1: Building a Successful Image Through Photography
Georgia O'Keeffe's persisting fame as one of America's best known artists is due, in no small part, to her success at creating an image for herself by working with some of America's best know photographers. Starting with her mentor -- dealer and eventually husband Alfred Stieglitz -- she learned about projecting an image of herself. It was knowledge that she went on to use with Life photographer John Loengard and a host of other famous photographers including Irving Penn, Ansel Adams, Arnold Newman, Karsh, Philippe Halsman, Eliot Porter and, improbably enough, Andy Warhol.
"Georgia O'Keeffe and the Camera - the Art of Identity," explore this topic in a fascinating, albeit occasionally frustrating, account. Susan Danly, curator of graphics, photography and contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine organized the show, which appeared in Portland and at the O'Keeffee Museum in Santa Fe, and wrote the catalog.
Perhaps the many books about O'Keeffe and Stieglitz cover their complex relationship in so much detail that Danly felt it unnecessary to probe more deeply, but this account sleights the importance of O'Keeffe's age, experience and success in dealing with Stieglitz. It suggests that Stieglitz took advantage of her youth and inexperience which may shortchange the power of her own personality.
At the core of this is the unexamined issue of O'Keeffe's posing nude for Stieglitz. Was she a na??ve young woman, or someone relaxed about posing for the famous photographer and gallery owner? The text seems to be uncomfortable with the real world in its disinclination to grapple with issues of age, experience, sophistication, and the passage of time. In 1917, at the time Stieglitz arranged her first solo show in New York, she was 30. Danly says she had studied art in New York during the 1910s before moving to Texas and teaching at West Texas State Normal College. It was at this time that Stieglitz began his series of pictures of her, including the nudes. Intriguingly, although the nudes form a key part of the story, none is included in the book. O'Keefe's friend Rebecca Strand, wife of the photographer Paul Strand, also posed nude for Stieglitz - something the Danly doesn't mention but which suggests that nudes were less of a problem for artists and photographers then than they apparently are for curators now. (This reminds me of the scandalized tone in wall labels at the Thomas Eakins exhibition at the Met a couple of years ago when they described his practices in teaching life drawing in Philadelphia.)
O'Keefe was 30 at the time of her first show and the beginning of her series of Stieglitz photographs, she lived in New York as an art student for at least a few years, she was a Texas teacher when she received a one-woman show at a leading gallery in New York - is there a problem? Okay, perhaps I need to go to the biographies for answers. Stieglitz didn't show the nudes after 1921, but apparently the photos and his commentary on sexual suggestion in her flower paintings incited critics to Freudian commentary, often a favored recourse of the partially educated. In any event, O'Keeffe apparently disliked the commentary and was spurred to take control of her professional image; in her campaign she enlisted her knowledge of photography to create her own myth in the high desert of New Mexico.
Her first trip to New Mexico in 1929 was with Rebecca Strand at the invitation of the famed salon hostess, Mabel Dodge, who provided a studio for three months at her home in Taos. Danly notes that Stieglitz's photograph of O'Keeffe in 1929 was captioned "After Return from New Mexico" and show O'Keeffe as a commanding, perhaps condescending, presence posed against an automobile, presumably the one she bought in New Mexico.
This "differs significantly from his earlier images of O'Keeffe posed with her work. Gone are the allusions to sensuality, either personal or aesthetic, and instead we see the artist as a saintly desert ascetic."
Of course, this image was 12 years later than the 1917 photos, so she had gone from 30 to 42 and Stieglitz from 53 to 62. Is a change in their relationship and the way she and he present her image so remarkable?
The book presents a remarkable story of an artist attuned to the growing American interest in art and celebrity, stoked by magazines like Life and Vogue.
The photographic styles are interesting - Ansel Adams, who became a close friend of O'Keeffe's in New Mexico and New York, has the friendliest photos of her - painting in the back of her car, and glancing coyly at a cowboy. She, in turn, drew from his architectural photographs a deeper interest in local buildings as a subject for her own work.
Each photographer brought his own style for depicting her - from Life's John Loengard's journalism - so popular it has been turned into a book and was reissued in several languages in 2006, to Irving Penn's New York studio portrait, Arnold Newman's signature style of her in front of an easel with skull and horns and Philippe Halsman's stark profile. Throughout the articles, portrait sessions and extended visits by photographers who shot her home, studio and brushes, she was apparently an avid collaborator in the creation of her own image.
One benefit of this carefully managed celebrity was that through knowing her life and her face people who might normally ignore abstract art or even western landscapes were attracted to her work. Sanford Schwartz, the author of several books about art, objected to some of the stagy photographs in an essay in the New Yorker, but added: "O'Keeffe was a figure with a national renown that cut through art circles and reached the widest public - a public that often had little or no interest in the art world. O'Keeffe's fame was special in that it was based equally on what people knew of her work and of her life."
Barbara Rose, another expert in art history, said that O'Keeffe's success in making her own myth was one of her greatest creations. "Her painting and her personal together provide a lasting drama of artistic and human interest."
As Danly concludes, "O'Keeffe's astute understanding of the power of the photographic image became a critical tool in fashioning her popular identity and a key to her abiding fame."
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