"Trees at Glorieta, N.M.,"
Georgia O'Keeffe, 1929. Oil on canvas from a private
collection.
WILLIAMSBURG, VA. - Georgia O'Keeffe, who has achieved a kind of
enduring iconic status among American art lovers, is usually
associated with New Mexico and to some extent New York City.
Often overlooked is the fact that she lived for several years in
Virginia and had an interesting exhibition at Williamsburg's
College of William and Mary in 1938.
The story of that neglected show and O'Keeffe's ties to the Old
Dominion are the subject of this small, beautiful display at
William and Mary's Muscarelle Museum of Art. After closing here
on May 27, "Georgia O'Keeffe in Williamsburg: A Re-Creation of
the Artist's First Exhibition in the South" will travel to the
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 23 to
October 21. Sponsored by MBNA America, it is accompanied by an
informative, illustrated catalogue.
The large, modern Muscarelle building, opened in 1983 and
expanded in 1987, features on its exterior a long wall lined with
solar tubes filled with colored water. Designed by Washington
color-stripe painter Gene Davis (1920-1985), "Sun Sonata"
transforms the museum's south façade into a dramatic vision when
the solar wall tubes are lit from behind at night.
In addition to the O'Keeffe show, elsewhere in the Muscarelle's
commodious galleries, visitors these days can enjoy a sampling of
works from the Muscarelle's permanent collection and a display of
recent acquisitions.
"Portrait of William Short," Rembrandt Peale, 1806. Oil on
canvas from the collection of the Muscarelle Museum of Art.
The Muscarelle's curator of collections, Ann C. Madonia, has made
a real contribution to American art scholarship in mounting the
current O'Keeffe exhibition and unearthing so much
correspondence, photography, and memorabilia relating to its
origins in 1938. A home movie, running continuously, captures a
gowned, smiling O'Keeffe on the William and Mary campus to
receive her honorary degree 63 years ago. "This exhibition is
important to the world of art because it was previously unknown
and undocumented," says Bonnie G. Kelm, director of the
Muscarelle Museum of Art and associate professor of art history
at William and Mary.
In conjunction with that decision, Mrs John D. (Abby Aldrich)
Rockefeller, Jr. gave the college a grand O'Keeffe floral
painting, "White Flower" (1932). By this time her husband's
ambitious project to restore Eighteenth Century Williamsburg was
well underway. A year later, Mrs Rockefeller donated hundreds of
objects to Colonial Williamsburg that form the core of the
collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum.
(Colonial Williamsburg's 75th anniversary and the Rockefeller
Museum will be covered in a future issue of Antiques and The
Arts Weekly.)
"White Flower" was added to the campus exhibition of O'Keeffe
paintings that coincided with the honorary degree ceremony. The
first public show of her work in the South, it consisted of eight
other paintings she and Stieglitz selected, offering a survey of
the artist's work from 1927 to 1937.
Exhibited for six days were four flower canvases, one view of New
York City, two landscapes of the Southwest, and a so-called bone
painting. All but one of these works, plus Mrs Rockefeller's
gift, have been reassembled for the current show.
The brevity of the original exhibition's run and its small size
undoubtedly contributed to its being overlooked in the extensive
scholarship about O'Keeffe. As a consequence, few of the present
owners of the paintings were aware of the 1938 show. Four of the
canvases are in private collections and four, including "White
Flower," are owned by museums.
Before she established her ties to Virginia, O'Keeffe had grown
up on a prosperous, 600-acre farm in Sun Prairie, Wis., the
second of seven children of Francis and Ida O'Keeffe. She
attended public and parochial schools and took drawing lessons,
which helped prompt an early decision to become an artist.
In 1903, fearful of tuberculosis that had plagued his family,
Francis O'Keeffe relocated the clan to Williamsburg, which touted
its temperate climate and "absence of tubercular consumption."
After the large family settled into "Wheatlands," a large white
clapboard house on the edge of town, Georgia went off to boarding
school at Chatham Episcopal Institute in southern Virginia.
Elizabeth Mae Willis, the principal and art teacher, recognized
O'Keeffe's gifts and encouraged her artistic ambitions.
Georgia's plain attire and interest in becoming an artist set her
apart from her southern classmates, but she made friends easily
and engaged in a variety of hijinks with them. Although an
indifferent student, she managed to graduate in 1905, and went on
to excel in studies at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Throughout these years, O'Keeffe returned to spend summers with
her family in Williamsburg. Advance publicity to the contrary,
"Malaria, typhoid, and smallpox thrived in the hot and humid
summer climate" of the southern city, curator Madonia writes in
the catalogue. Indeed, in 1906 O'Keeffe contracted a severe case
of typhoid fever that prevented her return to Chicago and
necessitated a year of convalescence at home. Her mother died of
tuberculosis ten years later.
