Fall 2013
Georgia O’Keefe, A Tree
Georgia O’Keeffe is most commonly associated with stark, mystical, and deeply sensual paintings of New Mexican hills, mesas, adobe walls and crosses, simplified and abstracted into a symbolist language, along with skulls and bones, often floating in an exultant, spiritually charged space. Yet the artist, whose life alone at the Ghost Ranch achieved an iconic kind of fame in her old age, had developed her chops as a painter in two very different environments: New York City, where she painted simplified, sublime renditions of skyscrapers in the 1920s, and Lake George, the Adirondack Lake where she spent summers and falls at an estate owned by the family of her dealer and later, husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, from 1918 to 1934.
The latter place has been deemed to be the least significant. Based on comments made by O’Keeffe herself, O’Keeffe scholars have portrayed the Adirondack lake as a place that suffocated the artist, both from a personal and creative perspective—a claustrophobia from which she finally broke free when she left Lake George for New Mexico, discovering her true spiritual home in the dry, barren landscape of the desert. “Here I am smothered with green,” O’Keeffe wrote to a friend in 1931. “I walk much and endure the green…Give my love to the wind and the big spaces.”
“Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George,” an exhibit on view at The Hyde Collection, in Glens Falls, through September 15 (afterwards traveling to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, in Santa Fe, which jointly sponsored the show with the Hyde), tells a different story. The first exhibit to pull together the many magnificent paintings she made at Lake George and the surrounding area, “Modern Nature” convincingly suggests that in fact, the grounds of the Stieglitz estate, which overlooked the lake and whose gardens were assiduously cared for by O’Keeffe, were a fecund source of subjects for her nature-derived abstractions and more representational works. According to the handsome catalog that accompanies the show, O’Keeffe painted her first flower paintings here—of the scarlet canna lilies and petunias she had planted, along with the apple blossoms in the orchard. The many paintings of autumn leaves in the show—fall, with its vivid colors, was a favorite time for O’Keeffe—are as compelling as the flowers, blown up to a monumental size, simplified to undulating forms in a totemic-like arrangement, and translated into sensuous, undulating forms with dramatic contrasts of dark and light.
The Jack in the Pulpit series, from 1930, are particularly striking: the trumpet-shaped, striated purple and white form is abstracted in the series to cosmic proportions, ultimately reduced to a single long hook of vivid white curving around the tubular piston in a vast, darkly hued cathedral-like atmosphere. Influenced by Stieglitz’s photographs of the same subject, O’Keeffe also painted individual trees—birch trunks twisting with animistic force or simplified into cubist geometries in an aureole of yellow; soaring pines similarly abstracted into synthetic cubic compositions; an expressive, gnarled maple trunk; a flame-like maple tree in autumn with whirling clouds; and a massive chestnut tree silhouetted, along with the background mountains, against a twilit sky, with the glimmer of the first star.
The powerful sense of form and profound feel for nature’s beauty and generative force is as strong in many of these paintings as the best of O’Keeffe’s New Mexican work. She also painted some extraordinary views of the lake, many from her second-floor room in the farmhouse, in which the lake was seen in the middle distance, between the distant mountains and a foreground border of trees. Lake George with Crows, from 1921, shows the dark blue-gray lake flattened, from an aerial perspective, and surrounded by maroon, gray, and dark green mountains and trees. It’s an image that’s both intimate and sublime, dreamlike and brooding. Her painting of the lake in a storm, entitled Storm Cloud, from 1923 is dark and ominous, with a crack of light dramatically outlining an arabesque of cloud; it was a personal favorite, and O’Keeffe kept the painting until her death. The artist also painted a pair of nocturnal works showing a strangely luminescent pair of knees in the bottom half of the painting framing the green and blue lake with the mountain and its reflection, in a highly original composition—purportedly based on her nighttime paddles in the lake.
“Lake George…provided the basic material for her art and evoked the spirit of place that was essential to her modern approach to the natural world,” writes Erin Coe, interim co-director and chief curator at the Hyde, in one of the three essays in the exhibition catalog. O’Keeffe’s years at Lake George were among the most prolific in her seven-decade career, consisting of some 200 paintings on canvas and paper, in addition to sketches and pastels, notes Coe. Although Lake George was a popular tourist destination, O’Keeffe left out the steamboats that plied the lake and other evidence of the contemporary human presence, her vision of nature as a mystical universe unto itself fully formed prior to venturing into the Western desert.
Eventually she worked from a shanty she and Stieglitz’s neice, to whom she was particularly close, fixed up. (Elizabeth Stiiglitz Davidson’s husband, Donald Davidson, a trained horticulturist who was in charge of the estate’s vegetable gardens, also became a lifelong friend. Years later, after she was settled in New Mexico, O’Keeffe continued to seek his guidance in planting her gardens and crops, writes Coe.) Her flower paintings found a ready audience and were something of a sensation when she began showing them in the mid 1920s. Stieglitz’ photographs of O’Keeffe at Lake George, napping by a basket of apples, posing with an ear of corn held angularly against her face, or standing before the door of her rustic studio also helped establish her legend as “the Sybil, the wild, mysterious long-haired one and the great calm rooted tree,” as Paul Rosenfeld described her in 1924.
“I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then,” O’Keeffe wrote in 1921. “Her sense of independence, her desire to be alone—all these are marks of a modern woman,” writes Bruce Robertson in another one of the catalog essays. “By the 1930s, she was famous enough to have essentially become a touchstone for critics and other artists,” writes Gwendolyn Owens in the third and remaining essay, which focuses on the feminist aspect of O’Keeffe’s life and art, including her influence on other women artists, including Zelda Fitzgerald, who had a solo show of paintings in New York City in 1934.
After separating from Stieglitz, O’Keeffe began spending more time in New Mexico, eventually relocating there permanently in 1949. One of her last pilgrimages to Lake George was in spring of 1945. She visited again the following summer, to bury Stieglitz’s ashes near a tree at the water’s edge. The artist described her visit to the estate in 1945 nostalgically in a letter to a friend, noting that “I realize I could probably even have a very good life there if it were not for all that family. I loved it—Of course I can remember too that the midsummer gets pretty soggy—but it was a pleasure to go over all the paths and little places I knew.” By the 1970s, Coe writes, that nostalgia had shifted into bitterness and complaints about her many summers spent at the latke. Lake George was “not really painting country,” she told Calvin Tomkins in a 1974 interview. “”She had discovered her America in New Mexico, but in the 1920s her view of Lake George had not yet ossified,” writes Coe. “”Modern Nature” goes far toward restoring the freshness of O’Keeffe’s inspiration at the lake. The many wonderful paintings that resulted and are on display need no other comment as regards Lake George as a touchstone of her talent.
“Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George” is on display at The Hyde Collection, in Glens Falls, through September 15. It will be at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, in Santa Fe, from October 4 to January 26 and at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young Museum, from February 8 through May 11, 2014. A beautiful catalog, Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George, with three essays and numerous color plates, is for sale at the Hyde.