“Georgia O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle” places the iconic work of O’Keeffe in the fresh context of artistic predecessors in the circle of her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The exhibition, which will be on view at the High Museum of Art February 9⁍ay 4, reveals how various women artists in the Stieglitz circle paved the way for O’Keeffe’s emergence in 1915. Featured are approximately 90 paintings, drawings and photographs by O’Keeffe, as well as Pamela Colman Smith, Katharine Nash Rhoades, Georgia Engelhard, Gertrude Käsebier, Anne Brigman and Alfred Stieglitz.
The work of O’Keeffe and her contemporaries laid the groundwork for the idea that women artists possessed a powerful creativity equal to that of men, and their stunning images convinced Stieglitz and his New York audiences that women could reveal a new and uniquely feminine perspective on modern experience. Each of the artists represented in “Georgia O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle” at one time embodied Stieglitz’s philosophy of the woman modernist, through their lives and their distinctive forms of artistic expression.
Dating from roughly the first three decades of the Twentieth Century, the featured works in the exhibition, including 30 by O’Keeffe, explore modern “feminine” themes such as a pastoral world of mothers and children, the female nude symbolizing the drama of the New Woman’s struggle for independence, abstractions of mood from the unconscious mind and nature as a paradise vis-à-vis the child’s intuitive vision of the world. The exhibition also includes two special groupings †a selection of Stieglitz photographs of his wife, O’Keeffe, representing the modernist ideal of the expressive woman-child, and a series of O’Keeffe’s red canna floral imagery, one of which (“Red Canna,” 1921) is owned by the High.
Women artists featured in this exhibition include photographers Gertrude Käsebier and Anne Brigman, and painters Pamela Colman Smith and Katharine Nash Rhoades. Käsebier was born in 1852 in Iowa. After moving to New York, she became known for her work as a portrait photographer, focusing primarily on the theme of motherhood. Käsebier was a founding member of the Photo-Secessionist group dedicated to promoting photography as a fine art. Born in Hawaii in 1869, Brigman was also one of the founding members the Photo-Secessionist group. She was known for dramatic photographs of nude women in natural landscapes. Painter Smith is best known for creating the design for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of tarot cards. Born in 1878 in London, Smith later studied at the Pratt Institute.
While in New York, Stieglitz mounted an exhibition of Smith’s work, the first show by a non-photographer at the gallery. Rhoades was born in 1885 in New York. A poet and a painter, her paintings were exhibited at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery. Rhoades later become a key decision-maker at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in its first decade.
O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in Sun Prairie, Wis. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League, New York. In 1915, O’Keeffe began a series of abstract charcoal drawings, now recognized as being among the most innovative of their kind.
She mailed them to a former classmate, Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Stieglitz, an internationally known photographer and art impresario. In 1918, O’Keeffe moved to New York. She and Stieglitz married in 1924.
From 1923 until his death in 1946, Stieglitz worked to promote O’Keeffe and her work. As early as the mid-1920s, when O’Keeffe first began painting her well-known, large-scale and close-up depictions of flowers, she had become recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists. Three years after Stieglitz’s death, O’Keeffe moved permanently from New York to New Mexico, whose stunning vistas and stark landscape configurations had inspired her work since 1929. She continued to work in oil until the mid-1970s, when failing eyesight forced her to abandon painting. After that point, she worked in pencil and watercolor until 1982, and produced objects in clay until her health failed in 1984. She died in 1986 at the age of 98.
The High Museum of Art is at 1280 Peachtree Street at 16th Street. For information, www.high.org or 404-733-4000.