In the meantime, the hard working, ambitious, midwestern
O'Keeffes found it hard to fit in with the laid-back residents of
the decaying old Virginia community. Moreover, Francis O'Keeffe's
various business ventures, including a feed-and-grain operation,
real estate, and a creamery, all failed. Along the way he was
forced to sell the large house and move the family into "Travis
House," an elongated, Eighteenth Century gambrel-roofed house in
town. The structure, which subsequently housed superintendents of
the nearby Public Hospital and served as a restaurant
(1930-1951), has been handsomely restored and currently contains
offices of Colonial Williamsburg.
When a cement-block construction business also faltered, the
O'Keeffes had to move again, this time into a truly ugly
cement-block model home the father and his sons had built. Long
considered an eyesore, it was demolished in 1968.
In 1909, Mrs O'Keeffe's illness prompted the family to move to
Charlottesville. Georgia took summer art classes at the
University of Virginia, which had great influence on her work,
and subsequently taught there for a time.
O'Keeffe also taught art in Texas and South Carolina and studied
at Columbia University Teachers College. Her art was eventually
discovered by Stieglitz, who helped bring her work to public
attention, starting with a solo exhibition at his famed gallery
at 291 Fifth Avenue in 1917. Before long, with Stieglitz's help,
O'Keeffe moved into the big-time art world.
As officials at William and Mary contemplated offering the
50-year-old painter an honorary degree, they feared that memories
of her family's hard times in Williamsburg and her well-known
reticence and aversion to public honors might dissuade her from
accepting. With the help of tactful intermediaries, however,
O'Keeffe agreed to accept the honor. She and Stieglitz also
agreed to organize the small exhibition of her work.
Responding to the formal invitation regarding the honorary degree
from William and Mary President John Stewart Bryan, O'Keeffe
wrote, "It will be lovely seeing the Williamsburg country again
with the spring leaves... I never imagined ever going there or
any other place for an honorary degree. It is quite outside my
usual way of thinking so it is very much of a surprise to me. A
pleasant surprise." It was the first of 11 honorary degrees
conferred on the artist.
O'Keeffe's unusually smiling demeanor, documented in the home
movie of the ceremony, suggests her pleasure with the event.
Nevertheless, to the consternation of her hosts, she refused to
make an acceptance speech. "O'Keeffe," writes Madonia, "was
always the strong reserved midwesterner, not inclined to small
talk... If she appeared to be 'hostile and in some other world'
[in the words of the college's Fine Arts department chairman
Leslie Cheek, Jr.] during the ceremonies, it was probably her
reserved manner that was so alien to the local citizenry."
In 1938 O'Keeffe was completing an up-and-down decade of
challenges and achievements during which Stieglitz's support and
promotion had made her a major figure on the American art scene.
Successful sales of her work enabled O'Keeffe to gain increasing
independence from her mate and mentor.
Tiring of the pressures of New York and her strained relations
with Stieglitz, starting in 1929 O'Keeffe began to spend summers
in New Mexico. She continued that pattern until she moved
permanently to New Mexico in 1949, three years after Stieglitz's
death.
O'Keeffe's off-again-on-again relationship with Stieglitz and
bouts of ill health limited her painting output, 1927-1937, but
as the works in the exhibition demonstrate, she produced some
outstanding works. The wide open spaces and arid landscape of the
Southwest infused her art with fresh energy and originality, as
well as new subjects, which proved highly popular with critics
and patrons. These qualities are readily apparent in the
paintings in the show, especially those of New Mexico.
In an interesting chapter in the exhibition catalogue, Barbara
Buhler Lynes pieces together clues from a rather inaccurate,
handwritten list prepared by Stieglitz and other sources to
pinpoint which paintings were included in the 1938 display.
Lynes, author of the recently released O'Keeffe catalogue
raisonné, curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and Emily Fisher
Landau Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center,
also provides insights into the time, place, and subject matter
of the O'Keeffe canvases.
She points out, for example, that "New York Night" (1928-29)
"prominently features the Beverly Hotel, a building standing
directly north of the Shelton [Hotel], with a distinctive
circular window and crenellated tower." The Shelton, where
O'Keeffe and Stieglitz lived at the time, is now the New York
Marriott East Side. The nocturnal canvas dramatically delineates
towering Manhattan structures and streets below, punctuated by
yellow lights.
