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There was a good crowd at the deYoung Museum on the first
great and beautiful Saturday afternoon of the year. Skipping St. Patrick's Day
weekend revelries, the crowd of more young women than normal casually
congregated to take in a showing of work by Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986,
born the same year as Le Corbusier). The exhibit
Modern Nature: Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George encompassed her work from her time spent around
Lake George in upstate New York in the 1920's and 1930's at family
estate of her husband Alfred Stieglitz, the renowned photographer and gallerist. Lake
George was the like the Lake District of northwest England, where lucky artists
went to escape the economic world and capture nature in their work.
Her portraits were not of famous or wealthy people but of
trees and barns and leaves, painting them with the intimacy and expressiveness
normally saved for the human face. Most of the works were beautiful and
lush, flowing shapes of powerfully mixed dark and light colors. The
game of chiaroscuro deftly employed to describe nature's bounty. Georgia
O'Keeffe is a legendary modernist painter but at the end of the day, she is a
genre painter, like Picasso - her works are mostly landscapes and still lifes,
with flowers and garden vegetables and dramatic views. What John James
Audubon was to birds, and Giorgio Morandi to glass bottles, so O'Keeffe is to
flowers. And to me that is great company, and an accomplished life.
More work from the exhibit, HERE.
