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Georgia O’Keefe was an artist world renown but a
person of mysterious character. She lived a unique life, which was not accepted
as moral by most people. In New York, the display of Alfred Stieglitz’s, a
photographer married to O’Keefe, nude photographs of O’Keefe had encouraged art
critics to inaccurately interpret her abstract and flower images as
representations of female body parts and O’Keefe’s sexuality. Without this
understanding, major aspects of her intimacy with the landscape have been overlooked
and her images misinterpreted. Georgia O’Keefe’s move to the west offered the
privacy, solitude, and self-determination that she wanted after the scrutiny of
her work and her life in New York.
Before
moving to the west, O’Keefe first painted New York skyscrapers as well as
large-scale depictions of flowers. After moving to the west, her painting
shifted into a more western feel. She was drawn to New Mexico’s unusual and
starkly landscape. As she explored the new environment, she was able to capture
the essence of the natural beauty of the northern New Mexico desert. O’Keefe encountered
things of simple beauty that inspired her like the vast skies, the richly
colored landscape configurations, and the unusual architecture forms. Most of
her time in the west was focused mainly on the landscape paintings. She
experimented with new colors, forms, and strategies of nature and really
focused on the high details of shape and color. Georgia O’Keefe simplified and
abstracted what she saw without departing from the overall shape and form of
what she was painting.
Georgia
O’Keefe started painting animal skulls by exploring the west. She lived in an
area called the Ghost Ranch and that is where she found animal bones. The types
of bones she mostly used were cow and horse bones. The animals represented the
death and destruction of landscape in the west. The bones symbolized the
eternal beauty of the desert. One reason she wanted to paint these bones was
because she wanted to pay tribute to the animals that were first inhabited
there. She only painted the skulls of these animals and then had a background
of a desert for example. She would focus on the skull, the biggest compound,
and then the desert is ambiguous. After a couple of animal paintings she
included flowers with the animal skull. “ [… ]When someone came to the kitchen
door. As I went to answer the door, I stuck the pink rose in the eye socket of
the horse’s skull. And when I came back the rose looked pretty fine, so I
thought I would just go with that.” – Georgia O’Keefe. Painting these animal
skulls helped her find the “true reality” of the bones.
Georgia
O’Keefe very little has been known to work with Native American art and
culture. Her move from New York to Mexico made her fascinated by the area’s
cultural richness. O’Keefe was inspired to paint churches, crosses, folk art as
well as Native American subjects. One of the types of paintings she focused on
while she was in the Southwest are the katsinam paintings. Kachina dolls, also
known as “katsina tithu”, are small, colorful figures that are sacred
representations of deities of the Hopi Indian religion. Hopi Indians were natives
of northeastern Arizona. These deities are supernatural beings that function as
messengers between the spiritual domain and mortals. These figures were used to
teach children about the Hopi Katsinam. Georgia O’Keefe went from many drawings
to watercolors, and paintings of the Katsina Tithu. After being inspired by the
beautiful figurines, O’Keefe viewed many cultural ceremonies in the west. Her
paintings of the Katsina Tithu are my favorite type of art that she does
because entire life was focused on paintings about nature. This type of art
shifts her art style and really focuses on the cultural aspect of the west.
Looking at Georgia O’Keefe’s work can help us understand the
nuances of how her images relate to how to she lived with and experienced this
landscape of the Southwest. Paintings of the Animal skulls, Katsinam dolls, and
the Landscape are the three main types of art she focused on in her time in the
west. She was less concerned with the precision, but more with the emotion and
the focus on shape and color. “Nothing is less real than realism. Details are
confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at
the real meaning of things.” –Georgia O’Keefe
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| "Kokopelli" was inspired by "Katsina Tithu" which are a small, colorful Hopi Indian figures. |
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| She painted "Horse's Skull with White Rose" because she encountered animal skulls while exploring the southwest landscape. She included the flower when she stuck a rose in the eye socket of a horse's skull and has been painting animal skulls since then.
Works Cited:
This website is from local newsletters in the Denver region. This website focuses on tells us a little bit about her landscape and architecture paintings. The type of painting that highlights this article are the katsinam figures.
For this website, I only used the section on Animal Skulls. This website gave me information on why Georgia O'Keefe was fascinated with painting animal skulls and how she came up with the idea of including the flower with the animal skull.
About Georgia O'Keefe: O'Keefe Museum This website was my favorite website because it had information about her biography. It explains about how she made the transition from the east to west and why she was amazed by the west. Georgia O'Keefe: Art Story I used this website for the quotes by Georgia O'Keefe. Reading these quotes really showed what type of person she was. This website also included information about her biography. Georgia O'Keefe: Catalogue Raisonné by Barbara Buhler Lynes: JStor This website had books in pdf files. This book talked about her life story and really went in depth about how and why people misinterpreted her artwork. It also tells us about her move to the west and how her art changed from her work in New York Georgia O'Keefe in New Mexico: Denver Art Museum This website includes information about the landscape and architecture, but mostly focuses on the katsinam figures of the Hopi Indians. It tells us what they were and how and why she painted the figurines. Georgia O'Keefe in New Mexico: Architecture, Katsinam, and the Land: Heard Museum This website also included information about architecture, katsinam dolls, and the landscape. It focused on the landscape portion of her artwork. Georgia O'Keefe (1887-1986): Metropolitan Museum This website tells us about her life before her move to the west and talks about the individual types of paintings that she focused on. |
