Georgia O'Keeffe -- Radical!

Just found three great quotes about Georgia O'Keeffe from Jerry Saltz, Art Critic for the New York
Times that zeros in on the essence of O'Keeffe.

In one small room O'Keeffe changed America with her abstract art . . .

Referring to the state of art in American in 1917, Saltz said:

O'Keeffe was one of the only people thinking about pure abstraction at the time.  It's radical. 

Saltz was speaking at the Whitney Museum of American Art's new exhibition America is Hard To See and discussing Georgia O'Keeffe's importance in the world of art.

 Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986), Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918. Oil on canvas, 35 × 29 15/16 in. (88.9 × 76 cm.) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Emily Fisher Landau in honor of Tom Armstrong 91.90. 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Robert Gerhardt and Denis Y. Suspitsyn/Digital Image ? Whitney Museum of American Art



Jerry Saltz continued his discussion of O'Keeffe in Did Modernism Ever Happen in America?

 I wouldn't wish what happened to her on any artist. Even today she's dismissed as a prissy painter of pretty pictures of vulvas, feminine folds, flowers that look like vaginas, a woman artist included when a "woman artist" is needed. Her work has been reduced to calendar art and dorm-room posters. In her own time, it wasn't much better; male critics wrote that she painted in "great painful and ecstatic climaxes," referred to her as "this girl," was said to think "through the womb," giving viewers "an outpouring of sexual juices" and "sex bulging, sex tumescent, sex deflated." No wonder she left New York behind and lived in relative isolation in New Mexico for the last 37 years of her life. The fact is that O'Keeffe was making abstract art as early as 1915. This means that she was one of less than a dozen people on Earth at that time who were thinking of art in terms of total abstraction. It doesn't get more radical than that.

Well said, Jerry!