O'Keeffe and Fashion De Young Museum Lecture Notes


To De Young.  For O Keefe lecture. 

 Woman appeared who had inherited from costume designer a belt like the one Georgia O Keefe wore.  Her mother was Austrian Aristocrat.  She had five brothers and sisters.  She is admired for her strength and determination and her authenticity.  Her father was an Irish immigrant and her mother an Austrian aristocrat.  Mother wore a bustle...as we are concentrating on dress.  She went to Chatham HS in Virginia...  played on the tennis team in 1890 Unusual for women.   Sewed her own clothes.   Studied with the NY Art Students League in 1907  Was influenced by the Japanese in the Arts and Crafts Movement.  Studied at the Art Institute in Chicago in 1918...in 1906 she had Typhoid fever.  She rented a room in a boarding house.  The lecturer points out that Fortuny was worn by Stieglitz sister, and that O Keefe wore this “bust “ dress, but not by Fortuny.  A fellow student did her  portrait and she was beautiful(only portrait in a check dress)  -- looked like Mabel Dodge Luhan, her friend and patron...She had a photo taken for her boyfriend, ostensibly. 
O Keefe said relationship with Stieglitz was more about the art...but the lecturer doesn’t know whether to believe her!   He was 52 and she was 28.   She was rarely seen in pants but did wear pants when she was at Lake George.  Drew en plein air, and fixed up shack in meadow to work.   She worked on a scale of canvas that she could carry around...”I wish people were trees.  Then I could relate to them.” 

Mischievious as child.. connection with Luther Burbank who was her contemporary...his drawings of flowers and species...Intense observation.  “Exploded asociations”...of normal viewing of flower.
Miguel Corambbusier did portrait of her, Our lady of the Lily, for the New Yorker.  I had calla lilies for my wedding...they are so special in the East, but here in California, grow profusely. 

Did a commission for Elizabeth Arden of Jimson Weed...

Ahead of her time.  The kimono.  Cross dressing.  Masculinization of fashion.   

Black and white.  Rodchenko theater costumes reflect abstraction in the same period.

Chanel popularizes the little black dress, and that is what Georgia is wearing! 

Sonia Delauney surface designs in geometrics...

O Keefe learned to “paint the space in between”...

Lived in brownstone of Stiegliz's   brother...lived in Shelton hotel..seized upon the masculine organic quality of clouds...

1949  Farewell painting to NYC of Brooklyn Bridge. 

Georgia’s early years in Chicago taught her commercial painting; she must produce.  She created income for Stieglitz’s gallery. She had plan for paintings.    Kept a clean palette each day.       Kept work box.  OCD routine, (which I don't quite buy...)says lecturer.  Clothes, etc.  --1930’s nervous breakdown over Dorothy Norman.  When she moved to SW, painted her doorway many times.   Drew clouds after her first airplane flight.   Inspired by Japanese sumi brush...Juan Hamilton entered in her last years and provided energy, youth  and companionship.    Liked the simplification of the Zuni pueblo architecture.   Prefered black kimono of fine cotton.  Made for her.  Wore Gaucho hat...

  In 1976 appeared for Caldar’s last retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC...and  I was there!   Georgia O'Keefee  was there!  I was ...doing some work with the Whitney Education curator at that time...and invited, and I was still young and beautiful.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Giacometti, Yanaihara Isaku.

Image
Yanaihara Isaku was 38 years old at the beginning of his stay in Paris. A recommendation of Jean Wahl had allowed him to get a scholarship from CNRS. In his homeland, he taught philosophy at the University of Osaka; he wrote and meditated about Rouault, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus which he translated  The Myth of Sisyphus  . After the parenthesis of a trip to Greece and Italy, he had agreed to pose for the artist he met at an exhibition for autumn 1955. This decision  transformed his life. Immediate consequence, she brought him to extend his stay in France: Alberto had always need new work days to specify what the disconcerted and frightened from his friend's face.  "Your face ... I see everything tiny and terribly huge ... I must paint the two together. "  Yanaihara had planned to leave for a trip to Egypt before joining Japan. His departure was constantly postponed: Giacometti desperate to complete the portraits he had...
Read more

Markus Schinwald at Wattis Institute exhibition, co curated by SFMOMA as an off site project

Image
Exhibit of images altered to represent "interior psychic adjustment" with external clues   Captivating Duncan pfyfe chair legs climb gold post Neil Benezra, Director of SFMOMA, SF   Anthony Huberman, Dir CCA Wattis Institute Stephen Beal, President  CCA at Wattis Institute               The Viennese Artist, Markus Schinwald, and his life partner, Ginger Dellenbaugh  
Read more

Pauline Kael house with Jess Collins murals, Berkeley

Image
my favorite mural Very exciting!  This house may become a poetry center, like the wonderful house, UPENN has, for its poetry readings.  But right now, it is still in a process of negotiation, as Sotheby's realtor, creatively organizes a committee to "save the house" and murals.  Christopher Wagstaff, author of a recent exhibition catalogue, the exhibition which is touring and currently in Pasadena, having been at the Grey Art Gallery in NYC, and at the Crocker in summer 2013) - unfortunately I was in China.  The exhibition centers on the relationship and work of Robert Duncan, Poet, whose work I greatly admire(and did as a UW student) and in NYC where I heard him read once before his death.  Pauline Kael is a legend and of course, I read her theater reviews, and heard her speak at the Y92 in NYC, in the 70s.  I never knew she started for a decade in Berkeley writing her reviews.  Her correspondence with poet Robert Duncan (1940-1946) has...
Read more