Flower and beyond, the full spectrum of Georgia O'Keeffe
For the first exhibition of the 25th anniversary of the museum, the Fondation Beyeler present the American modernist and pioneer: Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986). With more than 85 works, rarely exhibited or housed in a European museum, the show highlight its link to her changing environment, between New York, Lake George and her no man's land.
With her works, she developed a unique and deeply personal language, ranging from the use of figurative subject to the evolution into an abstract and gestural language in the 1960s and 70s.
Her first step, from teaching to modernity
From Kandinsky to a new beginning
At the end of 1911, she opened the photo journal "Review Camera Work". In one of the article, she found a translation of an extract from “Du Spirituel dans l’art, et dans la peinture” by Vasily Kandinsky. This will lead to the link between her abstract work and her symbolic source of inspiration.
Later on, when she finally moves to New York (due to Alfred Stieglitz and a large some of money) she will focus fully on her artistic practice and began painting predominantly in oil.
She will focus on the question of composition, the configuration of surface and depth in pictorial space, and the impact of shapes and colors, while having the spiral as a recurring motif. From time to time, she will be inspired, like Kandinsky by music.
This will lead to the creation of "Blue and Green Museum" from 1919/1921. Where she assembled a large ray of shapes to create a diagonal element, creating movement from the lower right edge of the picture. The undulating shapes will lead to the representation of musics, with their undulating bands of Jazz.
Flower. Pornography or photography ?
In the fourth room of the show, you encounter one, if not the most emblematic picture of Georgia O'Keeffe: her flowers. Consisting of more than 200 oil paintings, the room bring together a selection of eight flowers.
Highly influenced by the painted flowers of Charles Demote, in which she meet in 1923, she found a personal way of depicting her subject, influenced by the close-up photography and Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Ansel Easton Adams.
“One rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I see.”
Georgia O'Keeffe in 1926
With the picture "White Iris" from 1930, she's depicting the blossom of a white iris, in a close up and tight cropped composition. Quite large in scale (101.6 x 76.2 cm), she's moving from conventional mode of depicting flowers and still life by depicting only one of them, and not a cluster.
New York - New York
At that time, the building was just completed and the couple have being living in there for almost a year. With his grandiose architecture, overlooking the city (the building was the highest building of the world at the time), Georgia experimented with the perspective of the budding, seeing from below, live the avant-garde photograph of her time.
New York - New York -> Lake George
While making the most of the city in the winter and spring, the couple goes back to Lake George during the summer month, due to the house of Stieglitz family. At this exact moment, she will alternately paint the movements of sky and water, fruit and leave from Lake George and the skyscrapers she can contemplate from the windows of the Shelton Hotel.
In the meantime, she will continue to use her close-up view on nature and objects while capturing the changing seasons of the same motif or place. Evermore when she rediscovered the photograph of the avant-garde (coming from Europe after and between the two wars) and the changing proportion of her subject.
New Mexico - Japan - Europe
In 1929, Georgia will stay in New Mexico. As she wrote with the critic Henry McBride: "Finally I feel like I belong – I finally find myself. A few years later, she acquired Ghost Ranch, an isolated house surrounded by deserts. She discovers a country".
During her stay, she will depict the landscape of New Mexico. From their icons skull (like "Mule’s Skull with Pink Poinsettias" from 1936), transforming them into an abstract sculpture, monumental, white, pure and resembling like the one of Jean Hans Arp to the houses and mountains of the no man's land.
While having a go in the vast and barren desert territory of the desert, she looked out from her house on Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. She will event depict it in the 50s and 60s, with a series of works capturing a door (generally in black) and the shapes of her courtyard and her facade. This will lead to her research on simplification of shapes, her relation to emptiness and fullness and to a new generation of artist such as Ellsworth Kelly.
Due to the death of Stieglitz, she will leave New-York and travel the world, from Japan to Europe. All of those trip will be memorized into a series of paintings depicting the views from her airplane window.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Fondation Beyeler
Date: 23.1.2022 – 22.5.2022
Curators: Theodora Vischer
Ticket: Available online OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Fondation Beyeler
Baselstrasse 101
CH-4125 Riehen/Basel
Phone: +41 61 645 97 00
Fax: +41 61 645 97 19
Mail: info@fondationbeyeler.ch