The New Mexico landscapes include "Trees at Glorieta, New Mexico"
(1929), a gauzy, evocative close-up of a grove of cottonwoods
near the Taos Pueblo. Cottonwoods became one of O'Keeffe's
favorite subjects.
"Purple Hills, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico" (1934) is one of 16
pictures the artist painted between 1934 and 1937 of the hills
around her Ghost Ranch house. The spectacular colors and
undulating landscape of this painting underscore why this
sweeping vista was so popular with the artist.
In one of O'Keeffe's signature bone paintings, "Deer's Skull with
Perdenal" (1936), the animal skull hanging from a dead cedar tree
is silhouetted against a brilliant blue sky and the distant
Perdenal Mountains. Surely no other artist has so effectively
exploited the artistic potential of bones as this painter.
O'Keeffe's close-up, vividly hued floral canvases are, as some
would expect, special. Even a small image, such as "Red Poppy"
(1927), which measures a mere 7 by 9 inches, is a magnified,
gloriously colored image that packs a wallop.
"Black Hollyhock Blue Larkspur" (1930), one of her several
paintings of these flowers, juxtaposes the black and blue blooms
in a harmonious and compelling manner. This monumental beauty
measures a substantial 301/8 by 40 inches.
Mrs Rockefeller's "White Flower," painted in 1932, is another
quintessential O'Keeffe floral portrait. This delicate yet strong
canvas is a treasure any museum would covet.
Another flower work, "Hollyhock Pink with the Perdenal, New
Mexico" (1937), features an enormous pink bloom floating over the
blue-green-purple mountain form. The Perdenal was visible from
O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch house.
According to Lynes, "O'Keeffe painted leaves and flowers
throughout her career, and had completed at least 40 leaf and
approximately 150 flower oils by early in 1938." Only "Yellow
Hickory Leaves with Daisy" (1928) "combines leaves with a daisy,"
she observes. This 30 by 40-inch oil, a marvelously compelling
symphony in yellow with white touches, is owned by the Art
Institute of Chicago. Too fragile to travel, it is represented at
the show by a large-scale photograph that appears to do justice
to its brilliant color and crisp configuration.
The 56-page exhibition catalogue, with informative essays by
Kelm, Lynes, and Madonia, a useful chronology, and a
bibliography, is very well done. Reproductions of all works in
the exhibition and others that relate to them, plus vintage
photographs and documents relating to the 1938 show, add valuable
insights. Published by the museum, it will be treasured by
O'Keeffe fans.
"Black Hollyhock Blue Larkspur," Georgia O'Keeffe, 1930. Oil on
canvas from a private collection.
The Muscarelle Museum's own collection, which can be traced to
1732, contains over 3,000 works of art from all over the world.
On view during a recent visit there were impressive portraits by
Rembrandt Peale and Sir Godfrey Kneller; a small but nice
"Village Scene" by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot; a tiny gem of a
still life by John F. Peto; a grand European landscape by Daniel
Ridgway Knight; a Frederick Waugh seascape; and a Guy Wiggins
snowscape.
Of particular note was an enormous, typically dramatic depiction
by American expatriate painter John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)
of "The Battle of Dunkirk" (circa 1814). Other standouts included
a gorgeously hued "Autumn Landscape" (1875) by Hudson River
School painter Jasper F. Cropsey (1823-1900) and a moody,
nocturnal scene, "Moonlit Landscape" (circa 1903-10), by
African-American artist Henry O. Tanner (1859-1937), who spent
most of his career in France.
Among the Muscarelle's recent acquisitions are fine etchings and
works on paper by Mary Cassatt, Arthur Wesley Dow, William
Hogarth, and James Tissot. The highlight is a large and
wonderfully colored lithograph by Faith Ringgold (born 1930),
"Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles." It depicts African-American
heroes such as Madam C.J. Walker, Sojourner Truth, Fannie Mae
Hamer, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and Mary McLeod Bethune
arrayed behind a large quilt, with Vincent van Gogh standing
somewhat quizzically to the side, holding a bowl of flowers.
This visit suggests that for art lovers, no sojourn in Colonial
Williamsburg would be complete without a stop at this fine
museum, which is adjacent to the old town.
The Muscarelle Museum of Art is on Jamestown Road on the
campus of the College of William and Mary. For information,
757-221-2700.
