms with smooth surfaces. For her, the natural world was smooth and effortless, and this is how she depicted her experience of being in nature with those soothing movements. However, in her attempts, she created art on canvases that were enveloped by infinity and beyond rational comprehension. Her work sprang from her experience of nature's immensity and its inexplicability. She cropped her tiny motifs and stretched them across that wide canvas without measurable boundaries, and the result was a record of nature's fluid rhythms.
Works Cited
"About Georgia O’Keeffe.” okeeffemuseum. 2016. Web. 18 March. 2016.
"AD Revisits: Georgia O’Keeffe." architecturaldigest. 2016. Web. 21 Oct. 2015
"Black Iris.” metmuseum. 2016. Web. 18 March. 2016.
"Black Place II.” metmuseum. 2016. Web. 18 March. 2016.
Fryd, Vivien Green. Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Web.
"Georgia O’Keeffe.” The art story. 2016. Web. 18 March. 2016.
"Georgia O’Keefe: The impact of criticism on her work & contemporary art world status." chalkjournal. 2012. Web. 21 Oct. 2015.
Messinger, Lisa."Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986).” metmuseum. 2004. Web. 18 March. 2016.
Potter, Polyxeni. “Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986). Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses (1932).” Emerging Infectious Diseases 10.3 (2004): 558–559. PMC. Web. 18 Mar. 2016.
"The Building that Would Glow at Night: Raymond Hood, Georgia O'Keeffe, and the American Radiator Building. walkingoffthebigapple. 2008. Web. 18 March. 2016.
