These big shows – and this has 13 rooms – are of course
always full of people getting in the way of the pictures. As a rule I tend to scoot from beginning to
end, hoping for say 6 or 7 pictures to catch my eye. I’ll then attempt to look at each one of
those seven when it isn’t being crowded.
This usually works, although of course it means I miss much. But I don’t believe you can look at more than
about ten or twelve pictures in an hour.
So, the thing I noticed on this scoot around was the
complete lack of human life. It might be
argued that New York city, of which there are two friendly paintings, can
hardly be said to be devoid of human life, but the truth is that they are an
anomaly. When O’Keeffe came to paint adobe
desert dwellings she painted them as though they were a part of the landscape,
natural forms (which, in a sense, they indeed are). A prime example of this is ‘Taos Pueblo’
(1929):
And when she begins to move back towards abstraction, human
habitation becomes fit for that too, as in ‘In the Patio No 4’ (although you can also feel the heat):
Steiglitz’s photos are often concerned with
geometry, with plainness and planes, and there is a sense in which this is true
of O’Keeffe’s work too, although her form is more plastic (I don’t really want
to say ‘softer’). As my son pointed out,
her paintings are exceptionally still things that absolutely pulse with life.
Perhaps this paradox is what makes them so alluring.
Having said that, my personal favourites were atypical. I
very much liked the early charcoal abstracts.
“I decided not to use any other colour until it was impossible to do
what I wanted to do in black and white”. The two pictures that come closest in
the exhibition to the depiction of the human body are: ‘Mask with Golden
Apple’, my photo of which somehow failed to come out (it is a letter box shaped
picture of an African mask lying flat and painted from side-on, with an apple
between the artist and the mask); and ‘A Man from the Desert’ (1934):
There ARE flowers there, of course, and they are remarkable. I prefer the simplicity of the desert, the austere nature of the abstract, the wonderful swoosh of the streak.
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