To attempt to distill the essence of the passionate, often tumultuous long-lived life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe in a biography is daunting. To attempt to do it in poetic form is a massive undertaking.
Jessica Jacobs, in her new book Pelvis with Distance, described as biography-in-poems of Georgia O'Keeffe, accomplishes this feat with both the passion and artistry that reflects O’Keeffe’s life and work.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Pelvis with Distance, 1943,
Indianapolis Museum of Art, c Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
Her book of poetry is based on relentless research at the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, study of O’Keeffe’s life through existing
biographies, and the examination of the many letters written to and from Georgia O'Keeffe during her life.
Jacobs focuses particularly on the correspondence between O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz who was first her mentor, then her lover, her business manager and her husband. Stieglitz was the first to show O'Keeffe's art at his Gallery 291 in New York in 1916 and continued exhibiting her paintings until his death in 1946.
Stieglitz was a photographer, publisher, galleryist and art impresario who first exhibited and promoted fine art photography. Later Stieglitz featured and promoted avant-garde modern painting exhibitions of European artists, such as Matisse, Rodin, Picasso, and Cezanne and later American Modern artists, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dow, and Georgia O'Keeffe.
Edward J. Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, 1915, MOMA
Jacobs poetry traces O'Keeffe's life and art through her early award-winning representational oils (1908), her breakthrough charcoal and watercolor abstractions (1915), O'Keeffe's first one-person exhibition in New York (1917), and her paintings in the Texas plains and Palo Duro Canyon where she taught college (1916-1917).
Georgia O'Keeffe, (untitled) Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot, 1908,
Art Students League of New York, Permanent Collection
Georgia O'Keeffe, Special No. 12, 1916, MOMA, Gift of the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation
Georgia O'Keeffe, Blue Lines. 1916, MOMA, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Alfred Stieglitz, Fifth photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe Exhibition, 291, 1917, Todd Webb Print, Beinecke Library, Yale
Georgia O'Keeffe, Evening Star No II, 1916, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, promised gift
Georgia O'Keeffe, Special #21 (Palo Duro Canyon), 1916/1917
Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico
Jacobs also follows O'Keeffe's abstractions in oil painted after O'Keeffe moved to New York in 1918. She traces O'Keeffe's move to abstract/representational form in her skyscrapers and large-scale paintings of flowers.
Jacobs also references the over 300 fine art photographs of O'Keeffe taken and often exhibited by Alfred Stieglitz beginning in 1917. Many were photographs of O'Keeffe in front of her art; many were nude photographs which worked to sexualize the critical and public perception of O'Keeffe's work.
writing, a passion for art in words, and a depth feeling for and
insight into O’Keeffe’s life and emotions. She is able to transform key moments of O’Keeffe’s life into poetry that eloquently expresses and meshes both O’Keeffe’s feelings and her own.
Jacob's poem Alfred Stieglitz at 291 (first encounter) captures the magnetism of one of the most important figures in the New York art world at the time, as well as the perplexity expressed by those who first viewed the modern art of Rodin at his Gallery 291.
Untitled Dead Rabbit with a Pot and Early Abstraction speak to O'Keeffe's frustration at having to paint in the traditional representational style taught at major art schools in the early 1900's
-- "speaking in every voice but my own."
In Early Abstraction, Jacobs capture the breakthrough moment when O'Keeffe rejected traditional art ("they dictated what we wanted to say") and first sketched abstractions in charcoal -- what she referred to as "the shapes in my head."
Interspersed with the poetry of O'Keeffe's life are personal reflections of Jacob's own life and the task she has set for herself In The Canyon (Everyday) . . .
Completing a poem a day is equal parts exhilaration and terror. It's like being on a winning streak in a gambling hall. It's like being in love. The longer it goes on, the more I have to lose when it's over.
Jacob's poem In The Canyon IX (Loneliness) draws together O'Keeffe's comments on loneliness, Jacob's reflections of her own parent's marriage, and the symbiotic relationship between O'Keeffe's art and Stieglitz's photographs.
Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, undated, unidentified photographer, Georgia O'Keeffe Research Center
Arnold Newman, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, New York, 1944
an unshared lifeJacob's poetry also draws upon the long distance relationship between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz, O'Keeffe's assertiveness and independence, and the letters between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz -- "letters of longing and recrimination" as well as Jacob's own personal feelings of being alone in the desert
is only half-lived
unetched by mutual memory
Finally, Jacob's poems touch upon the tender feelings expressed by O'Keeffe during the last days of her husband's life, and her resolute sense of finiteness after she buried him ("I will never to back to New York again").
Jacobs then intertwines O'Keeffe's sense of independence and confidence in her later years in the poem Composite (Self) Portrait As A Wise Desert Elder ("I need them only to take the picture").
John Loengard, Georgia O'Keeffe on her Roof, 1967
John Loengard, Georgia O'Keeffe with Rock, 1967
Jacobs' poem Once in Her Eighties, Georgia Attempts A Joke captures O'Keeffe's retrospective response to art critics, who O'Keeffe always maintained attributed their own feelings, not hers, to O'Keeffe's art ("Sex is not flowers, Death is not bones") and captures the essence of a down-to-earth woman who had become both famous and infamous.
The last poems of Pelvis with Distance reflects upon Jessica's own experience during her time camping in the desert outside of Santa Fe and her feelings as she is preparing to leave (In The Canyon XII Last Run).
The final poem in Pelvis With Distance, entitled May 6, 1986, (the date of O'Keeffe's death) is Jacob's succinct and eloquent tribute to both the life and death of Georgia O'Keeffe.
Georgia O'Keeffe, My Last Door, 1952 / 1954. Oil on canvas, 48 x 84 inches.
Gift of The Burnett Foundation. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Gift of The Burnett Foundation. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Jacobs spent hours in the Research Center of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and camped in the Canyon lands, internalizing O’Keeffe’s life story through her study of O’Keeffe’s art and
letters and by experiencing the connection to the land in the way
that inspired O’Keeffe.
Georgia O'Keeffe, My Front Yard, Summer, 1941, Art Institute of Chicago, Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches, Gift of the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, ©Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
Arnold Neuman, Georgia O'Keeffe, outside of Ghost Ranch, 1968, Swann Galleries, NY
While researching and writing her book of biography-in-poetry, Jacobs not only came to know O’Keeffe on an intellectual
and artistic level, but experienced and translated into her poetry the emotions of life in the New Mexico desert much as Georgia
O’Keeffe did in her art during her life there.
Through her hard work, dedication, mastery of language, and most of all her passion, Jessica Jacobs has been able to ultimately translate her intellectual and emotional connection to the life and art of Georgia O'Keeffe to her own life and poetry, and has produced the seminal biography--in-poetry of Georgia O'Keeffe, Pelvis With Distance.
Jessica Jacobs, photo by Lily Darragh
In June 2012, Jessica Jacobs lived alone in a primitive cabin in a remote canyon near Abiquiu, New Mexico, the area where Georgia O'Keeffe lived for the last thirty years of her life. She wrote most of her poems there.
In June 2012, Jessica Jacobs lived alone in a primitive cabin in a remote canyon near Abiquiu, New Mexico, the area where Georgia O'Keeffe lived for the last thirty years of her life. She wrote most of her poems there.
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