Modern Nature Georgia O'Keefe and Lake George at De Young Museum SF

The show was curated to show how O'Keefe went from literal representation to abstraction.  The most stunning example was her Jack in the Pulpit, which she painted several times, at Lake George, each time abstracting some element, until in the end all that remains is a filament of light and the jack.  

 

 

 

 

 

 She eschewed the Freudian interpretations of her "sexualized" flowers, and returned to more literal still lifes, like her many paintings of apples, and trees and leaves at Lake George. 

Stieglitz's studio for developing his photos at Lake George 

 

 

 

This was one of the more unusual examples.  It is always amazing that new discoveries can be found when O'Keefe's oeuvre has been so examined, but this exhibition reassess placing all the emphasis on her late period in New Mexico, which in the last phase of her life, won her so much acclaim, and shows how significant the more than 200 paintings produced in this era, represented her development as a painter, and belied the idea that she did not like Lake George, but was rather nurtured by it, and the homes and space of the Stieglitz family, which Stieglitz himself, so much loved.

 

One of the more beautiful paintings of Lake George, reflecting O'Keefe's interest in interiority and the exterior of things, and how the boundaries interpenetrated one another. 

 

The Shanty where Georgia Painted at Lake George.   The barns which she painted at Lake George she said reminded her of her childhood in Sauk Prairie Wisconsin, where she grew up with five brothers and sisters, and her Austrian mother and German father on a farm.   

Almost looks like a Modigliani, in part...

The show had many surprizes and this was one of them!