Georgia O'Keeffe (1887—1986)
The Fondation Beyeler Museum in Basel, Switzerland, has been Switzerland's most visited art museum for twenty-five years, and its founders, Mr. and Mrs. Beyeler, have been hailed as "the greatest art dealers of the post-war period." The Fondation Beyeler Museum dedicated its first exhibition in 2022 to Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), the "mother of modern American art."
O'Keeffe is currently the highest price female painter on the market, and her Mandala Flower (Hundred Flowers No. 1) sold for $44.3 million in 2014. Featuring some 80 of her works, the exhibition provides a comprehensive review of O'Keeffe's career, including early abstract paintings, flowers, Texas landscapes, and New York cityscape themes, as well as late works with New Mexico wilderness and multicultural characteristics.
"Month of the Americas"
In 1918, O'Keeffe came to New York at the invitation of the famous photographer and gallerist Stiglitz. Stiglitz had previously successfully curated an exhibition of O'Keeffe's paintings, and the two fell in love and married in 1924. After that, O'Keeffe began to create extraordinary collections of large-sized flowers, entering the first peak of her artistic career. Growing up on her family's dairy farm, O'Keeffe has always had a passion for America's natural landscapes, from Semprey, Wisconsin, Charlottesville, Virginia, Amarillo and Canning in Texas, to Lake George in New York and the wilderness of New Mexico.
British writer D.H. Lawrence, who called New Mexico the "month of the Americas," planned to live permanently in Taos, New Mexico in 1922, where Lawrence kept revising his work, but growing tuberculosis forced him to return to Florence, Italy, three years later. It's no coincidence that Lawrence lived in Taos, as Taos and Santa Fe in the early 20th century became popular destinations not only in New Mexico, but also in the homes of artists. At that time, although the United States controlled New Mexico for more than six decades, the land was still foreign and exotic in the eyes of ordinary Americans; In the eyes of the artist, New Mexico's natural environment, lifestyle and Indian style are full of primitive cultural charm.
O'Keeffe's 1930 painting of Black Mesa, New Mexico
O'Keeffe and her sister first set foot on New Mexico soil in 1917, five years after New Mexico had become the 47th state in the United States. Twelve years later, O'Keeffe and her friend Baker Strand returned to New Mexico, not solely in search of inspiration for artistic creation, but more like a healing journey to soothe emotional entanglements.
At this time, O'Keeffe was no longer so dependent on the arrogant, demanding and fickle Stiglitz in terms of economy, life and art management, and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York began to exhibit O'Keeffe's works regularly. In 1929, O'Keeffe and friends boarded the Santa Fe Railroad's "20th Century Limited" train. The Santa Fe Railroad was one of the most famous railroad companies in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, and it was the first of its kind to set up dining cars as a convention today; It also commissioned artists to create a number of paintings in the Western Romantic style, sparing no effort to promote the appeal of tourism in the Southwest. The duo traveled from New York to Chicago, south through Kansas, and finally to the Lomi train station in eastern New Mexico, before heading to Taos, where they stayed for five months in the Mabel Dodge Luján ranch adobe room. O'Keeffe was impressed by the starry sky over the ranch night sky and the rhubarb pine spiraling in front of the house, Lawrence's Tree is a majestic, uncontested yet vibrant poetic scene, and Bear Lake in New Mexico is an exploration of beyond Taos.
Lawrence's Tree, 1929
In 1930, a severe drought that would last for years was hitting New Mexico, killing a large number of animals, and the bones of antelope, rams, cows and horses were everywhere on the pastures, and O'Keeffe's friend and photographer Ansel Adams once captured a photograph of O'Keeffe searching for bones. O'Keeffe sent a bucket of animal bones to the East by freight train, which became the material for 1931's Cow Skull: Red, White, and Blue, an oil on canvas painting on the shores of Lake George that can be seen as both a transition from Lake George to New Mexico and a spiritual calling and emotional link in the Southwest.
