Vaginas

Sometimes a flower is just a flower: Georgia O’Keeffe at Tate Modern

Tate Modern
by Victoria Stapley-Brown  |  04 July 16

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Georgia O'Keeffe's Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932). Photo: Edward C. Robison III. © 2016 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS, London

One hundred years after the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) made her professional debut at the 291 gallery in New York, Tate Modern opens the first UK survey of her work since 1993. The show, which is almost entirely drawn from US collections, speaks to a startling fact: none of O’Keeffe’s works are held by any public UK museum.

With around 100 pieces by the artist, the survey opens with abstract charcoals, including those shown at her first 291 exhibition, and moves through the skyscape series she made in the early 1960s, when she was “still working at the height of her powers”, says Tanya Barson, the curator who organised the exhibition.

Thirteen galleries will be organised chronologically and thematically so that visitors will encounter less familiar works before her flower pictures and south-west American landscapes. One room, for instance, is dedicated to paintings O’Keeffe made at Lake George in upstate New York, where she took annual holidays from 1918 to the early 1930s. Another gallery will include photographs of O’Keeffe taken by Alfred Stieglitz, who founded the 291 gallery and later became her husband. O’Keeffe was “a collaborator and co-author” of these pictures, Barson says. “The strength of her own self-presence comes through really powerfully in those works.”

The show’s central aim is to “privilege O’Keeffe’s voice”, Barson says. “From very early on, interpretations were made of her work that she didn’t agree with.” In particular, the Freudian reading of her flower paintings, which originated with Stieglitz, emphasised how the flora resembled vaginal forms. Barson, however, insists that the works are about “form, composition, colour”.

The exhibition is co-organised by the Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna, where it shows from 7 December-26 March 2017, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (22 April-30 July 2017).