Discoveries: Arts and Culture

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 F...

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 tha...