Works such as "A Horse Skull with a Pink Rose" (1931), "Ram's Head, White Hollyhock Flower" (1935), "Summer Time" (1936), and "From Far Away, Close at Hand" (1937) are also bone paintings with poetic names. The first three place bones and flowers at the center of the picture, highlighting the distinct and strong character of the American Southwest. In February 1938, Life magazine published a four-page interview with O'Keeffe, using three photographs of O'Keeffe taken by Adams, all of which showed animal bones, and the connection between the artist and the bones became the main line of the interview. The skull at hand, and the hills with small scales and distant retreats constitute a special sense of space, and the bright decorative forms, abstract expressions and realism combine the picture to convey not the perspective of ordinary travelers, but an almost mysterious atmosphere. O'Keeffe's bone paintings, inspired by surrealism, breathe new life into the popular painting style of the American West through the tension between near and far, interpreting an implicit theme that explores the inner self.
Ram's Head, White Hollyhock (1935)
From afar, near (1937)
O'Keeffe and Bones
Physical and mental freedom
In 1934, after a mental illness residency in New York and a recuperation in Bermuda, O'Keeffe returned to New Mexico and found a new home, a ghost ranch with an ancient animal skull marker on its gate. She later recalled: "As soon as I got here, I knew I was going to live here. O'Keeffe rented a guest room for several summers. In 1940, she bought Ghost Ranch. Residences have also become new subjects in her paintings.
New Mexico's red hills, canyons, deserts, wilderness, rocks, unique light, space and tone, allowed O'Keeffe to find fresh creative themes and touch the core charm of Westworld. At this time, O'Keeffe has a sense of physical and mental freedom. In her first house, she created the "Black Land" and "White Land" series, which became O'Keeffe's most sacred place in New Mexico.
Located in the Colorado Plateau, close to the Navajo Nation area, the largest Indian reservation in the United States, O'Keeffe has long watched Mount Pidenon rise from the wilderness. Mount Pidennon, which is flat and square at the top of the mountain, is a sacred mountain in the eyes of the Indians, and O'Keeffe repeatedly traces it, hoping to collect the landmark landscape she cherishes with a brush. O'Keeffe, who began living alone in New Mexico, has long and continuously cared about local philanthropy, and has formed deep friendships with Hispanic women who work for her, and the daily blend of food and language and customs have become the background of O'Keeffe's creation.
In December 1945, O'Keeffe bought a dilapidated estate in Abhichu from the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe, and two events followed a few months later. From May to August 1946, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a very successful retrospective for O'Keeffe, the museum's first retrospective for a woman; Before the show was over, 82-year-old Stiglitz died of a stroke. O'Keeffe spent most of the next two years at home in New York to deal with her husband's inheritance. Meanwhile, the four-year-old reconstruction of the Apicchu house is proceeding slowly. When the house was completed in 1949, O'Keeffe returned to New Mexico, and the painting "Brooklyn Bridge" is a commemoration of O'Keeffe's farewell to New York.
At this time, O'Keeffe, there was no longer Stiglitz and New York in her life, she lived in Ghost Ranch in spring and summer, and in Apicchu in autumn and winter. Both residences are not far from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons were developed, and Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," the anti-nuclear activist, frequented Ghost Ranch, and O'Keeffe built an underground shelter in Abicchu.
The walls of the Apicchu residence are glass, and there is a window to see Route 84 to Santa Fe, and since 1952 O'Keeffe has taken the road as the focus of the picture, and "Road No. 2 on the East Side of Pingding Mountain", "Road Through the Landscape", "Winter Road No. 1" and so on have been completed one after another. However, as time passed, the picture of the road became more and more abstract, and the iconic work "Winter Road No. 1" is both abstract painting, graffiti-like work, and Chinese ink painting. O'Keeffe traveled to Asia twice and has a significant collection of Asian art. The Apicchu house and the road in front of her door form O'Keeffe's world, which is both home and starting point, and it was from New Mexico that O'Keeffe embarked on a series of subsequent round-the-world trips.
Winter Road No. 1 (1963)
O'Keeffe's Abhichu residence
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In the early 1980s, O'Keeffe, who was old and nearly blind, rarely traveled, and bought a house in Santa Fe to facilitate medical treatment. In 1986, she died peacefully at her home in Santa Fe, named Sun and Shadow. Andy Warhol interviewed O'Keeffe, who told him about the wilderness of New Mexico and her cherished home. However, in her 1976 autobiography, she told readers not to try to interpret her work through the places she called "home."
O'Keeffe, who changed residences frequently and travelled for four decades, seemed to echo what she said to Andy Warhol: "It's nice that I've lived alone at the end of the world for a long time, walking back and forth in the fields with my own things, and nobody cares." ”
Author: He Peiqun
Editor: Liu Di