The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe is a simple place but packs a very powerful message about this incredibly gifted woman who found her inspiration in the New Mexico landscape. Her bold use of color and shape somehow wake you up to what is around, and you can “see” New Mexico with deeper eyes.
There is a room of photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe taken by her husband, a photographer and leader in the movement of photography as art. I was surprised at how much Georgia cooperated in the cultivation her own image through his photographs. It’s as if she knew that the way that we use image - even images of ourselves - as masks, and that art is a way to break through that image to essence. The very antithesis of what photographers do with celebrities. It reminded me of the photographs that Eugene Meatyard took of Thomas Merton.
There is also a good film about Georgia shown in the museum. The museum is not large but we felt that it acquainted us well with who she was/is, and are much enriched by the knowing.
Her husband, Stieglitz, was one of the great photographers of the last century. What fascinated me about O'Keeffe's paintings is the undisguised sexual imagery of them. Did you learn much about her as a person?
ReplyDeleteI learned that she was really upset when people interpreted her art, and her person, as "sexual" ... she felt that both her art and her person were being trivialized. When Merton was in NM in the summer of 1968 he planned on meeting with her, but it didn't work out. My sense is that the link between art and spirit is inseparable in her.
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