GEORGIA O'KEEFFE | THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA O'Keeffe MUSEUM beyond the hills
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE | THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA MUSEUM
Charo Ramos
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Comments0Founding artist of American modernism, Georgia O'Keeffe (Sun Prairie, 1887-Santa Fe, 1986) traveled to Spain for the first time in 1953 and, in addition to admiring the Altamira caves and Goya's works in the Prado Museum, had time to visit Seville at Easter and go to the bullfights, where he was fascinated by the art of Manolo Vázquez. She was so meticulous that she kept her tickets, tickets and souvenirs of that journey, among them numerous postcards of matadors with the suit of lights making moves. Interest in bullfighting and in the confrontation between man and animal attracted all the avant-gardes of his time and the United States, which the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum reveals in all its complexity until August 8 with an exceptional meeting of 90 works that cover all his creative stages, was no exception. O'Keeffe was interested in cultural expressions linked to the ancestral, to the land; wild nature and the purest passions. In 1954, encouraged by bullfighting, she returned to Spain, and those two visits triggered numerous international trips that would inspire her last works.
The curator Marta Ruiz del Árbol, curator of Modern Painting at the Thyssen, traveled to Santa Fe, in New Mexico, to put together this ambitious project -which the art gallery had dreamed of for two decades- and found all those travel memories and postcards preserved from the time in the museum that manages the artist's legacy. Faced with that harsh and arid nature that O'Keeffe made her definitive home in 1949, after becoming a widower of her husband and promoter Joseph Stieglitz, Ruiz del Árbol found the crack through which to look at the artist in order to present her alone, without the shadow of her former mentor or the rest of the photographers who, like Paul Strand or Ansel Adams, made her one of the most powerful icons in the United States. "Her great friend Anita Pollitzer, who published their correspondence, said that O'Keeffe felt very well at home but always wondered what was on the other side of the hill. And that metaphor guides this exhibition: her desire to explore new territories, whether it was walking through the places where he lived -in the manner of Thoreau and the transcendentalists- or traveling to the other side of the world", details the curator.
"There is something inexplicable in nature that makes me feel that the world is much larger than my ability to understand it," wrote O'Keeffe, who aspired "to try to understand it by trying to capture it." The reflection that all these trips have in her art, the themes that they foster and inspire, is what makes this exhibition so special compared to the previous ones -the ambitious one that the Tate Modern dedicated to her in 2016, surrounding her with photographers like Stieglitz, 23 years old older than her and that he portrayed her 300 times; or the first presentation in Spain of her work, by Juan March-, and another not least merit is discovering Georgia's creative process and her technique, introducing the viewer to the secrets of her studio, which is recreated in the last room , including the sill of the immense window that she opened in the wall of her house in Abiquiú and where the leaves, stones and skulls bleached by the sun that she collected on her walks and captured in her paintings rested; canvases where she always invited us to look beyond, even using the skull or pelvis of a cow to force us to contemplate the line of the horizon through the bones.
"She was a very reserved woman and did not like to be seen at work, which is why the technical studies we have carried out of the five paintings that the Thyssen owns reveal how she painted, how meticulous she was, and that when she throws herself on the canvas she is decisive. and he knows everything he's going to do beforehand," explains Ruiz del Arbol, who admires his ability to define textures and achieve those "so smooth, almost imperceptible" color transitions.
Such a harmonious result that seems effortlessly achieved is due to meticulous drawing, previous work and the wet-into-dry technique: apply a color, let it dry, use the glass palette to slightly modify the color there and when the first is dry apply that second so subtle, like a gradient. She never mixes the brush on the canvas, she does it on the palette so that the colors are clean and she even uses a different brush for each tone.
O'Keeffe remains the most sought-after painter in the world since her White Flower in 2014. Jimson weed No. 1 will be auctioned for 44 million dollars, and the Thyssen Bornemisza National Museum is the art gallery with the most of his work outside the US (five in total from different periods and genres, around which this project pivots, which will later arrive at the Pompidou and the Beyeler Foundation). 35 collections have supported this exhibition, extraordinary like its catalog and postponed for a year due to the pandemic, which the end of the state of alarm will allow it to be appreciated as it deserves: it is an unrepeatable meeting and it would not have been possible without the generosity of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum of Santa Fe, which has loaned 37 pieces.
Learn how to be patient in enduring the faults of others, remembering that you yourself have many which others have… https://t.co/IeguKuW2Ft
— Marco🇻🇦👑 Tue Mar 02 00:11:54 +0000 2021
The exhibition has a chronological axis that in some rooms becomes thematic to show its evolution in a genre, as is the case with the central wing dedicated to those flowers that she monumentalizes to force the viewer to contemplate them, "painting them as if they were great buildings", He said. O'Keeffe wants everyday beauty to not go unnoticed, that of the small motifs -callas, poppies, lilies- that she turns into giants by changing the scale and adopting photographic techniques.
The exhibition thus travels through the fundamental places for this painter with a nomadic soul born on a Wisconsin farm who was always faithful to the call of nature, despite the impact that her abstract work and her personality had on New York in the 1920s and 30, which inspired some urban views that can be admired here almost as an anecdote among its splendid landscapes, from Lake George where he spent the summer with the Stieglitz family to the deserts he discovered in 1929 and made his last home.
Ruiz del Árbol begins his story with the first abstract drawings in charcoal on paper (1915) by a young woman who was unknown at the time -although she had academic training and was instructed by her teacher Arthur Wesley Dow in Japaneseism, Kandinsky's synaesthesia and landscaping- and who she burst into modernist circles like a priestess when Stieglitz, through his gallery 291 -which introduced the avant-garde and Picasso-, raised her as a native pioneer of non-figuration.
Her pictorial language always oscillated between figuration and abstraction, without ever being framed, because it was the formal aspects that really interested her to capture her vision of her world. In the 1920s, she lives in New York, but nature's prominence returns strongly around 1929 when O'Keeffe discovers New Mexico and sets out to conquer its peculiar American West. This remote state will first be the subject of her cultural visits until she, in 1949, already a widow, settles there definitively. For two decades she had lived half the year with her husband and the remaining six months, alone in the desert.
The sublime American nature, the reflection of the authentic, explains the great compositions of O'Keeffe, who revels in shapes and colors with total disinhibition, an attitude that is more daring in his final work: on the one hand, in the aerial views that he takes from the window of the planes he boards after turning 62 - abstractions that capture the meandering riverbeds - and in the recreations of the patio of his house in Abiquiú. The global artist and the local, face to face at the Thyssen.
O'Keeffe tried to compose seeking harmony through shadows and color, pursuing that very difficult thing called balance. "There is no doubt that she is a great artist -regardless of her gender and her nationality- but when you discover her life you still like what you see more. That free and consistent personality, who moved away from what she did not like and got rid of artistic and social conventions, communicates a lot with us", emphasizes the curator of this unique opportunity to meet a pioneer in her time who, even today, continues to fascinate us.
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