Discoveries: Arts and Culture

The occasion of visiting the Luther Burbank home and memorial park was inspired by Erin B. Coe's essay in the catalogue, "Georgia O'Keefe and Lake George, where Coe analogizes O'Keefe's floral studies to Burbank's own eugenics and adaptation of species,  O'Keeffe having seen the photographs in Burbank's seed catalogues,  in which he enlarged the flowers, and emphasized their colors.   Janet(L) and Susan Coolidge(R)   in rose garden Luther Burbank's hybrid petunias, for example, inspired her own "petunia" series painted at Lake George.  Because so much attention was focused on the last solo years of O'Keefe's  life in the SW in New Mexico, this exhibition gives perspective to the many paintings which evolved during the period she spent with Stieglitz at the Stieglitz home on Lake George in the summers, in NYC .  Onsite, we discovered the Frido Kahlo painting, which is in a museum in Mexico City. Luther Burbank's body was...

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...