Georgia O’Keeffe at the Nevada Museum of Art
The Nevada Museum of Art has opened the “Georgia O’Keeffe” exhibit. This exhibit is indeed a stunning and inspirational exhibit.
The “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern,” will be on display through October 20.
Check out the video where Amanda Horn takes us on an in-depth tour of the exhibit. The Biography is a great read a well.
Georgia O’Keefe at the Nevada Museum of Art—
She Lived to Please Herself
~By Norm Robins~
Now showing at the Nevada Museum of Art—a well curated collection of the dress worn by, paintings by, photographs of, and memorabilia from the long and productive life of Georgia O’Keeffe. She worked her whole life to please only herself and her sense of art. When she couldn’t please herself she put down her art materials. When she was ready to again please herself she picked up her materials and returned. She was ruthlesslyhonest with herself, and we are the beneficiaries of that rigor. Over the 98 years of her life she produced work after work that taken altogether have left us with a collection that astonishes to this day.
Early on she announced to her female classmates, “I am going to live a different life from the rest of you girls. I am going to give up everything for my art.” And she did, even to the point of making her own clothes. She favored severe black and cream colored whites that have aged gracefully and implacably over the decades since she designed them and sewed them by hand.
To say she was photogenic is a monumental understatement. She was photographed by the greats of the profession, Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, and Annie Liebovitz to name only some of them. She was photographed by the great Canadian photographer Yousef Karsh whose portrait is so beautifully composed it transfixes the viewer as he is drawn to look and look and look seemingly without end. It isn’t seen. It is imbibed. Andy Warhol painted her. Photo and painting are nearby.
Her paintings are by now the stuff of legend. There is a good collection of them here in the Museum. All in all, the collection of paintings, photographs, dress, and memorabilia are well balanced and informative. She did indeed live for her art. The immersion was deep and total. This exhibition, put together by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, is well worth a stroll for more than a few minutes through this genius’ art.
This exhibition will be on view through October 20, 2019 at the Nevada Museum of Art. The Museum will also present “The American Look: Georgia O’Keeffe and the Fashion of Her Time” on August 9th, “Georgia O’Keeffe: The Candid Camera with Dr. Ariel Plotek” on August 29th, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky with Dr. Brett. M. Van Hoesen” on September 6th, “Artist KelleeMorgado on Consumption and Waste in the Fashion Industry” on September 20th.
For more information go to https://www.nevadaart.org/art/exhibitions/georgia-okeeffe-living-modern/
Georgia O’Keeffe Biography
(Condensed From the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum)
Georgia O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, and grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wis. As a child she received art lessons at home, and her abilities were quickly recognized and encouraged by teachers throughout her school years. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O’Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist.
O’Keeffe pursued studies at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–1906) and at the Art Students League, New York (1907–1908), where she was quick to master the principles of the approach to art-making that then formed the basis of the curriculum—imitative realism. In 1908, she won the League’s William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). Shortly thereafter, however, O’Keeffe quit making art, saying later that she had known then that she could never achieve distinction working within this tradition.
Her interest in art was rekindled four years later (1912) when she took a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. She mailed some of her drawings to a former Columbia classmate, who showed them to the internationally known photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieglitz, on January 1, 1916.
Stieglitz began corresponding with O’Keeffe. In the spring of 1918, he offered O’Keeffe financial support to paint for a year in New York. By the time she arrived in New York in June, she and Stieglitz, who were married in 1924, had fallen in love and subsequently lived and worked together in New York (winter and spring) and at the Stieglitz family estate at Lake George, New York (summer and fall) until 1929, when O’Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico.
From 1923 until his death in 1946, Stieglitz worked assiduously and effectively to promote O’Keeffe and her work, organizing annual exhibitions of her art at The Anderson Galleries (1923–1925), The Intimate Gallery (1925–1929), and An American Place (1929–1946). As early as the mid-1920s, when O’Keeffe first began painting New York skyscrapers as well as large-scale depictions of flowers as if seen close up, which are among her best-known pictures, she had become recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists.
Three years after Stieglitz’s death, O’Keeffe moved from New York to her beloved New Mexico, whose stunning vistas and stark landscape configurations had inspired her work since 1929. Indeed, many of the pictures she painted in New Mexico, especially her landscape paintings of the area, have become as well known as the works she had completed earlier in New York. Indeed, her ability to capture the essence of the natural beauty of Northern Mexico desert, its vast skies, richly colored landscape configurations, and unusual architectural forms, has identified the area as “O’Keeffe Country.” Indeed, the area nourished O’Keeffe’s creative efforts from 1929 until 1984, when failing eyesight forced her into retirement.
She made New Mexico her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death, and continued working in oil until the mid–1970s. She worked in pencil and watercolor until 1982 and produced objects in clay from the mid–1970s until two years before her death in 1986, at the age of 98.
