The Lifetime Channel recently aired a made-for-TV movie entitled Georgia O’Keeffe starring Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons. In spite of excellent acting, the movie was a big disappointment to me* [see footnote], focusing primarily on O’Keeffe’s turbulent love affair with New York photographer Alfred Stieglitz (played by Irons), her ultimate marriage to him and her “nervous breakdown” which the movie would have us believe resulted primarily from her husband’s philandering.
Though it is conceivable O’Keeffe’s art might have remained obscure were it not for Stieglitz’ promotion [exploitation?], the movie barely touched on O’Keeffe’s love of solitude and her many years as an artist after Stieglitz’ death. O’Keeffe’s solitary life without Stieglitz in her beloved “far away” (New Mexico) contributed a great deal to her artistic notoriety.
But O’Keeffe was an artist and educated woman before she met Stieglitz. (They met after he showed some of her paintings in his New York gallery without her permission.) And although she lived much of her life pre-feminism, and may not have defined herself as such, O’Keeffe was a feminist in her own right. For someone growing up in a time when men still controlled most power, most assets and most women, she achieved a high level of self-sufficiency and independence.
O’Keeffe is most well known for her large paintings of flowers (with an erotic, vaginal imagery which she denied was intentional); and her representations of the New Mexico landscape and its elements. Further details of her biography are available at Wikipedia. The website of the The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has several good slideshows of her art.
O’Keeffe made it to the Most Memorable Hermits list because she valued solitude and found she could best experience it through her own creative process. This discovery occurred before she moved to the wilds of New Mexico (and before she met Stieglitz). This O’Keeffe quotation about the creation of her art is from 1915 (pre-Stieglitz):
“There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own unknown – no one to satisfy except myself.”
O’Keeffe didn’t like to sign her paintings and rarely named them herself. I suspect she is an artist who would have painted, and painted what she wanted, whether or not her efforts ever gained notoriety.
She was not a total recluse. By the time she moved to New Mexico, she was a woman of means who could hire assistance with her property. But she did learn to drive so she could travel into the far away on her own, with her paint supplies in the back of her car. Outside of her paintings – perhaps her own words give us the best sense of who she was:
“I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.”
“One day I found myself saying to myself… I can’t live where I want to, I can’t go where I want to…I can’t do what I want to. I can’t even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted, and that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself.”
“It was all so far away – there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.”
“I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.”
“Filling a space in a beautiful way. That is what art means to me.”
“I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.”
“I know I can not paint a flower, I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning, but maybe in terms of paint color, I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.”
Special thanks to Oregon hermit, artist John C., who recommended Georgia O’Keeffe for the Memorable Hermits list.
*Footnote: One irony of the Lifetime Channel’s ostensibly “pro-woman” worldview (and one reason I rarely wander there) is Lifetime’s over-emphasis on women’s successes and failures as a factor of the men in their lives – romance. On the other hand, I do appreciate the difficulty of marketing a film of a lone woman wandering around the desert with her painting supplies. Most successful desert movies seem to require lots of horses and explosions.
